"Structures of Desire: Toward an Analysis of Modern Erotic Worlds".

The article discusses the social structure of sexual desire in the modern world. Relationships are made all the more complex in late modernity as sexuality is decoupled, with increasing regularity, marriage exchange and religious proscription. The pursuit of sexual pleasure in the modern world has been transformed, not only with respect to its cultural reception or its significance over the lifecourse, but as an increasingly commodified lifestyle choice organized by semiautonomous erotic worlds. The social structure of erotic worlds is constituted by eroticized social schemas related to race, class, gender, age and nationality, thus binding the "how, why and with whom" of interaction to the regularities of collective life.