Looks like Japanese translation of L’erotismo

I started reading Francesco Alberoni‘s L’erotismo (“Eroticism”, 1986). I discovered Alberoni through de Botton when I read Essays in Love, Alberoni’s predecessor is a cult item.

The main discourse of the book is difference between female and male feelings for eroticism along the continuity/discontinuity axis, an approach I believe first explored by Georges Bataille, although Alberoni invokes Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut (Le nouveau désordre amoureux).

It also mentions a 1894 funny study by Francis Galton on skin sensitivity in women and men: The relative sensitivity of men and women at the nape of the neck.

The book is well-informed and references Nina Baym (mother of Nancy Baym) and her work on women’s fiction and female reading and writing practice (and the mishistoriography thereof). It equates female pornography with the novels of Barbara Cartland and her equivalents in Europe (Liala in Italy and Delly in France).

Also mentioned are Helen Hazel, the author of Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination[1], a work on the rape fantasy (bodice rippers), and Opus Pistorum by Henry Miller (but actually ghost-written by female writer and entrepreneur Caresse Crosby.

And I’ve only read 10 pages.

Dare I say one of the more interesting works on eroticism to have crossed my hands?

P. S. I’m reading a Dutch translation, I’m not sure if L’erotismo has been translated into English.