The ambulance leaves, but Lamby starts again when the woman below me coughs, a deep weak rumble that I often mistake for male sounds of sexual pleasure or the evening news.

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As I considered that, my mind flashed to my liberal arts college's Women's Studies classes' literature about female circumcision being used in some countries for the precise reason of decreasing sexual pleasure.

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L. James's novels, I confess to being somewhat baffled by the appeal of a romantic hero who, while filthy rich and preternaturally handsome, gets sexual pleasure from beating his girlfriend with a belt.

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But logic requires judges to follow a tortured path of first determining that female circumcision is medically unnecessary and deprives women of future sexual pleasure, while male circumcision has some medical justifications and does not unduly deprive men of sexual pleasure.

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Prosecutor Antonio Sangermano said the parties organised at the villa in Arcore, north-east of Milan, were the "expression of a tried and tested prostitution system organised to satisfy the sexual pleasure of Silvio Berlusconi, and of which the young Moroccan girl was completely a part".

BBC: Berlusconi 'hosted prostitution parties', trial hears

Breaking with religious teachings that the sole function of sex ought to be procreation and that any other erotic pursuit was sinful, Reich offered a new and defiantly humanist perspective, asserting that sexual pleasure was beneficial indeed, necessary to human flourishing, and that, when it came to orgasms, the more the merrier.

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