Prevailing social attitudes, the author asserts, are how we determine what acts are harmful. He examines several specific kinds of self-harm that he says one might want or need to do at least on occasion, based on society's current moral expectations. These are masturbation, sadomasochism and voluntary slavery, prostitution, humiliating oneself on a talk show, posing naked in front of a camera, not striving to reach one's potential, drug abuse, and self-neglect. Next he considers four ways in which self-harm can be inflicted: physically, spiritually, socially, and emotionally. In the second part, he turns to self-control, focusing first on the phenomenon of unnecessary self-control, illustrating this idea by describing the present-day behavior of undergraduate men in the locker room at the University of Virginia, where he finds that they hide themselves from the view of other men to protect their sexual reputation. He then considers the limits of self-control, as, for example, in clinical depression. In the final section, Portmann gets down to his central thesis, the paradox that both a sense of self-control and loss of self-control are essential.
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