James Giles is a philosopher and psychologist. He is Lecturer in Philosophy at La Trobe University, Australia, and Lecturer in the University of Cambridge, Institute of Continuing Education. He has taught at several universities in different countries. Giles' writings on philosophical psychology, relationships, and sexuality are widely discussed. He is the originator of the Vulnerability and Care Theory of romantic love, and the idea that dependency, paternalism, masochism, and sadism are love-orientations with diverse responses to vulnerability. For Giles, sexual desire is related to love through vulnerability and care as desires for mutual baring and caressing. It is existential need rooted in the experience of ourselves as incomplete gendered beings. Related to this is his Naked Love Theory of human hairlessness. This theory locates the evolutionary origin of naked skin in the ancestral mother's pleasure in naked contact with the infant. Naked skin, he argues, was one of the preconditions for the appearance of romantic love.
