Sex and the Single Professor Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
Herzog, Dagmar
booKs In RevIew The Slaughterhouse Sex and the Single Professor N N ow might be an appropriate time to state the Freire Modern Professor Hypothesis, which goes like this:...
...Evangelicals never dreamed that so many of their values would be challenged and politicized, but that’s precisely what happened during the first sexual revolution...
...A A s an intellectual exercise, the book has all the value of a Hustler coloring book...
...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 77...
...Except “Soulgasm”—that one’s a hoot...
...You can feel virtuously superior to and voyeuristically outraged by sexual minorities and abortion seekers...
...while English courses taught by Herzog’s contemporaries focus on “transgressive sexual identities in the Western canon...
...Evangelical sex advice books to topsecret anti-gay conspiracy meetings are fair game, as are abstinence education materials...
...He can take turns with Bill Clinton...
...You heard me...
...Herzog points out that she was raised in a “deeply Christian” household, with clerical relatives and everything...
...Maybe it really is all pride parades and cheeky costumes...
...They might start billing us...
...In other words, parents who express concern over their high schoolers playing doctor in the supermarket parking lot are really just caught up in the “ideological assault on something pretty fundamental: the most intimate and personal aspects of sex...
...You heard me...
...That makes me feel only slightly better, because her book was also an agony to read...
...Reinforcing contempt for homosexuals was how the Religious Right made it big in the first place...
...Traditions weren’t simply evolving, they were being trampled over by free love, skyrocketing out-ofwedlock births, and abortions...
...And of course there’s the well-known fact that STDs are really just scare tactics to prevent adolescents from having all the meaningful, innocent sex that the first sexual revolution was supposed to exalt...
...Math...
...Bonus if there’s little substance to the topic of study, and no utility for the research...
...Now America’s pants hang in limbo, as conflicting messages about morality and sexual freedom play out in churches, town halls, and episodes of reality TV...
...Based on this, Professor Dagmar Herzog’s new book should make her a university president in no time...
...Whatever the case, readers should feel insulted by her “some of my best friends are Christian...
...Evangelicals are to blame for lousy whoopee...
...And you can know that God forgives all your own prior sins, and that He promises you decades of spectacular sex in marriage...
...Social do-gooders sought to subsidize sex education for minors, dictating new mores and effectively endorsing behaviors that had gone unmentioned in the classroom but were expressly prohibited by parents...
...76 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 booKs In RevIew Rather than approach Christians with understanding, Herzog can only show contempt: To anyone reading its sex and marriage advice literature, the Religious Right’s core message to its followers becomes abundantly clear: you really can have it all...
...She makes her case in six chapters...
...Herzog complains that the Religious Right has gone too far in pursuing a legislative agenda based on social issues...
...Instead, everyone ought to help “people get comfortable with the unruliness of desire...
...Ask anyone about the most romantic achievementsofliterature, andthey’lllikelyciteShakespeare or Austen, two writers hardly rebelling against the sexual “repression” they faced in their time...
...Even if you stay between the lines, nothing’s going to jump off the page, and it’s not like you’ve learned anything new...
...Live a little...
...They might be a nation of super models, but they’re bored super models...
...Evangelicals are to blame for lousy whoopee...
...approach...
...Each paragraph reads like a stand-up comic saying, “Get a load of this...
...Over here, Victoria’s Secret has a certain ring to it, but if we’re going to be so casual about it, we might as well call it Victoria’s Emporium of Added and Unnecessary Layers...
...But maybe I’ve got the South all wrong, experienced as it was in doses of Denny’s and Waffle Houses on family trips...
...In such a world, when Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute was told, “He might ask you to do things you’d consider unsafe,” one would have to add, “But, c’mon...
...If students are learning about sex from this woman, we really are in a crisis...
...We weren’t born sex in crisis: The New yesterday, and it’s pretty sexual Revolution and the clear she’s not born-again...
...It’s a study of the sexual counterrevolution of the ’80s and ’90s, but to hear Ms...
...That’s the rub...
...Forget that in most faiths there’s a word for the “unruliness of desire”: “temptation...
...She yearns for the Bible Belt of her high school and college years, Ms...
...Fourteen-yearold boys must never learn that one can make a living studying pornography and (as in this book) complaining about the hypocrisy of religious parents...
...But don’t get her wrong...
...Instead, the romantic bits of their tales were better on account of the restraint of the protagonists...
...This book was an agony to write,” begins author Dagmar Herzog in her foreword to Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics...
...A professor of the history of sexuality, Herzog maintains the kind of job that could exist only in a society where Cosmopolitan rakes in obscene ad revenues by plastering on its cover different permutations of the phrase “How to Please Your Man...
...Reviewed by J. Peter freire If all this and attending church make somebody an Evangelical Christian, Rudy Giuliani is the new Billy Graham...
...Herzog advances the notion that the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s liberated us from the oppression of keeping our pants on when strangers are present...
...Most you can skip...
...To be clear: she is paid to do this...
...Essentially, Herzog has written a disquisition accusing the Religious Right of stepping out of line for daring to fight back...
...What to teach then...
...Then again, if it stops being “transgressive” and becomes “normal,” doesn’t that take the fun out of it...
...when sexual choices were “fluid and adaptable” for “evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike...
...Herzog tell it, we’re in the midst of a “sexuality crisis” that is entirely the fault of a conspiratorial Religious Right...
...and schemed to spoil all the pants-free fun...
...Professor Herzog is right about one thing though...
...Is the desire to quash dissent a requirement to get a Ph.D...
...Her job is to read that article, take notes, and present a paper on it...
...booKs In RevIew The Slaughterhouse Sex and the Single Professor N N ow might be an appropriate time to state the Freire Modern Professor Hypothesis, which goes like this: The more a professor favors taboos over traditional morality, the further that professor will advance...
...Future of american Politics She thinks abortion “rights” By Dagmar Herzog are as inalienable as “homo (BasiC Books, 249 pages, $26.95) sexual rights,” and she seems pretty cool with teenage sex...
...This dreamy Bible Belt could have existed, I guess, but it’s hard for this Connecticut native to envision...
...Yet temptation, and ultimately sin, are what give Americans an edge over Sweden, where sex is more of a handshake...
...But she forgets that her colleagues started this mess...
...Herzog tell us we’re in the midst of a “sexuality crisis” that is entirely the fault of a conspiratorial Religious Right...
...These days, however, it’s futile to offer such an argument Parents who express concern over their high schoolers playing doctor in the supermarket parking lot are really just caught up in the “ideological assault on something pretty fundamental: the most intimate and personal aspects of sex...
...Shockingly, people who closely follow the Bible were not okay with this development, J. Peter freire is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...I can’t imagine the 19-year-old Dagmar helping her pastor polish the altar, mopping between the pews, and sharing her excitement over someday writing a book on Sex after Fascism, after which little Billy Ray Jones would run in wearing a skirt and tiara, to no one’s surprise...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 7
