Intimate Matters/The Americanization of Sex
Cameron, J. M.
THE SEARCH FOR SEXUAL HAPPINESS INTIMATE MATTERS A History of Sexuality in America John d'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman Harper & Row, $24.95, 428 pp. THE AMERICANIZATION OF SEX Edwin M....
...He is very much concerned about decency and civility in sexual relations and he reminds us of the cruelty and violence that seem to be increasing in the sexual life of Western societies...
...Of course there are, they recognize, some dark and painful phenomena associated with the various sexual revolutions...
...He is especially good on the ways in which the market and advertising affect sexual life along with everything else...
...All three authors are "progressive...
...Greer's work...
...Its effect was foreseen by Lionel Trilling who knew that the report was a revolutionary document...
...It is curious that "safe sex" is being touted by those who advocate the use of condoms, one of the oldest forms of contraception, along with coitus interruptus and, for the self-controlled, coitus reservatus...
...The immense growth in contraception and the surgical sterilization of men and women has been accompanied by a growth in the number of abortions and in the number of single-parent families...
...But he refuses to accept the reduction of sexual relations to the personal and private...
...The United States has been a pioneer in many of the new attitudes to sex that have changed, if not forever, at least for a long time to come, sexual practice and the hitherto central institution of monogamous marriage...
...though even for a sociologist some of his writing is overripe...
...But in its handling of the moral issues that arise out of any consideration of sexuality in our society, it is feeble...
...there is simply no critical reflection on the forms of sexuality...
...In all its breadth and depth sex is more than an area in which private preference and individual whim are sovereign...
...Indeed, with the rise of male and female homosexuality as two large subcultures, straight sex, procreative or nonprocrea-tive, has a battered look...
...Ger-maine Greer, though only Schur, among our authors, seems to have noted Ms...
...AIDS has obviously had a startling effect in strengthening conservative views and making people more cautious in their conduct...
...Coitus interruptus has been given a certificate of respectability by Ms...
...That it was such an area unchallenged in the earlier phase of the sexual revolution, and that it cannot be understood simply at the private and personal level, is well argued by Schur...
...their adherence to the ideal of bourgeois, monogamous marriage may, for some, place them on the reactionary side...
...Although divorce is relatively easy and much more non-procreative sex is available, the amount of happiness in sexual relations doesn't seem to have increased in quite the way anticipated by such prophets of the sexual revolution as Bertrand Russell...
...All information about changes in sexual practice feeds a natural curiosity...
...In particular, abortion is taken to be a necessary feature of women's emancipation...
...Intimate Matters is the work of two historians who have assembled, analyzed, and sorted out an immense amount of material on the topic since round about 1650, roughly since the coming of (Protestant) Europeans to North America...
...Recent changes in sexual practice are, for the authors of Intimate Matters, on the whole beneficent...
...In this respect The Americanization of Sex is much worse, but Schur at least has the excuse that he is a sociologist...
...We seem now to have reached the stage when petting and casual fornication are no longer youthful offenses, common or rare...
...Neither Intimate Matters nor The Americanization of Sex is likely to have such a profound effect on the American reader...
...Progressive ideology is something given...
...J. M. Cameron Sexuality in modern society seems of perpetual interest to members of opulent societies and especially to Americans...
...Intimate Matters is useful as a reference book...
...THE AMERICANIZATION OF SEX Edwin M. Schur Temple University, $24.95, 229 pp...
...The history of the IUD has been a disaster...
...The most startling example of this has been the Kinsey Report...
...now "The Erotic [has become] incorporated as a regular, ongoing feature of their maturation...
...and sometimes it may change the norms of behavior...
...He accepts a progressive ideology with even more complacency than do our other two authors...
...Most of the information given is not new, except in detail...
...the depth of sexual problems is simply not considered...
...This is barbarous jargon and one is sorry to find it and hundreds of other such examples in the work of two historians...
...Schur discusses, with some solemnity, whether or not Masters and Johnson are true progressives...
...That the remedy is simply and primarily to move our society away from the savagery of capitalism and towards more cooperative social forms is asserted rather than demonstrated...
...Underneath the fearful jargon in which Schur's book is written there is an interesting thesis about the absorption of sexual thought and behavior into the processes of capitalist society...
...His essay, published first in the Partisan Review in 1948, and subsequently collected in The Liberal Imagination, states that the report is likely to have a large' 'permissive effect.'' (It is curious that Trilling's essay is not mentioned in either of the books under review...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 2
