Are We Sex Addicts?

...the narrowing horizons everywhere are turning man's attention more and more onto his private world, the world of pleasure and of the senses, of security and of retirement at 45...

...Any sexual activity other than sexual intercourse between man and wife...

...And what is this "sex gluttony" which Professor Sorokin claims to be the bane of civilization...

...There still remains the fact that such activity is a response to a cultural and psychological situation, rather than the stimulus which leads to individual and social turmoil...

...Nowhere does he grant that the extra-marital relationships which he so deplores are often but gropings after that love and understanding which too many of us are denied, that the first shy fumblings of adolescent love are anything but the first step toward the "sex sewer" and the causes of world crises...

...Beneath the garbled thinking in this book, and the many facts misused and misinterpreted, there lies, one feels, a great hatred for the senses and the beauty they impart to life...

...Reviewed by Arthur Oesterreicher Associate editor, "Dude" Here is a little book, urging us to turn back the sexual clock to a never-never land of chastity, which is light in step with the big Conform-or-Perish sex freeze which is slowly creeping over the country...

...While research into and diffusion of the facts concerning these important problems should be cultivated among the specialists and serious students, it is uncertain whether this knowledge ought to be freely broadcast urbi et orbi, to everybody...

...This state Professor Sorokin terms "sex anarchy," and many will agree with him...

...When uncritically accepted, this view contributes to the spread of sexual gluttony, and, therefore, to the deterioration of the vitality and longevity of its devotees...

...These extreme manifestations are limited to a fringe of the population, however, and are not even the major targets of Professor Sorokin's ire...

...nowhere does he see it as an invigorating and a replenishing function of the human body...

...Fur-llierniorc, it is true that American culture and everyday life have become intensely sexualized, that sex is equated by us with success and with status...

...With more newsdealers than ever being hounded (justly and unjustly) for peddling pornography...

...Perhaps this is a little unfair to the author, who is obviously well-intentioned and sincerely alarmed by what he thinks is going on...

...It is curious to read that a man who believes in human freedom also believes that "After 1930...

...If Professor Sorokin is to be believed, all that the world needs is for all of us to keep our eyes on the ground and our hands to ourselves and the H-bomb race and depressions and economic inequality will just quietly wither away and everybody will be in Total Love with everybody else...

...of course, Professor Sorokin's privilege...

...with burlesque almost at its last bump thanks to our courts, Professor Sorokin has arrived to give the movement a little intellectual eclat...

...There followed a renaissance of the fine arts and literature, a notable decrease of the previous persecution of religion, and a restoration and glorification of the great national values of Russia, which had in the preceding period been vilified by the Communist regime...

...Disapproval of all extra-marital sexual activity, even kissing, is...

...Total love wearing a chastity belt, of course: Musn't take chances on starting the Third World War in the back of a parked car, must we...

...lie makes little mention of prostitution, which, after all, is almost non-existent in this country...

...Our Brave New World of avant-garde non-virgin clubs, suburban wife-swappers and the like is a world of rootless, thwarted people, who have turned to a distorted use of sensuality as a desperate, neurotic last resort to assert their shackled individualities...

...Though The American...

...No one will deny that, in the past fifty years, American sexual mores have been revolutionized to the point where the old imperatives are valid for only a minority segment of the population...

...Which leaves only extra-marital heterosexual intercourse, specifically, pre-marital relations and adultery...

...For the sake of argument, let us admit that it is impossible for any such relationship to be ennobling and satisfying...

...America's most serious sex problem —the steady, ominous rise of homosexuality—is nowhere discussed, except in the most transient manner, in The American Sex Revolution...

...Due to its complex nature it cannot be transmitted adequately to the persons and groups who do not have the required preparation for its full understanding...

...But how can he confuse the many degrees of emotional involvement possible in such activity, lumping prostitution and intercourse between engaged couples into the same moral category, equating Romeo and Juliet with Justine and the Marquis de Sade...

...Adultery, as Leslie A. Fiedler pointed out in a review of Irwin Shaw's Lucy Crown, is one of "the last frontiers'" in a self-satisfied, corporate and conformist America...

...Sex, he warns, unless accompanied by something called Total Love, is not only morally, psychologically and biologically deleterious, but is well on its way—all by its little self—to putting all of Western civilization into the dustbin...

...On the subject of sexual education, Professor Sorokin comments: "A large part of this stuff is blatantly unscientific and worthless...

...when the task of curbing sex freedom [in the Soviet Union] was essentially accomplished, the destructive activities of the Government began to subside and its constructive work gained momentum...

...On what evils, specifically, is he blaming the ills of America and the world...

...Sex Revolution is replete with anti-Freudian gibes in the most poisonous vein imaginable, ils author, whether he knows it or not, is squarely lined up with the psychoanalysis on this point...

...Throughout his book, Professor Sorokin sees the sex act as an enervating expenditure of energy, of which there is only a limited supply...

...Armed with a few facts and one all-embracing theory, this Harvard sociologist shakes a stern, humorless finger at us and makes like Cassandra...

...Nor is Professor Sorokin incorrect in correlating abusive sex practices with personal and cultural disintegration...

...with rock 'n roll declared Pelvic Menace Number One to our youth...

...But it comes as a shock to learn that, according to Professor Sorokin, most Americans are "sex gluttons," and victims of "sexual addiction somewhat similar to drug addiction.' Furthermore, he claims that "the current view that limitation of the sexual urge is an important source of illness is in large measure a fashionable myth, as is its corrolary [sic] that unrestrained sexual activity is not harmful...