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12 - Revolution in Sexual Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Richard M. Abrams
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

Sex is not a mere physiological transaction. … It dominates in fact almost every aspect of culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. … [It embodied] the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. … Society regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph.

Henry Adams

It shouldn't take a rocket scientist, or even an anthropologist, to make this observation, but one anthropologist did feel impelled to comment in 1999: “The craving for sexual gratification is a primordial drive … that has not changed its basic composition in some 70 million years.” The poet W. H. Auden called it “that intolerable neural itch.” It is so powerful that men and women high and low and throughout history risked their careers, their fortunes, their reputations, and even their lives to satisfy it – from Paris of Troy and Dido of Carthage, to Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Heloise and Abelard, on to the likes of Billy Swaggart, Jesse Jackson, and Ted Kennedy – not to mention presidents Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, and William Jefferson Clinton. The craving has enabled many a lowborn man, and also many a woman in a male-dominated world, to gain high place among royalty and other sites of wealth and power.

Type
Chapter
Information
America Transformed
Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2001
, pp. 157 - 182
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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