Our Sex Hy-genies Are Out of the Bottle, Everything We Fight About
Amazon.com review from Publishers Weekly -
Luker, a University of California–Berkeley sociologist and author (Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 1994), gingerly examines the issues of sex education that divide communities along political lines or between the competing visions of sex as pleasure versus sex as danger. . .after reading this book it is impossible to look at the intersection of the intimate and the political in the same way.
See also NYT review dated Sunday, August 27, 2006 by JUDITH SHULEVITZ:
the way in which we
disagree about sex has everything to do with how we’re breaking apart as a nation.Luker identifies Americans’ competing visions of sexuality as “liberalâ€
and “conservative,†but even she acknowledges that those terms are too
flabby to nail down our real differences. More muscular terms, it seems to me, would be “naturalist†and “sacralist.â€Naturalists, whom Luker calls sexual liberals, hold that sex is natural and unmysterious, a healthy, pleasurable, quasi-recreational activity.
Sacralists, whom Luker calls sexual conservatives, consider sex sacred but dangerous, transformative when contained by marriage but destructive outside it. . .Luker traces the debate about sex education back to its invention by the “social hygienists†of the Progressive era, but she locates the source of present-day hostilities in the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, which she calls as “disorienting and historically important†as the French,
American and Russian Revolutions.“Like them,†she writes, “it will
continue to reshape human life in profound ways for many, many years to
come. . .â€â€œThe sexual conservatives and sexual liberals I interviewed
live in the same towns, practice the same professions, have similar educational and social backgrounds ... and often belong to the same church,†she writes.
And yet, she concludes, “the two sides have very little in common.†They disagree on “basic questions about human nature,†and therefore on the kind of society they want to live in.Conservatives are “modern-day Calvinists†who believe “humans are fundamentally capable of the worst†and that society must protect itself through hierarchies, boundaries and unquestionable moral codes.
Liberals worry about society encroaching on the individual, and have doubts about all of the above.
One way to get these conflicting worldviews out in the open is to fight about marriage, which Luker thinks is the true subject.. .
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Stupid I Know But
in all my years as a professional educator and as an apple-polishing schoolgirl myself before that, do you know I NEVER connected Eve biting into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge with "an apple for the teacher" as the symbol of schooling?
Isn't that creepy??
(not creepy that I didn't see it before but that it connnects with such impact, well, it's also creepy that I didn't ever see it until now, oh you know what I mean . . .)
I remember being clobbered by similar power of story recalling the cover of Lauren Slater's psychological experiment book a couple of months ago, with the giant nutcracker half-open on the front. It had come to mind quite suddenly, how much it looks like an image Lorraine had just posted, of two fingers half-open on a computer mouse in the same upside down V, both so obviously evoking the Mysterious Female.
I own the Slater book and had read it twice (in bed even, late at night!) but never had seen the book cover that way, never given it a second thought. Now I can't STOP seeing it that way.
My verbal and logical intelligence is very facile after all these decades of constant use, but I think my visual vocabulary might need some major development. I feel like the little kid who doesn't get what all the grownups are sniggering at!