Passion Lost

Yet this emphasis on the physical has eroded our understanding of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of intimacy. Today, sex has saturated contemporary life through television, movies, books, magazines, videos, tabloids, advertising, and the internet. Meanwhile densensitization and sexual dysfunction, obsession with body image, short-lived commitments, and high divorce rates are signs that our deepest private desire remain unfulfilled.

We yearn for true connection with the romantic other, and our growing malaise has given rise to nostalgic myths of golden times that never really existed. Patricia Anderson's Passion Lost, a lively history of sexual more —from the burgeoning sexual concerns of the twentieth century's early years, the changing morality of the 1920s and 1930s, the liberties of wartime, and the 1950s' veneer of rectitude, to the freedoms of the following decades— examines those myths and paints a compelling new portrait that illustrates how deeply the present is rooted in the past, and how our quest for intimacy has been hijacked by our public obsession with sex By guiding us through the landscape of emotional and sexual development in the twentieth century, Patricia Anderson gives fresh meaning to the role of passion in our culture and new hope for the future of relationships.

Patricia Anderson. Passion Lost: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century. Toronto, ON: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2001. Softcover xii+271 pp.