Sex in Crisis
ISBN-13: 978-0-465-00214-6
Writer: Dagmar Herzog
Title: Sex in Crisis
Subtitle: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
Place of publication: New York
Publisher: Basic Books
Year of publication: 1/7/2008
Format: 145x220 mm
Pages: xiv+249
Binding: red black boards in colour dust jacket by Rodrigo Corral
Inside back jacket of writer's colour photograph: Michael Staub
Weight: 444 gr.
Original price: USD 26.95 / CAD 28.95
Supplier: Anybook Ltd
Order Number: 67218864
Order Shipped: 10th August 2020
Entry Number: 2020014
Entry Date: 24th August 2020
BOOK DESCRIPTION
The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true - have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no.
Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It's 1950s redux. Politicians - including many Democrats - insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a "sex education" curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex runs future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.
The truth is Americans have not become ant-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex - not least due to the strategems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America - a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won.
How has the Religious Right scored so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals have appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals have crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of "hot monogamy" - for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message has enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.
Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America's culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisicated national conversation about the facts of life.
