BOOK DESCRIPTION
Sex is one of the great joys of life – satisfying to the body, sublime to the soul. But when we examine our sexual psychology with a careful eye, we will find a reservoir of fear toward sexual expression.
BOOK DECRIPTION
At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
The most beautiful beach in the world... that happens to be a nude beach.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Here is an odyssey through the wilds of American mating, and there has never been a look like it because Ralph Schoenstein has ever had the necessary blend of derring-do and ignorance.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
This isn't just another major novel. This is for readers who, having perhaps recently cruised in a number of such vehicular masterworks, might like a joyride in a jalopy. They will be whisked out along Iowa backroads to see the sexual revolution in full sway in what only yesterday was called the Bible Belt, with a marriage counselor named Bill Bumpers at the wheel, driving with the top down and the accelerator floored.
Wildly uncertain whether he is saving the demise, Dr. Bumpers nurses a rural union into ménage à trois, an that into a sort of updated Brook Farm commune, as hired men, shirtsleeve philosophers, and assorted other American folk archetypes Get With It. Using his familiar broad cartoon strokes, De Vries quickly sketches for us the utopia of total self-gratification we have been promised by rhapsodists urging us to scrap the work ethic along with the Puritan. Women's Lib is now a seminal (sic) force, and there is of course creative self-realization for all- the hired man turned primitive and critic is certainly one of the author's happier inspirations.
All this is orchestrated with our guide's own personal life, giving us stopovers at orgies, black masses, and what not as we wing our way merrily toward 1984 rather different from the one we had been fearing. By no means necessarily opposed to unfettered freedom, the author simply reminds us that the broader the front on which man pursues it, the greater his potential for absurdity. As Whitney Balliett long ago pointed out in The New Yorker, "De Vries, in a highly devious way, is battling both immorality and morality."
The title is taken from a hitherto unpublished poem of Whitman's unearthed in recent scholarly researches on the Master.
Peter De Vries (1910-1993). I Hear America Swinging, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. 211pp.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
PORNOGRAPHY. The very word arouses emotion - and the subject is one about which it is difficult to be uncommitted.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
"A big city wife tells the almost unbelievable story of how she and her husband became embroiled in today's new kind of "modern" social life, where marriage ties become only a passport to a party!."
Lisa Daimler: The Underground Society, Cleveland, OH: Century 015, soft cover, 192pp.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Discussions of globalization usually focus on political, economic, and technological transformations, but fail to recognize how we experience these processes in our daily lives, including our most intimate acts and practices. In this volume, anthropologists and sociologists draw on long-term ethnographic research on love, gender, and sexuality in a broad range of regions to discuss how global forces shape marriage, commercial sex, the political economy of intimacy, and lesbian and gay expressions of companionship. The richly-textured ethnographies provoke a series of questions about emerging vocabularies for friendship and romance; the adoption of cultural forms from faraway places; the emergence of new desires, pleasures, and emotions that circulate as commodities in the global marketplace; and the ways economic processes shape public and private expressions of sexual intimacy.
