Sexual Revolution Book

What does "sexual revolution" mean? When, how, and why did it begin? What, if anything, did it change? And what hope do we have that its ideals of equality and pleasure can be realized?

From Susan Sontag’s "Pornographic Imagination" to Al Goldstein’s notorious review of Deep Throat, Sexual Revolution explores the cultural, economic, political, and moral consequences of new ways of sexual thinking and behaving — reclaiming the female orgasm and challenging the double standard; celebrating open marriage and homosexuality; and defying taboo and censorship. With Anne Koedt’s classic "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" and Norman Mailer’s "The Homosexual Villain;" Helen Gurley Brown to Lenny Bruce — to name a few — this book features the voices of those who registered and provoked popular consciousness and transformed how we think about sex. Today, Dr. Phil talks about oral sex among grade-schoolers and porn star Jenna Jameson gets a six-figure advance for her memoirs. Something has changed, but Sexual Revolution reminds us that our sexuality remains a bitterly contested battleground.

This collection includes selections by Erica Jong, Lawrence Lipton, Masters and Johnson, Betty Dodson, Gayle Rubin, Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, Huey Newton, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.

Library Journal

Any competent study of history requires access to original texts of the period, and Escoffier (formerly with the New York City Office of Gay and Lesbian Health; American Homo: Community and Perversity) has surely compiled a definitive-perhaps the definitive-anthology on the sexual revolution. Focusing on the colorful 1960s to the aftershock of the 1970s, the more than 50 selections are organized thematically: "Recognitions," "Female Sexuality," "Changing Lifestyles" (open marriage, black sexuality, leather and SM, drugs), "Obscenity/Pornography/Erotica," "Homosexuality," and "Intellectual Analyses" (Freud, Reich, Marcuse, de Beauvoir, Foucault). And what a terrific and comprehensive collection this is, from the opening salvo from Time magazine in 1964, through Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl), Masters and Johnson, Erica Jong, Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Al Goldstein, Paul Goodman, Pat Califia, and many more. Additionally, well-crafted section and selection introductions promote insight and analysis. Highly recommended for all academic and public libraries, to complement John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution and David Allyn's Make Love, Not War.-Martha Cornog, Philadelphia Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.