The New Age of Sexual Anxiety
Sex in Crisis:
The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
by Dagmar Herzog
Basic Books. 320 pp. $26.95
Of the making of books about the state of sexual relations in the United States, there will be no end. But Sex in Crisis, a new polemic by a professor of modern German history at the CUNY Graduate Center named Dagmar Herzog, does its best to take the national discussion to a new extreme. Herzog offers a full-throated argument in support of a renewed commitment to sexual liberationism. She is unmoved by the results of innumerable public-opinion surveys that reveal the dissatisfaction of never-married Americans—how they cannot seem to find satisfactory offerings in the sexual cafeteria presented to them by the common culture, and how they are riven instead with anxiety about the freedom they are instructed to enjoy and the wild oats they are now required to sow, even though they may have neither the desire nor the hunger to do so.
Herzog argues that such reactions are not examples of the fallout from the sexual revolution that began in the 1960’s, but are the consequences of the failure to take that revolution to its logical conclusion. She is concerned not that things have gone too far, but that they have not gone far enough—that progress toward a new utopia was stopped in its tracks by the nefarious influence of the Religious Right. Herzog contends that over the past fifteen years the U.S. has experienced a counter-revolution due to the trifecta of sexual pharmacology, Internet pornography, and the prurience of popular culture.
The advent of Viagra, she argues, has led to both an increasingly mechanical view of sexuality and unrealistic expectations regarding sexual performance. “Male difficulties,” she writes, are now “treated first and foremost as a problem originating in the body. Forget your unhappy childhood or unhappy prior relationships. Sex [is] about now.” At the same time, she laments the constant stream of advice on sexual technique and hygiene that pervades the media. The effect of such talk has been to induce unwarranted paranoia about the threat of disease and to create unrealistic hopes. “Expectations have been exponentially raised,” Herzog claims. “Life in all its ordinariness no longer feels good enough.”
As for the increasing popularity and social acceptance of pornography—which, thanks to the Internet, can now be consumed cheaply, easily, and anonymously—Herzog considers it to be anxiety-producing in the near term, as it unsettles our outdated notions of what is or ought to be morally acceptable. But she otherwise finds the proliferation of pornography to be a blessing, since men and, more important, women are finally recognizing and giving in to the “unruliness of desire.”
The evangelical Right, Herzog believes, has offered a disturbingly seductive solution to this new age of sexual anxiety. Deploying secular arguments about the physical and mental health threats posed by a more promiscuous society, propagandists of the Religious Right have, Herzog claims, stealthily sought to impose their faith-based view of the superiority of monogamous sexuality within the bounds of marriage. She has studied marriage manuals and sexual-aid guides produced by and for evangelical Christians, and is appalled the arguments she finds there—arguments about the way in which fantasizing about others during the sexual act might lead to distance between a husband and wife, and the way the consumption of pornography might split the marital bed asunder entirely. “Since at least the mid-1970’s,” she writes with unconcealed disdain, “evangelical Christians have been pushing the good word that evangelicals have more fun—that godly sex is the most fabulous sex.”
Although these manuals claim that channeling sexuality strictly within monogamous opposite-sex marriage is the surest path to a life of bliss and contentment, Herzog argues that they are, in fact, re-introducing a “fifties-style culture of shame”—with its prohibitions on “self-touching, fantasy, emotional association during sex, attractions to people other than one’s partner”—that is guaranteed to lead to disappointment and psychic distress.
Why should we think evangelicals have won their purported war on the sexual revolution when it seems clear there is not an evangelical Christian on this earth who believes it to be true? Herzog’s standard of victory is a low one:
The success of the Religious Right is most evident in the way many self-defined sexual liberals now rush to concede that a delay in sexual debut is desirable and that keeping the number of sexual partners in a lifetime to a minimum is an important sign of psychological health and self-valuing.
Despite this supposedly “conservative” victory, Herzog acknowledges that a majority of Americans already support civil unions for homosexuals, that there is growing grassroots resistance to abstinence-only education, and that U.S. teens have more sex partners and higher rates of abortion than their Canadian and European coevals. But that offers her little comfort.
Herzog says she was motivated to write Sex in Crisis by the gaping divide she sees between the current state of affairs and the America she seeks: one in which there is same-sex and polygamous marriage, legalized prostitution, adolescent sex (presumably including sex between and among adolescents and adults), abortion on demand, and billboards like the one in Germany that features a condom and the slogan “Having an affair? Take me with you!” The America she wishes to live in would be one in which open relationships are widespread and publicly acceptable, abstinence is discouraged, and long-term partnerships are no longer considered the ideal.
The sexual morality Herzog champions, but never fully fleshes out, is a hyper-individualistic, hedonistic one based almost solely on the foundational “concepts of self-determination and consent.” Polymorphously perverse, it is an ethic free of shame, guilt, and taboos.
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It seems never to occur to Herzog that there is an obvious alternative explanation for why many “liberals” now defend at least some of the old sexual morality: witnessing the real-world consequences of unbridled sexuality, they have come to acknowledge the wisdom that used to be common sense. This is especially hard for Herzog to see, because she refuses to acknowledge the connection between sex and procreation. Looking forward to a society in which sexual arrangements are fleeting, combinatorial, and non-exclusive, she never considers who will raise the children, if indeed any will be permitted to be born.
Anything that might enhance traditional sexual practice is considered part of the edifice of repression. Take Viagra, the drug that has solved perhaps the most humiliating difficulty men experience. Why isn’t the cure it provides something that Herzog can welcome and celebrate? The problem with it, she argues, is that it has reinforced the centrality of “‘normal’ sex,” by which she means coitus that concludes with an orgasm. By way of making a case against “normal” sex, she cites “the endlessly reported news that the majority of women were not all that delighted with coitus in the first place and would have been more than happy to engage in other mutually orgasm-inducing practices.” In the end, then, Herzog’s book is less a broadside against the current trends in American sexual practice and more a polemic against the sex act as it is traditionally understood.
“The book was an agony to write,” Herzog confesses in the preface. “I found myself inescapably inhabiting . . . a landscape I found consistently disturbing as well as exceptionally disorienting.” Perhaps that explains why she had such a hard time thinking straight.