Soulgasms

Thomas Laqueur reviews Dagmar Herzog's book on sex and politics:

The problem with the Evangelical agenda that Herzog exposes in all its detail is not primarily, as she suggests, that it will reverse or has already reversed the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Americans are having as much or more premarital and extramarital sex as they ever were; what people do in bed is remarkably resilient in the face of all but the most concerted state efforts. (Pro-natalism, for example, almost never works; an anti-natalist campaign with the full panoply of punitive measures, as in China, perhaps does.)

At the core of Sex in Crisis is a debate about what kind of a world Americans want to live in.

An Evangelical “babe” on the ticket of a major political party as a candidate to be “a heartbeat away” from the presidency suggests that the debate is going in one direction. The fact that Proposition 8, an effort to amend the California constitution so as to prohibit gay marriage, is failing in the polls – especially now that it has been rephrased on the ballot as a question of taking away a right that people already have – gives hope that it is tilting in the other. Dagmar Herzog’s book really is about what her subtitle claims: “the future of American politics”.