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Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics | 
| Author: Dagmar Herzog
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 29319
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0465002145
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.709730904
EAN: 9780465002146
ASIN: 0465002145
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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 ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies. The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex?not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America?a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of “hot monogamy”?for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message 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 sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Interesting in places but doesn't make the case August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has some interesting material but the author never manages to justify her overall argument: that the Christian right has changed the way Americans think about sex, making us all more anxious, more hypocritical and more dissatisfied.
I'm no supporter of the Christian right but not every ill in our society can be laid at their door and the author failed to persuade me of this. She begins with the claim that the invention of Viagra in the late 1990s and the sudden availability of Internet pornography fundamentally changed our understanding of sex. She states on page 10, without offering a scintilla of evidence, "Viagra changed how everyone thought about sex." It made every man even into old age a potential Lothario. Well, excuse me, I just don't buy it. Two pages later, Herzog is suddenly arguing the exact opposite -- that men in huge numbers had become bored with sex. The evidence quoted here is a few magazine articles.
That's basically the method throughout. You'll find here an enormous amount of footnotes -- Herzog has read everything and once an assertion appears in print, no matter where, it can be quoted and footnoted. But she never goes out and speaks to real people herself (or at least the book never includes their opinions). This is therefore an "academic" book for a popular audience. It falls between the stools -- not rigorous enough to be academic, not entertaining enough to be popular.
Herzog always seems to have both sides of the argument. Christian evangelicals now embrace sex but only within marriage. That doesn't seem wrong to me. What's her alternative? She never quite says.
I too oppose the waste of dollars on "abstinence only" sex education. It doesn't work. But that's the point. Far from changing the behavior of young people, or changing our societal attitudes toward sex in general, it's water off a duck's back. And now the political pendulum is swinging away from the Christian right as well as such policies.
It's true, as Herzog notes, that the Republicans spent years using homophobia to win elections. But what's the result? Public acceptance of gay marriage and gays in general has only risen.
The best chapter concerns the Bush administration's war against condoms in the international fight against HIV. There, she's on firmer ground. The United States has done enormous harm in the world with its damaging policy opposing the use of condoms to fight AIDS. As a result, people have died and societies set backward.
This book could have been a lot better without making extravagant claims. I suspect the publisher pushed Herozg to do so, thinking she could widen her audience beyond academic circles. But it's a bridge too far.
For more about me and my book Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons (Prentice Hall Paperback) go to www.alanelsner.com
 Please Be Objective August 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Jeri Nevermind - actually I believe it is since abstinence only and other dishonest forms of sex education were instituted that the rate of unplanned pregnancies has risen so sharply. And part of actual sex education, as opposed to fearmongering and empty moralizing, would be to teach fathers responsibility, and women assertiveness (as opposed to obedience and "just saying no"). The very largest proportion of abortions, illegitimate children, etc. among my students are had by women from religious families, trained to obey men ("have sex with me!" "now abort the child, it is not convenient to me!" "but have this one, because God has told me you should!").
 What's wrong with her theory? Pretty much everything. July 31, 2008
5 out of 20 found this review helpful
Herzog argues in this silly, poorly written book, that the religious right is going to take over and roll back the sexual revolution.
Yes, as everyone knows, the religious right controls television, Hollywood movies, CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times and all the universities.
No...wait...actually, the liberals control all these! So where have the puritans, laughed at on every sitcom, managed to grab control back? Um...nowhere, so it's difficult to see the point of the book.
She solemnly announces, "We are experiencing sex in crisis" (p 3). Then, on the same page, she disproves her theory by chattering happily about Viagra, which has meant even the very elderly can be promiscuous. Does this sound like sex in crisis?
The crisis continues in the next chapter where she talks about Evangelicals. Aiming her razor wit at the enemy, Herzog notes that, "Evangelicals incessantly...admit that they are drawn to the very things they say they despise" (p 39). I am shocked, shocked to hear that people are drawn to sin. Then, with relish, she relates every shred of evidence proving Evangelicals actually like sex and therefore are hypocrites.
By page 69, after pointless rambling, she relates the terrifying facts of the Evangelical Glen Eyrie project which was actually against gay rights and made an initiative to "Pressure politicians to commit to opposing any gay-friendly legislation" (p 69).
Christians staying by the same morals they've been teaching for 2,000 years? Let us all pause to take a few deep breaths.
Grimly, she continues with "Reports from Love in Action and similar ex-gay ministries routinely claim that reparative therapy...have a success rate of anywhere from 25 to 50 percent" (p 80). Herzog promptly exposes this nonsense by telling the story of Paulk, who claimed to be cured of homosexuality, but was later found in a gay bar.
Besides the rambling writing and flawed logic, Herzog fails at the most basic level by not tackling the problems the sexual revolution has created.
She keeps pushing thorough sexual education as if it were a cure all. She's blind to the obvious: since we began sex education in our schools, the illegitimacy rate skyrocketed to more than 30%, sexual diseases are so common Herpes medicines are standard commercials, and some 1,200,000 abortions occur every year.
Even in the UK, which has one of the most clinical, pro-sex, pro-condom teaching given to children before they can read, sex education has been a catastrophic failure. The UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe and a soaring abortion rate.
Even the very left Alan Guttmacher Institute, a part of Planned Parenthood, shows fewer than 20 percent of all pregnancies nationwide end in abortion, 72 pregnancies end in abortion in New York for every 100 births. Funny, since New York practically throws condoms from you on every corner. So the most rigorous pro-contraception education has resorted in...why, the highest rate of abortion! Amazing.
These are common enough facts. So why won't Herzog acknowledge and discuss them?
Herzog refuses to admit that the sexual revolution has harmed people. And the people most harmed by all the collapsing marriages and freewheeling sex are the children. Children need a mother and father who will love and take care of them.
Children who live in single parent households are at huge risk for abuse compared to those children living with their biological parents. Statistically, these children will perform poorly in schools, use drugs and alcohol, statistically, be much more likely to end up in prison, and be at much higher rates of suicide and emotional problems all through their lives compared to those raised with their mother and father.
Herzog badly needs to read such books as "Abolition of Marriage" and "Fatherless America".
At any rate, skip this silly book.
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