Apparently, the goal in writing about human psychology and behavior these days is to work "desire" into your book's title. While
The Evolution of Desire was only slightly misnomered, this book's title,
Disorders of Desire, is entirely misleading. It sounds like a book about pathologies of sex, perhaps including sex addiction, nymphomania, rape, child molestation, and so forth. That's why I checked it out, when I was researching a paper on hypersexuality.
Unfortunately for my purposes, this book is actually a fairly dry, scholarly, and comprehensive history of... sex research and sex researchers in the US since the 1940s. (When Kinsey created the field with his groundbreaking work.) The book has chapters on Kinsey's studies, Masters and Johnson's work in later decades, medical issues with sex, sexual politics, sex therapy techniques, transsexualism, etc. The book was useless for my research paper, but it had some interesting information in its own right, so I read the good bits and kept it around until I had time to write a review.
To the scores:
Disorders of Desire, by Janice M. Irvine, 2005.
Concept: 7 (Misleading title: 3)
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 7
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7
Entertainment Value: 5
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 7
I enjoyed the book, but it's not something written for a mass audience. You'll find this one in the collection of therapists, sex researchers, and college libraries. It's not overly technical or academic in the presentation, but it's not pop cultural either, and if you aren't interested in the subject you'll never make it through. Nor want to. It is informative and well-researched though, so I found it of value. But I'm used to (at this point) reading scholarly/academic works, and this is a field I'm interested in. If you're not and you're not, then your mileage will almost certainly vary.
This isn't the type of book that draws sweeping, societal conclusions. It's not trying to do so. The overall impression, however, is of how much progress society has made in this area since the early-mid twentieth century. Before Kinsey's work in the 1940s, there essentially was no sexual research, much less therapy. Anyone with desires or interests outside of the heteronormative, marriage-centric area was a pervert. There wasn't any acceptance of homosexuality or fetishism or anything we take as commonplace today, and there was no acknowledgement of sexual problems even within marriage. Subjects like a "healthy sex life" that are today the subject of numerous bestsellers and Oprah show segments weren't imagined, much less discussed in public forums.
Alfred C. Kinsey got the ball rolling with his studies of male and female sexual behavior in the 1940s. His work couldn't have come about without societal changes in the previous decades, but thanks to World War I and the ongoing decline of rural life, those were present. More Americans than ever before lived in the relative anonymity of big cities, more women were working, and just as cultural conservatives feared, sexual immorality was on the rise. The book notes that female smoking was seen as a horrible development when it grew in popularity in the 1920s. Some cultural moralist is quoted from that time, saying, "Virtually all the male vices will be feminine vices, too." You gotta admit he pretty well called that one, eh?
Kinsey wasn't the first sex researcher; the book cites some others who carried out similar research in the early 1900s. What Kinsey did was apply a rigorous, scientific discipline to the field, and he conducted an amazing number interviews, thus giving him large enough sample sizes to give credence to his conclusions. Kinsey was a professor of zoology at Indiana University, who specialized in gall wasps. He had no formal training in human sexuality (not that there was any such training to receive at that point), and had to invent and pioneer most of the techniques and questions he used in his lengthy interviews. Kinsey describes his methods in detail in his books, so check into those if you want the full story. In brief, his usual interview required 2-3 hours, and covered 300-500 questions. He felt this level of depth got past the individual's ability whitewash their sexual history. Kinsey wasn't the only one carrying out these interviews, of course. He had hundreds of assistants, and they were rigorously selected (and entirely male WASPs) and formally trained, to ensure high quality, non-judgmental interviews.
He published his male results first, and they stirred up quite a bit of controversy, but that was nothing compared to the female results published some years later. The men in power and setting national policy could accept that most men masturbated constantly, cheated on their wives, frequented prostitutes, and so forth, since after all, they knew it was true. They were far less sanguine about seeing scientific validity given to the fact that most women engaged in premarital sex, that more than a quarter cheated on their husbands, that they fantasized about other men during sex, etc. Information about the ubiquity of sex play amongst children, and the high frequency of homosexual activity amongst adult males was not too welcome either.
A key to his research, and the factor that earned him so much criticism and antipathy during his life and since his death, was his scientific, "value-free" approach. He did not make value judgments or criticize the sex or fantasy lives of his subjects, nor did he present his research with moral arguments. He just compiled statistics on how frequency of sex, how many people had extramarital affairs, premarital sex, homosexual experiences, frequented prostitutes, and so forth. The results of his research were (and still are) infuriating to cultural conservatives, who don't want sex to be a legitimate subject for discussion, and they especially don't want people to know how much deviancy actually exists in society. So they attack societal changes, find things to blame our perceived cultural decline, and do all they can to vilify Kinsey, or anyone else who reproduces his work and reaffirms his conclusions.
This is not just a recent phenomena. As the book quotes Kinsey at the time:
There was some organized opposition, chiefly from a particular medical group. There were attempts by the medical association in one city to bring suit on the ground that we were practicing medicine without a license, police interference in two or three cities, investigation by a sheriff in one rural area, and attempts to persuade the University's Administration to stop the study, or to prevent the publication of the results, or to dismiss the senior author from his university connection, or to establish a censorship over all publications emanating from the study... In one city, a school board, whose president was a physician, dismissed a high school teacher because he had cooperated in getting histories outside of the school but in the same city. There were other threats of legal action, threats of police investigation, and threats of censorship, and for some years there was criticism from scientific colleagues. It has been interesting to observe how far the ancient traditions and social customs influence even persons who are trained as scientists.
Kinsey was almost entirely apolitical, but he could not ignore the results of his studies, which showed that most people engaged in numerous activities that were illegal under the moral codes of the time. He was therefore a harsh critic of the "sexual psychopath" laws that were on the books at the time in many states.
After Kinsey came Masters and Johnson, male and female doctors who built on Kinsey's work with more laboratory study. It had become more acceptable by the 1960s to study sexual activity, not just interview people about it, so things that Kinsey had do in secret (observe and film hetero and homosexual couples, measure body parts, etc) could be done, if not openly, at least without as much secrecy and risk of career suicide. The time of women's liberation was coming about, and sex research showing that women had their own goals and desires, and that these were frequently not being met, was ripe for the times. The presentation of it was still quite tricky, though. The first edition of
Human Sexual Response was published in 1966, and was described as "an almost impenetrable thicket of Latinate medicalese." This was not an accident, as Masters explained:
Every effort was made to make this book as pedantic and obtuse as possible and, may I say in all modesty, I think we succeeded admirably. Although we were specifically writing a textbook for the biological and behavioral professions, we were all aware that aware that the text would be dissected paragraph by paragraph by others, and that if one line, or even a suggestion of "pornography" could be established in any context, we would have had to ace a holocaust.
Despite this, the first printing sold out in 3 days, and the book was soon #2 on the NYT bestseller list. "Once again, it was obvious that there was a vast market for sexual information."
One of the oddest aspects of M&J is that they were both quite conservative. They researched sex, they watched and filmed hundreds of volunteers having sex, they broke ground in the precise descriptions and definitions of human sexual response, but they were culturally Neanderthal. They frequently argued the fact that sex was "natural" and a beautiful and equal activity, enjoyable by both men and women. Yet their definition of "natural" was almost exclusively "married heterosexual" and they would up on the wrong side of the fence, scientific truth, and historical consequence decades later, with their responses to the early years of the AIDS crisis.
In 1988, seven years after AIDS was first diagnosed in the US, M&J published an alarmist tract that claimed vastly higher HIV infection rates than any official study had found, warned of massive HIV outbreaks, recommended mandatory pre-marital testing for AIDS, and went against all established scientific evidence in claiming that HIV could be spread through casual contact, such as from saliva and toilet seats. The reaction from other researchers and public health officials was almost uniformly savage, and when M&J did their usual defensive lock down and refused to release their raw survey data, their conclusions were largely disregarded... except by cultural conservatives, who used them for their own demagogic ends.
The book covers a great deal more ground, including Humanism in sexuality (basically rich hippies fucking like mad, under the guise of sexual research), the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement, the general failure of sex researchers and professionals to get in front of the ball when the AIDS crisis began (epitomized by M&J's craziness), the controversial misandry revealed by The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, early research into female ejaculation and the reality (or not) of the G-spot, and much more. I'm going absurdly long on all my book reviews/discussions though, so I'll refrain from going any deeper into this one. Seek it out at your library if you're curious, or have a college student/professor of your acquaintance order it from their library if you can't find it in your city/county system. If you're interested in the history of sex research, it's an excellent survey of the field.
Labels: book review, sex
