Haeberle's The Sex Atlas

Haeberle's The Sex Atlas: New Popular Reference Edition is a comprehensive guide to the biological, behavioral, and social aspects of human sexuality. The book is well organized with essay-like chapters that offer accurate, precise outlines of many subjects, an easy-access, chapter-coordinated bibliography, and a glossary of sexual slang terms. The bibliography is also supplemented by reference and recommended-reading lists at the end of each chapter, providing, overall, an excellent starting point for readers who wish to know more about a particular topic. The writing style is effective and quite clear in the sections dealing with anatomy, biological processes, and other basic subjects. The tone in other chapters is more personal and assertive where Haeberle argues against repressive, out-of-date notions of sexuality. The chapters dealing with factual information would make an excellent reference tool for non-specialists. But there is a considerable problem with Haeberle's handling of the history sections. In sections on men's and women's social roles and on the marriage and family in historical perspective Haeberle tends to present popular ideas of the past that do not appear to result from any great depth of research. In those sections (over half the book) in which Haeberle presents opinions combined with a very selective group of historical facts to construct arguments that generalize from history, the reader acquires the impression that his book is quite unreliab

errant behaviors. In the same section Haeberle asserts that the Greeks and Romans emphasized "sexual desire itself" rather than its object and argues that, therefore, "men and women were loved" not because of themselves but because love, which "originated in the lover," caused them to appear desirable (325). Throughout the arguments about Greek culture Haeberle ignores the fact that women were generally sequestered and kept out of the public eye even though he notes elsewhere, in passing, that from the fifth century they were little more than "domestic slaves" (295). He has, however, taken a literary and philosophical ideal and retroactively applied it to the society that produced the myth. In other sections the attitudes he reveals can be callous and his arguments are patchy and, to be charitable, poorly thought out. The section on prostitution, for example, demonstrates most of his failings. After an introduction to the problem, and an overlong digression on the Mann Act, Haeberle offers a summary discussion of prostitution in the past. Following the statement that prostitution has existed among all "civilized nations" (but not stopping to ask the implications of its existence or non-existence among 'uncivilized' people

Category: Psychology - H