Solving America's Sexual Crises
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Ira Reiss' Solving America's Sexual Crises is a call for action in response to the sexuality-related problems that plague the United States. Among the crises Reiss addresses are sex education, sex among teenagers, AIDS, pornography, and rape. The book is written in a direct, forceful, polemical style in which Reiss frequently addresses the reader in the second person and persistently emphasizes his own voice. His call to action is all but shouted at the reader, as if he was trying to wake someone up. Yet, despite all the excitement he generates, Reiss' arguments are, for the most part, well though-out and well presented. His overview of the America's sexual crises is based on the perception that Americans have repressed and hidden sexuality--turning against open manifestations of it and taking all legal and social means to repress such expressions. Reiss' fundamental notion is that Americans need to recognize the root problems of sexual repression and adopt a new attitude that endorses a pluralistic, rather than a narrowing, approach to sexuality. Reiss is deliberately confrontational in his approach and encourages confrontation as a means of promoting greater sexual openness. As he notes, in regard to the claim that it is counterproductive to offend traditional values, significant change is always going to offend someone. He asks, "Did not the civil rights movement offend the traditional American view of black inferiority?" (36). And he deliberately cites an examp
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ity, while those countries, "like Spain and Ireland, where erotica is much less available, are far less gender equal" (146). He then adds, "These findings support the view that accepting men and women as equals promotes a greater willingness to accept erotica" (146). It is unclear how he arrives at this conclusion. Could it not also prove the reverse, that accepting erotica promotes gender equality? And what of the other hundreds of differences between the two types of countries in his example? This is not, perhaps, a serious failing, but such flawed supporting points tend to distract the reader from the essential aspect of Reiss' message.
More seriously, however, Reiss sometimes misses the point entirely on matters related to gender equality. He often makes the cogent point that the way to eliminate repression is not to replace it with more repression. But his (often correct) impression of repressive feminism is sometimes taken too far and the assumption that he is dealing with more repression blinds him to an essential principle. He says, for example, that one should "be leery of anyone who wants to 'protect' women by clothing the Dallas cheerleaders . . . or labeling some literary, film, or artistic work as 'degrading
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Approximate Word count = 1660
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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