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 example of a revolution that goes to the heart of the most fundamental values a society possesses because, as he details in the subject-oriented chapters in his book, the sex-related problems that exist in American society exist only because people adhere to repressive standards and, even when they claim to be open about sex, come up against many stumbling blocks--that is, aspects of truly pluralistic approaches to sex that they simply cannot integrate into their view...