Factors Influencing Beliefs and Attitudes

The increasingly secular nature of society, the sexual revolution, and the industrialization of the U.S. economy all played a role in changing attitudes and beliefs with respect to family, love and sexuality, and friendship in the twentieth century. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than with respect to love and sexuality. Erich Fromm argues that changes in attitudes and beliefs in regard to sexuality stem from the tendency to confuse sex and love. Fromm argues that erotic love encompasses an exclusivity not found in fraternal or motherly love. As he writes, erotic love, ôis the craving for complete fusion, for union with one other person. It is by its very nature exclusive and not universal; it is also perhaps the most de

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in sexual relations without it involving the conventional concept of love, ôHow do they do it, the ones who make love / without love?ö (Olds 168). Olds sounds similar to Fromm when she says that those who do so ôdo not mistake the lover for their own pleasureö (168). She is saying that these individuals do not confuse love and sex in a manner Fromm suggests is detrimental to happiness. These individuals understand their condition in the modern world, one of isolation and the pursuit of instant gratification, ôthey know they are alone...the partner in the bed...not the truth, which is the / single body alone in the universe / against its own best timeö (Olds 168). Thus we see the sense of isolation and distancing from each other in the modern world as viewed in Sex Without Love. Changes in the twentieth society also led to shifts in attitudes and values with respect to the family. This is true in terms of attitudes and beliefs with respect to parenting and the roles of husbands and wives to their families and to each other. We see this clearly demonstrating in June JordanÆs work, which reads like an outcry against years of patriarchy that have reduced women, though greater in numbers, to the social, economic, sexual, and pol
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1300
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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