Sexuality, Sex Role

Sexing the millennium

Name: Sexing the millennium
Author: Linda Grant
ISBN: 9780802133496

by Linda Grant

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Overview

Sexing the Millennium is the first major attempt to analyze the cultural explosion that was the sexual revolution. It is an insightful and profound overview of our sexual psyche over the past thirty years and a frank investigation of both liberation and libertinism, in which Linda Grant eloquently argues the need for an eroticized female life. Joan Smith has said that "Linda Grant is on the side of sex and on the side of women," and Sexing the Millennium is a compellingly thorough examination of the colossal social shifts catalyzed by that brief period when sex was free from the threats of both pregnancy and disease. Brilliantly written, Sexing the Millennium charts the origins of sexual freedom from the Ranters' seventeenth-century belief in sex as a liberating agent to the hippie idealism of sixties counterculture - group marriage, politicized promiscuity, organized orgies - to the intellectual backlash of the seventies and, as we stand nervously in the shadow of AIDS, to our present, postmodern obsession: voyeurism. Along the way, Grant examines the full impact of the Pill and its origins, medically, scientifically, and socially, as well as the contemporaneous political movements and changes: the decline of the Catholic church, the rise in experimental living communities, the female desire to achieve the stereotypical male freedom for pleasure that was so enthusiastically endorsed by men. On the heels of heated debate about the backlash against women, Grant examines the rise in violent sex crimes, the prevalence of misogyny, the brutality of porn, and the rarer but compelling phenomenon of violent female response. Emerging from the failed attempt to merge male and female into something androgynous and liberated, and from a lack of interest in co-opting traditional male pleasure forms, women are reconstructing their weapons and desires. A seminal and deeply probing examination of the period when sex seemed like a kind of solution, this book is a forward-looki

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her frequently provocative odyssey through the 1960s sexual revolution and its aftermath, London-based freelance journalist Grant explores a window of sexual freedom that opened briefly between the advent of the Pill and the AIDS epidemic. She begins by tracing the roots of modern sexual liberation back to the 17th-century English Ranters, anti-Puritan pacifists who viewed erotic freedom as a liberating agent. Wending through hippie communes, open marriages and sexual freedom advocacy groups from London to San Francisco, Grant pays particular attention to the Catholic Church's declining hold on sexual mores, to the women's health movement and to the 1970s conservative backlash. Calling for a renewal of female sexuality that will overturn the assumption of ``women's monogamy and men's promiscuity,'' she vaguely sketches a sexual future allowing for long-term nonmonogamous relationships that combine love and commitment with casual encounters. (May)

Library Journal

In certain circles, discussion of the sexual revolution elicits cynical, arched-eyebrowed expressions of ``what sexual revolution?'' The perceived backlash against women in recent years has caused many to question the success of the sexual revolution that swept the United States and Britian during the past 30 years. Grant attempts to analyze this brief period in our history from a millenarian, socially optimistic perspective. Beginning in the 18th century with the Ranters, an anarchist organization who believed in sex as a liberating agent, Grant leaps enthusiastically ahead two centuries to the hippie idealism of the Sixties counterculture, then moves to the current postmodern obsession with voyeurism. Aside from Grant's failed attempt at a ``happy ending,'' this work paints a staggering landscape of sexual liberation and, ultimately, repression. Recommended for academic libraries with social history collections.-- David R. Johnson, Arnold LeDoux Lib., Louisiana State Univ., Eunice