Century of Sex

Arguing that the 1960s "sexual revolution" was in fact a chapter in a much larger social movement, the author investigates a century of sex and its impact on the culture, from Freud's first visit to America in 1909, through the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. 75,000 first printing.

The Century of Sex is a comprehensive chronicle of sexual mores, relations, and politics in the twentieth century. James R. Petersen argues that the "Sexual Revolution" began generations before the advent of penicillin, Playboy, and the Pill-and ultimately produced seismic cultural shifts that have changed forever the way Americans live.

Beginning at the turn of the century with the pioneering efforts of Free Love radicals, The Century of Sex chronicles the ensuing struggles of activists for sexual liberation against the agents of repression. Petersen weaves a decade-by-decade narrative packed with colorful characters, a panoply of causes, and unforgettable events. He profiles the activities of censors like Anthony Comstock-head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice-and agencies such as the Legion of Decency and the Moral Majority, and culminates with the prosecutorial inquisitions of Kenneth Starr. He introduces heroines such as Ida Craddock, who wrote one of the nation's first marriage manuals (and paid for the act with her life), Margaret Sanger, who fought with Comstock over birth control-and won-and heroes like Alfred Charles Kinsey, whose groundbreaking research changed the way we look at sex.

Throughout the narrative, The Century of Sex explores the ways in which historical tumults of the 1900s affected sex-and vice versa-through the Jazz Age, the depression, two world wars, the cold war, the sixties, the disco era, and the age of AIDS. The book covers America's periodic moral panics, from the white-slave hysteria of 1910, to the homosexual panic of the 1950s, to the child-porn scare of the 1980s, and also traces the changes wrought by medical science, social science, and technology, from the vibrator to home video to Viagra.

The Century of Sex is a trenchant chronicle of a turbulent era that proves the truth behind the song lyric from the 1944 movie Pin-Up Girl, "Battles are won in the day time/But history is made at night."

From the Foreword by Hugh M. Hefner: "In 1995, I asked the editors of Playboy to undertake a history of the sexual revolution. But not the one that I am sometimes credited with (or, conversely, blamed for) starting.

Most Americans today think the sexual revolution happened in the sixties and seventies. As they recall, it only lasted a short time and gave us the Swedish Bikini Team, Debbie Does Dallas, unwed teenage mothers, date rape, and AIDS.

The story I envisioned was a far grander event, one that was inextricably connected with the history of the twentieth century. If viewed over a one-hundred-year span, the sexual revolution would be seen for what it was: a great struggle involving ideas, champions, and villains. We would chart the liberation of men and women, of language, the body, the imagination.

I believe that sex is the primary motivating factor in the course of human history, and in the twentieth century it has emerged from the taboos and controversy that have surrounded it throughout the ages to claim its rightful place in society. This was The Century of Sex, when mankind confronted the fears that controlled and shaped sex as they had since the beginning of time-and triumphed."

James R. Petersen wrote and edited the "Playboy Advisor," America's longest-running sex-advice column, for over twenty years. He is the author of 365 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life and has also written for Outside, Diversion, Sports Illustrated, American Way, Ski, and Parenting. Hugh M. Hefner is the editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953.