Sex or Snake Oil?

Russian-born Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, professor of sociology at Harvard since 1930, has long viewed with distress the moral laxity of the U.S., his adopted country. He is especially concerned with the national preoccupation with sex, as evidenced by the success of Mickey Spillane's detective stories ("calculated to enthrall the most brutal sex sadist") and of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's reports on sexual behavior. As a nation, Sorokin warned this week, the U.S. is in danger of going sex-crazy.

"A consuming interest in sex has so penetrated our national culture that it has been estimated we encounter some kind of sexual lure every nine minutes of our waking day," Sociologist Sorokin wrote in This Week Magazine. "Greece, in the third and second centuries B.C., 'brought sex out into the open in a manner that has yet to be equalled. We know, because there were Kinseys in those days, too, men who prided themselves on their objectivity as they calmly recorded the distressing picture of whole families getting together to indulge in promiscuous behavior. Adultery, prostitution, homosexuality and even incest were so common that those who indulged were regarded merely as interesting fellows."

Stop Lights & Fireplugs. It is, said Sorokin, "downright dangerous to jump to the conclusion that an act which you have committed, or commit frequently, is all right simply because you can mention a sexual-research project that proves you've got plenty of company. In this country there are large numbers of automobile drivers who have a habitual contempt for traffic laws. They speed, forget to signal, pass stop lights and obstruct fireplugs when they park. But their growing numbers do not make their crimes 'all right' . . . Sexual behavior, like any other kind, must be tested for Tightness or wrongness by your own conscience. Will it harm your community? Your family? You yourself? Then it is wrong, and you cannot make it right by proving that 50% of the population does likewise."

No one, said Sorokin, wants to "send sex back to the barroom, the back alley and the whispered snicker . . . But neither can we afford to stand idly by while the conclusions of some well-meaning but misguided investigators are cited to justify the destruction of the moral system which has created and sustained our own free democracy!"

Statistics v. Potato Bugs. "The major misconception of our sex-centered culture is one that would be funny if it weren't so nearly tragic. It is the idea that the measure of a man--or a woman--can be taken in terms of his or her sexual efficiency. It is easy to see how this concept might occur to a biologist. These scientists spend their lives studying lower forms of life --animals, insects and plants--and they quickly observed that the entire life cycle of a potato bug or a fruit fly is devoted to insuring the survival of the species. But we are not potato bugs, and you cannot take theories that look good in a zoology lab and apply them unchanged to human beings.

"We have gotten the impression that the cause of most unhappiness is a low sexual charge and that to become sexually active and skillful is a sure cure for al most anything. It is not going too far to say that a large portion of the U.S. population regards sex. today with the same simple faith that their great-grandparents reserved for snake oil!

"Well, it is time we got off it. Many scientists are already wondering whether or not there is a connection between the shaky status of our sexual morality and the rise in the rate of crime, suicide, juvenile delinquency and insanity. Personally, I believe there is."

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