Passion Lost: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century

by Patricia Anderson

While sex has been historically a private matter, in the twentieth century it became a public obsession. Beginning in the early 1900s, people widely felt that increased openness about sex was the key to personal fulfillment and happy relationships. Yet this emphasis on the physical has eroded our understanding of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of intimacy. Today, sex has saturated contemporary life through television, movies, books, magazines, videos, tabloids, advertising, and the Internet. Meanwhile, desensitization and sexual dysfunction, obsession with body image, short-lived commitments, and high divorce rates are signs that our deepest private desires remain unfulfilled. We yearn for true connection with the romantic other, and our growing malaise has given rise to nostalgic myths of golden times that never really existed. Patricia Anderson's "Passion Lost", a lively history of sexual mores - from burgeoning sexual concerns of the 20th century's early years, the changing morality of the 1920s and 1930s, the liberties of wartime, and the 1950s' veneer of rectitude, to the freedoms of the following decades - examines those myths and paints a compelling new portrait illustrating how deeply the present is rooted in the past, and how our quest for intimacy has been hijacked by our public obsession with sex.

271 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001