Foreword

Foreword I have read in more than one place that the Kinsey Reports brought sex into the open for the first time inAmerica around 1950. Dr. Kinsey's first book, which appeared in 1948, described the presumably shocking variety of sexual behaviors among white American males; a few years later he did the same for white American women. While these books were indisputably best-sellers, I have my doubts about how surprised their readers were to learn that a significant percentage of Americans achieved orgasm in a variety of ways. This was, after all, information available at most high schools. It is quite true that the media and advertising have relied on sex to an escalating degree since the 1960s, yet how much their carefully manicured renderings of the subject have to do with newfound or progressive "openness" is a matter of dispute. Sex and sex appeal provide grist for the mills of our entertainment. Sex papers the walls of our electronic culture, yet the novelty may be as much in the omnipresence of the media as in increased openness about sexuality. After all, the nude body has been used to sell art for over two thousand years. The sex scenes in some of The Canterbury Tales, written over six hundred years ago, are every bit as bawdy as those of a contemporary movie. To me, the often boring salaciousness in today's entertainment and the perfumed visions of commerce are not convincing evidence of a culture of openness about sexuality, any more than are the sweeping opinions of "gender specialists" and theoreticians, which seldom seem to address the needs of individuals. Such discussions tend to shift quickly from what at first seem like intriguing issues to unsubstantiated abstractions that, as soon as they are separated from the rest of life—personal needs, individual history, economics, culture—rapidly fall apart as topics of discussion. Commercial magazines were well aware of the selling power of sex by the 1920s. Feature films discovered the dangerous, sexy vamp around 1910—possibly in part out of anxiety about the New Woman. Theda Bara was soon invented (her stage name was a play on words— "Arab death" or "air of death"), both vamp and the first of the "bombshells," actresses such as Jean Harlow or Marilyn Monroe, whose appeal hinged entirely on male-fantasy sex. At about the same time as the appearance of the first bombshell, Douglas Fairbanks dove from a rock into a river in a feature movie, The Half-Breed, in nothing but a thong—and, yes, he did have a cute butt. He was one of the many fetching, nearly nude Indians, cowboys and swashbucklers in tight pants who dominated the silent screen. Even in the distant past, entertainment and advertising often involved sex. Elizabethan court ladies certainly did everything they could to display their bosoms, and presumably would have broadcast them in the media, had any been available. I wonder, though, what an Elizabethan father would have done had he found himself in the position that I did recently: sitting alongside my teenaged daughter watching a feature film, newly released to video, in which a guy her age gets caught by his father having sex with an apple pie. Writers in this issue of The Missouri Review describe complex and sometimes paradoxical sexual relations, and a surprising number of them illustrate the prevalence of rule-making in matters sexual. Marshall Boswell's story "In Between Things" describes a contemporary couple, two former graduate students, who are officially broken up yet still carrying on according to an unlikely and comical decorum that includes "dating other people" and "not feeling guilty." In Jamie Callan's story "Talk About Sex: An Orientation," it is apparent that the rules indeed are the fun. Dorothea Freund's Editors' Prize-winning essay, "A Bride for My Son," describes a Jewish mother and son in what may at first seem like reversed generational roles: Freund's son is Orthodox and she is not, yet must deal with the rules that the son's religion prescribes for choosing a bride. Both Jennifer Anderson and Donald Hays write about characters who have varying degrees of what might be called...