Culture June 28, 2011

It’s hard, perhaps, to recall that once sex was radical politics conducted by other means. When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase “the sexual revolution,” he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated from the alienating culture and the authoritarian state. Christopher Turner’s new book is in part a report from that past, when sex held the promise of social reform.