The Most Dangerous Books of the 20th Century

...according to Human Events Online, a conservative journal to which I won't be subscribing today, thanks anyway. I haven't given much space on Disruptive Juxtaposition to wax political, but this list of "dangerous books" contains too many books from my coursework and "to-read-soon" list for me not to laugh. One choice highlight from the warning on Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: "Five years later, [Kinsey] published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy." Right, I mean, of course that's what they were designed to do! They were scientific reports based in ideology and lefty agenda-making, dark tracts in pursuit of making modern Gomorrahs of our cities and Main Streets. Kinsey was nothing short of a bondage-clad devil smashing his rubber stamp of approval on the vilest brands of fluid exchange! I mean, what else could he have been doing? Trying to, I dunno, understand human sexuality?

Lists, and thinking, of this sort represent to me a frightening level of if not ignorance than unwillingness to consider the particulars. Yes, Kinsey's research on human sexuality may have been read as lending authentication to certain taboo sexual practices, but to a) disregard any potential scientific worth in his study altogether and b) ascribe virtueless motive to that study smacks, smacks of the authors' fear that any sort of sober analysis, that to grant the straw-man opposite viewpoint any quarter, will finally and forever pierce the big, beautiful, fragile and ultimately imaginary bubble of American Christian Morality.

Then again, I'm a Dan Savage faithful. To take the sex & politics discussion in another direction, Dan has some important things to say regarding the threatened nature of sexual privacy in this country these days.

I dunno. I start thinking and writing about politics as I see them and find myself flashing back to the morning after the election last November. I walked around campus feeling unwelcome - not on the campus, but in the country. That's a melodramatic way to feel, and it isn't offered as anything more than an anecdote. Still, I don't wish to feel that alienation again; neither do I wish it on others. Talking about social class this morning, much of what we had to say made use of the handy Red / Blue shorthand that's entered the local and even global lexicon. It's troubling, is all I have to say for now.