In these scandalous times, is there anything left to say about sex?
TV offers us All-Monica all the time. The globally accessible Internet offers its own virtual red-light district. Surrounded by wall-to-wall visuals and 24-hour media blather, we\’re inundated with sexual information. Ultimately, inevitably, it has become boring, degenerating into vaguely provocative background noise.
I am a lousy gift-giver. I\’m bad enough on birthdays, when gift-giving makes me so nervous that my gifts never arrive on time. But I\’m absolutely awful in December, when I feel so pressured by Chanukah expectations that I buy gift after gift for three of the people on my list, inadvertently leaving out everyone else. Maybe it\’s a new kind of learning disability, Adverse Gift Disorder. But I mean well, I do.
Who is supposed to pay? And why does the whole subject make me so squeamish?
The young Lithuanian woman in the prison libraryhas the narrow chest, hunched shoulders and wary eyes of someone whohas known poverty and is not sure where the next blow is coming from.
The dominant stories of 5757 centered around ourcontinual war of words fought over religion, sex, politics andhistory
For Robert Anthony Siegel,April is indeed the cruelest month.Siegel\’s first novel came out in April — that was kind. But so did novels by Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. That was very,very cruel.\n\nAs book reviewers wrote fevered mini-tomes, dissecting the latest works by the greats, and publishing-house publicity budgets emptied to push Saints Norm, Saul and Phil, Siegel\’s exceptionally funny and entertaining novel, \”All the Money In the World,\” received zero attention.
Dr. Susan Marilyn Block is a nice Jewish girl, who talks about sex on late-night cable TV. From Esther to… Dr. Suzy?\n
Naomi Wolf, author of \”Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood\”\nSex will always be with us, but thoughtful, non-hysterical conversations about sexual issues are few and far between. With the publication of her newest book, \”Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood\” (Random House, $24), social critic Naomi Wolf has helped bring the subject of girls\’ sexuality to the national spotlight in a serious way — for at least as long as it takes to conduct a book tour.
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