This Book Review originally appeared in Charleston City Paper, February 9, 2005

The Best American Sex Writing 2004.  Edited by Daniel O’Connor.  Thunder’s Mouth Press.  267 pages.  $14.95.

Katha Pollitt sets the tone for this collection, jumping straight in on page one with her brief essay, “Is the Pope Crazy?”  Not only is the sanity of the pope called into question but also the sanity of fundamentalist Protestants and abstinence-only sex ed programs, funded with $117 million in tax dollars by the Bush administration.  “But what do doctors know? Or the Centers for Disease Control, or the World Health Organization, or the American Foundation for AIDS Research (Amfar)? ” Pollitt asks, pointing to the nigh-universal endorsement of condoms within the medical community for the prevention of disease or unwanted pregnancy.  “These days, the experts on condoms are politicians, preachers and priests, and the word from above is: Condoms don’t work.”

Susie Bright follows right after Pollitt’s essay with a letter to editor of New York Magazine that begins: “If you could flip a magic switch and turn off every gigabyte of Internet pornography, you would still not stop young men from masturbating every day.”  There is this undercurrent running throughout the book: a need, probably justified, to remind us of very simple facts about human sexuality.  Biology is one poor beat-on child in American politics.  Everyone has to challenge evolution and sexuality.  Covalent bonding is just a theory, after all.  When are some stickers going to be slapped into a Physical Chemistry text.

Not that such talk would be tolerated in a classroom receiving federal dollars, of course.  As Judith Levine demonstrates in her contribution, “The Expurgation of Pleasure,” classroom discussions are pressured to stress only consequences of and “reprobate reasons for sex.”  Lists of reasons that teens might have sex are offered, stressing loneliness or rebellion, but curiously, “Not on this list or almost any other: to have pleasure.”

The essays are just seething with words the authors have wanted to say for a very long time.  That comes across first.  They are just as good on a re-read.  The passion, the calm referral to medical documented facts and common sense, and simply good writing shows through then as well.

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