• Research Paper on:
    Sexual Liberalism Development in Postwar Years

    Number of Pages: 7

     

    Summary of the research paper:

    A 7 page research paper that examines how sexual liberalism developed after World War II. The writer summarizes the effect of sexual research, such as that of Kinsey, on societal ideas and briefly examines the sexual trends of the last several decades. Bibliography lists 6 sources.

    Name of Research Paper File: D0_00sexlib.rtf

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    143). On the one hand, social scientists announced that tremendous shifts in sexual behavior had occurred, but on the other hand, rival observers vehemently denied the reality of changing sexual  mores. An abundance of sex experts in the 1950s endeavored to compensate for what they judged to have !been the wars corrosive effect on the concepts of masculinity and femininity  by exaggerating traditional gender concepts (McLaren 143). The noted sociologist Talcott Parsons, for example, argued that only by men and women fulfilling "radically different, gender-specific roles" could family happiness  and stability be assured (McLaren 143). Alfred Kinsey, who became associated in the public mind as being responsible for a blurring of these identities, was castigated by conservatives as  subversive and "possibly a communist dupe" (McLaren 143). Nevertheless, Kinsey presented himself not as a sex revolutionary, but rather as a detached, scientific observer of sexual behavior. Because of this,  his findings were being hailed by the end of the 1950s by opponents of the sexual status quo who ranged from Huge Hefner of Playboy fame to the first adherents  of the US gay rights movement (McLaren 143). In the postwar era, Kinseys name soon became a !synonym for scandalous sexual revelations. Kinsey was a middle-aged Indiana University professor of  entomology who had a compulsion for collecting enormous amount of data (McLaren 144). When he turned his attention to human sexual behavior, Kinsey was struck by the diversity that he  discovered. His findings led him to complain that generations of self-appointed "experts" had terrorized patients with words such as "infantile, frigid, sexually under-developed, under-active, excessively active, over-developed, over-sexed...or sexually over-active"  (Kinsey, et al Male199). As a biologist, Kinsey did not categorize any biological act as "abnormal," which he considered to be a word coined by philosophers and priests. Kinsey 

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