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Bloomington. Indiana University Press, 2000, 189 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 232 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $17.50 paper.
The two books under review, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920-1982 by Jane Gerhard, and New Millennial Sexstyles by Carol Siegel cover overlapping time periods, but take different analytical directions. Siegel delves into the youth culture to conjure up a response to sex and gender issues that will perplex anyone not familiar with rap, punk, and heavy metal groups like W.A.S.P. (We Are Sexual Perverts), Nine Inch Nails, Afghan Whigs, and others whose performance art includes music about sado-masochism, "the Curse," bondage, dramatization of victimization, and abuse.
She addresses the generation gap through her informal interviews of people between the ages of 13 and 25. But who are the young women in this sample she describes who "forcefully assert their refusal to be duped by romantic love or dominated by males" (101)? Who populates the women she calls her generation, those who "see heterosexual activity as a competition in which women can only attain pleasure if they manipulate men into acting affectionate by withholding the sexual pleasures men seek" (100)? And, did I miss something growing up, like having "oral sex in the back row of a movie theater, a common practice of youth for at least the last fifty years" (101)?
This is the latter part of the book, which some may decide to forego. If we go back to the beginning, Siegel provides a useful perspective on sex and gender change. Here she becomes a situated speaker by introducing the reader to herself -- her thoughts, her life, her feminism. She describes herself as a feminist who has experienced irrational and uncontrolled love for men. She wants to write about heterosexual love and sex as a challenge to the ways these terms have been vilified, and also because of her awareness of the "radical changes in American culture surrounding representations of sexuality, love, and gender" (3). Interestingly, it was this awareness that coincided with her...