Personal
Stories of How I Got Into
Sex: Leading Researchers,
Sex Therapists, Educators, Prostitutes, Sex Toy Designers, Sex
Surrogates, Transsexuals, Criminologists, Clergy, and more...
Personal
Stories of How I Got Into
Sex: Leading Researchers,
Sex Therapists, Educators, Prostitutes, Sex Toy Designers, Sex
Surrogates, Transsexuals, Criminologists, Clergy, and more...
The excerpt below is from my chapter, and was the only one from this book appearing in Mélange, a book-excerpt feature of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly newspaper of academia. The book's table of contents appears below the excerpt.
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More precisely, I'm an intellectual bastard. My mother discipline and my father discipline have a lot in common, but they don't seem to get along very well. I don't think their fights and petty jealousies are very important, because I use what each of them taught me every single day. Accordingly, I don't really have an intellectual home. But what's a poor bastard to do? My mother discipline is evolutionary biology. I learned it at a hotbed of evolutionary thinking, Harvard University, where I had originally wanted to be a mathematical biologist, Illustration: |
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using computers and equations to describe the life-and-death processes of populations. But that first year as a graduate student I fell in love with evolution and behavior.... I liked studying behavior, because it was real. I loved learning about evolution, because it involved a lot of logic and deduction. The sixties were over chronologically, but their better aspects weren't over politically, socially, or academically. |
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Change was normal. In particular, biologists were getting ready to announce to the world (rightly or wrongly) that evolutionary thinking was the key to understanding not only the physical structure of organisms but also their mental structure--including the human psyche, morality, and the best and worst of human nature. It was thrilling to be part of it all. For my Ph.D. thesis, all I had to do was to marry my theoretical training -- evolution -- with a specific topic, which turned out to be sex. Mom -- meet Dad. My father discipline was the rowdy one. A bit disreputable, perhaps, but trying to reform. Old enough to have some experience under his belt (ahem), but ready to settle down and become a bit more respectable. This was sexology in the 1970s.... |
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Published in 1997 by Prometheus
Books.To order this book at a substantial discount from Amazon Books, click the bookstore link.
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Looks best on Netscape viewers (version 3.0 or later), but should work OK with most browsers.
'm a
bastard. Growing up, no one ever
told me this. I had to figure the awful truth out all by
myself.
