Harvard Expert Warns of Drift, Evening Star (Article, January 1957)
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Harvard Expert Warns Of Drift to Sex Anarchy
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 4 (AP).--A noted Harvard expert on human behavior says Americans are becoming "victims of sex mania as malignant as cancer and as socially menacing as communism."
Prof. Pitirim Sorokin, in a book entitled "The American Sex Revolution," says Americans are drifting toward sex anarchy in the same manner that marked the downfall of earlier societies, including Rome and Greece.
"We are completely surrounded by the rising tide of sex which is flooding every compartment of our culture, every section of our social life," Prof. Sorokin writes.
Prof. Sorokin, head of Harvard Research Center in creative altruism, cites as reflecting the Nation's "sex obsessions" the ever-mounting divorce rate, the upsurge in sex crimes, "the emphasis of sex in radio and TV programs, stage plays and movies, popular songs, pictures, reading matter and advertising."
Sex, according to Prof. Sorokin, also plays a major role in modern American political life. One of the alarming results, he says, is that "sex bribery and sex blackmail... are now as prevalent as monetary corruption."
Prof. Sorokin charges "sexually infamous persons or their proteges" are appointed to ambassadorships or other high office and "profligates" sometimes become "the popular mayors of metropolises, or members of the cabinet or leaders of a political party."
"Among our public officials," Prof. Sorokin says, "there is a vast legion of profligates, both heterosexual and homosexual."
Sexual promiscuity, he says, is reflected by the alarming rapid increase in the number of illegitimate children born in the United States each year.
"Our morals," Prof. Sorokin goes on, "have changed so notably that continency, chastity and faithfulness are increasingly viewed as oddities, as the ossified survival of a pre-historical age.
"This sex revolution is as important as the most dramatic political or economic upheaval. It is changing the lives of men and women more radically than any other revolution of our time."
