LAUSR

Despite this scientific view, the belief that sex has a negative effect upon the individual has been more common in many historical and most contemporary cultures. In fact, Western civilization has a millennia-long tradition of sex-negative attitudes and biases. In the United States, this heritage was relieved briefly by the “joy-of-sex” revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but alarmist sexual viewpoints retrenched and solidified with the advent of the HIV pandemic. Today’s public discourse about sexuality is almost exclusively about risks and dangers: abuse, addiction, dysfunction, infection, pedophilia, teen pregnancy, and the struggle of sexual minorities for their civil rights. Public discourse about the physiological and psychosocial health benefits of sexual expression has been almost entirely absent (Davey Smith et al., 1997; Reiss, 1990).