ABSTRACT

The popular books of the day is Dr. Phyllis Chesler's Women and Madness professor of psychology and a poet, she believes that American society is driving women crazy by sexist discrimination and oppression. Depicted as a great sexual marketplace in newspaper and magazine accounts, and groovy indeed to the tourist's eye, it is deadly to those who seriously partake. Bad sex drives out the good, and the worst of all—philandering and homosexuality—are exalted. The increasing incidence of divorce, desertion, illegitimacy, and venereal disease produces a chaotic biological arena. The movement barges into all the private ceremonies, sexual mystiques, and religious devotions of the society as if they were optional indulgences rather than the definitive processes of our lives. The central position of the woman in the home parallels her central position in all civilized society. The aggressiveness and extroversion of males is most useful to the society when it is submitted to, but not absorbed by, female sexual values.