ABSTRACT
There is a certain way of discussing sex, highly developed in America, but regarded with suspicion elsewhere, which summarizes the great matter of eros in a set of statistics and a bill of rights. The statistics are often phoney, the rights invariably liberal. And if the resulting morality is offensive to the conservative conscience, this seldom troubles those who propose it. On the contrary, it is the conservative conscience-the conscience which is prepared to condemn a great many of our erotic adventures in the interests of an idea of normal conduct-which appears as the villain in the story, the artificer of those ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ from which the new morality promises to free us.
