Sex, Art, and American Culture [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The essays in this collection are united by common themes. I want to rethink American cultural history in order to clarify the heritage of my generation of the Sixties, which heroically broke through Fifties conformism but which failed in many ways to harness or sustain its own energies. Popular culture is my passion. It created Sixties imagination. I define pop culture as an eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the West. Its brazen aggression and pornographic sexuality are at odds with current feminism, whose public proponents are in a reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery, like that of the Temperance movement a century ago. We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, uncon-soling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siecle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. My essays often address the impasse in contemporary politics between "liberal" and "conservative," a polarity that I contend lost its meaning after the Sixties. There should be an examination of the way Sixties innovators were openly hostile to the establishment liberals of the time. In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively labeled "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual history presented no other alternatives. My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm—as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. Similarly,