Having condemned hyper-sexualized culture, the American religious Right is now wildly pro-sex, as long as it is marital sex. By replacing the language of morality with the secular notion of self-esteem, repression has found its way back onto school curricula – to the detriment of girls and women in particular. “We are living through an assault on female sexual independence”, writes Dagmar Herzog.
Dagmar Herzog
(1961) is professor of history at the The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is author of Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton 2005); published in German translation as Die Politisierung der Lust: Sexualität in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Siedler/Random House 2005); and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton 1996). Her forthcoming book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics will be published in June 2008 by Basic Books, New York.
