The term and concept of sex-positivity is generally attributed to Wilhelm Reich. His hypothesis was that some societies view sexual expression as essentially good and healthy, while others have a generally negative view of sexuality and seek to repress and control libido.

Pornography and simulated sex were on the curriculum. by Rhyd Wildermuth. This makes it quite easy for Leftists to dismiss the lesson of this moment in history: that our radical imagination can stray dangerously far from reality. The Frankfurt School in many ways embodies this danger, and the Left should not be afraid to say […]

With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen? By Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker. Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.” The trials of twenty-two former […]

By Guillaume Le Blanc December 2, 2019 Sexual subject, speaking the truth of oneself, and confession are the three great theoretical operations that circulate in the text. They are three effects of a technique of the self that was constructed thanks to sexuality—through which we all became confessional creatures. We must therefore say that sexuality […]

by Mike Cross Sex is a powerful tool. Freud recognized in “Civilization and its Discontents” that unleashed libido would threaten the foundations of society which were, after all, based on repression of sex and aggression. To have a successful civilization one must subjugate the animal instincts and direct them into socially acceptable pursuits, including marriage […]

by By Ariel Levy, The New Yorker. Not that Reich undervalued garden-variety orgasms. “The actual goal of therapy” was straightforward and invariable: “making the patient capable of orgasm.”

by Christopher Turner. JD Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer were all devotees of the orgone energy accumulator, nicknamed by Woody Allen the ‘Orgasmatron’. Its inventor, Wilhelm Reich, claimed that better orgasms could cure society’s ills. Reich could be said to have invented this “sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the […]

by P.T Mistlberger. Antinomian is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms (Latin: mores), or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings.

by Marie Louise Berneri. “Freud’s original theory of sex was revolutionary and evoked the most violent reactions. The story of psychoanalysis is essentially the story of never ending attempts to allay these reactions on the part of a shocked world, and, to make psychoanalysis socially acceptable, sexuality had to be robbed of its real significance […]

by Jeffrey Escoffier. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s thinking about sexuality on intellectuals and more indirectly on the general culture. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was initiated by people who shared many of Reich’s beliefs (whether or not they got them from him directly) about the detrimental impact of […]

by John Heidenry. Endowed with ferocious legal cunning, she [MacKinnon] was to play Robespierre to Dworkin’s pamphleteering, emotional Marat in the radical feminist Reign of Terror against men that was to wash over the country in the coming decade.

by Gay Talese. “If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is orgasmic and sexually healthy,” [Betty] Dodson declared. “‘Frigid’ is a man’s word for a woman who cannot have an orgasm in the missionary position in five minutes with only the kind of stimulation that is good for him. We must no longer […]

by Shulamith Firestone. “Thus, without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/ emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of […]

First published in 1936 as: Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (“Sexuality in the Cultural Struggle”). by Wilhelm Reich. In matriarchal society, which rests on the social order of primitive communism, children have unrestricted sexual freedom. The ideology of asceticism for the child develops along with the development of patriarchy in the economy and social structure. This […]

Wilhelm Reich published The Sexual Revolution in 1936. He argued in the book: “The healthy individual has no compulsive morality because he has no impulses which call for moral inhibition… Intercourse with a prostitute becomes impossible. Sadistic phantasies disappear. To expect love as a right or even to rape the sexual partner becomes inconceivable, as […]