Abstract

Nothing could be more private or more social than sex. It is this unique characteristic of human sexual patterns that has resulted in a long and harried controversy among critical social theorists, a controversy largely dominated by white males steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and focused on the significance of sexuality to the revolutionary demand for social and political transformation. Voices from leftist circles have been scattered but loud, ranging from Lenin's straight-laced bunkum, which treated sexuality as an insignificant and at most secondary material need, to Reich's biologism, which pitted the revolutionary potential in the groins of communist youth.