A very public private affair.(Bird's Eye)(sexual orientaion)

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution. That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects.... Sex is the gateway of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway. But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about in the gate and never get any further.--G. K. Chesterton

There may be some readers who will think that a long examination of good sex, and bad sex, and how to tell the difference, is an odd subject for a magazine devoted to public affairs. Sex. Isn't that private?

Well, yes, of course it is. But it is also one of the most important influences on the day-to-day shape of our society and the fabric of our collective life. As Chesterton points out above, sex is the element out of which we synthesize the family, and much of our sense of obligation to one another, as well as literally the next generation.

Chesterton also notes that there are some people who have an impaired appreciation of sexuality. They may grasp the mechanics, and get the part about what it can do for them. But they ignore all the rest of the elaborate architecture of lovemaking.

It's a little hard to understand where the modern concept of "casual" sex came from. When and where has sex ever been casual? Most people through time have realized that sexuality is quite the opposite of casual--it is frantic, it is overwhelming, it can inspire sublime acts, it is able to cause insanity. I've always assumed that a significant portion of the polemicists promoting the idea that a person's sexual behavior is "no big deal" must be persons who have never experienced real sexual love. Sex is fire: it can warm, it can thrill, it can have utility, it can burn horribly--and mankind's control over it is always tenuous. Only a eunuch or a fool could imagine that sex is casual.

Yet that has been the reigning pretense for about 40 years now. In the detailed article at the heart of this installment of The American Enterprise, Jenny Morse describes in measuredly rational, sometimes moving, occasionally very personal ways, how harsh the effects of that mistake have been during her lifetime. Jenny is an economist and a powerful empirical thinker, not a raver. But she is also a sensitive soul, a mother, and someone who has ...