Sex or Science
AIDED by fifteen hundred doctors and abetted by six thousand women Dr. Chesser has compiled a formidable survey of the emotional life of female England. Unlike Dr. Kinsey, whose researches were more of a zoological nature, Dr. Chesser has taken into account the problems of childhood and adolescence, the degrees of parental control and early impressions about sex, the home and religious influences, the incomes and intelligences, in fact the general background of his willing guinea pigs. This vast work with its diagrams, graphs and questionnaires cannot but be a specialist's item, of deep interest to students of behaviour patterns, to psychologists and welfare workers, a valuable pointer to those engaged in the betterment of human relationships. To the lay reader it is frankly alarming, the over-all impression being that nearly all English women are emotionally and sexually maladjusted, and the odds against any of them being happy at any time, anywhere, enormous. Every conceivable combination of age, upbringing and belief, every aspect of physical love— except the abnormal, which, curiously enough in a work of this magnitude, has been omitted—every factor having any bearing on the libido has been explored and charted. Monumental, statistical, sober in tone, this book undoubtedly proves a great many things conclusively, but it takes a scientific rather than a dirty mind to appreciate their worth.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
Previous page
