The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective

Abstract

The level of faddism and simplistic popularism runs so appallingly high these days in field of sex role studies so as not only to confirm already recalcitrant skeptics in their indiscriminating prejudice against whole enterprise but also to alienate reluctantly suspicious teacher trying to deal fairly with a controversial topic. Amidst confluence of my need to treat subject matter on one hand and my reticence to take sides on other, I stumbled upon The Longest War and used it in a course for nurses, entitled Sociology of Human Sexuality, and subsequently in a course for sociology majors, entitled Sociology of Women. My students were delighted with content and I was not unhappy with perspective. However, I must speak out loudly about my gross disappointment with first chapter, which is so simplistically naive and shallow in its snippet approach to Western classical literature as to have necessitated from me a blanket apology for authors' educational deficits and a disclaimer relative to its abuse of classics. Social scientists who are, unfortunately and too infrequently, trained in neither history nor classics should steer clear of critiques based on their misinformation or second-level acquaintances with both history and classics. That Tavris and Offir give but a meager paragraph to Judaeo-Christian perspective (falsely construed at that) on male-female relationships is not as embarrassing as their unabashed readiness to indict in one sentence each integrity of such noteworthies as Periander of Corinth, poet Semonides of Amorgas, Plutarch, Pliny, Zoroaster, Liby, Plato, and Aristotle, no less. What scientific service such simpleminded treatment renders escapes this reviewer. Nevertheless, in spite of initial bad showing, book does well what it sets out to do. Divided into two unequal parts, Part I, composed of two chapters, treats of need to define qualitatively and accurately two sexes, distinguishing between real and imagined differences, followed by a rather careful review of literature on the great orgasm controversy. Part II, composed of six chapters, begins with a finely executed review of biological components of sexu-