BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE CASE FOR SEXUAL LIBERTY, Vol. I. Albert Ellis, Ph.D., Seymour Press, Tucson, 1965, 141 pp., looseleaf binding.

Dr. Ellis attacks this subject with his usual literary elegance and scientific finesse-("So I know that sex, even in our crummy time, can be great fun . . .") According to the author, this compilation represents investigations begun in 1938. The original MS, entitled "The Case for Promiscuity," was completed in 1940, then rewritten in a condensed version under the present title in 1941, at which time a 10-volume publication was contemplated. The whole project then lay fallow till 1962, when the first portion was again revised into its present form.

In Part I of this volume, Dr. Ellis ventures some definitions of marriage, sexual liberty, and the various types of (heterosexual) relations, being careful to make it clear that he does not recommend "forcing sexual liberty" on anyone-indeed, that sexual liberty implies freedom to behave sexually in as promiscuous or in as restricted a way as desired, so long as it does not "unnecessarily and harmfully impinge upon the well-being of others." Then follows a chapter on "Advocacies," in which he describes a permissible latitude for sexual behavior, stopping, again, only at behavior "causing definite and needless harm to unwilling adults, or deliberately misled minors

... etc." He further advocates sociosexual reforms directed against the enforced marriage codes (monogamy or monogyny) which are the rule in most modern civilized countries. In the third chapter of Part I, Dr. Ellis expounds the "ethical basis" of his advocacies, which basis resembles Par. II of the U. S. Declaration of Independence, as variously illustrated and qualified by himself.

Part II, by far the greater bulk of Vol. I, is entitled, "Evidence Against the 'Monogamous Instinct," and is spent almost entirely belaboring a point which has been quite clear to most people for centuries, namely, that monogamy is not the natural instinct of man. This axiom is discussed and illustrated through 13 chapters, in which the futility of legislating sexual behavior into monogamous (or apparently any other) channels (not "injurious to others") is held up before the reader as a sufficient ethical basis for not doing so. Even the "illegitimate" child (Chap. 13) is cited merely as a statistical instance of the nonmonogamous tendencies of genus bomo,—not as the very likely human victim of an impoverished economic and family environment, under the present conditions of most modern industrial and bureaucratic societies. Dr. Ellis may have some satisfactory theory, later to be unveiled, for fitting the care of infants and children into his pro-

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