PASSION LOST

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-919028-41-8
Writer: Patricia Anderson
Title: Passion Lost
Subtitle: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century
Language: English
Place of Publication: Toronto
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
Year of Publication: 2001
Format: 154x228mm (trimmed)
Pages: xi+271; Notes, 233; Index, 267
Illustrations: one black and white of the writer on the back flap by Tamara Roberts
Cover design: Gordon Robertson
Cover Photograph: Edward Holub
Binding: Paperback in duotone printed wrappers
Original Price: CAD 24.95
Weight: 392 gr.
Entry No.: 2013016
Entry Date: 28^th May 2013

BOOK DESCRIPTION

While sex has been historically a private matter, in the twentieth century it became a public obsession. Beginning in the early 1900s, people widely felt that increased openness about sex was the key to personal fulfillment and happy relations. Yet this emphasis on the physical has eroded our understanding of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of intimacy. Today, sex has saturated contemporary life through television, movies, books, magazines, videos, tabloids, advertising and the Internet. Meanwhile, desensitization and sexual dysfunction, obsession with body image, short-lived commitments, and high divorce rates are signs that our deepest private desires remain unfulfilled.

We yearn for true connection with the romantic other, and our growing malaise has given rise to nostalgic myths of golden times that never really existed. Patricia Anderson's Passion Lost, a lively history of sexual mores– from the burgeoning sexual concerns of the twentieth century's early years, the changing morality of the 1920s and 1930s, the liberties of wartime, and the 1950s'veneer of rectitude, to the freedoms of the following decades– examines those myths and paints a compelling new portrait that illustrates how deeply the present is rooted in the past, and how our quest for intimacy has been hijacked by our public obsession with sex. By guiding us through the landscape of emotional and sexual development in the twentieth century, Patricia Anderson gives fresh meaning to the role of passion in our culture and new hope for the future of relationships.