Myth and Sexuality - Hardcover

Highwater, Jamake

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0453007082 ISBN 13: 9780453007085

Publisher: NAL Books, 1990

Synopsis

In this fascinating study of the ways in which our ideas about sex and gender are shaped, Jamake Highwater shows that far from being the most natural force of our lives, sexuality is the one most susceptible to cultural influences. Each culture designates various practices as appropriate or inappropriate, moral or immoral, healthy or unhealthy. Author's TV appearances include the PBS series Six Great Ideas and The Power of Myth.

About this title

From Library Journal:

Highwater outlines a brief social history of sex in the West in order to illustrate his thesis that a society's mythology derives largely from its view of the human body and sexuality. Beginning with the earliest peoples (for whom the body and all nature were essentially female), he traces the rise of patriarchy, with its glorification of male sexuality; and goes on to explain how, among Christians, the body became the locus of original sin. Later on, the Romantics produced a still different view of sex as (ultimately doomed) pleasure, which was superceded by the Enlightenment notion of the body (and the universe) as machine. Particularly compelling is his discussion of capitalism's belief in the body as a product from which profits can be made. Anthropologist Highwater (author of 20 books) relies heavily on the work of Joseph Campbell and Elaine Pagels; however, this synthesis would have benefited from a few footnotes. Nevertheless, it is beautifully written, provocative, and highly recommended.
- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Our bodies are the cosmos," asserts Highwater; each society's fundamental values and myths predetermine its conception of the human body and sexuality. To classical Greeks, the body was an idealized locus of beauty; to pioneer sexologists influenced by the mechanistic worldview of science, the body was a pleasure-pain machine; in our own era of consumer capitalism, the body is a sexualized commodity. Author of many books on Native American culture, Highwater attempts to map a mythic history of the body in this ambitious, imaginative essay. From egalitarian Neolithic worshippers of the Great Mother through the Greeks' dethroning of women, to the pervasive "sex-negative" attitudes said to stem from Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian beliefs, we have lost any sense of the body as spiritual, the author provocatively suggests, in a book that will appeal to fans of Joseph Campbell.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: NAL Books
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0453007082
• ISBN 13: 9780453007085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224