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Growing out of several anthropological symposia and sponsored by the Institute for Sex Research (the Kinsey Institute), this anthropological collection attempts to establish 'comparative similarities and differences and then to develop a number of generalizations about cultural, social, biological, ecological, and psychological forces as these influence human sexual behavior'. Of the eight essays, seven are by anthropologists, one by a sociologist. The cultures surveyed range from Polynesia and Africa to England and Ireland. The breadth and diversity of human sexual experience are indicated, but not much else; each essay, like the foreword, prologue, epilogue, and appendix, manages to be disappointing or unpleasant in its own way.
Psychoanalytic terms are used abundantly, but the contributors reveal little if any knowledge of, or interest in, psychoanalysis. Freud is mentioned several times in passing, at least twice with frivolity. Apart from a cursory reference to Devereux, the other leaders of psychoanalytic anthropology in this country (Róheim, La Barre, Muensterberger, et al.) appear not to have existed at all, and Devereux's name is misspelled by two of the writers, each with his own unique misspelling. Most of the nonpsychoanalytic anthropologists of the past and present are dismissed as prudish, unscientific, or wrong. Several, including the late Ralph Linton, are ruthlessly dealt with in a curious display of intellectual (and dyspeptic) cannibalism.
This is, in brief, an aggressive, hard-shelled, and 'liberated' anthropology which runs the gamut from Masters to Johnson, with a backward glance at Kinsey. For all its vaunted and aggressive modernity, much of the book is quite traditional in theory and method, and its half-baked scientism and behaviorism can even be described charitably as old-fashioned.