To a great extent, Von Hildebrand’s brilliant vision
of marriage went unnoticed, ignored, and contradicted. By contrast, many twentieth century Catholics did not escape the influence of the so-called Sexual
Revolution, or its generals – Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich, Alfred
Kinsey, Hugh Heffner, and Helen Gurley Brown.
Margaret Higgins Sanger, Catholic raised
The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret “Sanger frequently reinvented her image,
aligning herself with socialists, sex theorists, lobbyists, eugenicists,
international birth control advocates, feminists, and suffragists, harnessing
the momentum of these movements to drive her fight for contraception....[Around
1920] Sanger turned to the most powerful
advocacy group of her time: the eugenicists ….Eugenic theory posited that the
human race would be improved ‘by encouraging high reproductive rates in classes
deemed socially desirable…and by discouraging reproduction amongst the
undesirables’….she wrote The Pivot of Civilization in 1922, in which she
espoused decreasing the birth rate of ‘mentally and physically defective’
people.”[i] Planned Parenthood acknowledges that “arguments continue
about whether or not her outreach to the black community was racially
motivated.”[ii]
Margaret Mead
More than anything, Margaret Mead’s 1928 “Coming of
Age in Samoa” seemed to give credence to the notion that standards of sexual
behavior were nothing more than cultural mores, which varied among peoples and eras
(From 1969 – 1971, Mead served as of Social Sciences at New York’s Jesuit
university, Fordham.). “In 1983, Dr. [Derek] Freeman charged that Dr. Mead's influential 1928 account…was mistaken
and misleading in its depiction of uncomplicated sexual freedom there and that
it had been shaped to support academic theory rather than to report the
realities of Pacific island society….After 40 years of research among Asian and
Pacific peoples, including six years in Samoa, he presented his carefully
documented conclusion ….He said Dr. Mead's research and reporting had been
hampered by poor preparation, inadequate command of Samoan, a decision to live
mostly among white officials rather than among the islanders, an effort to fit
two competing research projects into a few months and pressure from her
sponsor….She wrote it at age 24 in 1925 and 1926 after a five-month visit
there….Dr. Freeman, who was born in New Zealand, wrote that it was Dr. Mead's
work on Samoa that had inspired him to take up the subject. During his first stay there, from 1940 to
1943, when he taught school and studied village life, Dr. Freeman, fluent in
the Samoan language, began to doubt Dr. Mead's observations and conclusions. He
suspected that she had shaped her reports to Professor Boas to support his
conviction that cultural conditioning alone determined human behavior.”[iii]
Wilhem Reich
“At the end of
the Second World War, Wilhelm Reich introduced American readers to some of his
earlier writings under the title The Sexual Revolution (1945)….The truth,
according to Reich, was that Western civilization had made people sick by
imposing on them an unnatural, destructive sexual morality”[iv]
Alfred Kinsey
“Alfred
C. Kinsey's work has had a profound effect on American culture….his studies in
the late 1940s and early 1950s, heralded as the first ‘scientific’ look at sex,
became the foundation of the sexual revolution….much of Kinsey's work has been
revealed as junk science and even fraud…he aided and abetted the molestation of
hundreds of children in order to obtain data on ‘child sexuality.’”[v]
Hugh Heffner
Heffner founded Playboy Magazine in 1953: “In the first issue, Playboy identified its
philosophy as anti-marriage….Playboy attacked women as gold-diggers who
bartered sex for a marriage license….When the Pill gave women the freedom to
join men in their sexual rebellion, cultural attitudes shifted radically. Junk
sex was no better than junk food, but millions of men and women greedily
devoured the empty calories….[Playboy] vulgarized what most men and women in
their deepest sentiments hold dear….It turned courtship away from the patient
pleasures of a gourmet meal with many courses and replaced it with a cheesy
burger”[vi]
Helen Gurley Brown
Brown’s “book
about her life as a single woman ….Sex and the Single Girl (1962), captured a
zeitgeist of the early 1960s….[It was] an advice manual that exhorted women to
remain single and find fulfillment in an occupation and non-marital
relationships….;Later,] Brown converted the conservative Cosmopolitan to a
female counterpart of Hugh Hefner's iconic Playboy”[vii]
[i] Rachel Galvin, Margaret Sanger's "Deeds of Terrible
Virtue", Humanities, September/October 1998, Volume 19/Number 5
[ii] Planned
Parenthood, Margaret
Sanger, Planned Parenthood Founder
.
[iii]
John
Shaw, Derek Freeman, Who Challenged
Margaret Mead on Samoa, Dies at 84, New York Times, 8/5/01
.
[iv]
Haeberle,
The Sex Atlas, New York: Continuum,
1983
[v] Concerned Women
for America, The Truth About Alfred
Kinsey
[vi]
Suzanne
Fields, Yearning for a Glimpse of
Shocking Stocking, Jewish World Review, 12/15/03 www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/fields121503.asp
[vii]
Helen Gurley Brown papers,
biographical note http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss142_bioghist.html
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