It is important to look at the error in which one has lived in, and it will reveal so much to one. When the heart rises up in one, and one is pricked in one’s reins, often it is discovered how brutish one was and ignorant has been as a beast before the World. In todays highly professionalized World, the term amateur invites a brush-off from business executive and economists. Yet throughout history, unpaid amateurs, working for themselves, their families or their communities, have made remarkable achievements in a wide variety of fields, including science and technology. Because science had not become a paying profession, early scientists were almost all amateurs. Many gained a living as paid professionals in one field but made their greatest contributions to history as part-time prosumers. Joseph Priestley, who in 1774 discovered oxygen, was a minster. Pierre de Fermat, whose “last theorem” puzzled mathematicians for centuries, was a lawyer. And Benjamin Franklin, paid as a printer, media mogul and politician, studied ocean currents on the side, inventing bifocals along the way and demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity. He, too, was a prosumer. Today prosuming amateurs are collecting huge amounts of valuable environmental information—for example, seismological data in the Philippines. However, it is astronomy and space that, often in collaboration with professionals, amateurs are making really important finds. They started early. When the World’s first artificial satellite, Sputink, blasted into orbit in 1957, amateurs all over the globe who had been organized by astronomer Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, were waiting to track it across the Heavens. There effort was dubbed Moonwatch demonstrated what amateurs could do when properly inspired and led.” Today amateur astronomers are, among other things, charting asteroids and other potentially dangerous objects in space.

Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden, a former astronaut, not long ago told the U.S. House Committee on Science that small objects “at the nuclear weapons scale” smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere at a rate of once about every two weeks. In June 2002 one such event occurred over the Mediterranean and released twenty to thirty kilotons of energy—more than that of the Hiroshima blast. “Has this occurred over India or Pakistan,” Worden suggested, “it could have triggered a nuclear war.” Urging more attention to such low-probability, but potentially devastating, dangers, he paid tribute to amateur monitors, pointing out that “some of them are not so amateur.” According to Richard Nugent, himself an amateur asteroid hunter and a contributor to Starscan, a newsletter to the Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society, “Amateurs are catching up with the pros in certain fields, and surpassing them in others [such as] asteroid discoveries, novae, supernovae, variable stars, occultation events, fireballs, meteors, planetary observations, satellite passes, and other unique events.” As research tools become smaller, cheaper, smarter and more powerful, making possible further changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of knowledge, amateurs will no doubt enter new fields. And this takes us to another overlooked contribution made by prosumers. Every single day around the World, countless volunteers get behind the wheel of their cars and drive to schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, hospitals, playgrounds or community centers to provide free services. Or they add to their odometers by picking up groceries for neighbors or taking a sick relative to a doctor. Nobody knows how many millions of miles they drive in aggregate over the course of year, or how much gas they use, or how much wear and tear they add to their autos in the course of creating unpaid value.

In addition, therefore, to delivering free lunch to the money economy by donating their unpaid time and labor, they are also contributing what amounts to a prosumer capital asset—the use of a vehicle—that makes possible or increases the value they created for others. That is more free lunch. (If they go to the trouble, tit is true that, in the United States of America, they may be able to reclaim some small part of their expenses as a tax deduction, but it is doubtful that in practice most volunteers do.) Car use, however, is not the only example of prosumer capital at work. As we have already seen, prosumers, as a group, spend large sums buying machines and tools—or, more accurately, investing in capital goods for use in prosuming. These tools range from telescopes, sewing machines and digital cholesterol testers all the way up to automobiles and other vehicles. And, in a new, fast-spreading practice, another pattern is emerging: Busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor. Only by taking account of practices likes these can we uncook the economic books. Now, Hobbes blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul). However, he, like Locke, did not develop the psychology of the self in its fullness, just as neither went very deeply into the state of nature, because the solution seemed to be on the surface. Once the old virtues were refuted—the piety of the religious or the honor of the nobles—Hobbes and Locke assumed that most men would immediately agree that their self-preservative desires are real, that they come from within and take primacy over any other desire. The true self is not only good for individuals but provides a basis for consensus not provided by religious or philosophies.

Locke’s substitute for the virtuous man, the rational and industrious one, is the perfect expression of this solution. It is not an ethic or a morality of a Protestant or any other kind of believer, but a frank admission of enlightened selfishness (selfishness that has learned from modern philosophy which goals are real and which imaginary), or self-interest rightly understood. Locke develops the opposite, the idle and the quarrelsome man—who, we see, may be the priest or the noble (id est, pretenders to a higher morality)—to debunk virtue in a less provocative way than Hobbes did. Lock’s rational and industrious man partakes, as a prototype, of the charm of the sincere man who acts as he thinks and, without fraudulent pieties, seeks his own good. Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism. The taste of the sincere expresses itself more in blame of Tartufferie than in praise of virtue. Terror in the face of death, an immediate and overwhelming subjective experience of the self and what counts most for it, and the imperative following from this experience that death must be avoided, were confirmed by the new natural philosophy which sees in nature only bodies in motion, bodies blindly conserving their motion by the necessity of inertia. All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct. However, man can be seen to behave as all other bodies behave, and the imaginary constraints on his following his powerful inclinations—constraints which would cause him to behave differently from natural bodies—vanish.

Irrational passion and rational science cooperate in a new way to establish natural law: Pursue peace. Man’s passionate subjectivity gives assents to the premises of natural philosophy—nay, takes them as its principles of action—and philosophy finds that that assent accords with nature. Man remains somehow a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle’s philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self. Lockean natural man, who is really identical to his civil man, whose concern with comfortable self-preservation makes him law-abiding and productive, is not all that natural. Rousseau quickly pointed out that Locke, in his eagerness to find a simple or automatic solution to the political problem, made nature do much more than he had a right to expect a mechanical, nonteleological nature to do. Natural man would be brutish, hardly distinguishable from any of the other animals, unsociable and neither industrious nor rational, but, instead, idle and nonrational, motivated exclusively by feelings or sentiments. Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected with the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed. Man tumbled down into what we called the basement, which now appears bottomless. And there down below, Rousseau discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high. Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one.

The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to one’s real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in one, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise one perfection or salvation but merely buys one off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the America premise. Rousseau still hoped for a soft landing on nature’s true grounds, but one not easily achieved, requiring both study and effort. The existence of such a natural ground has become doubtful, and it is here that they abyss opened up. However, it was Rousseau who founded the modern psychology of the self in its fullness, with its unending search for what is really underneath the surface of rationality and civility, its new ways of reaching the unconscious, and its unending task of constituting some kind of healthy harmony between above and below. Rousseau’s intransigence set the stage for a separation of man from nature. He was perfectly willing to go along with the modern scientific understanding that a brutish being is true man. However, nature cannot satisfactorily account for his difference from the other brutes, for his movement from nature to society, for his history. Descartes, playing his part in the dismantling of the soul, had reduced nature to extension, leaving out of it only the ego that observes extension. Man is, in everything but his consciousness, part of extension. Yet how he is a man, a unity, what came to be called a self, is utterly mysterious. This experienced whole, a combination of extension and ego, seems inexplicable or groundless. Body, or atoms in motion, passions, and reason are some kind of unity, but one that stands outside of the grasp of natural science.

If there were no place to hold them, Locke appears to have invented the self to provide unity in continuity for the ceaseless temporal succession of sense impressions that would disappear into nothingness. We can know everything in nature except that which knows nature. To the extent that man is a piece of nature, he disappears. The self gradually separates itself from nature, and its phenomena must be treated separately. Descartes’ ego, in appearance invulnerable and godlike in its calm and isolation, turns out to be the tip of an iceberg floating in a fathomless and turbulent sea called the id, consciousness an epiphenomenon of the unconscious. Man is self, that now seems clear. However, what is self? Our gaily embraced psychology leaves us with this question. If we are to abandon ourselves to it, it is important for us to know the unbearably complicated story behind it. If this psychology is to be believed, one thing is certain: it came to us belatedly, in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected in out liberal society, and it opens up a Pandora’s box, ourselves. Like Iago it tells us, “I never found a man who knew how to love himself.” Modern psychology has this in common with what was always popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it. The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinctions between good and bad, in one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for oneself. Now the good man is the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. This is most obvious in the political realm.

For Aristotle, good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, while bad ones have rulers who use their positions to further their private interest. For Locke and Montesquieu there is no such distinction. A good regime has the proper institutional structures for satisfying while containing the selfish men who make it up, while a bad one does not succeed in doing this. Selfishness is presupposed; men are not assumed to be as they ought to be, but as they are. Psychology has distinctions only between good and bad forms of selfishness, like Rousseau’s deliciously candid distinctions between amour de soi and amour–propre, untranslatable into English because we would have to use self-love for both terms. For us the most revealing and delightful distinctions—because it is so unconscious of its wickedness—is between inner-directed and other-directed, with the former taken to be unqualified good. Of course, we are told, the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others. To which I can only respond: if you can believe that, you can believe anything. Rousseau knew much better. The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of the most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things. Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. However, he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any others necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion.

  Socrates was always among the Athenians but was not quite one of them, apparently never made uncomfortable by the fact that they did not trust him. He was neither solitary nor citizen. Rousseau, a figure of similar stature in the new tradition, was distressed by the hatred of mankind, and was both, at least in speech, the perfect citizen and the complete solitary. He was torn between the extremes, and there was no middle ground. Although a very great reasoner, his preferred means of learning about himself were the reverie, the dream, the old memory, a stream of associations unhampered by rational control. In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates’ quest for man in general, or man in himself. The difference is made apparent by comparing the image of Socrates talking to two young men about the best regime, with the image of Rousseau, lying on his back on a raft floating on a gently undulating lake, sensing his existence. Did you know that slow, synchronous brainwave activity is ordinarily associated with lack of eye movement, fixation, lack of definition, idleness, inactivity, overall body inertness? No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective association, deprived of their purposeful character. Alpha is the mental state most commonly associated with meditation, but before anyone equates meditation with television, it is important to make a critical distinction. In the former, you produce your own material and in the latter it comes from outside; it is not internally generated. People who are good at meditation are among the most difficult to hypnotize. They start going into hypnotic trance, but at a certain point they begin producing their own material and cannot be influenced by outside instruction unless they choose to be.

These individuals have their own thing going. We doubt that any good meditators watch much television and that meditation might be an excellent ability to develop in people who are bothered by television addiction. In fact, television addiction might itself be symptomatic of an inability to produce one’s own mental imagery. When we compared brainwave activity while watching television with brainwave activity while reading magazines, it appears that the mode of response to television is very different from the responses to print the basic electrical responses of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to the content differences. The response to print may be fairly described as active, while the response to television may be fairly described s passive. Television is not communication as we have known it. Our subject was trying to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about the television. Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure. This indicates that one gets a decease in beta [fast waves] and an increase in slow activity with a large percentage of alpha. Alpha wave patterns, recorded over the occipital areas of the scalp, disappear at the moment when a person gives visual commands (focuses, accommodates, and verges), when one takes charge of the process of seeking information Any orienting outward to the World increases one’s brainwave frequencies and blocks [halts] alpha wave activity. Alpha occurs when you do not orient to. You can sit back and have pictures in your head, but you are in a totally passive condition and unaware of the World outside of your pictures. The right phrase for alpha is really “spaced-out.” Not orienting. When a person focuses visually, orients to anything, notices something outside oneself, then one gets an immediate increase in faster wave activity and alpha will block [disappear].

Many meditators are in alpha but in meditation you are learning self-control and how to call upon your own internal processes. There is no such discipline with television. You are not training your mind to control itself, which biofeedback, and also meditation, accomplish; television trains people only for being zombies. Instead of training active attention, television seems to suppress it. Ten kids were asked to watch their favorite television programs. Our assumption was that since these programs were their preferred shows, the kids would be involved in them and we would find there would be an oscillation between alpha slow-wave activity and beta. The prediction was that they would go back and forth. However, they did not do that. They just sat back. They stayed almost all the time in alpha. This mean that while they were watching they were not reacting, not orienting, not focusing, just spaced-out. Also, children who are watching television are far slower to react to an emergency than children who are doing something else. And, that is predictable because when they are watching television, they are being trained not to react. To really learn anything, you have to interact with the source of the data. With television you do not really think. If I get engaged, I know that speaking for myself, I can only really learn, as in the Socratic method of teaching. The best teaching is an interactive form. Some people learn best, for example, by writing notes because the notes are a feedback system. (Like a journal or a diary.) Television watching is only receiving, no longer reacting. It cannot do anything but hold your attention; you are receiving, not looking. The key for why they are in alpha is that when they are watching they are not looking at, not orienting.

If you have a light which is not really being attended to, you can get an infinite amount of alpha. Perhaps it is that the TV target is so far away, the screen so small that your eyes need not move; you are looking at infinity, in a way, like looking at the hypnotist’s flashlight. If you look at moving targets, you have at least a little active interaction; that would tend to put into beta. However, with television though there seems to be movement, you stay all the in alpha. Reading produces a more active learning process and a higher amount of beta activity. You would expect abnormality in anyone who produces alpha while reading. The horror of television is that the information goes in, but we do not react to it. It goes right into our memory pool and perhaps we react to it later but do not know what we are reacting to. When you watch television you are training yourself not to react and so later on, you are doing things without knowing why you are doing them or where they came from. Because of the implications of this study, computer programmers might want to design their software to be less helpful in order to force users to think harder so that televisions and computers do not wipe out their brain functions. That may well be good advice, but it is hard to imagine the developers of commercial computer programs and Web applications taking it to heart. One of the long-standing trends in software programming has been the pursuit of ever more “user-friendly” interfaces. That is particularly true on the Net. Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor. A small but telling example can be seen in the evolution of search engines. It its earliest incarnation, the Google engine was a very simple tool: you entered a keyword into the search box, and you hit the search button.

However, Google, facing competition from other search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, has worked diligently to make its service enter more solicitous. Now, as soon as you enter the first letter of your keyword into the box, Google immediately suggests a list of popular search terms that being with that letter. Their algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google can make your searches more convenient and efficient. Automating cognitive processes in this way has become the modern programmer’s stock-in-trade. And for good reason: people naturally seek out those software tools and Web sites that offer the most help and guidance—and shun those that are difficult to master. They want friendly, helpful software. Why would they not? Yet, as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, they are likely diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind. Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-World evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. After exanimating an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005, then analyzing citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online; considering how much easier it is to search a digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations.

However, that is not all that was discovered. As more journals moved online scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information leads to a narrowing of science and scholarship. With these counterintuitive finds, it as also been noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what is not. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to find prevailing opinion, the more likely they are to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashion library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage of to take. Before Frederick Taylor introduced his system of scientific management, the individual laborer, drawing on his training, knowledge, and experience, would make his own decisions about how he did his work. He would write his own script. After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it.

The messiness that comes with individual autonomy was cleaned up, and the factory as a whole became more efficient, its output more predictable. Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. Even if the hidden codes were revealed to us, when we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others—algorithmic instruction that few of us would be able to understand. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we are following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we are following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships Facebook, we are following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.” Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions. Now, society is constantly always undergoing influx and change. Decades after it electrified, horrified, revitalized, and transformed Western society, North America’s revolution of the pleasures of the flesh is now firmly entrenched as a mainstream way of life. By now, its effects are showing—for one thing, it has probably cropped years off the age of the average virgin. Today, the median age of losing virginity is 17.4 for girls, and 16.6 for boys, about three years earlier than in the late, staid 1950s. Broken down, these figures are actually more startling: 19 percent of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen are nonvirgins. By age sixteen and seventeen, this rises to 55 percent, and fully 72 percent of all high-school seniors have had intercourse, at least half with more than one partner.

These figures do not paint a picture of uninhibited, liberating, and rewarding sexuality. To the contrary, they are adrip with poisonous consequences: a rash of pregnancies—by the time American women reach twenty, 43 percent will have become pregnant once (one every twenty-six seconds)—among mainly unmarried, ill-prepared mothers. Another way to understand this is to compare it with the situation in 1960: then, 33 percent of teenage mothers were unmarried at the birth of their first child; by 1989, this percentage had shot up to 81 percent. Rates of sexually transmitted disease (STD) have also skyrocketed, so much today, by the age of twenty-one years, about one in four is infected with such STDs as chlamydia, syphilis, or gonorrhea. More frighteningly, AIDS and COVID are making inroads of many young people. Despite impassioned warnings from such famous figures as basketball player Magic Johnson, who admitted his reckless promiscuity had caused his tragic diagnosis, many young people still engage in unprotected pleasures of the flesh. However, these same people were demanding that others get vaccinated and were a mask. I guess the difference is this new cancel culture gets to take their rage out of others just for thinking they are being exposed to others, while using a prophylactic requires self-responsibility, and people do not want to take preventative measures. Also, the government is not, nor are celebrities or politicians reminding people that it is dangerous and potentially deadly to have unprotected pleasures of the flesh. Perhaps people also may need abstinence from alcohol so they do not make irresponsible decisions and to play more sports and get more physical activity. If humans degrade it, it is perfectly normal for a natural function to become degraded. If elevated, noble. If sublimated, changed.

Where excessive erotic thinking accompanies physical continence, the result may be a mental disorder or bodily sickness. Equally sobering is that teenagers do not practice what they preach: despite their own early indulgence in pleasures of the flesh, few consider it reasonable to first have pleasures of the flesh before the age of sixteen or seventeen. Why, then, do they so blatantly jump the gun? Curiosity is the leading reason, and being in love is a distant second—63 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys surrendered their virginity to consummate their love. Alarmingly, even more girls (but only 35 percent of boys) succumbed to pressure from their sweethearts, while 58 percent of both were driven by the desire to impress their friends and become more popular. This, despite the ever-hardy double standard by which they judge themselves: two-thirds agree that pleasures of the flesh experiences enhance a boy’s reputation while it damages a girl’s. However, the children who would be born to parents whose matings are few, whose minds are pure, and whose hearts are aspiring, would be markedly superior in every way. An enforced chastity, which is the product of rigid circumstances or lack of temptation, is not the philosophic chastity. The power of pleasures of the flesh to make or mar happiness or equanimity is formidable. Left to run amok in savage lust it harms and degrades a human but, redeemed and transmuted, it serves one’s best interests. One knows, by theory and practice, logic and experience, that chastity may conserve energy—physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. However, one knows also that it creates undesired and undesirable effects in mind and character. Chasity is not the same as purity, although the two are often confused. The one is a way of outward life; the other a state of inner life.

If the energies needed for mastering the mind are to become powerful enough, such chastity cannot be avoided. In most men pleasures of the flesh is the largest diversion of these energies. The true union between man and woman is tantric. However, it cannot be brought about without developed qualities on both sides. Pleasures of the flesh, ought to be a natural controlled urge, between a married couple, but has all-too-often become a disease, a fever, an obsession. Once upon a time, before the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, chastity was easier for girls to maintain. For one thing, they menstruated later, at fourteen rather than twelve, as they do now, and married earlier, at twenty-one rather than today’s twenty-five. Then, a young woman could reasonably calculate that she had only seven years of chastity to conquer before she married, at which point she could surrender her virginity with the full approval of parents, religious authorities, and mainstream society. Today, both she and her brother are under sever pressure from hormones, a sex-driven society that scorns virgins as geeks, friends and classmates who taunt virgins and boast of their own sexual prowess, and the personal pain of dealing with boyfriends who coax or coerce them to have sex when they would prefer not to. Yet despite today’s rampant sexual experimentation even among the very young, about 20 percent of all teenagers remain chaste until adulthood. Why do these young men and women defy the norm? How do they handle the forces that defeat most of their peers? In what fundamental ways are they different from them? And, having achieved chaste maturity, do they regret deferring their sexual initiation? These issues must be examined against the backdrop of today’s complicated social and moral climate, in particular the media and music World dedicated to millions of young people and the power of the purses they control.

In those Worlds, hedonistic values, sex-driven advertising, and musical presentations blare out the message that pleasures of the flesh are good, natural, cool, and ubiquitous. Those physical and passional conditions which pass for love among the young—with their uncontrollable sensuality, their total unconcern with higher values, their puppet-like copulation—all show that they have still to outgrow the close ties which they still have to the animal stage of evolution. Pleasures of the flesh, as they portray it is a physical maneuver preceded by seductive, flirtatious behavior and cloaked in suggestive clothing, come-hither stances, and an aroma for animal musk. In this sex-sated World, feminists interpret the sexual act from the perspective of power politics, revealing how it, too, is integrally linked to the inequities between men and women. Unfortunately, their analyses have inspired some other women to conclude that righting the wrongs of the damnable double standard means adopting more dominant sexual standards. Translated into action, this has led to belt-notching, score-keeping, power-play pleasures of the flesh, initiated and controlled by women. They see nothing ironic about defining independence and equality as gaining mastery of infinite varieties. In their combative version of the pleasures of the flesh revolution, real women carry prophylactics in their jeans, grade (out of ten, for instance) the hard curves of men’s rear ends, and initiate pleasures of the flesh with partners who arouse their transient lust. However, in these vary same Worlds, vying with that overwhelming vision of life, in another powerful force, the aggressively proselytizing Moral Majority of the Christian right wing. It, too, has its youth wing and sponsors a counter-cultural movement that preaches sexual abstinence until marriage and heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of orientation, and it provides converts with accessories as trendy and upbeat as those of the rival ethic of sex-is-almighty. The best-known organization within this framework, once whose reach extends Worldwide, is the aptly named True Love Waits.

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