Sex at Almost Any Price

If a mere medical publishing house like W. B. Saunders Co. can make big money on Zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (at $6.50), a lot of other publishers would like to get in the act. This week, with the Kinsey Report still high (No. 3) on the non-fiction bestseller list, publishers were scrambling to turn out volumes appraising Kinsey's statistics, arguing with Kinsey's conclusions--or just riding the Kinsey bandwagon.

Prentice-Hall got out first with something called Sex Habits of American Men ($3). It is a serious symposium edited by PM Columnist Albert Deutsch; most of the 13 contributors are friendly to Kinsey. But Yale Psychiatrist Robert P. Knight offers a sharp dissent to Kinsey's assumption that prevalence and normality are the same thing. The common cold, says Dr. Knight, has about the same incidence as homosexuality in Kinsey's findings (that 37% of all U.S. males have some homosexual experience). But the prevalence of colds, says Dr. Knight, does not make them "normal."

One day later the Greystone Press issued American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report, a kind of Kinsey-made-easy, without difficult graphs and tables. Price: $1.96. The authors, leftish Lawyer Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, a publicity man, dedicate their book to Kinsey and his associates, "who have enriched the market place of thought."

Next week Hogarth House will publish (at $2.95) The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women, by Norman Lockridge (author of Bachelors' Quarters and editor of The Golden Treasury of the World's Wit and Wisdom). Says a dust-jacket blurb: "We did not plan to publish the contents of this book for some time to come . . . [but] excitement caused by the recent appearance of the Kinsey Report has suddenly brought most of these doubtful factors into a maturity of public interest. . ." Sample spicy headings in Lockridge's work: "What a Man Expects of a Mistress," "Good Women Not as Skillful as Prostitutes," "The Perfect Wedding Night," "A Frenchman's Experience."

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