Sex and Treatments(but not necessarily for sex)

Sex:

Hecht offers a summary of her chapter on sex in its beginning, "Searching for happiness, men and women throughout history have been advised to address the issue of sexuality: through fulfillment, abstinence, or monogamy, and a million further details" (222).This is a lot of ground to cover, so I'll just point out some sections that particularly stood out to me: The first being that I will probably never eat cereal again. From this section I learned that Kellogg was indeed a strange man filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical beliefs. His Battle Creek Sanitarium (sanitarium, yeah right) was the epitome of confounded Victorian views about sex and its relation to the public/private life. This point exemplified the second because, from Victorian society to the sexual revolution to now, there is a constant correlation between social rewards and pressures to the sex lives of Americans. D: What are these correlations and how do they still manifest in our society?

F: (I'm going to list a few, just in case we have a question crisis again.)

In Hecht's opinion, who's work led directly into the sexual revolution later in the century (in which he was working) because of his focus on primary responsibility being personal happiness ?

A: Freud (231)

F: What are the sex lives of Americans, grouped by gender, age, class, and ethnicity, heavily determined by?

A: social rewards and pressures (above and 238)

F: In the book _Married Love_ who argued that, for the benefit of the nation, happy homes are needed which generate from healthy sexual relationships?

A: Marie Stopes (230)

Treatments:

In this section, she focuses mainly water treatments/spas and its relationship with society starting with Roman spas and ending with modern showers. Her larger goal, I think, in this chapter is to further point out "the programs of self-denial" in societal norms, which even spa days and bubble baths have. Regardless of the indulgence of treatments, spas were still advertised as a place to become healthy and if you are going to pay all that money just live sparsely then at least you get to "break through" your own psychology. Although Hecht concedes the point that "self-denial can be very distracting, and sometimes people need distraction" (250), she concludes that "Flexing you willpower is no more meritorious than flexing your muscles: not much. What matters is whether you step up when it counts" (255)

D: How do you interpret this last quote? What does this last ambiguous "it" mean?

F: In the twentieth century, what became a symbol of pampered female life?

A: bubble bath (245)

F: In what two cities does the rise of a culture of self-denial become exemplified?

A: Ocean Grove and Asbury Park (250)