Publisher's Synopsis
Good science is dispassionate, impartial. Sexology, the scientific study of sex, has difficulty in being dispassionate and impartial in our times. Sex is simultaneously the driver of so many of our thoughts, emotions and actions, and the generator of so much fear, hysteria and anxiety. Only discussions of religion, politics and perhaps the occult, generate as much heat and so little light. Not surprisingly, religion and politics have a lot to say about sex. Sex has been politicized, moralized and theologized until it constitutes an entire body of knowledge which is not sexology, but sexosophy. This has gone on as long as there have been religious and political rules and rulers. Social control and protectionism was and is the goal. By contrast, this volume, Childhood and Adolescent Sexology , Volume VII of The Handbook of Sexology, offers an antidote for the toxic effects of misguided morality. As did its six predecessors, this seventh volume in the series pioneers new territory and clearly succeeds in establishing that mature sexuality has its precursors in the prepubertal years of infancy and childhood.
