What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics? Few societies have posed this puzzle as urgently, or as disturbingly, as Nazi Germany. What exactly were Nazism's sexual politics? Were they repressive for everyone, or were some individuals and groups given sexual license while others were persecuted, tormented, and killed? How do we make sense of the evolution of postwar interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics? What do we make of the fact that scholars from the 1960s to the present have routinely asserted that the Third Reich was "sex-hostile"? In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends. A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics? Few societies have posed this puzzle as urgently, or as disturbingly, as Nazi Germany. What exactly were Nazism's sexual politics? Were they repressive for everyone, or were some individuals and groups given sexual license while others were persecuted, tormented, and killed? How do we make sense of the evolution of postwar interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics? What do we make of the fact that scholars from the 1960s to the present have routinely asserted that the Third Reich was "sex-hostile"? In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends. A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

"The interrelationship of fascism and sexuality has attracted a great deal of interest for some time now. This collection offers fresh perspectives by leading scholars on the history of sexuality under national socialism on such topics as the persecution of Jewish-gentile sex in the "race defilement" trials, homophobic propaganda and the prosecution of same-sex activity within the Wehrmacht and SS, representations of female sexuality in film, prostitution on home and battle fronts, sexual relations between Germans and foreign forced laborers, and reproductive practices among Jewish survivors. Moreover, the authors provide new insights into the relationships between Nazi sexual politics and antisemitism and challenge assumptions of Nazism as sexually repressive ; instead they emphasize the interrelationships between incitement to sexual activity and persecution and mass murder." --book jacket.

Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts—including sadomasochism and homosexuality—not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy.

In this classic study, Reich repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. Instead he sees fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.

'Captivating, emphatic and deeply inspiring, Sexual Revolution lifted me greatly by envisioning the possibilities of our moment' V (formerly Eve Ensler) 'Brilliant; vital; revolutionary' Kate Manne _________________ This is a story about how modern masculinity is killing the world, and how feminism can save it. It's a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence. Sex and gender are changing, and the world is changing with them. In this time of crisis, we are also witnessing a productive transformation: a revolutionary change in how we define gender, sex, consent and whose bodies matter. This sexual revolution is a threat to the social and economic order. It undermines the existing power structures and weakens the authority of institutions from the waged workplace to the nuclear family. No wonder the far right is fighting back so hard. Told with Laurie Penny's trademark urgency and candour, Sexual Revolution is a hand-grenade of a book: both a manifesto for social change and a story of how feminism can save us.

The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true - have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no. Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It's 1950s redux. Politicians--including many Democrats--insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a "sex education" curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies. The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex--not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America--a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of "hot monogamy"--for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences. Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America's culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.