Sex Dictionary

For more than a decade the independent Roman Catholic publishing house of Herder & Herder of New York has been the most adventuresome in its field. Four years ago it won praise, and in church circles a degree of notoriety, for the erudite but controversial "Dutch Catechism.'' That ruckus will seem a mere parlor game compared to the brouhaha that is likely to greet Herder's latest effort, a show-and-tell encyclopedia of sex called The Sex Book.

The $9.95 explicitly illustrated volume, scheduled for U.S. publication early this summer, has already sold 30,000 in a German edition published last year by an independent Lutheran firm there. It has become a standard sex-education text at all the Lutheran youth centers in West Germany. The author of the German edition, Protestant Physician Martin Goldstein, in fact developed the book in response to questions he encountered as a medical adviser to the Lutheran Youth Counseling Center in Duesseldorf. For the U.S. edition, Yale Research Fellow Erwin J. Haeberle has rewritten the text to reflect U.S. sex laws and mores. As in Germany, the book is primarily intended for youthful readers, preferably with adult guidance.

The book has a humane, almost joyful candor that might well assist a perplexed parent. But as for critics of sex education, it is a toss-up which will disturb them more, the permissive attitudes expressed in the text or some of Will McBride's black-and-white photos. Among the picture subjects are couples during intercourse, erect penises and ejaculation; there are also less explicit, sometimes charming evocations of conjugal and family love.

The dictionary-format text (supplemented by a Portnoyesque glossary of slang) similarly blends frankness with a pervading concern for mutual tenderness and respect in expressions of sexuality. The definition of brothel, for instance, is a deft putdown: "a house where people can rent sexual partners." Nudity describes the body not only as being "sexually attractive" but also as "vulnerable and in need of protection." Chastity, far from connoting abstinence, involves "respect for the sexual partner as an individual, not as a sexual object to be used at convenience." There is also compassionate treatment of the difficult subject of homosexuality and a rather challenging argument for modern versions of the extended family, such as communes and kibbutzim.

One section that may disturb many is the discussion of sin. Considering certain sexual actions sinful in themselves, the book says, is "a belief [that] can lead only to more fear." Some celibates may also take umbrage at the observation that "only a few emotionally disturbed people never think about sex." Ultimately, the judgment that greets The Sex Book may well be the same as the book itself makes on striptease: "It can be argued that [it] serves a social purpose, although it may not be to everybody's taste."

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