Sex Made ‘Mechanical’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31366, 11 May 1967, Page 2

Sex Made ‘Mechanical’

f.V.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) DETROIT, May 10. Sex has been reduced to little more than a mechanical act, according to a psychiatrist and medical authority on female sexuality, United Press International reported. The reason is a "demand for instant everything in a time of nothingness,” Dr. Natalie Shainess said at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. The by-products are “college drop-outs, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and narcotic and alcohol addiction.” She said all this is Incongruous since this is “a time of greater sexual freedom.” The result, however, is that sex has been mechanised on

a mass basis and has been robbed of its element of tender love, she said. Sex must be humanised again, Dr. Shainess said. “We must reaffirm the fundamental connexion between human relatedness and physiological sex. Let us avoid the dehumanising rape of sex and strive to understand the failure to love freely.” “Our compulsive preoccupation with sex,” she said, “is reflected in our advertising, in which practically every product sells by use of sexual innuendo, and television and movies offer a constant parade of hostile, alienated, cruel or violent sex.” She added: "Rarely is sex portrayed as part of a warm and meaningful relationship.” The change has been from a greater freedom to “a kind of libertinism,” Dr. Shainess said.

“While the freeing of women from the burden of unwanted childbearing has resulted in a greater awareness of their own potential for

sexual satisfaction,” the psychiatrist said, “there is a noticeable trend in which women pursue men, and have become strident in their demand for sex, suggesting a diminishing femininity.” A member of the faculty of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Institute of New York, Dr. Shainess warned that “man can tamper with his humanness only so far.” In yesterday’s session of the association. Dr. Daniel Desole, a psychiatrist, said “role strain” has led to a suicide rate among young doctors three times higher than that of other young males.

Desole blamed the condition in a large part on society’s failure to provide the necessary support for the twentieth century scientific medicine which young doctors are taught to practise. Suicides now account for 26 per cent of all deaths among doctors 25 to 39 years old, he said, compared with a 9 per cent general average for the same age group.