Is Sex Necessary

By: James Thurber and E. B. White

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Synopsis: Here a tidbit from this hilarious spoof: I wrote Thurber the other day and asked him please to bring sex up to date for the book. He replied as follows: "I last had word about Dr. Karl Zaner in 1941 when a correspondent wrote me that she had seen him about town, walking a little unsteadily and given to muttering inaudibly. There is some reason to believe that Dr. Zaner in his late years has become depressed by a lack of the schematic and the presence of too many variables in the study of sex. An ophthalmologist who studies two thousand similar eye ailments can come up with dependable conclusions, but the scientist of sex, completing his investigation of two thousand persons in love, is just about where he was when he started out. Only two facts, I suppose, can be stated in this fluctuant field, without fear of successful contradiction: young women are still faced with the problem of how to tell popularity from promiscuity, and young men are still up against the equally difficult problem of how to have fun without getting married while they are still making only $37.50 a week. The larger aspects of sex become more and more complex at the hands of the psychiatrists. As I understand it, and I am probably wrong, bisexuality is on the increase and the psychiatrists are inclined to view this trend as a development, or even flowering, of the individual. Historians, on the other hand, appear to regard it as an evidence of the decline of the species. ..."