Is Sex Necessary?: Why You Feel the Way You Do

1929, 1944 Blue Ribbon Books edition
James Thurber and E. B. White
Is Sex Necessary?: Why You Feel the Way You Do
Original price unknown, bought used for $4.00
Worn hardcover
B+

Still laugh-out-loud funny after all these years, from the opening of the Foreword onward:  "During the past year two factors in our civilization have been greatly overemphasized. One is aviation, the other is sex. Looked at calmly, neither diversion is entitled to the space it has been accorded."  I'm not sure if this book was written entirely by White, or if Thurber had a hand in the text as well as the typically odd illustrations.  Both men were already on the staff of The New Yorker, and this is definitely a very 1920s New-York-intellectual-humorist sort of book.


I'm using the "nonfiction" label*, although you won't learn whether sex is necessary, or much else from this parody of sexology.  It's definitely written for men, with women alternately too mysterious and too frank, as in the discussion of feminine types.  (It turns out that you don't have to watch the Quiet Ones.)  The "What Should Children Tell Parents" chapter could well have been written in the 1960s, but generally this is the product of the earlier sexual revolution.  It's not at all an explicit book.  It's sort of talking about talking about sex, rather than just talking about sex.  The scene where a bride, whose mumsy taught her that she'd have a three-year-old son if her husband "brought a pair of bluebirds into a room filled with lilies-of-the-valley," finally stops being coy and blurts out, "Sex-- if you want to know!", is about as direct as it gets.  And at that, his attempt to enlighten her doesn't get any further than him saying that women are "that way," meaning "the way you are...from me...that I am, I mean."


The authors are just as vague.  And that's where much of the humor comes from.  It's also funny how they give the history of sports and leisure, as alternatives to sex.  The glossary includes some of the best lines from the text, such as "loving" meaning "being confused by, or confusing some one."  It is odd to run into "Swastika" as something that men doodle, particularly considering the timing of this edition, but the world had changed a great deal in those intervening 15 years.


I'm not really sure what to say about Thurber's illustrations, beyond most of the people look either irritated or confused (understandable according to the text), and some of the pictures are almost abstract, just a few wavy lines.


This is a nice way to wrap up the 1920s.  I don't have any book for 1930, not even an Oz book, since I'm missing a couple Thompsons.  But 1931 will make up for this.

*Since changed to "humor."