A New Sexual Revolution? Critical Theory, Pornography, And the Internet (Essay‪)‬

Spiritual "procreation" is just as much the work of Eros as is corporeal procreation, and the right and true order of the Polis is just as much an erotic one as is the right and true order of love (Marcuse 1974:211). HERBERT MARCUSE WAS WIDELY REGARDED AS a leading intellectual figure of the "sexual revolution" that marked North American popular culture in the 1960s. As Douglas Kellner (1984) notes, "Counterculture advocates of play, free love, flower power and personal liberation could find powerful articulations of their values in Marcuse's writings" (pp. 2-3). Although he was a theorist in the Marxian tradition, concerned with the dominance of technological rationality and the contradictions of advanced industrial society, Marcuse melded his critique of capitalism with a call to liberate sexuality from the strictures of bourgeois patriarchal morality. As a result, his work fitted almost seamlessly into the social, cultural, and political climate of the 1960s.