Lecture
Friday, Jan 30, 2009, 4:45 PM

Mariam Lau

Publicist, Berlin

The Ambivalent Heritage of the Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies has left an ambivalent heritage: it put an end to much of the fear and superstition of the fifties, yet it also destroyed a lot of the new gained intimacy by politicizing sexuality. It was feminism with its rhetoric of suspicion about the relationship between men and women in particular who reloaded sexuality with new fears of overpowering and dominance. And the fact that women have children and can be happy with it does not really appear in the feminist cosmos. The result is that the left has not got much to say about the desires of most young couples.

Mariam Lau, senior correspondent of the WELT, born 1962 in Teheran/Iran, studied American language and literature at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut in Berlin und at the Indiana University in Bloomington. In the year 2000 her book Die neuen Sexfronten. Vom Schicksal einer Revolution was published by the Rowohlt-Verlag. She lives together with her husband and three children in Berlin.

The event will be held in English