Sex and Taboos

Sex and Taboos
LEVITICUS : 15: 1-33

“Sexual intercourse began / in nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me),” the poet Philip Larkin wrote in his poem “Annus mirabilis.” It was the decade when the pill made it possible to separate sex from procreation. My prospective in-laws were horrified when they discovered that their prospective son-in-law had been discussing contraceptives with their daughter. Then we learned a few months after we married that the separation was more complicated than we thought. When the British Medical Journal reported that the particular contraceptive pill Ann had been taking was less effective than some others, we had already proved this...