Customer Reviews

The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior

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The Janus Report is a book of tables and rather dry discussion about them, for the most part. It's subtitle informs us it's "the first broad-scale scientific national survey since Kinsey", and it is, without a doubt--but where it may be broad it's often not very deep.

One can easily ascertain this by considering the amount of material within the book devoted to particular topics, like BDSM, for instance. The book attempts to discuss all sexual deviance fairly early at chapter four, and spans a total of thirty-two pages, with such "significant findings" as "35% of the men and 23% of the women agreed that making love is the best way to make up after an argument, but 51% of the men and 65% of the women disagreed". Now don't get me wrong--I find that information interesting, but I'm not exactly sure that's the sort of information one has in mind when researching "sexual deviance".

After some brief and dry blurbs about all the major and tremendously fascinating subjects of sexual deviance that could fill up books on their own, we're given some survey tables and move right on to swingers in chapter five.

Throughout the book we're given survey tables that break various sexual subjects down into the following ratings:

Very normal

All right

Unusual

Kinky

Never heard of it

On the subject of pedophilia, for instance, I think most might find the category of "kinky" doesn't stand in very well for the most negative feelings such a subject can illicit. In fact, it's downright odd to find "kinky" among one of the qualifiers for that particular subject, especially if you don't include "alarming" as the next option. I say this not to proselytize, but to provide an example about how limited these tables are in what we can glean from them. I think taking account of the strongly negative (and positive) emotions humans have on certain subjects is tremendously valid to include, but all we get is such arbitrary terms as "normal" or "never heard of it". For me, the information provided in this book was just too general in most areas to be highly useful.

If you're looking for a somewhat detached and basic scientific reference to human sexuality, this book is for you. If you're looking for detailed behavioral analysis, commentary and critical psychological explorations, the survey-based nature of books like The Janus Report will come up somewhat short.