SOURCE: "Writing about Sex," in Partisan Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, Fall, 1967, pp. 552-63.

In the following essay, Phillips explores the implications of sexual freedom in contemporary literature.

Since sex is older than literature, one would think it is entitled to more respect. But the relation has always been just the reverse; literature has always been protected against the encroachments of sex. Even now, when it would seem that almost anything goes, a number of serious critics have been alarmed by the lack of sexual restraint in literature, which they regard as a symptom of moral decline. Most of their fire is directed at figures like Genet, Burroughs and Mailer, though they are generally upset by the moral tone of contemporary writing as a whole.

Now we need hardly be reminded that what goes by the name of the moral question is an old and recurrent one, popping up...