“The time has come to think about sex,” the anthropologist Gayle Rubin asserted at the start of a now famous 1984 essay. Sex, held Rubin, might appear to cerebral academics, among others, as “a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation.” But, she countered, it was precisely in such self-evidently serious circumstances “that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.”1