Debating Sexual Correctness

Debating Sexual Correctness Edited by Adele M. Stan (Delta, $11.95) Now that political correctness is just about written out, having inspired numerous books on both its virtues and vices, it's time for sexual correctness to have its day. What is sexual correctness? Like its political cousin, there's no real definition, except in terms of what it isn't: Sexual correctness isn't pornography, it isn't date rape, it isn't inequality-or at least that's the message you get after reading this anthology of essays, testimony, op-ed pieces, and article excerpts. That makes a fairly vague framework for a collection, and a lot of the chapter headings intended to give the book shape and trajectory-''Passionate Polemics,'' ''Rights and Wrongs in the Intimate Arena,'' ''When the Personal Becomes Political''-seem forced. Still, many of the pieces, by such famed sexual crusaders as Andrea Dworkin, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Katie Roiphe, and Lisa Palac, are interesting and meaningful on their own merits, and they give the work as a whole a certain impact. Buy it for your Neanderthal friends. B -Vanessa V. Friedman