Global Sex - Review

New Internationalist, Oct, 2001 by Vanessa Baird

Dennis Altman (University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-01606 -4)

Books on globalization are landing on reviewers' desks thick and fast in the sudden flurry to get a grip on (and make money from) the world's dominant trend. Books on sex are... well, as popular as ever.

Yet, this book, combining the two, is refreshingly original if not unique. Australian politics professor Dennis Altman is a wonderfully clear writer and thinker with a magpie skill for accumulating relevant nuggets of information. This makes Global Sex both illuminating and fascinating.

We get bizarre details of the exponential growth of cybersex (the computer room is now, apparently, the busiest place in some(sex clubs) alongside hard-hitting analyses of how the rampant commodification of sex. affects the most vulnerable: poor women and children caught up in the ever-growing sex trade. His perception of the oppressive puritanism of religious fundamentalism as a result of, and reaction to, economic globalization is particularly useful.

In an era when sex is most commonly linked with contemporary capitalism, Altman's presentation of the politics of sex is clear and refreshing. Persuasively, he argues that a 'meaningful sexual politics in a globalizing world must involve both the iniquities of the larger socio-economic order, and those implicated in the broader structures of sex and gender, which are constantly being remade through the very processes of globalization'.

Global Sex is dazzlingly ambitious in its scope, ranging from fellatio in the White House and bulimia in Fiji to AIDS in Africa and transgender in Taiwan. It also acts as a timely reminder that the personal is still political.

RATING: * * * * *

STAR RATING

EXCELLENT: *****

VERY GOOD: ****

GOOD: ***

FAIR: **

POOR: *