Word: kon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology and the nation's leading -- and perhaps only -- sexologist: "If you want to imagine the atmosphere in the Soviet Union, imagine a world before Kinsey -- even before Freud...
Magazines such as Soviet Photo and Ogonyok are publishing erotic pictures, and there is a publication called Moscow Personals. Kon's own textbook, An Introduction to Sexology, became available in the Soviet Union last year, more than a decade after it was first published in Eastern Europe. Already half a million copies of the Soviet edition are in print. An explicit sex manual, Advice to Young Couples, is a best seller at bookstalls...
Nonetheless, Kon is encouraged that things are changing a little. He finds that younger people are maturing earlier and learning more and that women's sexuality, which was previously denied, is starting to be acknowledged. At the same time, men's total authority is starting to crack. Kon even intends to have the word sexism added to the next edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy...
...meantime, Kon, now at the Institute for Ethnography, hopes to use his new status as a member of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to keep pushing for change. At Kon's urging, the April issue of the magazine Semya (Family) will begin to run a translation of the no-holds-barred French children's sexual-instruction book La Vie Sexuelle (The Sexual Life). Three different publications this year will include excerpts from the works of Freud. "Readers will be enchanted," Kon says. "They will think it is the latest thing." Perhaps, he suggests, the excerpts should be accompanied...
...political liberalization. Some demonstrators told Western reporters they had been motivated by televised reports of rallies in France, the Philippines and South Korea, where students have protested against government repression for years. Last year alone, South Korean students held more than 1,700 demonstrations, including a rally at Kon- kuk University in October at which 1,288 students were arrested. The death last month of Park Jong Chul, a student who was killed while being tortured by police, has ensured that the protests will continue...