Books in Brief: The Rape of the A.P.E.

The Rape of the A.P.E. The Official History of the Sex Revolution, by Allan Sherman, Playboy Press, 410 pp., $9.95. Allan Sherman, “My Son the Nut,” etc., put this one together a few months before his death. The raped A.P.E. is the American Puritan Ethic, and Sherman’s lengthy account of our century’s gestures toward sex freedom makes the same impression as a solemn Playboy pronouncement: wellmeant and sort of dumb. Sherman never really tangles with the cultural forces that have made sex—and all the words that refer to it—into dynamite. Instead he produces an interminable allegory starring two cave people, Sap (for Homo Sapiens) and Lala (for Ooh-lala, I guess), grants them immortality, and forces them to endure all the various repressions since the dawn of time. There’s a religious leader named Dawg-Muh and a scientist named Testoob, and along the way Sherman offs all the pigs: warriors, bureaucrats, and so on. Alas, what was meant to be funny has a leaden ring; it sounds like those whimsies the high school students are producing in reams nowadays: “Once upon a time in the kingdom of Nixonia . . .” Yet Sherman’s research makes the book worthwhile as a reference text. He’s dug up enough offbeat information to turn this into a Guinness Book of the Outlandish. Did you know that the average New York apartment has four tamperproof locks on the front door? Or that Leonardo da Vinci, around 1500, concocted a theory of sex and wrote it backward, in mirror writing, for fear of reprisals? Sherman tracks it down and reprints it, along with hundreds more. I wish his book had an index. don crinklaw