SUNDAY REVIEW / TOYING WITH 100 YEAR OLD TREATISE "IS SEX NECESSARY?"

A necessary New York erection

First published in 1929, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do remains a curious hybrid—part parody, part cultural snapshot, part literary time capsule. 

Written before either author had become an American institution, the book set out to mock the solemnity of the “scientific” works on love and sexuality popular in the 1920s. 

The era was thick with self-styled experts eager to catalogue human desire with charts, terminology, and pseudo-medical precision. Thurber and White turned this trend on its head. 

 The result is a string of essays, each adopting the voice of a knowing authority while advancing deliberately absurd conclusions. White’s prose is straight-faced and elegant, a perfect foil for Thurber’s wry interjections and his now-famous line drawings. 

Together they coin spurious psychological terms, recount case histories that never happened, and spin elaborate theories that collapse under their own ridiculousness. What makes the book still readable nearly a century later is the precision of the humor. 

Thurber’s drawings, with their skittish dogs and perplexed lovers, remain as sharp as his later New Yorker work. 

White, who would go on to write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, shows here that his control of language was as deft in satire as it was in children’s fiction. The laughter comes not from crude gags but from the unerring mimicry of expert jargon and the universal folly of romantic behavior. 

 Of course, the social attitudes of 1929 are evident. Gender roles are painted in broad strokes, and the book assumes a readership comfortable with a certain urbane male point of view. 

Yet this context is part of its charm: Is Sex Necessary? is as much about the voice of the Jazz Age as it is about the ostensible subject. For readers interested in the early careers of two American humorists, the book offers an illuminating glimpse of their developing styles. 

For those who simply enjoy smart comedy, it delivers dry, sly entertainment that has not entirely dated. 

Now in the public domain, it is freely accessible online, ready to be rediscovered without the burden of permissions or price tags. Is Sex Necessary? never answers its own question. 

Instead, it leaves the reader with something better: the reminder that human relationships—whether in 1929 or today—are endlessly complicated, endlessly funny, and best approached with a sense of humor.