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A Few Universals. Gagnon and Simon developed their Victorian-sounding conclusions amid the welter of sexual data still accumulating at the Kinsey Institute, where they worked together for three years. Gagnon is now with the sociology department at the Stony Brook, L.I., campus of the State University of New York; Simon is program director in sociology and anthropology at Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research. Both writers found that Freud's views on sex are not only misbegotten but unrealistic and sadly out of date. One of the reasons that his theories still command popular respect "is that in a world fraught with instability and change, one wants to be able to hold onto a few universals. Freud tried to define an inner core of constants in man." Among them he placed the sex drive, and in a period of rapid change, it can be comforting to know that some things do not change at all. "But a man's anatomy doesn't become his destiny," Gagnon says. "Man is primarily a social being, unlike the animals, and his destiny is determined socially, not biologically or instinctually."
