The Dutch Society for Sexual Reform is a Dutch organization known by the acronym NVSH (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Seksuele Hervorming). The NVSH was founded in 1946, as the successor of the Dutch Neo-Malthusian League, a birth control organisation which opened the first birth control clinic in the world in 1881, in Amsterdam. The NVSH was once the only source of condoms in the Netherlands.
Up to the 1960s, a great deal of energy went into building up the organisation, which in its heyday ran over 60 birth control clinics in The Netherlands. Much work in those early years was put into improving the quality and availability of contraceptives (condom, diaphragm and spermicidal jelly). In 1966 the society reached a membership of 220,000. Contraceptives were officially legalized in 1970, after which membership began to fall. In 2002, the number was about 1500 and late 2008 about 700.
According to its website, the NVSH aims at what it calls the sexual emancipation of individuals and the improvement of sexual conditions in society, including:
- Equality for men and women
- Availability of good contraception and abortion services
- Informative sex education at all levels of education
- Training of sex teachers and researchers at university level
- No restraints on pornography
- Criticism of marriage and the family
- No discrimination against any form of voluntary sex
- Critical concern about population growth
The NVSH website states that they advocate acceptance of all forms of human sexuality, including those forms that are commonly labeled "abnormal". The website states that NVSH considers the use of the label "normal" to be "problematic," with regard to sexual practices such as premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, masterbation, oral and anal sex, zoophilia and pedophilia.
Famous quotes containing the words dutch, society and/or reform:
“Too nice is neighbor’s fool.”
—Common Dutch saying, trans by Johanna C. Prins.
“Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.”
—Alison Neilans. “Justice for the Prostitute—Lady Astor’s Bill,” Equal Rights (September 19, 1925)