Lillian Rubin kept reading that the sexual revolution was dead, killed by a universal fear of AIDS, and that everybody had shifted back to a 1950s mentality: nice girls don`t, and nice guys don`t insist.
But that wasn`t what her instincts as a sociologist told her-or what she heard from single friends, colleagues and patients in her therapy practice in San Francisco.
Rubin, 66, who has become known as a perceptive chronicler of personal relationships through such best-selling books as ”Intimate Strangers” and
”Just Friends,” decided to find out for herself.
She traveled around the country talking at length to 375 people between the ages of 13 and 48 about their sex lives.
Their responses, along with those of 600 more subjects who answered personal questionnaires, are the basis of Rubin`s latest book, ”Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution?” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95).
Her conclusion: The sexual revolution may have quieted down, but it is far from moribund.
A short postponement
Rubin-who teaches part of the year at Queens College, City University of New York and who has been married for 28 years to Hank Rubin, a wine writer-found scant evidence that AIDS has had any real impact on heterosexual behavior. (All her subjects were heterosexual.)
Many people told her they wouldn`t go to bed with someone they had just met anymore. However, they might sleep with him or her on the second date when they hardly know this person any better.
Men and women were quick to say they carried condoms with them at all times, but they said they didn`t always use them. A 27-year-old TV producer in San Francisco rationalized, ”If it`s someone where I think it could turn into some kind of a relationship or something, then I figure it`s probably OK” not to use a condom.
”The notion that sex can kill is now embedded in everyone`s consciousness,” Rubin said. ”But people still take the risk.”
They are not, however, as sexually active as during the heyday of free love in the `60s and `70s.
The ”highly visible behavior” when men and women would brag about their sexual conquests has disappeared, she said.
Now when people do have sexual relations with someone they hardly know or don`t care about, they regret it.
They told Rubin they promised themselves they wouldn`t do anything like that again.
”It is not trumpeted as an ideal way to be sexual as it once was. People have said, `Enough of that kind of sex-it`s boring,` ” Rubin said.
The permanent bond
There is a tremendous desire among singles in their 30s and 40s to marry. ”They have experimented. They`ve had all the freedom anyone can have. They are ready to settle down with another human being,” Rubin said.
The extent of their sexual experimentation has become a problem for these women.
They told Rubin they lied to men about their sexual pasts out of a fear that they would not be considered marriage material if they told the truth.
Meanwhile, the sexual revolution continues to have an enormous effect on the ways in which people are sexual. According to Rubin`s research:
– About 75 percent of people use pornography to stimulate themselves sexually.
– 40 percent of married men and women have had extramarital affairs.
– 5 percent of couples have experimented with open marriages.
– 10 percent of people have experimented with sex with a member of the same sex, although all consider themselves heterosexual.
– 25 percent of people have experimented with bondage.
Living together has become so common that nobody seems to think much about it.
Rubin was struck by the convent-educated woman she interviewed in her mid-50s who mentioned ”in the most casual way” that her daughter was living with her boyfriend.
Rubin said that at the height of the sexual revolution, it looked as though men and women would win-men because sex was available to them in a way that it never had been before; women because they were finally freed from the sexual constraints they had felt.
However, she found some women no longer felt they won the revolution.
”Women had a lot more leverage with men before sex got so free,” one woman, a 38-year-old weary veteran of the sexual revolution, told her.
One thing hasn`t changed much because of the revolution: Once couples settle down, their sexual desire cools.
”Whether they`re married or living together, sex very quickly takes a back seat. There is a drop in interest and passion and sexual connection,”
Rubin said.
Because of the revolution-and the sexual experiences they have had-”
people mourn it a lot. They mourn the loss of it.”
