MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History
By David Allyn
Little, Brown, 381 pages, $26.95
The so-called sexual revolution belongs to a paradoxical tradition of predictable chaos. “Revolution” means turning around, after all, and a lot of things spill when the world turns upside down. Revolutions are always manifold, messy, confusing, destructive, disputatious, self-contradictory and unlike what anyone intended. They energize friends and enemies alike, these volatile mixtures of hope and rage, exhilaration, astonishment and disappointment — the longing for total satisfaction coupled with inevitable anticlimax. Starting out unheralded, running overly long or overly brief, depending on who is asked and exactly when, they change directions in midcourse, get mistaken for what they are not, peter out or run aground as their opponents rail most vigorously against them and incite harsh arguments about who gains and who loses. The rational and the demented find themselves yoked together, with only the fanatics sure how far they want to go, clear about what they are doing — and not even they are always sure. Neither are those who denounce and resist. No one seems to know how to get to the pulp of the achievement without the bitter rind.
The sexual revolution was — if we can use the past tense — especially confusing and multiple, making huge changes in the law and practice of the most intimate of human relations, roping together contraception and cohabitation, same-sex and interracial sex, obscenity and anti-monogamy, sex clubs and communes alike, all pell-mell and topsy-turvy. The revolutionaries were disparate, but what they wanted in common was freedom (or, as their enemies said, license) — loosening the bonds of the law, making possible more public expression, more kinds of sexual acts, more legitimacy. On almost every front they prevailed, though they were not entirely happy with everything they won, and some of the consequences — especially of promiscuity, and of encouraging (or at least ceasing to discourage) early sex — turned out destructive indeed. Certainly the Republican Party thought so, to the point of last year’s presidential impeachment trial. Yet the Republicans never carried the public with them, and their defeat in the Senate marked, like it or not, another triumph for the sexual revolution.
David Allyn, a historian born in 1969 and now teaching at Princeton University, has compiled a useful and readable chronicle of this melange of activity and talk that changed American culture irreversibly. He understands that what drove the revolution was not so much indiscriminate lust as the desire to remake society — rationalist in its motives though reckless often enough in its methods. Drawing on interviews with pioneers and recruits known and unknown, consulting an impressive range of documentary collections, Allyn assembles dozens of stories bearing on sexual freedom campaigns.
Remarkable characters, martyrs and entrepreneurs abound: University of Illinois biology professor Leo Koch, fired because he wrote a letter to the student newspaper defending premarital sex; fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, whose topless bathing suit made headlines in 1964 and who turns out to have been an insurgent gay nudist burning to make the world safe for exposed flesh; early hippie Jefferson Poland, who founded the free-loving Sexual Freedom League, sponsored New York City’s first public demonstration for homosexual rights and changed his name in ways a family newspaper would not cite though Home Box Office would; Harvard Business School graduate and utopian fictionist Robert Rimmer, whose book “The Harrad Experiment,” embracing group marriage, sold 2.5 million copies within 18 months of mass-market publication in 1967; Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose remedial approach and scientizing bent made the clitoral orgasm as American as peanut butter.
Curiously missing, though, are George and Nena O’Neill, whose 1972 book, “Open Marriage,” slapped a name on a trend that persists, if we are to judge from Amazon’s on-line bookstore, which reveals that readers who ordered it also ordered “The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities,” “Recreational Sex: An Insider’s Guide to the Swinging Lifestyle,” “Threesome: How to Fulfill Your Favorite Fantasy” and “Women Can Win the Marriage Lottery: Share Your Man With Another Wife (The Case for Plural Marriage).”
Allyn knows his history. Revolutionaries like to declare that they are starting the world all over again, but Allyn points out that waves of sexual profligacy frequently alternate with waves of chasteness. The American Puritans, he notes, were themselves fleeing what they thought to be the sexual profligacy of 17th Century England.
Sex is explosive, and explosions tear up the ground where people walk. No wonder that Allyn’s attitude, by the time he gets to the commercialized ’70s, is chastened. By the 1980s, what with genital herpes and then AIDS, not to mention general cultural backlash, “the sexual revolution was out of steam. People did not suddenly stop having sex outside of marriage, or having same-sex relationship, or consuming pornography. But Americans became more pessimistic about human sexuality. The quest to abolish hypocrisy, ignorance, shame, self-loathing, and the fear of sexual expression had run its course. Americans had become resigned to their own moral contradictions and intellectual inconsistencies. Many had accepted the power of the state and the authority of religious spokesmen to dictate sexual morality.”
Allyn suggests that sexual guilt reared its irrepressible head. Contradiction abounded. In 1994, the first president to have evidence about his sex life entered into the Congressional Record fired his surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, for recommending that schools teach the virtues of masturbation.
Allyn writes about outwardly observable conduct and does not illuminate the inward experience of sex, how it might or might not have changed. In fact, his account is remarkably chaste. He goes so far as to claim that “(m)uch, if not most, of the pleasure associated with sex comes not from having sex but from talking about having it.” A likely story. He sympathizes with sexual revolutionaries as well as with children (including himself) whose “emotional needs were often overlooked because the focus of the culture was so geared to adults and their desires.” In the end, for all the disturbances launched by sexual freedom — AIDS above all — Allyn is still inclined to credit the freedom lovers, though our chastened turn-of-the-century historian shows himself reluctant to celebrate the unleashing of pleasure for pleasure’s sake.
Allyn wears his learning lightly but benefits from academic training–a nice combination. Still, publishers have a penchant for crashing cymbals, and so this admirably calm but not stodgy book comes with a subtitle to the subtitle to jazz up what doesn’t need to be jazzed up: “An Unfettered History.” It’s as if the publisher has been thrown back to the ’50s. Unfettered! Allyn does a better, less flamboyant job describing what he has accomplished–explaining “why and how the sexual revolution took place, why it ended when it did, the many ways it contributed to the overall improvement of American life, and, at the same time, the many ways it left us all less at peace with ourselves.”
