Ground Zero of the Sexual Revolution

2,024 words

Italian translation here

The British philosopher C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) once explained societal decadence as “a sign of man’s tendency to misread his position in the universe, to take a view of his status and prospects more exalted than the facts warrant, and to conduct his societies and to plan his future on the basis of this misreading.”

Decadent ages begin when

man having enjoyed a long period of success believes that nothing is impossible to him. He is, he feels, the arbiter of his fate and his fortune; the future is his for the making. “Men,” as Alberti, the Renaissance Florentine, put it, “can do all things if they will.”

The human condition is in fact always subject to many limitations and constraints that must be taken into account, and hazards that must be negotiated, if the individual is to achieve success in life. But men in decadent periods forget this, believe limitations surmountable or non-existent, and become blind to hazards. The rosy hopes which result from such optimism inevitably end in disappointment which is the more bitter in proportion as the preceding optimism was rosier and persisted in more stubbornly.

This is, in nuce, the story of the sexual revolution.

The dating, marriage, and sex scene in the America of the 1950s, which I described in a previous essay, was still mostly governed by an acceptance of the natural limitations of the human condition. But American society was already taking on the traits which, according to Joad, lead to decadence. Whereas the formative experiences of the older generation had been the Great Depression and the Second World War, the baby boomers of the postwar era grew up amid a long era of peace and prosperity. Optimism was in the air, and hopes were high. Many assumed the lives of the rising generation would almost inevitably turn out better and more enjoyable than those which had come before.

The result was the rise of utopian thinking in which man took a more exalted view of his prospects than the facts warranted. This expressed itself in the popular science fiction of the time, for example, where the people of the future zipped about in spaceships enjoying stimulating adventures that usually ended happily, all while enjoying a high standard of living. And it also expressed itself in a new style of thinking about sex.

Previous generations were simply grateful if a boy could be found for every girl, and this very modest degree of optimism, or consolation, was well-expressed as late as 1955 in the hit movie Marty. But now a wholly different degree of optimism emerged, one which broke decisively with the past. The new idea in the air was that past generations had gotten things wrong by instituting lifelong monogamy. They had not stopped to consider how pleasurable and exciting sex were, and how monogamy places onerous restrictions upon its pursuit. This had somehow simply escaped everybody’s attention.

So a new standard began to emerge: a kind of “new morality,” as it was called in the 1960s. Its general principle was that sex should be a matter “between consenting adults.” It was nobody else’s business what two adults did in private, and those who thought otherwise were accused of “wanting to put a policeman in every bedroom.” Older folks liked to joke that this new morality bore more than a passing resemblance to the old immorality—and of course, they were correct.

On a deeper level, the real objections to the new morality were that it did not provide adequately for the inevitable and legitimate needs of children, that it disregarded evolved mechanisms such as jealously (with such disregard resulting in greater unhappiness for the “consenting adults” themselves), and that it led to an unreasonable and morally ugly contempt for the less attractive, as well as a widespread and unhealthy preoccupation with sex itself.

At first, the new utopian thinking had little effect on the practices of dating and marriage, which went on through much of the 1960s largely as they had during the previous decade. This was due partly to the human ability to keep thinking and practice compartmentalized, and partly to sheer cultural inertia. People chattered about the new morality, the men peeking at Playboy while women perused the scandalously-titled bestseller Sex and the Single Girl (1962), but few took the talk entirely seriously.

The decade also saw the rise of the New Left, which championed utopian political and sexual thinking at the same time. Everyone was going to “make love, not war.” Women who wanted to get married were oppressed victims of a false consciousness. Once “liberated,” their previously cramped and constrained sexual desires would naturally expand beyond the previously imposed narrow limits. They would start having more sex with more men, in effect adopting the behavior of bathhouse homosexuals, with the result that both men and women would enjoy more orgasms and greater excitement in their lives. After all, according to another popular doctrine of the time, men and women were really the same; all observed sex differences resulted from the distinct ways in which boys and girls had been socialized in the bad old days of the past.

Such was the program, even as young men and women continued to date much as their parents had: men trying to obtain sex while women pressed them for commitment, children eventually getting born, and families settling down.

Then something happened.

The scene was the American college campus of the late 1960s. The obscure events transpired not in public for all to behold, as with political revolutions, but in the privacy of college dormitory rooms. What happened there has been celebrated or deplored ever since, but rarely understood. It was ground zero of the sexual revolution. To understand the true character of everything that followed, everything we are still living with, it is important to have a correct understanding of just what happened in those college dorm rooms nearly six decades ago. That is the purpose of this essay.

Having observed men and women and their erotic behavior all my life, I now feel as if I can see the entire scene unfolding in front of me exactly as it happened, as if I had been there to witness it in person. In fact, I was a small boy of about five or six running around on a school playground. But let me explain to the reader what I can see in my mind’s eye, and he can judge its plausibility for himself.

A young man and a young woman have been out on a date. They arrive outside a dorm room, where the fellow nervously prepares to give the girl the customary goodnight kiss. Then the girl says something unexpected. Something to the effect that there is no reason for him to stop at the threshold. They can perfectly well enter the room and . . . make believe they are already married.

The young man’s first reaction is bewilderment. What could be happening? This is simply not the way girls are. Sure, everybody talks about liberating them to have sexual relations with men freely, according to the principle that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business. Sure, this is supposed to lead to more sex and greater pleasure for both men and women. But come on man—everybody knows full well that this is not how girls actually behave! And yet here is this girl standing right in front of him proposing they take all that “new morality” talk literally.

There may also have been some communication between the young man and woman about an advance in medical technology known as the “birth control pill.” Several competing brands were by now available in the United States, the first having come on the market back in 1960: already ancient history for these two young people. These amazing pills are now being handed out for free by the university health dispensary, didn’t the young man know that? (Quite possibly he did not; young women are often better informed about such matters.)

The young man is neither a saintly ascetic nor a rapist. He’s just dumb and horny. He has fantasies about women sometimes, but could scarcely imagine ever satisfying his urges through force. He’s a decent kid. And he finds himself confronted with a quite unforeseen situation. He is excited and nervous at the same time. He ends by telling to the girl: “well . . . if you say so.” And they enter the room.

We may pause here to note that not everyone has described the beginning of the sexual revolution as I have just done. Other authors, in no better position to watch them unfold than I was, reconstruct them very differently and feel even more certain of the correctness of their reconstruction than I do about mine. Let’s look at a couple of competing versions.

First, there are gallant, old-fashioned male conservatives who understand young men’s urges (because they remember their own) but not women’s specific form of sexual responsiveness or ways of thinking. And these authors love nothing more than posing as protectors of women. So in their view, sexual wrongdoing must be men’s fault. They believe that the young men’s lusts must have gotten out of hand, causing them to take advantage of the women, “preying” upon them.

These older, politically or religiously conservative men may be well-meaning, but they do not know the first thing about sex. The first thing about sex is: women choose. They represent the supply side. Except in the case of forcible rape, women rather than men decide when sex takes place. And absolutely no one in the America of the late 1960s spoke of what was happening on those college campuses as the mass-raping of the women by the men. The idea that an act of fornication later regretted by a woman constituted “date rape” was only cooked up by feminists several years later, with the term first appearing in print in 1975.

A second competing reconstruction of the events in question has been offered by feminists. I remember hearing one refer to the late 1960s as “the age of genital appropriation.” On this view, the whole thing was a clever conspiracy by men to persuade women to act in ways men would enjoy but women would not. These feminists agree with old-fashioned male conservatives that everything was the fault of the young men. But their interpretation is not motivated by any desire to “protect women.” They just want to absolve the women of those days of any responsibility for their own decisions and actions, as women so often do. Taking responsibility is a male trait, and rarely found in feminists, however mannish they may otherwise be.

My lifelong observation of young men tells me that almost none would have been clever enough to devise a program of propagandizing young women with sexual utopianism for the conscious purpose of getting them into bed. Men are just dumb and horny, not cunning. Many young men of the late 1960s were sincerely drawn to sexual utopianism, imagining the quantity of sex on offer to them from women could somehow be expanded. What young man would not find such an idea appealing? And it could be found in Playboy and many other publications aimed at men in those days. But women had their own utopian ideas as well: an exciting, highly attractive man was available for every woman who wanted one! They were reading about this in Cosmopolitan magazine and books like Sex and the Single Girl.

The best-kept secret of the entire sexual revolution, in its initial phase we are now discussing as well as in the decades of social devastation it has wreaked ever since, is that it has been driven almost entirely by women and their specific form of sexuality, not by men and theirs. Constituting only the demand side of sex, men are not in a strong enough position to force any revolution in sexual behavior. That is why I feel confident my reconstruction of those obscure events in the college dormitory rooms of the late 1960s is more accurate than those offered by either male traditionalists or feminists.