1,539 words 
The decade of the 1970s coincided with my seventh through the seventeenth years. They made a strong impression on me, as those years of one’s life generally do. I remember a lot of what I saw, experienced, and thought about growing up. Much of this has to do with sex, not only because adolescents are naturally interested in the subject, but because practically everybody was talking about sex in the 1970s as if it had only recently been discovered.
The general belief of the time was that, if not literally a recent discovery, there was unquestionably a lot more sex now that the 1970s had arrived than there had ever been before. Nobody argued in favor of this thesis; nobody considered any argument necessary, because the matter was perfectly obvious. Only a fool would deny that there had been a great increase in the amount of sex available, especially to men. Just a few years earlier, American college girls had started putting out like there was no tomorrow. The rising generation of boys—boys like myself—were the luckiest dogs in world history, because they were going to inherit the new morality, along with loads of nubile and willing girls. It made older men sad they would have to miss out.
A little reflection ought to have made clear to people that, while social mores had unquestionably loosened, men and women were basically the same as they had always been. There were still a lot more sperm than eggs being produced. This ought to have aroused doubts as to whether there could really be more sex available to men than there had been before, but most people are not reflective and accept what they hear around them. And the message was clear in the 1970s: there was more sex nowadays.
Just as a thought experiment, let’s see if we can figure out how the total quantity of sex might be increased for the benefit of men. As far as I can tell, there are only two possible ways. First, the sex ratio might shift, as in Jan and Dean’s 1963 hit record “Surf City” about a town where there are “two girls for every boy.” The ménage à trois could then replace the monogamous family as the basic social unit. Every child would grow up in a family with three adults: two mommies and a daddy. Of course, this might have all sorts of foreseeable and unforeseeable negative consequences as well. Among the foreseeable ones are jealousy and rivalry between co-wives and less time available for intensive parenting by fathers. But men would get a bit more sex.
The other way would be to hold the sex ratio constant but significantly increase the female libido. There might still be monogamy, but guys would be run ragged trying to keep up with their wives’ voracious appetites. I am reminded of some words frequently encountered in snake-oil ads from the dirty magazines of the 1970s: “She’ll be begging you for it!” For men, marital intimacy would become a Sisyphean ordeal more demanding than training for the Olympic games, or filling up a bottomless pit. It would be husbands, not wives, looking at their spouses in disgust and saying, “Is that all you ever think of?” You get the idea.
These two methods, or some combination of them, are the only ways I can think of that the quantity of sex available to the male sex as a whole might be significantly increased. Yet no one living in the 1970s ever tried to demonstrate either than the sex ratio had shifted or that women’s desires had increased. No one felt this to be necessary. It was simply treated as obvious that because some girls had misbehaved themselves a few years ago, there was now more sex out there. It was one of the greatest and most successful hoaxes ever perpetrated on a gullible public. And it was believed not only by enthusiasts supportive of the sexual revolution, but even by opponents. I remember hearing conservatively-inclined adults lamenting to one another that nowadays there was more sex than there ought to be. Somebody needed to do something to suppress all this sex overflowing its banks and threatening to inundate the entire world!
What had actually increased, of course, was talk about sex. Both public discussion of sexual issues and explicit treatment of such matters in books and movies had been visibly increasing since the late 1950s, long before those coeds misbehaved. By the 1970s, sex talk simply saturated American popular culture. It was not the best time to grow up as regards traditional conceptions of childhood innocence. I would laugh to myself when adults spelled out the word “s-e-x” rather than pronouncing it in my presence. The impossibility of any half-way clever child of the 1970s remaining uninformed for very long about where babies come from ought to have been obvious to them, I thought. Adults are often the innocent ones, not children.
I attended a coeducational primary school in the early 1970s. All the boys thought it was better to be a boy, while all the girls were sure being a girl was better. Sometimes these preferences would get expressed. We boys did not care what the girls thought, but there was at least one girl in my class—her name was Mary, I believe—who did not like it at all when any boy expressed disdain for girls. She would speak right up in defense of slighted girlhood, which I found an amusing personal quirk on her part. Such disdain for the girls certainly existed, but was hardly mean or cruel. And I suspect it was mirrored by a similar but less frequently expressed disregard on the part of girls, who probably viewed the boys’ more boisterous and competitive ways as silly and uncalled-for.
Sex was all over the bestseller lists in those days, and kids inevitably saw the books on store shelves. Titles included The Sensuous Woman and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), both published in 1969 but influential for much of the following decade. Then came Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972) and The Rape of the A*P*E* (1973), a comical history of the recent relaxing of American mores: “A*P*E*” stood for the “American Puritan Ethic.” Phil Donahue’s pioneering daytime television talk show entered national syndication in January 1970, and more than half the episodes dealt with sex in some fashion.
There were sex surveys and studies everywhere. Kinsey was old hat by now, but Masters and Johnson, whose main works were published in 1966 and 1970, were still much discussed. In 1976, Shere Hite published The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, inspired by what she saw as the male bias of previous research. These survey reports spawned countless articles in the popular press. By the age of fifteen, I’m sure I had read my share.
Of all the sex survey findings I perused, only one now sticks in my mind. Researchers discovered that most men had wildly mistaken ideas about how early other men lost their virginity. When asked this delicate question, interview subjects would usually begin by saying, “Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but in my case, it was kind of late.” They would then give an age which turned out to be average or even younger than average. There was a general assumption that every other guy started at thirteen. This was just one expression of the “more sex” fallacy common at that time.
You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.
Another popular idea of the 1970s, arising from such sex surveys, was that women had “rape fantasies.” Senator Bernie Sanders got in trouble a few years back for having written or said something to this effect back in the 1970s, and hearing of this scandal made me feel old. I knew perfectly well that this is what everyone was saying at that time, but few could remember now. A closer look at women’s “rape fantasies” reveals that they are really fantasies of being so desirable that some man—always a highly attractive one, as it happens—loses all self-control. In practice, of course, it is mostly quite unattractive men who commit rape, since they are the ones unable to obtain sex in any other way. As so often in women’s perceptions, the real moral difference between “good men” who “ravish” them (think: Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up the stairs) and “creeps” who “rape” them is simply one of sexual attractiveness.
Gay liberation came along. It was still edgy in the early part of the decade, but suddenly in the late 1970s there was a year when every television sitcom did a “gay” episode. These were all the same. Some nice fellow is discovered to be a homosexual, and this gives rise to talk and plenty of jokes, but by the end of the thirty-minute episode, everyone concludes that he really is just a nice fellow after all, his unusual tastes notwithstanding.
There were more exotic variants of gay rights in the 1970s as well. An organization called the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) operated quite openly. One spokesman described the group’s aim as “to seduce your sons legally.” This organization is rumored to exist still, but is now a clandestine operation.
32 comments
Yep, Blackpilled has looked as many of these “gay episodes” from the 70s-90s and how they played a pivotal role in pozzing a largely captive audience on Sunday evenings. How tolerant!
It was really the 90-00s where sitcoms were changing the public’s attitude towards gays. “Ellen” and “Will and Grace” had to be the biggest offenders.
In the late-1970s sitcom episodes I remember, the gay character would typically be played by a guest actor rather than an ordinary cast member. Permanent gay characters came later, with Ellen, etc. I had long stopped watching television by that time, so have little to say about it. I have heard that in more recent years the abundance of gays on television has created an absurd overestimation in the popular mind regarding how common homosexuality is. People really do get their ideas about life from TV.
When it comes to the 70s. The dude in popular tv show Three’s Company may as well have been gay. But gayness on tv was not overt. Well, except when Mick Jagger licked Keith Richard’s ear on Saturday Night Live.
As for books, don’t forget this “gem”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Flying_(novel)
The premise with Jack Tripper was that he had to pretend he was gay to be allowed to live with the girls as a roommate. He was a ladies’ man; gayness in Three’s Company was caricatured and lampooned.
I can remember two sets of landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Roper and Mr. Furley. Mr. Roper played the homophobe, mocking by gesturing with limp wrists and lisping while having the airs of being a closet case himself. Mrs. Roper repeatedly stated she could not get any action out of Stanley (Mr. Roper) – and he would blanch at the thought – but then she’d hint maybe Jack could do the “job”.
Homosexuality was indeed mocked, especially the male version. I cannot recall any questions of whether Janet and Chrissy were questioned about the potential of that.
Looking back, I am totally convinced that my childhood friend’s older brother decided to act & eventually become gay because he found that John Ritter TV character so funny & endearing. Three’s Company was his favorite show. He knew all of Jack’s lines.
He eventually moved from the East Coast to Hollywood to become an actor. I thought I’d see him at his father’s funeral, but ironically, the gay genX hollywood actor had a falling out with both his parents, (mostly because his liberal democrat parents hated Trump more than the devil!)
You mention sex seemingly being first “discovered” in the 1970s. Heck, I’d suggest marketers invented mainstream sex in the ’70s! Spencers naughty gimmick double-entendre gift shops in suburban shopping malls, Playboy mag on the coffee tables in the houses of my schoolmates, the “4 o’clock, after-school” (hippie sexcapade) movies on network tv, X-rated matinee movies plainly advertised on the street sign at the small “artsy” movie theater, etc.
As a gal, I was very fortunate to have been under 10 years old during the 1970s. I was kept blissfully naive of (the full details of) bad, anything-goes, adult behavior.
In defence of Miss O’Hara’s rapture for Mr Butler & not one of the farmhands, this is a moral attitude. In order for a system of morality to be successful it must first ensure its own propagation. Female hypergamy within a patriarchal system has maintained the breed down through the ages.
I should perhaps state that I am not actually recommending high-born ladies carry on with the farmhands, nor even enter into honorable matrimony with them. But I do believe there is a certain confusion in the female mind between the aesthetic and the ethical, with women perceiving plain or low status men as “creeps” responsible for their own creepiness. Recently in Pennsylvania there was a false accusation of rape. When the woman was cornered, she acknowledged that the man in question had simply struck her as “creepy.” (I don’t think he had even spoken to her.) She is not required to marry the guy, obviously, but she might have refrained from a false rape accusation.
Excellent series of articles, Mr. Devlin.
But I would like to especially highlight this particular post of yours.
For a woman it is ethical to despise the unaesthetic or disgusting man, especially if he makes any sign that might be seen as a come on. He represents a serious danger to her highest purpose, namely to bear only the children of the best men available to her in her social system. Her attitude to poor, ugly women however can be quite different since charity to such isn’t laced with danger.
Men don’t face this existential dilemma in personal interactions except when confronting rival men. If they are of fairly high status and are confronted with ugly, unpleasant or low status people of either sex they can usually afford to be more magnanimous in their treatment of them. It is being trapped into marriage or a paternity suit that he has to fear.
When we had a Christian society ugliness & low status were tolerated by most women, since to do so was a sign of piety, although any hint of assertion on the part of such men would raise hackles. In our era of self-absorption little quarter is given to the lowly.
I assure you I understand thoroughly the point you are making because I have been the low status man in question. And you are correct that such men are given little quarter.
I think most men get this reaction from some (variable) proportion of young women. It might be a bit ‘gay’ but one of the consolations of growing older I find is being able to converse with older women who would’ve, according to nature’s demands appropriately, spurned me in youth and are both wiser and “less judgmental” now that procreation is off the table.
All I was trying to say was that a young woman’s psychic reaction to a man, whom her whole being is telling her to avoid, has no male equivalent and is a fundamental aspect of femaleness, hence its vehemence and disproportionality. “Hell hath no fury….”
Well, is it not intellectually dishonest to not even consider a third possibility, which is also the established one: not so much that women’s libido got stronger, but rather that it gained freedom from so-called “oppression”, so women were indeed able to have more sex than before, which would have increased the amount of overall sexual activity?
Yeah, an increase in sexual activity and variety for specific sorts of men: scumbags, criminals, good-looking men, rich men, and high-status men.
“Hybristophilia” is the psychologist’s name for the very real phenomenon of women being sexually attracted to criminals: for a sensitive literary treatment, see the story Gramigna’s Mistress by Giovanni Verga. Many women are specifically attracted to cads as well: how else could the cads succeed in becoming cads?
Thanks for the response Roger. I grew up in the latchkey-kid 90s in one of the boroughs of in the outrageously multicultural and socioeconomically diverse NYC. It was apparent to me from a young age that women liked anti-social men and criminals. Some women I know to this day have dead criminal exes and behaved as the property of gang members back in the day. Some of these women passed themselves around like sex dolls for social cliques and gangs.
My own brother had horrible health habits, vices and went away for several years for drug dealing. I was the clean-living, gym-going, conscientious sibling. Guess who never had a hard time getting the babes?
“The Question of Female Masochism” and “Rotating Polyandry and Its Enforcers” are great pertinent essays.
I’ll check out the recommended title.
You might find this interesting as well: https://nypost.com/2025/04/13/us-news/taylor-lorenz-defends-luigi-mangione-fangirls-on-cnn-as-a-morally-good-man/
The best way for women to have more sex than they would personally want is by trying to please their husbands. This is what usually happens, in fact. In most marriages, the amount of intercourse is a compromise between the low needs of the woman and the high desires of the man. Then feminists came along and decided that if a woman ever has intercourse without intensely desiring it herself then she has been raped. Hence “date rape,” as well as the historically unprecedented “marital rape” laws passed in the 1990s that put “a policeman in every bedroom.” I discuss this more in an upcoming essay.
I understand that this is the “established” view, but the whole thrust of my writing on sex is that it is incorrect. Women perceive fewer attractive men than men perceive attractive women. To a man, most women in the marriageable years are more or less attractive enough to have intercourse with, whereas women are only sexually attracted to a few men. In one recent essay I mentioned a survey where women rated eighty percent of men in photographs as of “below average attractiveness.” That’s a lot of below average men. This state of affairs is what is meant when people say that “a woman is more particular.” Liberating female desire therefore results not in a broadening of the number of men they are willing to consider, but a narrowing. The only way monogamy can work at all is if most young women can be convinced to look beyond the narrow range of the sexually attractive and give other men a chance to show that they are really not so bad, even though they may not be as exciting. This is what mothers used to advise their daughters, and the mothers were correct: most of them were married to ordinary men and had learned to be reasonably content with their lot in life. Sexual attractiveness hardly guarantees success in marriage in any case: just think of all those Hollywood movie stars who keep marrying and divorcing as if playing a game of musical chairs.
Well, ok, but if we just compare the year 1960 with 1970, and ask ourselves, how much sex did people in the USA have per capita, what do you think the answer would be? I don’t disagree with your ideas, but somehow my instinct tells me 1970 would “win”.
Dr. Devlin: You should write a major book on all this, updating and extending Sexual Utopia. Something at the level of Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters. Maybe call it Why Sex Matters. It could be the definitive anti-feminist book written from a secular perspective. You have the ability and obviously the interest (obsession?) to pen such a tome.
And if some wise-ass says, “Well why don’t YOU write it, Shang?”, I would say, I have neither the ability, nor time, nor especially the interest to do so. This is a vitally important topic, to be sure, but less so than others, imo; specifically, the ethics of white nationalism, and race and Christianity. But to each his own.
Martino @ April 13, 7:06 am, I agree and I would put it this way: even if newly liberated women narrowed their choices to the most attractive men, it’s still true that the attractive guy in 1970 had a better chance of getting laid than a similarly attractive guy had in 1960.
I’ve always been under the impression that men of the boomer generation who were young in the 70’s retained an incredibly naive idea of the high female sexual desire and their own irresistibility to them. To this day, they think they were a godsend to women, even though their only performance with the opposite sex used to be a bad divorce.
They say ‘Don Quixote’ is the biggest selling novel of all time. Maybe, but even if it’s true I doubt many copies have been read. The biggest seller/most read appears to be ’50 shades of grey’. All bought by women. It’s just fetish porn masquerading as literature. On female targeted websites (like dailymail.com) every second story is about sex. How have they got away with making men feel like we are the ones obsessed with sex?
Voltara: Women are obsessed with reading about sex; men are obsessed with having sex. That’s why we get the rap, and deservedly so.
“Just as a thought experiment, let’s see if we can figure out how the total quantity of sex might be increased for the benefit of men. As far as I can tell, there are only two possible ways. First, the sex ratio might shift”
But that is, in a sense, exactly what happened, in a sense, during the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, at least if we are concerned with, no the overall sex ratio, but rather what biologists call the ‘operational sex ratio’.
After WWII, there was a famous ‘baby boom’. The baby boom generation began to enter sexual maturity in the 1960s.
Since women/girls tend to date and marry men and boys somewhat older than themselves, this meant there was a surplus of young women/girls from this generation, but not enough older men from the earlier generation to go around.
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss argues that this is indeed why the sexual revolution happened when it did:
https://oliverscottcurry.squarespace.com/s/buss1996.pdf
__________
“In practice, of course, it is mostly quite unattractive men who commit rape, since they are the ones unable to obtain sex in any other way”
In evolutionary psychology this is called ‘mate deprivation hypothesis’. However, it isn’t that well supported.
On the one hand, it does seem to be “mostly quite unattractive men who commit rape”. For example, one study supposedly found a higher rate of facial deformities among rapists, not only as compared to the general population but also as compared to other offenders (Masters & Greaves 1967). Another study supposedly found lower levels of facial symmetry among convicted rapists (Krill et al 2006).
However, the claim that rapists “are the ones unable to obtain sex in any other way” seems to be false. Actually, sexually coercive males report having more sex partners on average than do other men (Lalumière et al 1996).
References
Kril et al (2006) Do ‘good genes’ predict forced copulation? A test of whether facial symmetry is related to sexual battery. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Philadelphia, PA
Lalumière et al (1996) A test of the mate deprivation hypothesis of sexual coercion, Ethology and Sociobiology 17(5: 299-318.
Masters & Greaves (1967) The quasimodo complex, British Journal of Plastic Surgery 20: 204-210.
I asked some AI:
To estimate the increase in sex per capita from 1960 to 1970, let’s consider the indicators I mentioned earlier:
– Average frequency of sexual intercourse: increased from 2-3 times/week (1960) to 3-4 times/week (1970). This represents a 25-33% increase.
– Average number of sexual partners per year: increased from 1.6 (1960) to 2.3 (1970) for men, and from 1.1 (1960) to 1.5 (1970) for women. This represents a 44% increase for men and a 36% increase for women.
Assuming these increases are representative of the overall population, we can estimate the increase in sex per capita.
A rough estimate could be:
– 25-33% increase in frequency (assuming an average of 2.5 times/week in 1960 and 3.25 times/week in 1970)
– 40% increase in the number of sexual partners (assuming an average of 1.35 partners/year in 1960 and 1.9 partners/year in 1970)
Using these estimates, the increase in sex per capita from 1960 to 1970 could be around 30-50%. However, please note that this is a very rough estimate and should be taken as a ballpark figure.
Your post is about averages, not redistribution of sex partners and sexual activity.
Well, the article itself raises the following question:
The general belief of the time was that, if not literally a recent discovery, there was unquestionably a lot more sex now that the 1970s had arrived than there had ever been before.
I apologize for this AI BS. A bit many partners PER YEAR!
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