Sexual Anarcho-Tyranny in the 1980s & 1990s
Part 1

1,804 words

The 1980s, the decade of my early manhood, was an era of transition. Seeds planted in the 1970s that would burst forth into hideous flower in the 1990s were quietly germinating. The rumor that there was more sex than before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s persisted—as it does even today among the less well-informed of the older generation—but the initial excitement had clearly died down. Some people missed the freewheeling sex-talk that had characterized especially the early 1970s. They complained there had been an “anti-sex backlash,” which was somehow supposed to be President Reagan’s fault.

The dating customs of the 1950s had broken down completely, so there were no accepted rules about how the sexes ought to relate to one another. There was no “going steady” and little formal dating, i.e., deliberately setting aside time for socializing with the opposite sex. Everyone was simply adrift with their natural desires. There was plenty of familiarity between the sexes in the coeducational institutions I attended, but perhaps not so much intimacy.

And marriage was increasingly being delayed. Whereas during the baby boom years, high school graduation day was followed by a large rush of weddings, by the 1980s far more young people were going to college. And at least within my observation, no college students ever got married before finishing a degree program. But, of course, inevitable human biology took its course. The stigma against sex outside of marriage had collapsed, and college-age men and women were young adults with the natural urges to match. So yes, there was some sex on campus, usually accompanied by the use of birth control. But there was not more sex than there would have been had everyone simply paired off at matriculation, whether with or without a ceremony. There was quite clearly less.

As I remember it, there were certain men the girls liked. Although girls are said not to care so much about looks, my recollections are that these young men were generally tall and rather well-favored. One of them might go through three or four girlfriends over the course of a four-year undergraduate program. And the men were not always responsible for the break-ups that brought most such “relationships” to an end. Just as often, the young women would grow tired of them or disillusioned with the boyfriend. In other words, the men were no more likely to “love them and leave them” than to “love them and get left by them.” Yet other women were never put off by this, but would happily take the place of the ex-girlfriend (much later, I would learn that I was observing “preselection bias”). The popular men thus moved easily from girlfriend to girlfriend, something that became known as “serial monogamy,” but was also jocularly dubbed “rotating polygamy.”

But not all the men were popular. In fact, most were not, and never had girlfriends, and amazingly, they never complained about this. They just went on with their lives and their studies in the quiet hope that the future would be different. Possibly some retreated into pornography—it is hard to say how many, since by now porn could be viewed privately. I never heard of anyone becoming “addicted” to it, however.

Individual acts of fornication (drunken or otherwise) also occurred sometimes, as they do in every society, but were not considered normal and not yet known by the name “hooking up.” Such was the humdrum reality behind the Dionysian frenzy we were all promised in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It may also be worth mentioning that during my college days I knew a couple of professors married to former students. This used to be quite common, and not considered scandalous. I have come across plenty of biographical sketches of academic authors from the days before the sexual revolution which included the information that Dr. So-and-so met his future wife when she was a student enrolled in one of his classes. The decision to pursue such an attachment mainly rested with the young woman, as such decisions generally do. But these relationships tended not to become intimate quickly because relationships rarely did in those days. Furthermore, most colleges were in loco parentis institutions, so students and professors were not considered peers for as long as the students remained students or legal minors. After graduation or their twenty-first birthdays, what former students did romantically was their own business.

In loco parentis was abolished at most American colleges in the 1960s at the demand of students who said they wished to be treated as adults. It was part of the youth cult of the time which also found expression in 1971 in the 26^th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting the vote to eighteen-year-olds. So in the 1970s and 1980s, affairs of the heart still developed from time to time between students and faculty, now unhindered by in loco parentis considerations. This was still not considered scandalous in the 1980s when I was in college.

Then in the 1990s, people suddenly made a shocking discovery: intimate attachments sometimes developed between female students and male faculty! There was a clear need to come down good and hard on the dirty old men responsible for such outrageous violations of trust and decency. Stern measures were adopted, but not before the last emeritus professors married to former students had shuffled off this mortal coil. I remember reading that Harvard University received an inquiry from retired near-centenarian John Kennith Galbraith asking if its new prohibitions would require him to divorce his wife of seventy years.

But back to our main story. Following completion of their formal education, men and women of the 1980s married, divorced, and remarried as only Hollywood celebrities had done in previous eras. Yet no one seemed to have noticed that “no fault divorce”—permitting divorce at the request of either spouse without grounds—amounted to the abolition of marriage as a legal institution. So men who refused to marry women they had been intimate with were still bums, but only if the woman wanted to marry them. Women themselves were allowed to pursue free love or fornicate if they so desired, and anyone who disagreed was a Neanderthal.

Feminism marched on, but was no longer new or exciting. Women got jobs and built careers, but did not feel like bold pioneers in doing so. Mostly, they just needed the money. Men were mysteriously losing their ability to support a family on a single income. In reality, female workplace competition itself was the primary culprit reducing men’s relative earning power, but few understood this. To most people, it just seemed harder somehow for families to make ends meet than it had been for their parents. Given continuing technological advancement and the emergence of ever more labor-saving devices, this almost seemed like a paradox: the younger generation was not better off than its parents, as earlier Americans had almost taken for granted it would be.

In 1982, Mary Koss published the results of her personal research on “date rape” at Kent State University, research she had begun in the late 1970s after reading Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, as noted in a previous essay. She then got a call from Ms. Magazine, which commissioned her to direct a nationwide study of the alleged phenomenon. The study was financed by the United States federal government. Feminists are real rebels, aren’t they?

The final report on the study appeared in 1988. It including the sensational claim that 27.5 percent of American female college students were victims of at least one rape or attempted rape during their college years. This finding took off like lightning, often with its inclusion of “attempted rape” elided, and “one-in-four” became a new feminist slogan. The most important vehicle for publicizing the alleged “hidden epidemic” of date rape was journalist Robin Warshaw’s book I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape, published the same year as the report itself, 1988.

Descriptions of these “date rapes” or “acquaintance rapes” proved baffling to men and women of the older generation, since they clearly did not match the traditional concept of rape. The men committing the supposed crimes did not jump out at the women from behind bushes, but were ordinary young men, classmates, friends, or romantic interests of their “victims.” As the current Wikipedia article on the subject says, “the phenomenon of date rape is relatively new,” yet “has constituted the majority of rapes in some countries . . . since the 1980s.” How did a major new form of crime arise this late in human history?

You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.

The American critic Irving Babbitt once wisely remarked: “Nowhere is the opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible than in matters of sex.” The sexual revolution might be defined as an unusually stubborn society-wide effort to forget this home truth. In the 1960s and ’70s, sex came to be understood by large numbers of people as the proper path to both pleasure and happiness. One result may have been a decrease even in sexual pleasure itself, but far more important was a sizeable decrease in long-term happiness for both men and women.

The sexes did not respond in the same way to disappointment at the sexual revolution’s broken promises, however. Men did not complain, while women were quick to cry foul. Date rape hysteria was the inevitable result of women’s discovery that they had been duped by sexual liberation. Sex did not necessarily make them happy. Indeed, they often regretted it afterwards, especially if alcohol or drugs were involved. This is not what Helen Gurley Brown had promised them.

About twenty years had now passed since “ground zero of the sexual revolution,” when women on American college campuses decided to “liberate” themselves from monogamy. To remind readers: at that time no one claimed the women involved were being raped, and many men were confused and dubious about the whole business. Now a new generation of women was being told their boyfriends and classmates were raping them, and ordinary men were being told they were the rapists. None of this could possibly be women’s own fault, of course. Women were still understood by the feminists at Ms. Magazine to have a right to sex on their own terms—as well as to the happiness that should result. A system of sexual anarcho-tyranny was being constructed, with anarchy applying to women while tyranny was exercised over men.

By contrast, how many men does the reader think were calling up Hugh Hefner in the 1980s to complain that their harem full of hotties had never been delivered? Most men were sensible enough not to take the popular sexual utopianism of the 1960s and ’70s too seriously, but many women really believed in it.