Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History / Edition 1

Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History / Edition 1

by David Allyn
ISBN-10:
0415929423
ISBN-13:
9780415929424
Pub. Date:
04/05/2001
Publisher:
Taylor & Francis
ISBN-10:
0415929423
ISBN-13:
9780415929424
Pub. Date:
04/05/2001
Publisher:
Taylor & Francis
Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History / Edition 1

Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History / Edition 1

by David Allyn
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Overview

When Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl hit bookstores in 1962, the sexual revolution was launched and there was no turning back. Soon came the pill, the end of censorship, the advent of feminism, and the rise of commercial pornography. Our daily lives changed in an unprecedented time of sexual openness and experimentation. Make Love, Not War is the first serious treatment of the complicated events, ideas, and personalities that drove the sexual revolution forward. Based on first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews, and period research, it traces changes in private lives and public discourse from the fearful fifties to the first tremors of rebellion in the early sixties to the heady heyday of the revolution. Bringing a fresh perspective to the turbulence of these decades, David Allyn argues that the sexual revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s, by telling the truth about their own histories and desires, forced all Americans to re-examine the very meaning of freedom. Written with a historian's attention to nuance and a novelist's narrative drive, Make Love, Not War is a provocative, vivid, and thoughtful account of one of the most captivating episodes in American history. Also includes an 8-page insert.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780415929424
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Publication date: 04/05/2001
Pages: 404
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range: 13 Years

About the Author

David Allyn has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has taught history at Princeton. He is now a journalist and writer, and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Daily News, and the Journal of American Studies. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1Single Girls, Double Standard When Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl hit bookstores in 1962, the sexual revolution was launched and there was no turning back. Brown did something few other American women had dared to do: She gleefully admitted, in print, that she had l ost her virginity before getting married. It was a wild confession, the kind of revelation that could destroy a woman's reputation, cost her her closest friends, wreck her marriage. But Brown did more than admit to a single indiscretion, she hinted a t a long history of casual contacts, and she extolled unmarried sex as a positive virtue. "Not having slept with the man you're going to marry I consider lunacy," she wrote. Unrepentant and unashamed, Brown gently urged other women to follow her exam ple. As she told those who might feel guilty about their erotic impulses, "[S]ex was here a long time before marriage. You inherited your proclivity for it. It isn't some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you're a bad, wicked girl."

As Brown and her publisher hoped, Sex and the Single Girl proved just controversial enough to become a sensation. One reviewer called it "as tasteless a book as I have read" and warned that it showed "a thorough contempt for men," who become "the mar ionettes" in an artful and immoral "manipulation." From a literary standpoint, the book was simply atrocious. Tossing exclamation points right and left, Brown could barely write a single sentence that didn't include a shriek of delight over rich men or expensive eyeliner. Most of the book's advice to women -- from makeup tips to cooking lessons -- was numbingly conventional. But the public adored its breezy style, forthright manner, and pragmatic attitude about premarital romance. The book was a n instant best-seller: 150,000 hardcover copies were sold the first year alone. Brown got $200,000 for the movie rights to the book -- the second-highest figure that had ever been paid for a nonfiction book.

Helen Gurley Brown was an unlikely revolutionary. Born in Green Forest, Arkansas, in 1922, she was bred to be a proper Southern lady. Raised by her mother (her father died when Helen was only four), Helen Gurley prided herself on being a good daughte r, always obeying the rules -- or at least telling the truth when she didn't. She was more bony than beautiful, suffered from severe acne as a teenager, and spent most of her youth caring for her older sister, who had polio. Helen performed well in s chool, but like most women in the forties and fifties, the only job she could find after graduation from college was secretarial. A firm believer in the American Dream, the young Gurley felt confident that if she were persistent enough, her literary talents would eventually be recognized. In the meantime, she took advantage of everything that working for wealthy, attractive men had to offer. Even though a company might frown on "intramural dating," Gurley would later write in her book, she belie ved in workplace romance if there were "good material at hand." If her boss was less than handsome, Gurley simply found a new one: "As long as we're in more or less of a boom economy, it's possible to change jobs easily." After she'd held eighteen di fferent secretarial jobs, Gurley's talent for perky prose landed her a position as a copywriter for an advertising firm.

Gurley had discovered sex at an early age. When she was only eleven, she and a relative, four years older, tried to have intercourse and failed only because her vagina was too tight.

That was some hot and heavy summer, as you can imagine. I was eleven and he was 15. There's nothing like a country boy who is 15 and horny. Yet I too felt -- what would you call it -- feelings, cravings, longings. And we once even tried it. But I, of course, was hermetically sealed, a tiny little person, I'd never been touched before, and his heart wasn't in it.

At sixteen, she kissed a boy in the back of a car and had her first orgasm. Four years later she lost her virginity. "Everything was sealed over. I think I bled a little. But I did have an orgasm. I knew then that sex is a wonderful, delicious, exqui site thing . . . after that nothing ever got in the way of my thinking sex was fabulous." The following day "the darling man went to a store and bought me earrings. He wanted me to marry him, but I said no. My mother was devastated."

At thirty-three, Gurley obtained a diaphragm and discovered the joys of sexual independence.

After a string of affairs, she finally did marry in 1959. She was already thirty-seven, an old maid by the standards of the day. David Brown, her movie-produ cer husband, was the one who suggested she write an advice book for young women. He knew a financial opportunity when he saw one, and she knew that there was a large gap between what women did in private and what was said in public. She was appalled by a 1961 article in the Ladies' Home Journal warning single women that they had two choices: to marry or remain absolutely chaste. Brown knew from her own experience that many single women were flouting public morals in their private lives. "Theoret ically a 'nice' single woman has no sex life. What nonsense! She has a better sex life than most of her married friends. She need never be bored with one man per lifetime. Her choice of partners is endless and they seek her." All a woman needed to fu lly enjoy single life was a little of Brown's advice on fashion, decorating, and sex.

Bubbling with optimism, Sex and the Single Girl reflected the spirit of middle-class America during the heyday of Camelot. The economy booming, the misery of the Depression and World War II all but forgotten, America in the early sixties was a vibran t, energetic nation. Brown's combination of coy femininity and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ambition was practically a guaranteed success. In the early sixties, anything seemed possible -- even the abolition of the age-old double standard.

******** The sexual double standard is as old as civilization itself. Among the Hebrews of the Middle East, monogamy was strictly enforced for women, while men often took concubines or multiple wives.

When Sarah could not bear children for Abraham, he -- with God's blessing -- simply took a maidservant as his mistress. According to Jewish lore, King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Jewish women were required to shave their heads so that they would not prove tempting to other men. According to the Old Testament, women who committed adultery were to be summarily stoned to death. In ancient Athens, men were free to have multiple partners (male or female), while women who were not professional prostitutes lived in virtual sl avery. A married woman was not only the property of her husband, she was confined to the upper floors of her home and forbidden to appear in public without a veil. In Greek mythology, the most powerful and revered goddesses remained lifelong virgins.

In Imperial Rome, the law was less harsh: A woman who committed adultery was banished from her home and never allowed to marry again. Although early Christians tried to introduce a single standard of sexual restraint for both men and women, they end ed up -- by glorifying Mary's virginity and demonizing Eve's eroticism -- merely reinforcing the double standard and providing a new justification for the punishment of sexually active women.

Despite the fact that gender roles fluctuated throughout the Middle Ages, promiscuous women were consistently attacked and denounced by Church authorities. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many were burned at the stake as witches. Chastity belts and other devices served where the fear of punishment did not. Despite the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, the double standard persisted into the modern era. While aristocratic women could afford to play by their own rules, Rousse au and other "modern" thinkers tended to be vocal opponents of female sexual freedom. After the bloodbath of the French Revolution, many observers in England and America blamed the loose morals of French women for the political mess in Paris.

In the nineteenth century, bourgeois notions of propriety and cleanliness lent new import to the notion of female purity. Victorian sensibilities required women to profess a total lack of sexual feeling. A middle-class woman was expected to tolerate her husband's advances only for the sake of having children. Women were simply not supposed to enjoy sex. Since men were known to need sexual release, moralists urged them to visit brothels rather than defile their own wives. As a result, red-light d istricts flourished in nineteenth-century cities. As in ancient Athens, a woman who appeared on the street alone in the Victorian era was assumed to be a prostitute.

The double standard had several cruel implications for women. Not only did it mean an unmarried woman was supposed to be absolutely chaste, it meant a woman who had been raped was deemed unsuitable for marriage. Not infrequently, a girl who was raped would be pressured by her parents to marry the rapist. Women were often blamed for the assaults. The double standard also led to laws against birth control and abortion, on the grounds that they would encourage female promiscuity. In 1873, the U.S.

government made it a crime to send birth control devices -- or even information about such devices -- through the mail.

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, a few scattered social reformers tried to dismantle the double standard. But they were almost always dismissed as strange bohemians or dangerous radicals and their writings were often banned. Slowly, how ever, the double standard began to wane. Anthropologists showed that premarital promiscuity was happily encouraged in some primitive societies without any adverse effects. The vulcanization of rubber led to the invention of modern contraceptives. Mar riage manuals encouraged husbands to attend to their wife's sexual pleasure. In the 1910s and '20s, working-class women discovered that money brought freedom. The economic vitality of the era encouraged a relaxed view of sex outside of marriage. But the double standard did not disappear. At the insistence of Catholic authorities, Hollywood drove home the moral that wanton women would ultimately be punished for their sins. In films like East Lynne (1931), Waterloo Bridge (1931), Grand Hotel (1932 ), Anna Karenina (1935), Jezebel (1938), and countless others, women were put in their place for expressing their sexual desires. When Mae West insisted on flaunting her sexuality onscreen and refused to abide by the dictates of censors, Paramount Pi ctures failed to renew her studio contract. As Sylvia Weil, who was born in 1910, remembers, "if it got around that a girl slept with a man before she was married, she was ruined. She would never find a good husband." Women continued to face retribut ion for "unladylike" behavior, while society generally winked at the sexual antics of young men.

Each new generation of young girls was indoctrinated with the same message: A woman's virginity is her most precious commodity. As actress Dyan Cannon, born in 1937, recalls, "My dad used to tell me that if I let anyone touch me, anyone, they wouldn' t respect me and I would be considered a tramp." In the 1950s, as Americans reveled in the "return to normalcy" after years of depression and war, the double standard was reaffirmed in books, movies, television shows, and popular magazines. American males were told that if they were healthy they should hunger for sex, while young women were advised to resist forcefully and demand a ring.

"You have no idea how bad it was," recalls Gloria Steinem, who grew up near Toledo, Ohio, in the thirties and forties. "There was always the fear that you might be punished for being sexual." One author catalogued the rules that the mass media convey ed to young women: The young miss, for example, must never take any real initiative in courtship . . . must not show any interest in one male when she is out with another . . . must never try to date a fellow who is going steady with another girl . . . must never go ho me with a man whom she has just met at a dance, lest he consider her "just a pickum or has some other legitimate excuse . . . must never be so forward with boys as to "cheapen her in a man's eyes."

Failure to abide by these rules could lead to gossip, insult, and public humiliation.

With the emergence of professional psychoanalysis in the postwar period, the double standard acquired "scientific" legitimacy. Psychologists and psychiatrists claimed that women were not only less sexual than men, they were naturally masochistic. Hel ene Deutsch claimed that women were inevitably masochistic because they could experience full sexual arousal only by being dominated. Marie Bonaparte argued that women were masochistic because during conception the ovum must be "wounded" by the sperm . Meanwhile, other psychoanalysts insisted that women who experienced only clitoral orgasm were immature and unwell; mature women supposedly transferred their orgasmic sensations from the clitoris to the vagina. The vaginal orgasm, psychoanalysts mai ntained, was the only true orgasm. Such ideas caused many women to feel inadequate and inferior.

Most teenage girls in the fifties did not even know orgasms existed. "I didn't know anything about orgasms," one woman recalls.

The first time [we had sex] we were in his dorm room. It was fast -- he came in and came out. It was a sharp, poignant pleasure that had no resolution . . . He would come in and then pull out and come into a handkerchief. I was always left hanging. I used to come back to my dorm and lie down on the floor and howl and pound the floor. But I didn't really know why I was so frustrated. It felt so lonely.

So long as the double standard was dominant, men and women were caught in a war of the sexes. Boys lusted after girls and tried to seduce them without getting trapped into marriage, while girls distrusted boys -- often with good reason. "When I was a kid," Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione remembers, finding a girl who screwed was like finding gold. It was a great piece of news if you heard about a girl who screwed, because it was extraordinarily unusual for a girl to screw without a lot of problems -- having to take her out, court her, spend mon ey on her. When you did hear about one, she was inevitably the object of many a gang bang. I remember going to see a girl in Teaneck, New Jersey, and there were four or five carloads of guys, and we picked this dame up, drove her to the schoolyard, a nd one by one, twenty guys screwed her on the grass.

Ronald Jones, who was a student at Ohio State during the fifties, remembers one weekend at his fraternity house when "over a hundred guys had sex with the same woman." Under the double standard, a woman who publicly expressed the slightest interest i n sex effectively forfeited her right to say no. As these examples show, the reward could be gang rape.

As Helen Gurley Brown revealed, women in the 1940s and '50s publicly claimed to observe official morality but often followed their own rules privately. There is no reliable data on sexual behavior from the period, but in 1957 alone, 200,000 babies we re born out of wedlock in the United States. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist turned sex researcher at Indiana University, reported in his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female ("the Kinsey Report") that roughly 50 percent of the 5,940 white Am erican women he surveyed admitted to having had sex before marriage. He also noted that approximately 25 percent admitted to having had an extramarital encounter. Since Kinsey's sample was not random, his findings cannot be treated as nationally repr esentative, but they do suggest a discrepancy between official morality and private behavior.

As a result of the double standard, girls who acquired a reputation for being "fast" or "easy" were both scorned and envied by other girls. Worse, sexually active girls tended to feel terrible guilt about their own behavior. Eunice Lake (a pseudonym) , who was born in 1930 and grew up in a working-class family in rural Indiana, was, in her words, "very promiscuous" between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. During that period, she had intercourse with twenty-three boys, six of whom she felt "i n love with." Later, she wrote in a diary, it was a time of "mental grief." "Promiscuous, whore, prostitute, slut, and nymphomaniac were some of the words I chose to call myself, I suppose, as some sort of mental punishment for not being a 'nice girl .'"

No matter what was really going on behind closed doors, those who publicly criticized the double standard could suffer severe consequences. As long as one championed sexual restraint for both sexes, there was no need to fear. But as soon as one advoc ated sexual freedom for women as well as men, the public responded with outrage. When, for instance, Ben Lindsay, a judge in charge of the juvenile court in Denver, began advocating "trial marriage" for young men and women in the 1920s, he was summar ily removed from office. In 1940, New York City authorities prevented faculty members at City College from hiring the famed mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell because he had defended sex outside of marriage in his book Marriage and Morals (1929). As soon as Russell's proposed appointment was announced, he was branded a "professor of paganism" and a "desiccated, divorced, and decadent advocate of sexual promiscuity." The Registrar of New York County said that Russell should be "tarred and feathered and driven from the country." The New York state legislature ruled that "an advocate of barnyard morality is an unfit person to hold an important post in the educational system of our state at the expense of taxpayers." Eventually the matter went to court, and a judge ruled that if City College granted Bertrand Russell a position on the faculty, it would be tantamount to creating "a chair of indecency." In observance of the court order, the New York City Board of Higher Education rescinded Russell's appointment.

Alfred Kinsey suffered a similar fate. Because his study of female sexual behavior implied that many women were likely to have sex before marriage and that traditional morality should therefore be scrapped, his book was viciously attacked. Though Kin sey was highly respected by fellow scholars and maintained a scrupulous public persona (his taste for crew cuts, bow ties, and classical music was well known), Sexual Behavior in the Human Female earned him a reputation as a public menace. Republican Congressman B. Carroll Reece branded Kinsey a Communist and demanded a federal investigation of the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey's major source of financial support. The foundation eventually cut off Kinsey's funding. Even Margaret Mead, who had m ade her name in the twenties as one of the first anthropologists to study the sexual behavior of other cultures, criticized Kinsey's "amoral" approach. At a 1954 conference, the American Medical Association charged Kinsey with creating a "wave of sex hysteria." In 1956 Kinsey died a defeated man.

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy died the year after Kinsey, and as the anti-Communist hysteria of the '50s waned, Kinsey's posthumous prestige grew. His statistics slowly gained the weight of scientific orthodoxy. Though Kinsey did not live to see the long-term impact of his work, by the late 1950s his numbers were beginning to make the double standard suspect. Other developments played a role in its decline. The backlash against McCarthyism, and the realization that ultraconservatives were ap t to be as authoritarian and intolerant as their Communist enemies, led to a general disgust with moral hypocrisy. The discovery of penicillin as a cure for syphilis took much of the danger out of sex. Meanwhile, middle-class white women were increas ingly entering the paid workforce, and as a result they had less patience with restrictions on their personal behavior. The huge number of teenagers (there were some 13 million in 1956) led to general friction as they rejected the moral assumptions o f their parents. Because the economy was so strong, these teens had money to spend and could spend it as they pleased. Corporate America quickly learned to cater to their tastes and values -- including their contempt for "preachy" sexual moralism.

These teenagers tore through copies of Peyton Place, the 1956 novel by Grace Metalious about sexual secrets in a small New England town. Peyton Place offered the same indictment of American hypocrisy as Kinsey's report on female sexual behavior. In o ne typical episode, Metalious describes the plight of a young woman raped by her stepfather.

When she realizes she is pregnant, the girl must plead with a local doctor to perform an abortion.

He agrees but, afraid of public censure, pretends that it is an appendectomy. Not just victims, Metalious's female characters were sexually assertive, independent, and determined to satisfy their desires, regardless of morality. In one scene, Betty Anderson, "an over-developed seventh grade girl," demands r ough sex from her boyfriend, Rodney: "Come on, honey," she whimpered. "Come on, honey," and his mouth and hands covered her.

"Hard," she whispered. "Do it hard, honey. Bite me a little. Hurt me a little."

"Please," murmured Rodney against her skin. "Please. Please."

His hand found the V of her crotch and pressed against it.

"Please," he said, "please."

It was at this point that Betty usually stopped him. She would put both her hands in his hair and yank him away from her, but she did not stop him now. Her tight shorts slipped off as easily as if they had been several sizes too large, and her body did not stop its wild twisting while Rodney took off his trousers.

"Hurry," she moaned. "Hurry. Hurry."

Metalious walked a fine line between the bold and the conventional. On the very same page that Betty has her torrid affair, she learns that she is pregnant, suggesting that she must be punished for her actions.

Born into a lower-middle-class French Canadian family, Metalious always felt alienated from the puritanical morality of her New Hampshire neighbors. Pregnant at eighteen, she had a shotgun wedding and began the life of a fifties housewife. After writ ing several novels without success, she was inspired by a string of tragic events in her hometown.

A young woman, the victim of her father's sexual advances, killed him in a combination of revenge and self-defense. Metalious realized that incest was the perfect centerpiece for a novel exposing the sadness and hypocrisy of small-town life. A New York publisher fell in love with Metalious's novel, and Peyton Place soon became a best-seller.

The eager consumption of Grace Metalious's fictional expos and the eventual public acceptance of Kinsey's report on female sexual behavior paved the way for Albert Ellis's sustained assault on the double standard. An irreverent, iconoclastic psychol ogist with a doctorate from Columbia University, Ellis first made a name for himself as a marriage counselor and therapist. Like Metalious, Ellis came from a working-class background and found himself at odds with middle-class definitions of morality . He began to rail against bourgeois niceties and made a habit of using four-letter words in his public lectures. Although he was reviled by many of his colleagues, Ellis attracted many New York clients, who liked his iconoclasm and rationalist -- th ough sometimes flippant -- approach to sexual attitudes. In a series of books in the 1950s and '60s, including The Folklore of Sex, The American Sexual Tragedy, Sex Without Guilt, and The Art and Science of Love, Ellis attacked the double standard as a barbaric remnant of primitive societies in which men owned women as property. Some critics blasted Ellis as they had Russell and Kinsey, but Ellis couched his critique of the double standard in terms midcentury Americans could not afford to ignore . According to Ellis (and contrary to Kinsey and Brown), women were reluctant to have premarital sex with men, and this was driving men to seek satisfaction through homosexual relationships. If women didn't abandon the double standard soon, the natio n would be swarming with homosexual men. Marriage and the family might disappear and the nation would suffer the consequences. Lawmakers, sociologists, and psychologists concerned about "rising" rates of homosexuality took note of Ellis's predictions and began to slowly accept the necessity of sexual freedom for women.

As the fifties came to a close, various forces were conspiring against the double standard. But moralists made a last-ditch effort to prevent the spread of sexual liberalism. In 1960, administrators at the University of Illinois fired professor Leo K och simply because he criticized the double standard and defended premarital sex in a letter to the student newspaper, while FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched a nationwide crusade against "pornography," a term he used to describe everything from titillating comic books to avant-garde literature. A 1961 issue of Reader's Digest offered "The Case for Chastity." That same year, in Better Homes and Gardens, another writer offered advice on "How to Tell Your Daughter Why She Must Keep Her Self-Re spect." The president of Vassar College told female undergraduates in 1962 that premarital sexual activity was cause for expulsion. But women were beginning to repudiate the double standard. As one Vassar student told a reporter, albeit under the cov er of anonymity, "If Vassar is to become the Poughkeepsie Seminary for Young Virgins, then the change of policy had better be made explicit in admissions catalogs." This was just the kind of sentiment Helen Gurley Brown knew would guarantee sales of her book.

******** If Sex and the Single Girl hadn't come along, those American women who disregarded public morality in their private lives would have continued to do so, and a few might even have risked social ostracism by openly challenging the double standard on ph ilosophical grounds. But Helen Gurley Brown, who had read Albert Ellis with relish, packaged sexual liberalism for early-sixties America as only an advertising copywriter could. Brown combined just the right amount of iconoclasm, individualism, consu merism, and conservatism to appeal to a mass market. Sex and the Single Girl was designed to reach sexually active single women and Madison Avenue executives alike.

True to Enlightenment tradition, Brown believed human beings were born without shame or sin. In the book's most provocative passages, Brown criticized American child-rearing practices for making girls ashamed of their bodies.

Well, the truth is everybody starts out sexy . . . or with terrific potential. A sixteen-month-old baby is the prototype of sexiness. . . . She will be sexy all her life if nobody interferes. Unfortunately in our society somebody nearly always interf eres! When she touches herself with pleasure and curiosity, her mother will take her hand away and say, "Naughty!" When she expels squashy brown cones not unlike the modeling clay she likes to play with, her mother will put over the idea they are ick y, dirty . . . to be flushed away quickly. If the child isn't dim-witted, she figures out that where these cones came from is dirty too.

Brown presented a radical redefinition of sex appeal. "Being sexy means that you accept all the parts of your body as worthy and lovable . . . your reproductive organs, your breasts, your alimentary tract. You even welcome menstruation as the abiding proof of your fertility."

But Brown's enthusiasm for expensive cosmetics and plastic surgery undercut her social critique.

"You probably wear lipstick, powder base and a little eye make-up every day. But have you considered drawing in completely new eyebrows, wearing false ey elashes, putting hollows in your cheeks with darker foundation, a cleft in your chin with brown eyebrow pencil or enlarging your mouth by a third?" Brown herself confessed to having had a "nose job" and being "delighted" with the results. She even ca lled herself a "cheerleader" for plastic surgery. "Plastic surgery is admittedly expensive, not covered by Blue Cross, horribly uncomfortable for a few days -- but oh my foes and oh my friends -- the results! The lovely cataclysmic results are the ki nd you can't get any other way." She warned overweight women that they were doomed if they didn't diet. "You must Do Something or you can't hope to be blissfully single." (As for men who claimed to find fat women attractive, Brown insisted that they were unsure of their masculinity.) A far cry from a serious intellectual, Brown was quick to ignore the wisdom of her own insights into child-rearing practices.

The suggestions about makeup and fashion were relentless, interrupted by only occasional pop psychological insights. She warned that nymphomaniacs were really "frigid" women desperately trying to overcome their sexual anxieties. (This theme was also the centerpiece of Irving Wallace's 1960 novel The Chapman Report, inspired by the Kinsey Report.) She cautioned her readers to be wary of homosexuals. Homosexuals, she wrote, "are little boys, or girls, in an arrested state of sexual development" wi th "tremendous emotional problems." These asides lent a conservative, contradictory element to Brown's sexual liberalism.

But Brown never claimed to be a radical. In interviews, she disavowed any attempt to encourage premarital sex. "I didn't suggest anybody do anything," she declared, rather disingenously. "I'm always careful to say that I'm not for promiscuity." After the book was published, Brown told reporters that it was meant only for women over twenty. But if her publisher hadn't feared censorship, Sex and the Single Girl would have been even more revolutionary than it was. The original manuscript contained a large section on birth control and abortion that the publisher deleted. "I fought for it, but it came out anyway," Brown said.

Though one might think that men would have been delighted by Brown's message -- she was, after all, telling women to say yes to premarital sex -- men raised to expect modest, demure, diffident female companions were in fact taken aback by Brown's vis ion of sexual equality. In a roundtable discussion published in Playboy in 1962 as "The Womanization of America," Alexander King, an editor at Life magazine, said he feared Brown's type of feminism enormously. "The assumption that a woman is supposed to get something out of her sexual contact, something joyful and satisfactory, is a very recent idea. But this idea has been carried too far, too. It's become so that women are sitting like district attorneys, to see what the man can or cannot perfo rm and this has put men tremendously on the defensive." King was unabashedly sexist: "I haven't the slightest doubt that this absolute, unquestioned equality is a great mistake and in violation of all natural laws. It is a mistake because democracy i s all right politically, but it's no good in the home." King also believed that women longed to be like men -- that they suffered from "penis envy."

Penis envy does exist, it's true -- I think that perhaps it's not conscious, but it exists. I have no doubt about it. I have known a great deal of women in my life and they've all been enormously competitive on all levels, you see, particularly in th e last few years. I think they do deeply and instinctively resent these outward manifestations of masculinity, of which they have none.

According to King, the fact that women were becoming so "dominant" was an important factor in the rise of "pansies."

In the same Playboy article, Mort Sahl, a comedian and political satirist, appeared equally angry that women were becoming "cold" and "predatory"; the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik expressed suspicion of all sexually assertive women. "What is astonishin g to me is that women, more and more, are taking over the active roles in sex, which was not so before. The men finally will resent it. They should." Reik believed that sexually assertive women would emasculate their male partners. "I would say there is a law -- a law as binding as the laws of chemistry or of physics -- namely, that a masculinization of women goes with the womanization of man, hand in hand."

Philip Wylie, a popular social critic of the day, warned in a 1963 Playboy article that sexually aggressive "career women" were modern versions of Delilah and Salome, "girl-guillotiners" who "used their sex appeal . . . at considerable cost to those males who would impede them." Desperately worried about the fate of the male sex, Wylie warned that a man must instantly be on the alert, for most dedicated career women will unhesitatingly use their sexuality in the manner of the Sirens, whose allur e had a single professional intent: luring sailors off course and causing ships to be wrecked. The latter-day career woman has much the same obscene compulsion: She must compete with and, if necessary, cripple manhood and masculinity on earth.

Sex and the Single Girl marked both the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Despite the fact that some men clearly felt threatened by her, Helen Gurley Brown was a hot commodity.

She was invited to take over the failing Cosmopolitan magazin e and transformed it into a self-help manual for the sexually active woman, which she did with great success. But Helen Gurley Brown was significantly older than the unmarried women and teenagers who were the prime consumers of premarital advice. It remained to be seen how these young women would view the battle of the sexes as they matured into adulthood. Would they be satisfied with Brown's hedonistic philosophy laced with tips on plastic surgery? Or would they demand a far more thorough respo nse to society's sexual ills? Their parents eagerly, yet nervously, awaited the answer."

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Single Girls, Double Standards 2. Beatniks and Bathing Suits 3. The Pill: A Prescription for Equality 4. Love the One You're With 5. Obscenity on Trial 6. Strangers in a Strange Land: The Harrad Experiment and Group Marriage 7. The Right to Marry: Loving vs. Virginia 8. In Loco Parentis 9. Strange Bedfellows: Christian Clergy and the Sexual Revolution 10. Performing the Revolution 11. Sticky Fingers 12. Gay Liberation 13. The Golden Age of Sexual Science 14. Medicine and Morality 15. Why Do These Words Sound Nasty? 16. (Id)eology: Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and Fritz Perls 17. No Privacy Please: Group Sex in the Seventies 18. The Joy of Sales: The Commercialization of Sexual Freedom 19. Lesbian Liberation: Equal but Separate 20. Sexual Freedom on Demand 21. Counterrevolution and Crisis Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Index but Separate
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