Whatever Happened to the Leisure Class Since ‘66? : A 20-Year Survey Describes Sex as Personal Care, as if It Were No More Enjoyable Than Brushing One’s Teeth

According to the prelimi nary findings of a 20-year study of leisure, Americans have less of it than the Dutch, the Danes, the Canadians and the British.

And the French, believe it or not, have less than any other people in the 11 Western nations.

These improbable figures were reported by Times staff writer Betty Cuniberti on the work of sociology professor John Robinson at the University of Maryland.

Prof. Robinson makes a basic error, I believe, in his definition of leisure.

First, he does not consider eating as a leisure occupation. That is obviously how the French managed to score last.

Anyone who has ever been in France knows that the French spend most of their leisure time shopping for meals, preparing meals and eating meals.

Naturally, since preparing meals is a French housewife’s vocation, she may not consider it leisure; but certainly the prolonged time spent at table, both at lunch and dinner, is the only social life she has and must be considered as leisure, even if she has to wash the dishes afterwards.

Considering the amount of time that the French spend eating and drinking, I am amazed that television has caught on in that country at all. However, my wife and I may have discovered the explanation one day when we had lunch with a French couple at their rural house in the Pyrenees. Throughout the entire meal, a television set remained on, within full view of the table, and with the sound turned up, but no one watched it.

I think that proves that given a choice between television and lunch, the French will take lunch; and it implies that, in France, eating is an act of leisure.

I think Prof. Robinson was naive, and a bit puritan, when he declined to place sex in the leisure category.

The professor explains that he did not wish to pry into the privacy of his subjects, so he assigned sex to “personal care,” as if it were no more enjoyable than brushing one’s teeth or grooming one’s hair.

If Prof. Robinson had put sex where it belongs, in leisure, we might have found out whether the amount of time most human beings spend on it has been reduced by television.

On the other hand, categorizing sex as a leisure-time activity might not have altered Prof. Robinson’s findings as to the relative amount of leisure time enjoyed overall by various nationalities. Since sex, like eating lunch, may be indulged in while the television is running, the amount of time spent on it might then have been disguised as watching TV.

Television has probably intruded more on other activities, such as household chores and child rearing, than on sex and eating.

A recent New Yorker cartoon shows a young mother and father sitting on a couch in front of the tube, mesmerized, while their infant toddles down the hallway crying “I’m walking!”

Had it not been for the magnetism of TV, these parents very likely would have been engaged in helping their child take its first steps, instead of watching a soap opera about “real life.”

Prof. Robinson has some trouble with his finding that employed American women have only 19 hours of free time a week, while men have 22. However, he noted, when employed women and housewives are taken together, they have about the same amount of leisure time as employed men.

Once again, I think it may be a question of categories, as with sex. When a man spends three hours watching a football game he is obviously at leisure. At the same time his wife may be luxuriating in her bath, doing her hair, painting her toenails and otherwise enjoying herself. Yet, that is not considered leisure.

I notice that Prof. Robinson has also assigned the time spent commuting between home and work as “contracted time,” or work time.

On the contrary, the time spent on the freeway driving to and from work is the most precious leisure time some of us have. For once in the day, we are alone. We are free to contemplate life, to think about truth, to listen to the unforgettables on KMPC or to Michael Jackson on KABC.

Unless we are upwardly mobile enough to have a car telephone, nobody can reach us. We are encapsulated, isolated from the demands of our world in our mobile container.

Cuniberti didn’t say whether Prof. Robinson categorized aerobic and isometric exercise as work or leisure. He would probably call it leisure, but when I see those young people pushing, pulling, puffing, straining and sweating, it looks like work to me.

If people can spend an hour or two every day pumping iron and riding stationary bicycles, they have too much leisure, and society has failed.

Don’t they know they could be reading, eating, having sex or watching television?