Looking Back Over a Century of Sexual Revolution in America

When I was around 9 years old, I somehow got the idea that I was in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. Most of my chums were Roman Catholic girls who still believed they’d been found under cabbage leaves, whereas my mother had told me the facts of life. This made me think of myself as one of the enlightened: a champion of truth, candor, sex, love and other life-affirming forces, a foe of narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy.

This, or something like it, is the attitude informing “The Century of Sex.” Conceived and edited by none other than Playboy’s founder, guiding spirit and embodiment, Hugh Hefner, and written by James R. Petersen, who has served as the magazine’s advice columnist for some 20 years, it is both a history of and an apologia for the sexual revolution. Or rather, since it does not engage in a point-by-point argument on behalf of the revolution, it is more of a history with a pro-sex bias.

Though some would seek the beginnings of the sexual revolution in the advent of the Pill, the Kinsey Report, the social upheaval of World War II or the Jazz Age, Petersen goes back even further, to 1900, to the great demographic shifts that brought increasing numbers of rural Americans to the big cities and new possibilities in the pursuit of personal independence and sexual freedom.

Petersen focuses on the war between sexual enlightenment and its discontents. He begins with the story of Ida Craddock, who wrote what we would now consider tasteful, high-flown pamphlets explaining the steps to “Wedded Bliss,” and her nemesis, America’s notorious self-appointed guardian of morals, Anthony Comstock, whose relentless prosecution and persecution drove Craddock to suicide. Petersen concludes, of course, with the Clinton impeachment scandal, presented here as a story about sex rather than about obstruction of justice, a misconception somehow a lot less astonishing coming from a Playboy columnist than from 400 historians.

Looking at history from the perspective of sex, far from inducing monomania, involves looking at a wide variety of interesting and often important topics and themes: Margaret Sanger’s courageous campaign for birth control; the question of movie censorship; the banning of books such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”; the repressive atmosphere of the 1950s; the swinging ‘60s; the feminist recoil; the gay rights movement; the shock of AIDS. The cast of characters includes everyone from Margaret Mead, Mae West and Masters and Johnson to J. Edgar Hoover. And, of course, attention is paid to Hefner’s role in promulgating the Playboy “philosophy.” We also get to read of “puritanical” feminist attacks on that philosophy--and of other feminists who celebrate a female-centered sexuality.

Yet, for all its appearance of covering an infinite variety, this history does tend to pit freedom lovers against the prudes. It leaves out the growing number of essentially liberal-minded critics who have come to question the cost of the sexual revolution and who, without rushing to join the censors, have offered words of caution. Roger Shattuck on the insidious effects of an aesthetic of violence, Gabriel Rotello on the epidemiological rather than moral dangers of promiscuity, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead on the divorce culture have all raised pertinent issues. Still, it is salutary to be reminded of the pioneers who took risks to enlarge the scope of personal freedom, even as we may ponder what constitutes its best uses.