Forever Young

“Make Love, Not War,” David Allyn’s book about the sexual revolution, begins in the early ‘60s, “because this was when white middle-class Americans first really began to accept the idea of young women having premarital sex,” and ends in the late ‘70s when, the author claims, “opponents on both sides of the political spectrum waged a largely successful campaign against sexual permissiveness.” Allyn’s implication that a confined period of sexual permissiveness suddenly expired at the end of the ‘70s is the first hint that he is way over his head in trying to assess the profound (and seemingly, permanent) changes wrought by the events he describes here. As he does in so many other places in this volume, he misjudges the events of the late ‘70s, exaggerating the backlash against the sexual revolution. Instead of offering a coherent argument, which might have explained how the upheavals of this 20-year period transformed relations between men and women--as well as the status of women and homosexuals in American society--Allyn offers something closer to a “greatest hits” of the era that he attempts to recreate.

Thus we learn about the nation’s first topless dancer (Carol Doda in San Francisco’s Condor Club in 1964); the blockbuster impact of Helen Gurley Brown’s “Sex and the Single Girl” (“a wild confession, the kind of revelation that could destroy a woman’s reputation”) and the immortal words of Linda Lovelace in “Deep Throat” (“Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?”) . Besides the snappy anecdotes, there are lengthy sections on the history of contraception, abortion, group marriage, pornography and the early days of gay liberation. Unfortunately much of the information is familiar, and many of Allyn’s speculations are wildly misleading.

In an unusual maneuver, the author warns us of his own limitations right at the start: “[T]his book was far harder to write than I ever expected it would be. Naively and arrogantly I thought I could simply interview a few people and read some out-of-print books and thereby master a topic as sweeping and complicated as the sexual revolution . . . more than that I assumed at the start that my own views on the subject were crisp and consistent. Over time I realized the opposite was true; in fact there were many moments while writing this book that I wished I had a clear political agenda to organize my thoughts. . . . Unfortunately I must beg the reader’s forgiveness in advance; I have not found any escape from my own highly idiosyncratic, personal concerns, which shape my perception of both the present and past.”

Because he was born in 1969, Allyn is too young to remember most of what he is describing. A big failing of this book is that he consistently flunks two of the most important tests faced by any cultural historian--accurately assessing the significance of individual cultural events and knowing when to

be skeptical of his sources.

For example, the 1975 movie “Shampoo,” which was a hilarious sendup of Hollywood’s most influential hairdresser, is singled out here for its emphasis on “the pathos of casual sex.” According to Allyn, Alex Comfort’s description of “the natural bisexuality of all human beings” in “The Joy of Sex” was “a truism of the time” and Comfort’s books sold well “in part, because they barely challenged conventional wisdom.” The owner of a gay bathhouse in Manhattan in the 1970s pretends that “people on drugs” were turned away at the door, and Allyn believes him.

For Allyn, the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969 marked the first time “Americans began to acknowledge the practice” of masturbation. Two pages later, we’re told, “Before 1969, it was practically impossible for a young man to grow up in America without hearing about the ‘dangers’ of masturbation” including “pimples, warts, fatigue, insomnia, weak vision, stomach ulcers, mental illness, impotence and a host of other unwelcome conditions.”

There are two problems with these observations about masturbation. First, the statements are mutually contradictory: How could there be so many rumors about a practice that wasn’t even acknowledged? Second, these assertions are individually false. As someone who was a teenager in the 1960s, I can testify that the practice most certainly was acknowledged before 1969, and in my experience these “dangers” were never anything but fodder for facetious locker-room banter.

Allyn’s lack of personal knowledge about the era he chronicles also results in more than the usual number of sloppy errors one is accustomed to in modern nonfiction books, many of which read as if they were never edited. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is identified as a “liberal senator” in 1965, though he wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1976, while well-known Michigan Republican Robert Griffin becomes the “Democratic Senate whip.” At another point, Allyn assaults sex educator Mary Steichen Calderone for her early homophobic writings (in 1967, she suggested the right kind of sex education could prevent boys and girls from becoming homosexual), without acknowledging that she later became much more enlightened (by 1977, Calderone was writing to the New York Times to decry the repeal of the gay rights ordinance in Miami, declaring, “Our shame should really be that this is a country that requires such protective ordinances in the first place”).

*

Allyn, who teaches history at Princeton, does much better when he writes about the psychiatric profession and the recent history of contraception. A section about the conventional wisdom of psychoanalysis reminds us that some members of this profession did as much damage to women as they did to homosexuals in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “With the emergence of professional psychoanalysis in the postwar period, the double standard [prohibiting women from engaging in premarital sex] acquired ‘scientific’ legitimacy,” writes Allyn. “Psychologists and psychiatrists claimed that women were not only less sexual than men, they were naturally masochistic. Among the wilder ideas offered up as facts by prominent members of the profession were Helene Deutsch’s claim 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.” Even someone as famous as Theodore Reik could sound remarkably unsophisticated in a Playboy round-table on “The Womanization of America,” published in 1962. “What is astonishing to me is that women, more and more, are taking over the active roles in sex, which was not so before,” said Reik. “The men finally will resent it. They should. I would say there is a law as binding as the laws of chemistry or physics namely, that a masculinization of women goes with the womanization of men, hand in hand.”

Allyn’s discussion of the legalization of contraception includes important history about the collusion of doctors with drug manufacturers to suppress the potential dangers of the contraceptive pill, including the American Medical Assn.’s opposition to the inclusion of inserts that would detail those dangers. It’s also useful to be reminded that open dissent was much more common within the Catholic church in the 1960s, when 600 Catholic clergymen publicly protested against “Humanae Vitae,” the papal encyclical that prohibited use of the Pill.

In the introduction to his book, Allyn writes that he grew up “with the vague sense of having missed something magical and mysterious. I remember the adolescent’s agony of realizing that my parents and teachers had witnessed extraordinary social transformations, the likes of which we might never see again.” Only at the very end of the book does he suggest that his own feeling of being neglected as a child may have been another reason he decided to tackle this history. According to Allyn, “the real problem” in the early ‘70s was that “children’s emotional needs were often overlooked because the focus of the culture was so geared to adults and their desires.” He says members of his generation have “a certain ambivalence about the sexual revolution” because they know that “more talk about sex does not necessarily mean more understanding. Listening is just as important for a relationship as talking--perhaps even more important. Missing from the sexual revolution was an appreciation of the value of listening.” Well, maybe. Or maybe it was just the 10-year-olds who weren’t being listened to, which is how old the author was in 1979.