The Desexing of America

Brace Yourselves: There is a bogus rumble in certain parts of the media to make you believe the sexual mood of America has turned from the open ground it gained over the past 20 years back toward the cold, mean shade of the old Puritan morality.

The message is subtle in some places and gross in others, but it is pretty much the same either way. We are being told that the sexual revolution has left us a bitter inheritance; that the freedom to discuss, study and experiment with our sexuality without the terrible burden of guilt and shame has produced more problems than it has solved; that God is angry; that the social order and even nature herself has turned on us for our hubris; and that the results are depression, despair, disease and even death.

The current media turn began five or six years ago with such stories and movies as Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Cruising, which implied that those who sought sex where it was openly available were likely to become victims of bizarre violence. And because most of us don't look for our partners in bars or bathhouses, there was a tendency to believe that the adventurous fringes of sexual pursuit were dark and dangerous.

But there were other reports, small ones at first, that began to hint that the forces of sexual liberation were stalling out. Statistics on marriage and divorce were carefully monitored, and when they varied by even a few points, it was interpreted as a profound shift toward old values and styles. Story after story reported the barking of small dog packs such as the fanatic right-to-life Catholics and the people who call themselves the Moral Majority; they were against abortion, sex education and the dispensing of birth-control advice; and, finally, against erotic photos of any kind on the absurd claim that such pictures inspire violence and pedophilia.

The more radical elements of the women's movement often played to that rhetoric by insisting that men as a group were sexually irresponsible animals who raped and otherwise exploited women, abandoned their children without qualm and clung viciously to a double standard that wanted to cast women as concubines.

More recently, columnists and other commentators have begun to theorize that the flood of sex manuals has left us wishing that the subject would just creep back into the closet and leave us alone. The message, stated in so many words by some writers, is that to demystify sex is to trivialize it, that to study it scientifically is to rob it of its purpose and its joy. Until, finally, the most profound charge of all was leveled at the new sexuality: that it had driven a wedge between love and sex and had rendered them hopelessly separate. Because the sexual revolution had suggested that sex and love could be separate events without anyone's being hurt or degraded, the critics began to argue that such a split was what the liberalizers had been after all along and that it was leading to a dangerous depersonalization of human behavior. Sex without love, they said, makes animals of us all.

When enough of these reports had been published, they became the subjects of pieces such as the one by Fran R. Schumer that appeared in New York magazine of December 6, 1982, called ''Is Sex Dead?''

A few paragraphs into the article, the author says, ''Indeed, a generation that skipped the hand-holding stage of adolescence is rediscovering dating. There's romance instead of lust, courtship in place of seduction. Pushed into the closet by the revolution, virginity has pushed its way back out. And in the offices of therapists, a new sexual dysfunction has made its debut: lack of desire.''

Throughout the article, people referred to as veterans of the sexual revolution confess that random, loveless sex has left them empty and that they are seeking something deeper and more selective these days. Schumer says that for some time now, ''there was among many a deep-seated dissatisfaction with some aspects of the sexual revolution's prescribed code of behavior: the studied indifference with which people approached sex; the enforced coolness; the thesis that sexual intimacy was the best way to get to know someone.''

Just who prescribed the behavior of the sexual revolution or who enforced the coolness is vague, of course, as are data indicating that people ever thought of love and lust as necessarily separate or that they want to retreat to the morality that insisted the two ought never to be separate on pain of sin and social disapproval.

Sooner or later, someone was bound to seek those data, the statistical proof that we are repudiating sexual open-mindedness in favor of the style practiced a generation ago. Psychology Today took on that project last February, using as its starting point the hypothesis that romance had been a casualty of the new sexual morality. It was obvious from the introduction to the questionnaire for their ''Love and Romance Survey'' what the editors expected to find.

We observe Valentine's Day this month--an appropriate time, we thought, to consider our beliefs about love and romance. Have we begun a new infatuation with romance? The makers of Valentine cards might say so; sales have increased by about 50,000,000 cards over the past decade. Is the sexual revolution over? Are the forces of workaholism, financial troubles and herpes turning us back to traditional romance? Have our feelings about love become more romantic and so, possibly, less realistic?

They found what they were looking for, of course. And they found it at least partly because of the way they had structured part of the questionnaire. The results, published in July 1983 and quoted by newspapers and TV newspeople all over the country, announced that 53 percent of the respondents wanted love from their relationships, while only one percent wanted sex. The fact that these two things were made to seem mutually exclusive, however, was the result not of the sexual revolution but, rather, of the way Psychology Today had framed the question. Readers had been asked, ''What do you look for in your relationship with your partner?'' and had then been instructed to circle only one among these choices: financial security, love, companionship, romance, sex, other. It's hard to imagine what could beat love in an either/or vote like that. And to oppose it to sex steals the brightest of possibilities from both.

•

In December 1982, Esquire published an article designed to remove any question about what modern erotic life had come to. A funeral wreath filled the cover under the bold headline ''The End of Sex,'' the title of George Leonard's new book, excerpted within.

Leonard is the author of the best-selling Education and Ecstasy, and for 15 years or so he has been the leading wordsmith for what used to be called the sensitivity movement and is now called humanistic psychology: the loving-caring-feeling-touching approach to life as lived at Esalen, the most famous of its ranches. For a long time, Leonard was one of this movement's most enthusiastic Pooh-Bahs, and he admits as much in the opening paragraph of The End of Sex.

''Like millions of other Americans, I welcomed the sexual revolution of the Sixties,'' he writes. ''I even did my own small part, through books, articles and special issues of Look, to help it along.''

And, indeed, he did: In a January 13, 1970, Look article called ''Why We Need a New Sexuality,'' he argues that although the old sexual taboos might have been useful before modern contraception and hygiene, it was time to let go of them. ''Today,'' he writes, ''these same attitudes threaten the social order, heighten the chance of violence and war, increase population pressures and needlessly restrict human pleasure and fulfillment.''

In the same article, he calls for an end to all sexual censorship. ''This means just what it says: Sexual intercourse and birth could be shown on network television and in family magazines. Nothing would be hidden.'' He ends his rhapsodizing over the new sexual order like this: ''The new sexuality leads eventually to the creation of a family as wide as all mankind that can weep together, laugh together and share the common ecstasy.''

Between then and now, however, the sexual revolution somehow failed to live up to the promises that Leonard invented for it, and so, in The End of Sex, he is forced to renounce the whole thing. Throughout the book he separates sex and love and insists that sex is either mindless and exploitative or part of a deeply committed romantic love that he calls ''high monogamy.''

''For example,'' he writes, ''the idea of sex for recreation has a lilting ring to it, suggesting the beautiful young people you see on television dancing from one partner to another ... taking pleasure and adding delight. And those who support it would be quick to point out that sex for recreation can involve caring and intimacy. But we who live in a leisure society have seen where a surfeit of recreation can take us: to frantic, aimless travel, increased pollution and stress, the desecration of ancient landmarks, the trivialization of history and culture. In the same way, 'recreational sex' has already led to a frantic, aimless search for sensation and from there to the deadening of sensation, to sexual escalation and stress, to a desecration of courtship and romance.''

Nowhere in his opus does Leonard cite instances where the leading voices of sexual liberation called for hit-and-run sex as an ideal. Instead, he claims to have sensed a mood of boredom and despair among his friends and others he interviewed for the book. When he does get around to the positive fruits of the sexual revolution, he admits he doesn't want to retreat from them. ''Make no mistake,'' he writes in Esquire. ''I do not sympathize with the methods or the aims of the so-called Moral Majority. I want to keep the best of the sexual revolution. The new freedom to talk openly about sexual matters is a blessed thing. A few straightforward words can sometimes clear up misunderstandings that would have produced a lifetime of guilt and shame in the devastating silence of times past. I want information on erotic feelings and actions, anatomy and physiology, venereal disease and disorders and birth control and abortion made available to young and old.''

Still, he says, ''The term sex might once have been useful in defining a field of study and focusing attention on certain modern problems, but it has outgrown its usefulness... It has become, in fact, an enemy of erotic love and must be seen as yet another aspect of the abstraction and depersonalization of life that now threaten human survival. 'Sex,' in short, is an idea whose time has passed.''

Leonard is never without hope for (continued on page 318)Desexing of America(continued from page 110) the future, however, and his hopes for the high monogamous love he proposes are very much like his Look hopes for the new sexuality. In fact, they are exactly like his old hopes. The final paragraph of The End of Sex reads: ''But I believe . . . that love will prevail, that love will eventually join us in a family as wide as all humankind that can laugh together, weep together and share the common ecstasy.''

Actually, he did change one word. In light of the women's movement, he evidently felt that mankind should become humankind.

•

But if Leonard and others like him are silly in their premature announcements of the death of sex, there is a more sinister aspect to the erotophobic turn of the media. It involves herpes and AIDS and turns on the cruel and heavy-handed equation of disease with sex and the Christian connection between sickness and sin.

Herpes was the warm-up. The media discovered this ancient malady about four years ago and almost immediately elevated it to epidemic status. Reports of its contagion appeared everywhere, and since its physical manifestations are generally mild, the emphasis was on the fact that it was transmitted sexually and is, so far, incurable. Anxiety was whipped to a point way beyond the numerical realities until the disease became a metaphor for the kind of punishment that puritans have always insisted is waiting for those who have sex with people they're not married to.

When Time got hold of herpes, it connected it to the angry morality of our past by calling it ''The New Scarlet Letter.''

The author of the Time story, John Leo, assembled the kind of sexual horror stories that used to come mostly from priests and nuns who were trying to terrify their young charges out of their sexuality by loading them with lurid scenarios that promised them that their bodies would somehow rot if they were sexual outside marriage. In a five-page cover story, Leo trots out no fewer than four sexual monsters, three of them women, who are out there somewhere consciously spreading herpes as some sort of insane revenge on their partners. ''They were just one-night stands, so they deserved it anyway,'' Leo quotes a Philadelphia man who brags that he has infected 20 women. A prostitute estimates that she and her sister have probably infected 1000 men.

''Few modern ailments have altered so much basic behavior so quickly,'' says Leo in describing the epidemic nature of the disease. And although such changes are difficult to measure, if behavior has been altered, it can be argued that it is not the true incidence of the disease that has changed it but the panic with which the press has reported it--an attitude that is explained in part by the fact that the sensational sells and in part by the fact that the morality behind those editorial voices is stuck somewhere in the past.

Leo and Time betray their sense of sin in the last paragraph of their herpes story by finding something positive in the spread of this tenacious virus:

It is a melancholy fact that it has rekindled old fears. But perhaps not so unhappily, it may be a prime mover in helping to bring to a close an era of mindless promiscuity. The monogamous now have one more reason to remain so. For all the distress it has brought, the troublesome little bug may inadvertently be ushering in a period in which sex is linked more firmly to commitment and trust.

In other words, if a little suffering and a lot of anxiety can turn things back toward Time's idea of what is sexually right and good, so be it.

With the discovery of AIDS, of course, herpes began to look like the relatively minor irritation it had always been, and it was quickly replaced in the press by this less common but far more awful disease.

Media coverage generally began on a misguided track, because the usual victims were male homosexuals and, again, because the primary method of transmission was suspected to be sexual contact. The May 31, 1982, New York titled an AIDS story ''The Gay Plague,'' as if somehow this vicious breakdown of the immune system, unlike any other disease in the history of medicine, chose its victims by their sexual preference. In October 1982, The Saturday Evening Post titled its AIDS story ''Being Gay Is a Health Hazard''; and the February 3, 1983, Rolling Stone, in an otherwise straightforward article about what was known about the disease, used the absurd question ''is there death after sex?'' as its headline.

It wasn't long, however, before the new panic was expanded to the general population. In an editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association of May 6, 1983, the possibility was raised that AIDS could be contracted through ordinary close, nonsexual contact with a victim. The wire services and The New York Times moved that story along, and Geraldo Rivera, on 20/20, added to the panic and confusion by suggesting that because AIDS could be spread by transfusion, the nation's blood supply might be contaminated and the best precaution was to begin storing your own blood.

And so another disease was approached clumsily by the media because of its sexual connections. The press reported the outbreak of AIDS as if it had been conceived and loosed on the world because of the sexual behavior of a small group. It was as if someone had suggested that the American Legionnaires had brought sickness on themselves and on the rest of us because they were middle-aged men who went to conventions in Philadelphia.

Time's July 4, 1983, cover story on AIDS focuses on the efforts of the Centers for Disease Control to track the cause and is followed by a report called ''The Real Epidemic: Fear and Despair,'' which catalogs the changes in gay lifestyle attributed to the scourge. ''Footloose gays'' are turning to monogamy, says the report; business in the bathhouses is down. A Moral Majority preacher named Dixon is quoted as saying that if homosexuals aren't stopped, it will mean the destruction of America. And then, in the last paragraph, Leo gets back up into Time's pulpit to take another swing at his idea of the real culprit. ''The sexual revolution clearly is not over,'' he writes, ''but the Eighties are proving to be a dangerous decade both for gays and straights who like casual sex and plenty of it.''

But if Time and Leo stop short of suggesting that God and nature were taking vengeance on the sexually permissive, syndicated columnist Patrick J. Buchanan does not. His column of May 24, 1983, in The New York Post is headlined, ''AIDS Disease: it's nature striking back,'' and it identifies him as a nasty moral retrograde. ''The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children,'' he writes. ''And among the revolutionary vanguard, the gay-rights activists, the mortality rate is highest and climbing.''

The story goes on to outline the spread of the disease, lists other homosexual maladies and then quotes medical researcher J. Gordon Muir as saying that male homosexuals should be allowed neither to give blood nor to handle food. Finally, of course, Buchanan finds a way of connecting Democrats with the disease. (He was Richard Nixon's speechwriter.) He notes that Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Alan Cranston are all committed to the cause of homosexual civil rights, including equal access to jobs, and then he asks, What of the rights of people who want to protect their children from the proctoring of this infected group? He ends with a half-witted sort of conservative Catholic righteousness that harks back not so much to Puritan America as to Spain during the Inquisition. ''The poor homosexuals,'' he says. ''They have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.''

•

It was no oversight that Ronald Reagan failed to send the pro forma telegram of welcome to the World Congress of Sexology when it met last May in Washington, D.C. This Administration represents almost perfectly the Puritan streak that still is, and may always be, alive in this country--a spirit that would just as soon have the lights all the way off whenever and however the subject of sex comes up.

The sexologists ought to have expected it. Even under more enlightened Administrations, they have had to struggle for their funding and their legitimacy. What they probably didn't expect was the negative attitude with which the press ambushed the most important and interesting recent development in the field.

The attack came from New York on July 19, 1982, and it was called ''The Next Sexual Hype--The G Spot.'' In it, author Linda Wolfe treated the renewed interest in the Gräfenberg spot as if it had been discovered to sell books.

''There have been some new discoveries about female sexuality--and they've got the world of book publishing all excited,'' she writes in her lead paragraph. ''The first is that inside the vagina there's a remarkable, pinpointable, dime-sized area of sensitivity that when stimulated will swell to the size of a half dollar and trigger an intense, unique orgasm. The second is that stimulation of this magical site . . . can cause some women to release, through their urethras, a fluid similar to semen--in other words, to ejaculate. The source of this intelligence is an outlandish book called The G Spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality.''

After listing the book clubs and the paperback houses that vied for the book, Wolfe carries her derisive tone through a list of the authors' credentials and then begins an attack on the fact that the scientific method involved in their work was less than first-class. In fact, the authors anticipated her objections in the preface by admitting that they had, in effect, written a popular book, that much more research remained to be done and that they hoped their hypothesis would be subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny for validation or rejection. Nevertheless, Wolfe goes to great length to point out the gaps in their technique and to ridicule the notion that women might ejaculate. She takes most of the courage for this attack from the fact that Kinsey and Masters and Johnson rejected the notion of the G spot after applying research techniques that she calls ''elegant.'' Wolfe ends her article by saying that whatever The G Spot is, it isn't science. ''Indeed,'' she says, ''it often resembles a highly inventive piece of shock-the-bourgeoisie porn.''

Since the publication of the book, and since Wolfe's catty attack on it, postmortem tissue studies by medical researchers in California and New York have confirmed not only the existence of the G spot but also a fundamental chemical similarity between female ejaculate and semen. Both research teams say that their studies are not yet complete, but the New York researchers predict that within two years, the G-spot phenomenon will be an accepted fact of female sexuality. Neither of the studies has been widely reported in the press.

•

In a way, the antisexual drift of the press should have been predictable. It's very American, after all. No one loves the notion of the pendulum effect more than we do: A thing is either ''in'' or ''out.'' From one-piece bathing suits to disco to Western movies, the natural ebb and flow of our attention is portrayed as wanting either all of it or none of it. And while a thing is ''in,'' it is touted to be the answer, the panacea, the truth, and then, when its time has passed, it's orange peels and coffee grounds.

In the case of something as complicated and as delicate as our sexuality, it should go without saying that each of us moves through a wide range of moods about it in our lifetime, and that these moods represent no more and no less than a natural evolution, a maturing that is deeply connected to both mind and body and that each of us goes through on our own schedule, which is the often mysterious product of our experiences and our world view.

The media are rough tools with which to deal with the subtleties of our daily realities. At best, they are a collection of thoughtful voices that admit their biases so that the audience can judge not only what is being said but who is saying it. Most of us come to the subject of sex with heavy and confused baggage that makes it difficult to pursue our own changing sexuality without struggle, error and some fear. What we need for the job is all the information we can get as straight as we can get it. What we don't need is the background rattle of judgmental nonsense from those in the media who cling to the timid belief that all sexual exploration leads to the fall of empire and then to hell.

''It involves herpes and AIDS and turns on the cruel and heavy-handed equation of disease with sex.''