Erica Jong may have long ago conquered her fear of flying, but in 1984, those perennial spoilsports, the prudes, seemed to be suffering more severely than ever from their own special phobia: fear of fun. Imagine: Somebody, sometime, might have had a photo taken au naturel. Somebody else might have showed a bunch of teenaged girls a tape of male go-go dancers wearing (gasp!) bikini trunks. (OK, the teacher in this case did win her job back, but a hearing officer ruled the tape "inappropriate for classroom viewing.") Somebody else might have (horrors!) Done It and Got Caught, with the evidence showing up nine months later. Well, say these modern Mr. and Mrs. Grundys, "Punish them! Make them pay!" At the rate they're going, we may yet see the return of that antique treatment for transgressors, stoning. Repression, after all, starts with little things, such as trying to keep contraceptives out of teenagers' hands and playboy off the shelves of your local 7-Eleven.It seldom stops there. To all of these self-appointed censors, we say a resounding "Phooey!" Time magazine may have tried to bury the sexual revolution in 1984, but the next report we read, in Parade magazine, revealed that the first study of American sexual behavior ever conducted with a national probability sample had found that revolution to be thriving. Concluded Parade's editors: "Traditional ideas of what constitutes normal and abnormal sexual behavior are no longer universally accepted." Nearly half the survey's respondents were into sexual experimentation--a lot of it. Interestingly, a similar percentage of that group considered itself religiously "very devout." This may come as a surprise to the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon, a pair of uptight clergymen who obviously don't agree with poet William Blake that "the nakedness of woman is the work of God." Actually, their contention that they represent mainstream America reminds us of the work of Hans Christian Andersen. Like the little kid in Andersen's tale, we're not afraid to say to thesewould-be arbiters of American mores, whose claims have no more substance than did the imaginary fabric in which the fairy-tale monarch wrapped himself, "The emperor has no clothes!"
Girls in Trouble
The naked truth in advertising
The lusty arts
Disorder in the Courts
Sales figures
Skin Gamesters
Winning Suits
Take-Offs
Winning Suits
Take-Offs
Science marches on
Politics' strange bedfellows
Holy terrors
First God, now sex?
Sports visions
Tubular
Monkey business
There'll always be an England
Off with the show
