Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution, Part VII: Make Love Not War, 1960-1969

Stick out your tongue. Your world is about to change.

In 1960 a bureaucrat at the Food and Drug Administration gives approval to Enovid, an oral contraceptive based on a hormone made from Mexican yams. The Pill, as it will be called, will free women from centuries of fear and will give them control of their bodies. By the end of the decade more than six million women will be on the Pill, performing a daily ritual once occupied by worry beads. The dispenser is the badge of the new liberated woman.

Stick out your tongue. In the summer of 1960 a Harvard lecturer named Timothy Leary sits by a swimming pool in Cuernavaca and ingests psychedelic mushrooms. He begins a quest to liberate the mind. Within a few years, after having been tossed out of Harvard for exploring innex space with undergrads, he will tell the world to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

A generation of Americans will reject their parents' world of booze and backyard barbecues to sample mind-altering recreational drugs. By the end of the decade nearly half of America's youth will belong to this counterculture. And the backlash is immediate. By 1967 the cops will make 300,000 marijuana arrests a year. Everywhere you look there is change--sudden, unexpected revelation. For 60 years we have charted the rise and fall of hemlines and found meaning. In England, designer Mary Quant creates something called the miniskirt. "Am I the only woman," she asks, "who has ever wanted to go to bed with a man in the afternoon? Any lawabiding female, it used to be thought, waits until dark. Well, there are lots of girls who don't want to wait. Mini-clothes are symbolic of them."

The world rediscovers women's legs, flashing scissors of energetic skin cutting through crowded city streets. After a decade of girdles and bullet bras, the female body is free.

Designer Rudi Gernreich introduces a topless bathing suit and within days Carol Doda wears her own version in the first modern topless bar, in San Francisco's North Beach. In subsequent weeks customers watch Doda's breasts grow from 34D to a monumental 44DD, augmented by silicone injections. Like volcanoes, they seem to symbolize a force of nature, something that evokes awe and wonder.

Marshall McLuhan, a professor of culture and technology at the University of Toronto who seems to have an explanation for almost everything, has lunch with writer Tom Wolfe in a topless restaurant. "Don't you see?" McLuhan remarks. "They're wearing us." What does it portend?

McLuhan looks at the waitresses' breasts and comments, "The topless waitress is the opening wedge of the trial balloon."

The body politic rediscovers the body. America goes from a country titillated by a young girl wearing an Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini to one watching a bare-breasted women playing the cello. By the end of the decade, actors will romp naked on Broadway in Hair and Oh! Calcutta! The cast of Dionysus in '69 pulls a woman from the audience each night and makes love to her onstage. In Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, the inmates in the asylum of Charenton will ask, "What's the point of a revolution without general copulation?"

Taboos disappear overnight. An article in Time comments on a new American passion called "Spectator Sex."

McLuhan tries to make sense of the revolution. In The Medium Is the Message and other books he propounds a theory of social change. We live, he says, in a global village connected by electronic media. Type, he says, is linear and trained man to adopt a single point of view. Television, on the other hand, is a cool medium--a mosaic, a field of tiny moving dots, an incomplete image that "commands immediate participation in depth and admits of no delays." Television creates an urge for involvement. We yearn, he says, to complete the picture. He calls this new force of energy "participation mystique."

Seventy-three million people watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. An adolescent sexual response that began with bobby-soxers going wild in the streets over Sinatra in the Forties gained momentum in the Fifties with female fans who fainted at the sight of Elvis. In Re-Making Love, Barbara Ehrenreich credits Beatlemania with unleashing the teenage sexual revolution of the Sixties:

"For the girls who participated in Beatlemania, sex was an obvious part of the excitement. One of the most common responses to reporters' queries on the sources of Beatlemania was, 'Because they're sexy.' And this explanation was in itself a small act of defiance. It was rebellious (especially for young fans) to lay claim to sexual feelings. It was even more rebellious to lay claim to the active, daring side of sexual attraction. The Beatles were the objects, the girls were their pursuers. The Beatles were sexy; the girls were the ones who perceived them as sexy and acknowledged the force of an ungovernable, if somewhat disembodied, lust. To assert an active, powerful sexuality by the tens of thousands and to do so in a way calculated to attract maximum attention was more than rebellious. It was in its own unformulated, dizzy way, revolutionary."

The revolution in sex roles, in appearances, in what it means to be a man or a woman, unfolds in the time it takes to grow a beard or long hair or to don a shortened skirt. Early reports label these changes youthful phenomena, something akin to the Flaming Youth of the Twenties. The revolution does seem to belong to those under 25, but something more is at work here. The Lost Generation of the Twenties ran headlong into the Depression. Youth in the Fifties had grown up in the paranoia and conservatism of the Cold War, an era marked by the politics of fatigue. Had they opted to become their parents, we would still be living on the set of Happy Days. What was different about the Sixties?

At the start of the decade John Fitzgerald Kennedy takes up residence in the White House. He is young, physically attractive, a rogue, a wit, a man whose middle name reminds writers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a man who tells the nation that the young are better fitted to direct history than the old are. Came-lot dies abruptly, with an assassin's bullet, but the prophecy will be fulfilled. Reminded of your mortality, you will create a new, more personal form of morality.

A generation that will be known as the Baby Boomers will accomplish by sheer numbers what no generation before could even contemplate. In 1960 there are 24 million people age 15 through 24. By 1970 there were 35.3 million. By 1966, 48 percent of the population was under the age of 26.

The flood of immigrants at the turn of the century had created a new America; this time the flood came from within.

The young spend $12 billion a year on their own subculture--clothes, music, movies. From folk to rock, the music provides a soundtrack for change. Elvis returns from a stint in the Army asking, Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Shirelles wonder, Will You Love Me Tomorrow? The Rolling Stones snarl, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. The music moves beyond moon and June, with artists such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon crafting songs that provoke the conscience of a nation. This is a revolution with a beat you can dance to.

Television, the tool of togetherness in the Fifties, now tears families apart. We watch police and National Guardsmen turn firehoses on civil rights and antiwar demonstrators, see water pressure that can "strip the bark off a tree" spin students around as though they were dolls. The Sixties will give us a generation gap as wide as the Grand Canyon.

You watch the war escalate on television. And again the numbers spin out of control. In Vietnam, 700 advisors in 1961 became 16,000 troops in 1963--542,000 by 1969. We watch the birth of resistance. Buddhist monks set themselves afire in protest. Young men burn their draft cards and march on the Pentagon, arm in arm with old radicals, chanting the new anthem of the decade: "Make Love, Not War."

The Playboy Mystique

Amid all this chaos is one place of urban revelry. Norman Mailer described the scene in The Presidential Papers: "The Bunnies went by in their costumes, electric-blue silk, Kelly green, flame pink, pin-ups from a magazine, faces painted into sweetmeats, flower tops, tame lynx, piggie, poodle, a queen or two from a beauty contest. They wore Gay Nineties rig that exaggerated their hips, bound their waists in a ceinture, and lifted them into a phallic brassiere--each breast looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac. Long black stockings--up almost to the waist on each side--and to the back, on the curve of the can, as if ejected tenderly from the body, was the puff of chastity, a little white ball of a Bunny's tail that bobbled as they (continued on page 110)Make Love Not War(continued from page 92) walked. The Playboy Club was the place for magic."

Hugh Hefner was a master of participation mystique. In 1960 he offered a new diversion from the worries of the Atomic Age. Playboy had sparked a male rebellion in the Fifties, redefining bachelorhood, offering urbanity in place of the macho posturing of the postwar era. It reached a million readers a month. The magazine was a wish book for the urban male, as popular in its way as the Sears, Roebuck catalog had been in rural America at the turn of the century. Hefner had created a fantasy, and now he moved to make that fantasy real--for himself and for his readers.

On February 29, 1960 he opened the first Playboy Club, in Chicago, and created what would become the first sex star of the Sixties. The Playboy Bunny was admittedly a most unlikely candidate in her satin costume, ears and cotton tail, but she would become world famous.

Variety called the Playboy Clubs "a Disneyland for adults." Within two years there were 300,000 keyholders, by the end of the decade almost one million. Playboy Clubs spread across America and abroad. Time complained that the clubs were "brothels without a second story." These descriptions were not inaccurate. The clubs recalled the private speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties, and even earlier versions of a male world. Like the Everleigh Club in Chicago, the Haymarket in New York or Storyville in New Orleans, Playboy Clubs presented an intoxicating mix of food and alcohol, music and other entertainment in a sophisticated, sexually charged atmosphere.

Hefner had re-created that world and rendered it squeaky clean. The clubs and the magazine celebrated the erotic without a hint of the tawdry. Generations of Americans may have associated sex with sin, but the Bunnies, like their Centerfold counterparts, were nice girls. As Hefner pointed out to the editors of Time, the "Look But Don't Touch" rule was strictly enforced. If the editors of Time wanted more, that was their problem.

In a way, the Playboy Clubs marked the end of an era, a time of sexual innocence that would soon be gone. Hefner said that he envisioned the Bunny as a "waitress elevated to the level of a Ziegfeld Follies Girl." Florenz Ziegfeld hadn't felt obliged to make the Ziegfeld Girls available to the customers during intermission, he said.

But the Bunnies were controversial just the same, requiring litigation in both Chicago and New York to acquire and retain licenses. Beauty, it was said, was in the eye of the keyholder.

Like everything associated with Playboy, the clubs were politically controversial as well. The Playboy Clubs were integrated in Miami and New Orleans when Southern states were still opposed to integration. And the clubs became a launching pad for black comedians who had never worked in white establishments before. Dick Gregory got his start making racial equality the topic of his humor by telling key-holders, "I sat at a lunch counter nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted."

The Playboy Clubs also helped launch the career of budding journalist and future feminist Gloria Steinem, who went underground as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Club in 1963. Her first impression of the club was unexpectedly favorable: "The total effect is cheerful and startling," she said.

Steinem announced that the costume was troublesome. The satin had to be taken in two inches for a proper fit. The built-in bras came in just two sizes: 34D and 36D. She kept a list of unofficial bosom stuffers: "Kleenex, plastic dry cleaners' bags, absorbent cotton, cut-up Bunny tails, foam rubber, lamb's wool, Kotex halves, silk scarves and gym socks."

Later she would complain that two weeks as a Bunny had left her feet "permanently enlarged by a half size by the very high heels and long hours of walking with heavy trays." If Prince Charming arrived with the glass slipper, would it still fit?

Steinem concluded in the end: "All women are Bunnies."

Mr. Playboy

In 1960 Hugh Hefner came out from behind the desk and started living the life his magazine promoted. In addition to opening the first Playboy Club, he moved into a 70-room mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast and began hosting a syndicated television show titled Playboy's Penthouse. It was a black-tie party featuring Centerfolds and celebrities such as Lenny Bruce, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. The interracial nature of this social gathering assured no syndication in the South.

The party format was a reflection of the real party that was going on at the Playboy Mansion. The brass plaque on the door announced: si non oscillas noli tintinnare (If you don't swing, don't ring). All America knew about the round-the-clock revelry, the indoor pool, the underwater bar, the woo grotto, the Bunnies and Playmates in residence and--at the center of it all--the round, rotating, vibrating bed. One writer described Hef in literary terms as a latter-day Gatsby who had assembled all the props--the never-ending parties, the red velvet jacket, the pipe, the white Mercedes 300SL convertible, the incredible Big Bunny jet. Hef was living out a bachelor's version of the American Dream.

Although we didn't know it at the time, JFK was having similar parties in the pool at the White House. He swung with Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals in Vegas and had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. When Marilyn sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President," wearing a dress that hardly covered the essentials, it seemed appropriate that a Hollywood sex star pay homage to the Washington icon. Kennedy, it was said, would do for sex what Eisenhower had done for golf.

Perhaps we should have suspected. Kennedy, after all, was a James Bond fan, and Agent 007 was the quintessential bachelor. Ian Fleming's hero was an ongoing part of Playboy in the Sixties. Bond is a Playboy reader, Fleming said, and in the film version of Diamonds Are Forever, he was a member of the London Playboy Club.

James Bond--and the superspy phenomenon he inspired--was clearly a part of the Sixties Playboy mystique, with its emphasis on gadgetry and girls. (The license to kill was strictly Fleming's invention.) Dean Martin's Matt Helm actually used working for a fictional version of Playboy as his cover and cavorted in a rotating round bed with Slaymates.

If we were going to save the world, we would do so stylishly, with the right wine and appropriate company. There would always be time for one last fling before getting back to business. Fancy fucking would win the Cold War. America's fascination with superspy spoofery was a sign the Cold War was no longer producing the paranoia of previous decades. The Red Menace was still there--but films such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ridiculed the military, with its Puritan zeal to preserve precious bodily fluids.

The last thing Hefner cared about was preserving precious bodily fluids.

The Magazine

At the start of the decade Playboy had been a literary magazine with a Centerfold, devoted to satire, science fiction and the art of seduction. In the Sixties it added a social consciousness. The magazine took controversial and frequently unpopular positions on sex, drugs, race, religion and the war. Playboy actively campaigned against involvement in Vietnam, but supported the servicemen who were sent there. The Washington Post reported that Playboy played the same part in Vietnam that The Stars and Stripes had played during World War Two. The men in Vietnam turned their rec rooms into Playboy Clubs and painted the Rabbit Head logo on jeeps and helicopters. The troops papered the walls of hutches with Centerfolds. Thousands of miles away from home, they still had the girl next door. No one knew what they were fighting for, but the Playboy Playmate represented what they hoped to find on their return.

It was said that you could tell when a particular battalion had arrived in Nam by the month of the first Centerfold hanging on the wall.

Hef had created Playboy for the young urban male of his generation, but no one, not even Hefner, was prepared for what happened when the Baby Boomers came of age and began to buy the magazine. Circulation climbed from one million a month in 1960 to nearly six million at the end of the decade. One out of every four college men purchased the magazine every month--and the rest were presumably reading a classmate's copy. More than in any other medium, the Sixties happened in the pages of Playboy.

The Playboy Philosophy

In 1962 Hefner sat down to write what he immodestly referred to as "the Emancipation Proclamation of the sexual revolution." He called it simply The Playboy Philosophy, and in it the editor-publisher spelled out--"for friends and critics alike--our guiding principles and editorial credo."

Having led men out of bondage in the Fifties, Hefner was ready to address some of the more serious questions related to sexual repression. He returned to the topics he had dealt with in 1950 in a college paper on irrational sex laws. It was a personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of our Puritan heritage.

The Philosophy was a 25-part teachin on sex, a consciousness-raising session that defined freedom in terms of the individual. Hefner believed that "man's personal self-interest is natural and good," that "morality should be based upon reason," that "the purpose in man's life should be found in the full living of life itself and the individual pursuit of happiness."

He attacked "the utter lack of justification in the State's making unlawful certain private acts performed by two consenting adults" and said flatly, "There can be no possible justification for religion's using the State to coercively control the sexual conduct of the members of a free society.

"If a man has a right to find God in his own way," he wrote, "he has a right to go to the Devil in his own way also."

If we were not free in our minds and our bodies, we were not free.

Critics claimed that Playboy had become a bible for young men and warned that "The Playboy Philosophy has become a substitute religion." Benjamin DeMott, a professor of English at Amherst, charged in an article called "The Anatomy of Playboy" that the magazine presented "the whole man reduced to his private parts."

Harvard theologian Harvey Cox attacked Playboy for being "basically antisexual." He declared that the magazine emphasized "recreational sex," and claimed that girls are just another "Playboy accessory."

But Hefner was espousing a new sexual ethic, one based on an acceptance of the sexual nature of man. Sex was neither sacred nor profane, he said. He attempted to separate sex from its traditional associations with "sickness, sin and sensationalism."

He argued that society's sexual dialogue had come to resemble George Orwell's Newspeak. Goodsex was chastity. Sexcrime was any form of sex outside of marriage. Hefner argued that some sex outside marriage was moral, and that some sex inside marriage was clearly immoral. He railed against early marriage, decrying the church--state licensing of sex.

More than by anything else, Hefner was frustrated by the hypocrisy of the past, by the lies and failures of an older generation that thought "sex is best hidden away somewhere, and the less said about it the better."

"The sexual activity that we pompously preach about and protest against in public," he wrote, "we enthusiastically practice in private. We lie to one another about sex; we lie to our children about sex; and many of us undoubtedly lie to ourselves about sex. But we cannot forever escape the reality that a sexually hypocritical society is an unhealthy society that produces more than its share of perversion, neurosis, psychosis, unsuccessful marriage, divorce and suicide."

Sex, he wrote, "is often a profound emotional experience. No dearer, more intimate, more personal act is possible between two human beings. Sex is, at its best, an expression of love and adoration. But this is not to say that sex is or should be limited to love alone. Sex exists with and without love--and in both forms it does far more good than harm. The attempts at its suppression, however, are almost universally harmful."

Sex was sex. More often than not it was fun. What a concept.

The New Morality

The quest for a new sexual ethic ricocheted throughout the culture. A college professor in North Carolina taught a course in philosophy that ranged from "Socrates to Hefner." Presbyterian minister Gordon Clanton stated the challenge posed to the church: "The church of Jesus Christ stands at the threshold of total irrelevance vis-à-vis one of man's most pressing concerns--his sexuality and the religious and societal demands associated with it. Although our people live in the age of Kinsey, Hefner and Enovid, the church and its spokesmen continue the futile attempt to extrapolate a full understanding of sex from the thought of Moses, Augustine and Calvin."

Everyone tried to play catch-up. Father Richard McCormick, in an article on the new sexual morality in The Catholic World, wrote that the church's greatest challenge lay in "[Playboy's] ultimate formula for significance: Sex equals fun. Mr. Hefner is making a tremendous effort to be taken seriously, and it is a measure of our confusion that he is partially succeeding."

Time magazine claimed that the new sexual morality could be reduced to one sentence from Ernest Hemingway: "What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

In an article called "The Second Sexual Revolution," Time paraded the new crop of moral experts. State University of Iowa sociologist Ira Reiss described "permissiveness with affection." Boiled down, his theory was: "(1) Morals are a private affair. (2) Being in love justifies premarital sex and, by implication, extramarital sex. (3) Nothing really is wrong as long as nobody else gets hurt."

Lester Kirkendall, author of Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships, offered this: "The moral decision will be the one which works toward the creation of trust, confidence and integrity in relationships." Teachers (continued on page 146)Make Love Not War(continued from page 112) would ask one simple question of students who came to them for counseling: "Will sexual intercourse strengthen or weaken their relationship?" Better that men and women explore the possibilities, discover who they were and what they wanted, before choosing a lifetime partner. Hefner expanded the universe of premarital sex to include experimentation that would not necessarily lead to marriage.

In place of marriage, the Sixties gave us the meaningful relationship. Critics of Hefner identified him as a prophet of hedonism, and incorrectly reduced The Playboy Philosophy to: "If it feels good, do it." (That phrase never appeared in the Philosophy, but it echoed through the culture.)

Psychologist Abraham Maslow elevated hedonism to an existential tenet in Toward a Psychology of Being. Pleasure, he wrote, was a path to growth. We should be like children, spontaneously living for the moment. Living, not preparing to live. "Growth," he said, "takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the last; the only way we can ever know what is right for us is that it feels better subjectively than any alternative. The new experience validates itself rather than by any outside criterion."

Joy, a word long missing from American discourse, reentered our vocabulary. "The joy consideration, I think, is really at the heart of the thing," Hefner told members of a 1963 panel discussion on the sexual revolution in America, hosted by David Susskind. "It is the joy and the understanding and the truth and the pleasure of sex that are the good parts."

The revolution nailed the new morality to the doors of the church. In Christianity and Crisis, Harvey Cox continued to discuss the problems raised by Playboy (noting that "Hefner's wearisome attack on the religious repression of sex has reached its 16th turgid installment"). Robert Fitch, dean of the Pacific School of Religion, tried to devise "A Common Sense Sex Code" for the readers of The Christian Century. "Either you control sex, or sex controls you," he wrote. "Needed right now are bigger and better inhibitions. Surely there is something ludicrous in the notion that while liquor, cigarettes and ice cream must be put under the most strict and rational controls, sex, on the contrary, is something to which you may help yourself when, as and if you please."

Joseph Fletcher, a theologian, lamented the loss of the old punishments, the repressive trinity of "conception, infection and detection."

In early 1965 more than 900 clergymen and students attended a convocation at Harvard Divinity School to discuss the New Morality. Delegates heard Paul Ramsey of Princeton declare, "Lists of cans and cannots are meaningless." Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin argued for "guideposts" not "hitching posts."

How had we become so hung up on sexual morality, asked others, when the true obscenities were unfolding in Asia and in rioting U.S. ghettos?

The debate on the New Morality was mostly men talking among themselves. If males were using a new vocabulary, we would have to change the way we labeled women. Madonna. Whore. Virgin. Wife. What did these terms mean anymore? We could change our moral rationale, but what would the women say?

The 1963 Susskind panel discussion with Hefner and others was deemed too controversial to air. The transcript recorded psychologist Albert Ellis' remark about the younger generation: "They are behaving, while we are still thinking about behaving."

The feminine mystique

What was the status of women in America? Hefner had responded to the charge that sexual liberation demeaned women by saying that women were the major victims of our traditional taboos. Our Judeo-Christian heritage supports the double standard that makes women second class citizens. Ira Reiss, he noted, believed that: "The Christians of the Roman era opposed from the beginning the new changes in the family and in female status. They fought the emancipation of women. They demanded a return to the older and stricter ideas and, beyond this, they instituted a very low regard for sexual relations and for marriage. Ultimately, these early Christians accorded marriage, family life, women and sex the lowest status of any known culture in the world."

In 1963 Betty Friedan would address similar issues in The Feminine Mystique. A journalist, she had abandoned her career to raise a family in the suburbs. Like many postwar women, she traded her brains for a broomstick. Women, she wrote, had been seduced and betrayed by the feminine mystique, the notion that a woman could find fulfillment as a wife and mother. Her book, originally titled The Togetherness Woman, was a full frontal attack on the family togetherness phenomenon of the Fifties.

Friedan found that a house in the suburbs was a comfortable concentration camp. "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women," she wrote. "It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: Is this all?"

Friedan called this malaise "the problem that has no name."

Three million women bought The Feminine Mystique. Out of their dissatisfaction emerged a new feminist movement. The goals of this movement were not unlike those expressed by Hefner when he launched Playboy. What Friedan called the feminine mystique, he called the womanization of America. He too had seen the trap of suburbia. And now, it seemed, women wanted to be more like men--single men.

Friedan claimed that the pressure cooker of suburbia turned women into insatiable sex seekers. One housewife had told her that "sex was the only thing that made her 'feel alive."' Denied status in the public sphere, these women would turn to sex, demanding more from their husbands or ricocheting into affairs. But sex didn't remedy their lack of fulfillment in the outside world.

Friedan was not antisexual--she recalled fondly her years as a single woman during World War Two, when every girl kept a diaphragm under her girdle and had affairs with married men at work. But when sex was the last frontier (as David Riesman called it) or the last green thing (as Gerald Sykes described it), it became stripped of its power to rejuvenate. For sex to thrive, it had to occur among equals. Friedan wondered if her housewives, in need of the "feeling of personal identity, of fulfillment, seek in sex something that sex alone cannot give."

Sex and the Single Girl

Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, tackled the same question as Friedan did but came up with a different answer. When Brown looked at marriage and asked, "Is that all there is?" her answer was, "Yes. So put it off for as long as you can."

Brown made her great confession: "Theoretically, a nice single woman has no sex life. What nonsense! She has a better sex life than most of her married friends."

The reasons were simple. "Why else is a single woman attractive? She has more time and often more money to spend on herself. She has the extra 20 minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make up her face. Besides making herself physically more inviting, she has the freedom to furnish her mind. She can read Proust, learn Spanish, study Time, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal."

More important, wrote Brown, "a single woman moves in the world of men. She knows their language--the language of retailing, advertising, motion pictures, exporting, shipbuilding. Her world is far more colorful than the world of the PTA, Dr. Spock and the jammed clothes drier."

Brown was the female version of Hefner (even though Playboy was not as inclined to sprinkle its philosophy with words like pippy-poo and mouseburger). She, too, was living proof of her own idea. She wrote her book having made the good catch, a husband who encouraged her work. "He wouldn't have looked at me when I was 20. And I wouldn't have known what to do with him."

The book devoured the best-seller lists, was soon translated into ten languages and was turned into a movie, netting $200,000 for the film rights.

Just as Hefner made it safe to be a bachelor, Brown made being "the girl" into a great adventure. She wrote a follow-up called Sex and the Office, declaring that it was completely honorable to seduce and even to marry the boss.

Hearst Corp. hired her to take over Cosmopolitan in 1965 and turn it into the female counterpart to Playboy.

Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women. Helen Gurley Brown gave us the singles bar. One thing made women's transitions into the world of work and the world of play possible: the Pill.

The Pill

The numbers tell the story. Within a year and a half of Enovid's approval by the FDA, some 408,000 women were taking the drug. By 1964 the figure was 2.5 million for Enovid, another million for a similar product by Ortho. By 1966 more than half of married women under the age of 20 were on the Pill. Among non-Catholic college graduates under the age of 25, the figure was 81 percent. Even more remarkable, Catholic women embraced the Pill: One out of five wives under the age of 45 used it. (See sidebar on page 168.)

Women took the Pill to postpone their first pregnancies, to avoid falling into the family trap described by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Their parents may have had the perfect family--four children one after another--but that model shackled a woman to one role. Wives of the Sixties used the Pill to space the births of their children, to create time to complete degrees or advance careers. The Pill granted the means to achieve the original feminist vision.

Single women used the Pill to postpone their first marriages. By 1969 it was estimated that more than half of unmarried college coeds were on oral contraceptives.

The Pill is credited with sparking the sexual revolution. By separating sex from procreation, women were finally free to pursue pleasure without risk. And pursue they did. One study conducted during the mid-Sixties showed that married women on the Pill had sex 39 percent more frequently than married women using other, less effective forms of contraception. But the same study showed that coitus increased for everyone over the decade. Between 1965 and 1970, the average frequency of coitus went from 6.8 times per month to 8.2 times. People on the Pill mated an average of ten times per month--a frequency matched only by those couples who were trying to get pregnant. Sex for recreation and sex for procreation were in a dead heat.

Loretta McLaughlin, author of The Pill, John Rock and the Church, lists the challenges posed by the new technology: "Far more than just unpopular, the idea of a birth control pill was still widely regarded as socially immoral and medically questionable. A birth control pill would be the first medicine in history given to well people solely for a social purpose.

"Sex would be set free, not only for the married, but for any woman, anywhere, any time, with anyone. Not only would the risk of pregnancy be eliminated, but, astonishingly, only the woman concerned would know. The whole control of her sexuality as well as her fertility would be placed in her hands. There would be no telltale act of preparedness associated with sex relations. Even more momentous, there would be no consequence as there was before, no aftermath of an unwanted pregnancy or an abortion. It amounted to handing over to women, for the first time in history, not only total governance over their sexual behavior, but total privacy--some would say secrecy. Women's sexual prerogatives would equal men's."

In the pages of The New York Times Magazine Andrew Hacker described the changing etiquette of sex: "For a long time there has been a certain ritual, not without moral overtones, connected with birth control as practiced by unmarried people. The young man is 'prepared' on a date, the girl is not. If there is a seduction, he takes the initiative; she is surprised. If she succumbs, he deals with the prevention of conception--which is proper because she had no advance warning as to how the evening would turn out. Vital to this ritual is the supposition that the girl sets off on the date believing that it will be platonic. If it ends up otherwise, she cannot be accused of having planned ahead for the sexual culmination. But now, for a girl to be on the Pill wipes out entirely the ritual of feminine unpreparedness."

Mademoiselle responded to Hacker, noting that while the Pill made it difficult for women to be demure, "surely, nowadays, it is both aesthetically and psychologically preferable for a girl who engages in sex to do so wholeheartedly, joyously, responsibly and responsively--rather than as an innocent victim."

The word no was banned (perhaps exiled is a better word). Suddenly sex was no longer the carrot, the reward for a proposal of marriage. The technical virgin--that elaborately entangled novitiate who had been able to achieve orgasm with tongue or fingers, in cramped quarters--was an endangered species.

A young man growing up in the Sixties tells about the pre-Pill dangers of dry humping: "I spent an afternoon at my girlfriend's house, rubbing against her. I must have come four times. When I left, my underwear was soaking wet. I walked out into a 20-degree winter day and suddenly, my underwear froze. My penis felt like a tongue stuck to an ice cube tray. I was in public, so I couldn't touch my crotch to warm up. I waited for a bus, worried that I would never get to use it again."

He survived to grow into a world where sex was not a struggle, where sex became a way to say hello, a way to find out if you liked a person.

A woman was no longer fettered to her purse nor by proximity to a diaphragm. No more barefoot dashes across cold wood floors to interrupt sex for safety. In an odd way, the Pill was less premeditated than diaphragms and condoms. Each day a woman looked at the dial of pills, took one and said, "I am a sexual being, free to be spontaneous."

The press, always conservative, charted the impact of the Pill. It told of a jealous husband who substituted aspirin for his wife's pills, to see if she was sleeping with someone else. We learned of housewives on Long Island who supplemented their incomes by Pill-protected prostitution. We heard about girls telling boys that they were on the Pill when they weren't. The Pill would become for many women the most important recreational drug of the century.

Our Lady of the Laboratory

We may never know her name. Dr. Leslie Farber, the first person to describe her, called her "the Lady of the Laboratory." Malcolm Muggeridge, in an apoplectic tirade titled "Down With Sex," called her "the Unknown Onanist" and said she deserved her own monument, like that of the Unknown Soldier.

She was one of 382 females who had had sex with an artificial penis--a clear plastic tube filled with cold light and a camera--while being observed by two sex researchers named Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson in St. Louis.

And what that camera saw would change our most basic notions of female sexuality. A film would show a woman's hand stroking her clitoris, would show the walls of the vagina glisten with lubrication, would show the clitoris bow and withdraw behind folds of flesh, would show the oceanic swells of orgasm ripple those vaginal walls.

Never mind that the scientists had also observed 312 males in the acts of intercourse and automanipulation. Who cared about male sexual response? A woman's orgasm, a woman's anatomy, a woman's potential--that demanded the world's attention.

The drumroll of publicity--most of it adverse--preceded the 1966 publication of Human Sexual Response by more than a year. Dr. Farber, a psychoanalyst in Washington, D.C., criticized almost every aspect of the research project, claiming that Masters and Johnson dehumanized sex. Not only had the scientists done away with "modesty, privacy, reticence, abstinence, chastity, fidelity, shame"--the emotional arsenal of a repressed society--they had reduced them to "rather arbitrary matters that interfered with the health of the sexual parts."

What seemed to bother Farber most was that the unidentified woman in the film had achieved her orgasm without male help. "According to the lesson of the laboratory," he wrote, "there is only one perfect orgasm--if by perfect we mean one wholly subject to its owner's will, wholly indifferent to human contingency or context. Clearly the perfect orgasm is the orgasm achieved on one's own. No other consummation offers such certainty and moreover avoids the messiness that attends most human affairs. Nor should we be too surprised if such solitary pleasure becomes the ideal by which all mutual sex is measured."

Muggeridge saw Masters and Johnson's research as the ultimate result of America's newfound belief in sex as pleasure. "Thus stripped, sex becomes an orgasm merely. To those self-evident rights in the famous Declaration there should be added this new, essential one: the Right to Orgasm."

Colette Dowling and Patricia Fahey also found the uppercase key on their typewriter. In an article in Esquire they wrote that "the new female status symbol is the orgasm." Women were suddenly embarked on "the Quest for the Holy Wail"; all of women's accomplishments paled next to "the Quality Orgasm." The Lady of the Laboratory described by Farber had "long been the woman of the American Sex Daydream." If only Masters and Johnson would release the film, they argued, every woman would be able "to raise her Orgasm Capacity."

How was a woman to attain this goal? Dowling and Fahey invoked images of belly dancers lifting eggs off tables with their genitals and quoted a sex manual that said the sexual responsibilities of women included exercising that magical pubococcygeus muscle.

When Human Sexual Response appeared it was an immediate best-seller, staying on the charts for six months. Masters and Johnson presented the physiology of arousal, breaking down the sex act into four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasmic and resolution. The book read like an owner's manual for the human body, recording myriad minute details: the clitoris retracting under its hood, the rising of the testicles as the male approaches orgasm, the skin rash sweeping across a lover's body like a summer squall. This is what the body did during sex, whether the sex was premarital, extramarital, solo or whatever.

Dr. Masters would later explain the impact of defining sex purely in terms of physiology. In a 1968 Playboy Interview he said: "Sexual demand seems to be a unique physiological entity. Unlike other demands, it can be withdrawn from; it can be delayed or postponed indefinitely. You can't do this with bowel function or cardiac or respiratory function. Perhaps because it can be influenced in this unique manner, sex has been pulled out of context. Lawyers and legislators have taken a hand in telling us how to regulate sexual activity. They don't, of course, presume to regulate heart rate."

In the eyes of the scientist, all orgasms were equal. Masters and Johnson put sex back into the context of the body. There was no sin in a vital sign, the rapid heartbeat or the powerful contractions of the penis or vagina. With one hand, the Lady of the Laboratory swept away the cobwebs and we saw sex in a new light. She made us aware of the clitoris. As someone would say (probably me), prior to 1966 everyone thought the clitoris was a monument in Greece. Indeed, the word clitoris appeared in the pages of Playboy for the first time in Masters and Johnson's 1968 interview.

Forget penis envy. The clitoris--which researchers called the homolog, anatomically, of the penis--was the only organ in the human body whose sole purpose was pleasure. Women had one. Men didn't.

It wasn't as though we hadn't known the clitoris existed. Freud had charmingly compared it to pine kindling used to ignite the whole body. Then he queered sex for 60 years by insisting that orgasms created by stroking and stoking the little fire were immature. Mature women went past that sideshow barker to experience deeper, vaginal orgasms produced by penetration and the great god Cock.

Masters and Johnson showed that at climax the whole body was involved in orgasm. Nipples became erect. Nostrils flared. The mind set off its own electrical show. It was absurd to divide the body and create hierarchies based on some analyst who studied people while they lay fully clothed on his couch.

•

Masters and Johnson were acutely aware of how phallocentric American sex had become. Only once in a 366-page book did they mention oral sex--and anal sex not at all. They knew these behaviors existed, but oral sex was still against the law in almost every state. They worried that even to mention such practices would cost them their careers. "We didn't have the courage," they told Playboy years later.

The book is filled with treasures. Women had another ability denied men. The chart for male sexual response showed a one-hill roller-coaster ride. Up. Peak. Down.

The chart for female sexual response showed a single peak cycle, a multipeak cycle and one curve that looked like a stone skipping across water. Women were capable of multiple orgasms.

That potential drew us into the sex act, to prolonging it, to playing with different buttons, to lighting up the universe and going for bonus points. Some women claimed that the emphasis on orgasm and multiple orgasms turned them into objects; others simply lay back and collected on a debt long overdue.

There is an irony here: At the very moment the Pill made intercourse safe for the unprotected penis, intercourse was deemed irrelevant. On the other hand, a woman could ride an erection, a tongue or a vibrator all night.

In the realm of applied science, a California inventor named Jon Tavel sought a patent for a battery-powered, bullet-shaped vibrator. The Post Office reported that mail-order companies were deluging widows and housewives with advertisements for "a fairly expensive fornication machine."

On your mark. Get set. Go.

Campus Sex

To fully appreciate the social upheaval that swept through the Sixties, one must look at a different laboratory. The college campus was a microcosm of the culture outside. What did the first war babies and Baby Boomers encounter as they came of age?

In 1960 Leo Koch, a biology professor at the University of Illinois, wrote a letter to the campus newspaper describing a novel idea: "With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least from a family physician, there is no valid reason that sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics."

A strongly worded letter from the Reverend Ira Latimer, an alumni dad, accused Koch of being part of a communist conspiracy aimed at subverting "the religious and moral foundations of America."

Koch was suspended, then dismissed. One headline stated: professor to be fired for urging free love. Students who demonstrated for Koch's free speech rights were photographed by the school's head of security, a former FBI agent.

In 1962 Sarah Gibson Blanding, the president of Vassar, reminded students that "the college expects every student to uphold the highest standards." She stated that premarital sex relations constituted "offensive and vulgar behavior" and that anyone who disagreed could simply leave campus.

Yalies predicted "a mass exodus from Poughkeepsie of indignant Vassar women wearing their diaphragms as badges of courage."

Blanding was simply exercising the power known as in loco parentis, the notion that the college should act in place of parents. One National Review editorial noted that in the past this had meant keeping Joe College sober enough to make his classes, but in the Sixties it became one of the last barricades to fall in the sexual revolution. As the Baby Boomers came of age, the college population increased dramatically, with a record six out of ten high school grads going on to higher education. More important, the percentage of women attending higher education doubled--creating a balance between the sexes.

College offered a room of one's own, no parental supervision and a jury of one's peers.

Colleges traditionally relied on a sexual time clock--known as parietal hours--to control romance. Women's dormitories were subject to lockouts. As Margaret Mead noted in an article prompted by Blanding's Vassar crusade: "Any girl who stayed out under circumstances in which she might be suspected of having had premarital sex relations was removed from the college--sometimes gently, sometimes harshly."

This was an era when married college women were not allowed to live in dormitories for fear they might provide "a contaminating atmosphere." Some Catholic colleges forbade students from going steady, saying the behavior was an "occasion for sin." They worried that when young lovers ran out of things to talk about, they would turn to sex.

Schools created bizarre and elaborate rules to control young lust. Handbooks dictated the number of dates students could have each semester, the hours in which the sexes could intermingle. Males and females could visit one another, but lights had to be on. (Students got around this by leaving a closet light on.) A school rule that said a door had to be open "the width of a book" sparked creative students to meet the letter of the law with a matchbook. A male student who wanted privacy would hang a tie from the doorknob of his room. (Mort Sahl tells of a campus Romeo who employed the code so often his roommate got suspicious and discovered the supposed Romeo alone, reading.)

The college handbooks were a Kama Sutra Americana--demanding that a male and a female in a dorm room keep at least three feet on the floor.

Some schools tried to put a stopwatch on dating--defining the term as spending more than 15 minutes in the company of a member of the opposite sex.

Russell Kirk tried to defend in loco parentis in the National Review: "A great many students at Columbia or Harvard--perhaps the majority--are decent people who have enrolled to learn something or other. They aren't alcoholics or satyrs. They might even enjoy a little quiet in which to read a book or converse. Decent people too have their rights, particularly the right not to have to endure a nuisance and a stench. If young people prefer the atmosphere of a sporting house, let them go thither--and leave the dormitories of Columbia and Harvard to these horrible prigs who actually still believe, after their reactionary fashion, that a college is a place of learning and meditation."

Barely three years into the decade, an off-Broadway theater group called the Premise was using humor to ridicule the public posture of college administrators. Mocking a commencement speech, an actor intoned:

"Ladies of Vassar and your guests from Harvard and Yale: I would like to say that premarital sex is indecent, immoral and wrong--and the least that you could do is stop while I'm talking to you."

By 1964 seven of 19 private colleges in the East had abandoned in loco parentis and restrictive dorm rules; none of the 18 public universities had yielded. By the end of the decade even Vassar had gone coed and created coed dorms.

Gael Greene, author of Sex and the College Girl, reported that the myth of the virgin was ridiculed on almost every campus. The owl at DePauw University was supposed to hoot when a virgin walked by, a Confederate soldier at the University of Mississippi salute, a statue of Abe Lincoln at the University of Wisconsin rise. Of course, they never did.

Students questioned the need for special protection. Many young people had gone away to college specifically to get away from parental supervision. The Fifties had encouraged early marriage. Nearly a quarter of 18-year-olds were already married. A student at Cornell told Greene that she couldn't see what the fuss was all about. After all, she said, "We're the high school girls who didn't get pregnant."

Some campus doctors actually prescribed the Pill to female students, saying they would rather see them now than six months later asking for an abortion. But it was done discreetly.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, male students had a new argument against in loco parentis. If an 18-year-old could be drafted and sent to war, an 18-year-old student should have control over his own actions--specifically the sexual. The concept became known as Our Bodies, Our Selves. Let me fuck before I die.

Coeds examined their coyness, the false front of flirtation. Students at Radcliffe complained that teasing was cruel. A Wesleyan teacher noted the girl who teased was a "sexual pirate." If you are going to do it, do it with affection. Students took courses in sexual ethics. A UCLA coed told Greene that Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals was "more or less my undoing." Philosophy courses introduced them to Norman O. Brown and Freud's concept of polymorphous perversity--the notion that the entire body is an erogenous zone.

Gloria Steinem would call the phenomenon "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed." She ended that article by stating, "The main trouble with sexually liberating women is that there aren't enough sexually liberated men to go around."

Everything happening in the culture at large swept through colleges. Walls sprouted posters of Che Guevara, the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix. A million guys bought the poster of Raquel Welch as a cavewoman in One Million Years B.C. and turned the Playmate of the Month into an icon. Some actually believed if you put a poster of a naked woman on the wall of your room, it would attract real naked women.

Cult classics such as Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land encouraged a new kind of sexuality--a "growing closer." Heinlein's science fiction novel, written in 1960, proved remarkably prophetic. The story of Valentine Michael Smith--the sole survivor of an expedition to Mars--foresaw cults, hot tubs (or at least communal nude bathing), group sex, the girl next door as a vagabond striptease artist and sacred prostitute, and the government destruction of communes. The tale also foreshadowed altered states of consciousness, with a technique called grokking.

By 1966 Robert Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment--a tale about an experimental college program in New England in which students were assigned roommates of the opposite sex, took phys ed classes together in the nude and attended nightly seminars in sexual ethics--billed itself as the "Sex Manifesto of the Free Love Generation." In Rimmer's fantasy world students were expected to sleep together. One of the few rules was to limit yourself to one partner per menstrual cycle, so that if a girl became pregnant there would be no question who the father was.

One of the coeds in Rimmer's book becomes a centerfold for Cool Boy Magazine, but only after demanding that the photographers and the publisher take off their clothes as well.

By 1969 many colleges were experimenting with coed dormitories. Look reported on what happens when members of the opposite sex spend time in continual close proximity: "There's more work sex when you live like this, just because girls are here. I mean, sex is sort of in the air."

But with a new twist: "You think twice about sleeping with a girl when you know you have to face her the next morning at breakfast--and at lunch, and at dinner, and at breakfast."

Coed dormitories changed courtship, the hideous formality of fraternity parties, the desperate fumbling for sex before lockout, the pressure to be pinned or spoken for. Gone were the makeup and rented tuxedo. "You see a girl at all her moments," said one guy, "not just her dressed-up ones." Gone were the corsages.

•

Leo Koch, the visionary professor who was tossed out of the University of Illinois, moved on to better things. With Jefferson Poland, a former civil rights activist, Professor Koch formed the New York Sexual Freedom League. The idea caught on. Poland moved to California, formed the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League and got arrested for staging a nude wade-in in the Bay. The University of California Sexual Freedom Forum sold buttons that said I'm willing if you are. Some scoffed at the buttons--arguing that you didn't need to join a movement to practice sexual freedom. On the other hand, weekly orgies involving 20 to 45 students didn't just happen by themselves.

The sexual freedom leagues moved off campus and blossomed into a network of wife-swapping couples and swingers' clubs. In loco parentis gave way to parents gone loco with lust. The freedom of the campus spread into the culture at large.

The Counterculture

There were those who turned their back on higher education. The walls around campus could not keep the real world at bay. Issues such as race and war made the rat race for a degree seem obscene. At Berkeley students fought for four months to have the right to raise money for political causes on campus. At the height of the furor students staged a sit-in on Sproul Plaza, holding a police cruiser hostage.

Increasingly, students simply dropped out and formed radical new communities, along New York's St. Mark's Place, Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, San Francisco's Haight Street, Chicago's Wells Street and Madison's Mifflin Street. They formed co-ops and collectives, or simply announced the existence of crash pads. These communities had enormous drawing power for the young. In 1966 the FBI reported that 90,000 teenagers had been arrested as runaways.

The counterculture re-created America, starting with underground newspapers. In Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, Abe Peck gives this comparison: "Main-stream newspapers ran crime news and arts reviews and Dick Tracy. Underground papers ran demonstration news and rock reviews and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, a comic about three amiable heads Tracy would have busted for their rampant pot smoking. The dailies carried ads for pots and pans and suits; the undergrounders sold rolling papers, LPs and jeans."

By 1967, Peck notes, there were 20 underground papers. By 1969 there were at least 500. The underground press was rude and confrontational. Pioneer Ed Sanders' 1962 magazine was called simply Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

The new culture embodied the McLuhanesque insight that in the global village people did not need jobs, they needed roles. The counterkids raided thrift shops and became gypsies, Elizabethan ladies, shamans, knights, clowns, cowboys, gurus and the like. Head shops supplied love beads, incense, cabalistic texts, massage oils, Indian fabrics and Lava lamps.

The counterculture turned the entire world into an art school. Mime troupes staged guerrilla theater in the streets, bands played in parks and old union halls. Borrowing a page from The Playboy Philosophy, a group called the Open Theater ready aloud from a 19th century sermon on the consequences of masturbation. Later, they staged a series of happenings called Revelations, in which motion pictures were projected on the bodies of naked actors and actresses. The young and the hip wore the movies as a second skin.

Those in the counterculture lived the Beat vision, and treated as saints figures such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ken Kesey's novel about inmates taking over an asylum, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, became the bible of the new rebellion. Kesey then gave up writing for a form of living art. He and the Merry Pranksters threw Trips Festivals, exploring the potential of LSD, which was still legal at the time. Some estimate that he turned on more than 10,000 people. Acid was as cheap and plentiful as confetti at a parade.

In 1966, the counterculture staged a Love-Pageant Rally to celebrate "the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy and the expansion of consciousness."

The invitation read: "Bring children. Flowers. Banners. Flutes. Drums. Feathers. Bands. Beads. Flags. Incense. Chimes. Gongs. Cymbals. Symbols." In 1967 that spirit culminated in the Summer of Love and the first be-in.

The authentic counterculture was over almost as quickly as it began. In October 1967 a group paraded a giant coffin through the Haight, announcing "the Death of the Hippie. Son of Media." A community of maybe 7000 gentle souls became a tourist attraction warding off 75,000 hippie wannabes over a single summer. Concerned citizen Chester Anderson printed a flier warning of the danger of the dream: "Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3000 mikes and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street."

The idea of the Haight disturbed conservatives and created new demagogues. Charles Perry recounts in his The Haight-Ashbury: A History that an actor named Ronald Reagan successfully campaigned for governor of California by promising to restore capital punishment, punish rebellious students at Berkeley and crack down on obscenity.

Within a week of Reagan's election, police busted the Psychedelic Shop for selling obscene literature. Two days later the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach was raided.

The obscenity in question was The Love Book by Lenore Kandel, a small-press collection of four poems. The community sponsored a protest read-in. Professors from local universities read aloud from a poem called To Fuck With Love.

When the book was declared obscene by a court, the poet thanked the police and pledged part of her earnings to their retirement fund. Their action had taken a book that had sold "about 50" copies and turned it into a local bestseller (with more than 20,000 copies sold after the bust).

Hippies took up a new address. In 1967 Hair played at the Public Theater of New York, then moved to Broadway. Put a flower in your hair. Must be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll

The counterculture was an idea, not an address, an energy, not a neighborhood. It represented the fusion of three forces--sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Rock heroes were phallic personalities who had sex with an entire nation. Jim Morrison of the Doors grabbed his genitals during performances and simulated oral sex. In Miami he mimed masturbation and exposed himself, earning an arrest.

When the Stones toured America in 1965, groupies lined up to get a taste of rock's nastiest boys. Every tour had a sexual sideshow as female fans traded oral sex for access to the stars, working their way through doormen, bellhops, roadies and managers.

Kathy and Mary, known as the Dynamic Duo, partied with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Terry Reid. But they had their clits set on Mick. Indeed, he was the benchmark. Their morning-after conversations went something like this: "Brian Jones? He's great." Pause. "But he's no Mick Jagger."

"Keith Richards? Fantastic." Pause. "But he's no Mick Jagger."

When they finally bedded Mick, the morning-after review went: "Mick? He's cool." Pause. "But he's no Mick Jagger."

Little wonder that two groupies in Chicago honored their heroes by making plaster casts of their private parts.

The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Youngbloods were gypsy bands. The rock of the counterculture was migratory. Concerts became social events--with audiences numbering in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, culminating in Woodstock, with numbers half a million strong. This was the body politic gone Dionysian--we went from alienation to Woodstock nation.

Abe Peck remembers rock "radiating what life could feel like if only people got together. Like a Rolling Stone, Satisfaction, My Generation, A Day in the Life, Purple Haze, Down on Me were stunning songs, vinyl diary entries marking a listener's first apartment, demonstration, orgasm, trip."

Rock heroes were the journalists of the new culture: When the Beatles discovered LSD, it showed in their music. Recreational drugs had their stamp of approval. The leap from Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds (a tribute to lysergic acid) to Magical Mystery Tour was rapid. Millions climbed on board the bus.

By his own estimate, Timothy Leary had tripped more than 100 times before the thought occurred to him to try sex on psychedelics. So much for the value of a Berkeley Ph.D.

Leary, who had first sampled magic mushrooms sitting around a pool in Cuernavaca in 1960, had been relatively unchanged by the drugs. "I routinely listened to pop music, drank martinis, ate what was put before me," he admitted.

Flora Lu Ferguson, wife of jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, suggested that Leary learn what life was like "in the first-class lounge." Leary consented and found himself tripping with Malaca, a model from Morocco. "We rose as one and walked to the sunporch. She turned, came to me, entwined her arms around my neck. We were two sea creatures. The mating process in this universe began with the fusion of moist lips producing a soft-electric rapture, which irradiated the entire body. We found no problem maneuvering the limbs, tentacles and delightful protuberances with which we were miraculously equipped in the transparent honey-liquid zero-gravity atmosphere that surrounded, bathed and sustained us."

After this experience, his hostess explained to him the secret of the universe: "It's all sex, don't you see?"

Leary brought Malaca back to Harvard but "it was hard for her to adjust to my domestic scene. After a week I still saw Malaca as a temple-dancer divinity from the 33rd Dynasty. But it soon became obvious that up here in the middle-class 20th century she was out of place, turning into a petulant, spoiled Arabian girl. The image from the drug session was slowly fading."

Leary checked with his guru. Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception, told him that of course psychedelics were aphrodisiacs, but "we've stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag." But outside the ivy-covered walls of academe people were discovering the delicious combination of sex and drugs on their own.

On the West Coast Ken Kesey was conducting Acid Tests--winner-take-all mind games with light shows that duplicated atomic apocalypse, a battle of the bands between the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and Elysian romps through the woods of Big Sur.

The press initially rhapsodized about the drug's potential for elaborate problem solving, for creativity, for psychoanalysis. Hallucinogenic drugs let you hear color, smell music, touch a scent. It made tripping sound like kindergarten class. Who would let the cat out of the bag? By the time Playboy caught up with Leary in 1966, he had tripped 311 times. Sex was all he could talk about.

"Sex under LSD," he said, "becomes miraculously enhanced. It increases your sensitivity a thousand percent. Compared with sex under LSD, the way you've been making love--no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from it--is like making love to a department store dummy. When you're making love under LSD, it's as though every cell in your body--and you have trillions--is making love with every cell in her body."

Recognizing a charismatic salesman, we let him talk on: "An LSD session that does not involve an ultimate merging with a person of the opposite sex isn't really complete. One of the great purposes of an LSD session is sexual union.

"In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session," said Leary, "a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms."

The Leary interview fused sex and drugs, but the magazine felt a responsibility to investigate further. The editors asked R.E.L. Masters, a researcher in the field of psychedelics and religious experience, to comment on the delights and hazards of Sex, Ecstasy and the Psychedelic Drugs in November 1967.

Masters dismissed Leary's claim for the hundred-orgasm woman: "I have yet to hear from anyone else about a single instance remotely approximating this. I feel rather confident that if it had been happening with any frequency, the world would not have had to wait for Leary to announce it."

Masters admitted that during psychedelic sex intercourse does last longer, but this is due to a distortion of time that gives the act "the flavor of eternity."

You could fill an erection with wonder. Sex was just a beginning, a stage set for awe-inspiring theater. You could genitalize any part of your body. One subject had told Masters that "he became aware of his entire body as 'one great, erect penis. The world was a vagina and I had a sense of moving in and out of it, with intense sexual sensations.' "

Whoa.

The backlash was inevitable. All America was in danger of becoming a drug culture. In 1967 Americans consumed some 800,000 pounds of barbiturates, some ten billion amphetamine tablets. But a drug that turned your whole body into an erection? Harry J. Anslinger, former Prohibition agent and father of Reefer Madness, was quick to respond to the Leary interview. "If we want to take Leary literally," he said, "we should call LSD Let's Start Degeneracy."

In 1970 the federal government created a new label for drugs for which "there is no legitimate use." LSD was banned, along with the previously outlawed marijuana and cocaine.

Sexual Politics

The counterculture believed that sex was political. It marched into battle with "banners flying from erect penises." And it knew how to play with the fears of the older generation.

The planners of a 1967 march on the Pentagon--a protest against the escalating war in Vietnam--petitioned the government for a permit to levitate the Pentagon. Abbie Hoffman invited members of the press to his apartment for a demonstration of a new hippie weapon, a psychedelic bomb. Jonah Raskin, in For the Hell of It, recounts that Hoffman told reporters that a group of radicals called the Diggers had come up with a high-potency sex juice called Lace. "When reporters showed up at Hoffman's apartment, two couples volunteered to demonstrate the power of the chemical. They sprayed one another with the purple liquid, then undressed and began to make love while reporters watched with glee. Making love would triumph over making war."

Hoffman wrote in East Village Other, "We will fuck on the grass and beat ourselves against the doors. Secretaries will disrobe and run into the streets, newsboys will rip up their newspapers and sit on curbstones masturbating."

By 1968 Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had founded the Youth International Party, the yippies. They called for a celebration of life to counteract the 1968 Democratic Convention being held in Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago. When the yippies applied for a park permit, they wrapped their request in a Playboy centerfold, on which was written the greeting: To Dick With Love, The Yippies.

Hoffman called for like-minded individuals to bring their "eager skin" to Chicago. He circulated rumors to the effect that yippie women would seduce convention delegates.

Abbie stood outside the Federal Building with a list of demands, one of them being, "People should fuck all the time, any time, whomever they wish."

Jerry Rubin gave this description: "A kid turns on television and there is his choice. Does he want to be smoking pot, dancing, fucking, stopping traffic and going to jail or does he want to be in a blue uniform beating up people or does he want to be in the convention with a tie strangling his throat making ridiculous deals and nominating a murderer?"

When "the pigs" tried to clear the streets the whole world was watching. What it saw was a police riot.

But afterward, a Harris Poll showed that 70 percent of Americans sided with the police. When the dust cleared, Richard Nixon was our president.

The Politics of Repression

In the Fifties, the nation had learned to wield scandal as a weapon of social control. In the Sixties, the federal government used sex to discredit those with dangerous ideas. One was the father of rock and roll, the other the father of the civil rights movement.

In 1960 Chuck Berry faced trial on two charges of violating the Mann Act. According to prosecutors, he had transported two women across state lines for immoral purposes. David Langum, author of Crossing Over the Line, writes that the trial was racially motivated. "Berry had a longtime business associate and secretary, a white woman named Francine Gillium. The federal prosecutor insulted her, using phrases such as, 'This blonde claims to be a secretary,' and demanding answers to questions such as, 'What kind of secretarial duties do you perform?' and 'Did you tell your people you work for a Negro?' " Berry was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail. He served 20 months.

For half a century the Mann Act, originally intended to curb a nonexistent white-slave trade, was, used to punish controversial figures from Jack Johnson (the first black heavyweight champion) to Charlie Chaplin. In 1962 the Department of Justice directed U.S. Attorneys to refrain from prosecuting noncommercial Mann Act violations without approval. Only those connected to kidnapping, rape or organized prostitution would receive government attention.

J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the Mann Act to carry out personal vendettas against those he perceived to be the enemies of the country. In the Sixties his major target was Martin Luther King Jr. The head of the FBI had placed King under surveillance in the Fifties, when the young minister drew national attention as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Hoover ordered wiretaps on King's home and offices and the hotel and motel rooms where King stayed.

Mark Felt, a deputy associate director of the Bureau, says that Hoover was "outraged by the drunken sexual orgies, including acts of perversion, often involving several persons. Hoover referred to these episodes as 'those sexual things.' " Hoover thought King was a "tomcat with obsessive, degenerate sexual urges."

In 1964, after King criticized the FBI's handling of the murders and church bombings in the South, Hoover decided to use the wiretap evidence he had compiled. He told associates, "It will destroy the burrhead."

The task fell to Assistant Director William Sullivan, who swore that King would be "revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers being what he actually is--a fraud, demagogue and moral scoundrel."

The tapes revealed that King was a sexually active male who, according to Curt Gentry, author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets, had enjoyed an "unbuttoned fling" with two female employees of the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Taylor Branch, in Pillar of Fire, writes that on January 6, 1964 the FBI had bugged King's room at the Willard Hotel near the White House. "In the midst of an eventual 11 reels and 14 hours of party babble, with jokes about scared Negro preachers and stiff white bosses, arrived sounds of courtship and sex with distinctive verbal accompaniment. At the high point of the recording, Bureau technicians heard King's distinctive voice ring out above others with pulsating abandon, saying, 'I'm fucking for God!' and 'I'm not a Negro tonight!' "

The Bureau offered highlights of the tapes to The Washington Post, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Daily News, The Atlanta Constitution and The Augusta Chronicle. Not one paper published the story. In the Sixties, the private lives of public figures were not considered appropriate subjects for journalism. A decade earlier the story would have been planted in Confidential or in Walter Winchell's column.

Frustrated, the FBI sent copies of the tapes to the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, assuming that Coretta King would open the mail. Accompanying the tapes was a letter threatening: "King, there is only one thing left for you to do.... There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

The threats and the tapes were ignored. It would take an assassin's bullet to end the dream.

Truth or Dare

Hoover was not the only man in Washington obsessed with sex. The homosexual witch-hunt of the Fifties had spread to all branches of the government and to all sexual orientations. Federal employees were routinely questioned about their sex lives. In March 1965 Congressman Cornelius Gallagher told fellow lawmakers that the government regularly outdid Kinsey, asking male and female federal employees to answer such true-or-false statements as: "My sex life is satisfactory. I enjoy reading love stories. I believe women ought to have as much sexual freedom as men do. I dream frequently about things that are best kept to myself. There is something wrong with my sex organs. I masturbated when I was an adolescent. I have had a great deal of sexual experience."

Both married and unmarried employees had to give written answers to questions asking if they had been troubled by such things as "petting and necking. Wondering how far to go with the opposite sex. Being too inhibited in sex matters. Feeling afraid of being found out. Being bothered by sexual thoughts or dreams. Worrying about the effects of masturbation."

Tristram Coffin, author of The Sex Kick, devoted a whole chapter to these American inquisitions, noting that a sadistic streak of voyeurism ran through the accounts. "The rationale used to justify this peeping," he writes, "was that a homosexual, an adulterer, a fornicator or a masturbator could, if discovered by communist agents, be blackmailed into turning over government or defense or industrial secrets. This assumed that communists were as thick as flies and were especially sensitive to erotic behavior or were leading innocent typists into sin. Later, when this appeared patently silly, the psychologists moved in and developed a new theory. Sexually aberrant individuals had unstable personalities and might cause personnel problems. Sexual aberration was most loosely defined, and the secretary who had daydreams of a love affair with Brando or the junior executive who kissed the comely chief of files behind the screen at the office party might be adjudged guilty of aberrance."

There were 512 polygraphs scattered through government agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency. Before the use of the polygraphs was curtailed following investigations by Congress, the sophisticated developed a strategy. Says Coffin: "In the true or false, reject every statement that might be considered by, say, a conservative congressman as antisocial. You don't like young people with beards, you don't approve of premarital sex relations, you never daydream about sex."

A national concern for our right to privacy was just one of the revolutionary ideas that came out of the Sixties.

Sex and Law

The idea that the state had no business in the bedroom was an idea whose time had come. In 1960 the American Law Institute, a group of judges, attorneys and professors, issued the final draft of a Model Penal Code that attempted to establish which sexual acts warranted government interference and which did not.

The new code recommended the punishment of "public indecency, prostitution, the public sale of obscenity (not the private production or noncommercial dissemination of obscenity, however), rape, sex with minors, indecent exposure, bigamy, incest and abortion."

But "private behavior will not be punished." The committee drafted a code predicated on the "danger to society rather than moral indignation."

The committee voted overwhelmingly to decriminalize adultery and fornication. When it came to the topic of sodomy, Judge Learned Hand said, "I think it is a matter of morals, a matter very largely of taste, and it is not a matter that people should be put in prison about."

Still, it was a close call. The members voted 35 to 24 to recommend that sodomy be "removed from the list of crimes against the peace and dignity of the state."

The Institute stated that the Model Penal Code would "not attempt to use the power of the state to enforce purely moral or religious standards. We deem it inappropriate for the government to attempt to control behavior that has no substantial significance except as to the morality of the actor. Such matters are best left to religious, educational and other influences."

With the publication of the code, a major offensive in the sexual revolution began. Illinois became the first state to repeal its sodomy statute, while oddly leaving in place statutes against fornication and adultery. Near the end of the decade three more states--Oregon, Montana and Connecticut--would adopt more-tolerant sex statutes. Others would follow.

Hefner devoted two entire installments of The Playboy Philosophy (February and March 1964) to the absurdity of state sex laws. As a graduate student, he had first expressed his concern in a term paper titled "Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law," written in 1950. Now he used the full power of the magazine to press for acceptance of more-liberal legislation. "No human act between two people is more intimate, more private, more personal than sex," he wrote. "And one would assume that a democratic society that prides itself on freedom of the individual, whose Declaration of Independence proclaims the right of every citizen to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and whose Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state, would be deeply concerned with any attempted infringement of liberty in this most private act."

The following month he continued: "America is presumably the land of the free and the home of the brave. But our legislators, our judges and our officers of law enforcement are allowed to enter our most private inner sanctuaries--our bedrooms--and dictate the activity that takes place there."

Other media that covered the ALI initiative downplayed the importance of reform. The statutes under attack admittedly seemed a little out of date in dusty law books, but how many people got arrested? A Time story on the original ALI initiative in 1955 had pointed out that actual enforcement was limited. In a single year, the editors noted, only 267 people had been arrested for adultery. Boston led the way with 242 arrests.

When Connecticut considered the Model Penal Code, New Haven police chief James Ahern claimed, "We hardly ever make a morals arrest anymore." The numbers seemed to back him up. Time reported that from 1965 to 1968, the number of prosecutions for fornication and lascivious carriage had dropped from 1048 to 349.

One policeman explained what justified an arrest: "When you see a black boy and a white girl together, well, you just know what's going on."

Hefner objected to state interference on principle. But he needed an individual case to drive the point home. In 1965 the magazine received a letter from Donn Caldwell, a radio disc jockey in West Virginia who was serving a ten-year sentence for committing "a crime against nature."

In Caldwell's case the act was fellatio with a teenage fan. Local authorities threatened the girl with prosecution if she didn't testify against Caldwell. Upon Caldwell's conviction, the judge ignored a psychiatric evaluation of the defendant that recommended leniency and, denying bail, remarked that he considered oral sex to be as serious a crime as murder.

It was this case that prompted Hefner to establish the Playboy Foundation as the activist arm of The Playboy Philosophy. "To put our money where our mouth was," he said.

The outpouring of sympathy for Caldwell from Playboy readers and in the West Virginia press supported a successful appeal of the conviction, funded by the Foundation. It was the first in a series of such cases, including one that led to the release of a husband who was serving a two- to 14-year sentence for having consensual anal sex with his wife in Indiana. After a marital spat, the wife had been persuaded by a neighbor to accuse the husband of the "abominable and detestable crime against nature." After the couple reconciled, the wife tried to withdraw the charge only to be told she was no longer the plaintiff. "The State of Indiana is the plaintiff."

The Playboy Foundation also helped free a young girl who was arrested, at her father's request, for fornication. His philosophy: "I'd rather see her in jail than debauched."

Over the years, the Playboy Foundation supplied funding for a series of cases involving birth control, abortion and sexual behavior. It made significant contributions to sex research (the Kinsey Institute, Masters and Johnson), sex education (Siecus) and other controversial causes, as well as to civil rights and antiwar initiatives. The Foundation also provided the initial funding for Norml's campaign to decriminalize marijuana.

Tiny skirmishes at first, the fights for the right to privacy would turn into a full-scale crusade.

The Right to Privacy

On November 10, 1961 police arrested Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. Charles Lee Buxton, a physician at the New Haven Planned Parenthood clinic. Their crimes? They had given birth control information, instruction and advice to married couples. The clinic had been open for nine days.

The law that they had broken might as well have been drafted by Anthony Comstock, the Connecticut-born Puritan who had raised so much hell at the turn of the century. It read: "Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than $50 or imprisoned not less than 60 days nor more than one year, or be both fined and imprisoned."

The case arrived before a Supreme Court that had already accepted the ALI's concept of public and private spheres of sex. On June 7, 1965 Justices William O. Douglas and Arthur Goldberg, writing for the majority, declared that marital sex was clearly protected by a right to privacy.

"Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?" wrote the Court. "The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

Justice Douglas waxed poetic. "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights--older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring and intimate to the degree of being sacred."

In a concurring opinion Justice Goldberg invoked a definition of privacy first outlined by Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1928 case: "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."

Justice Brandeis had earlier articulated that thought in a dissenting opinion. Now the voice of the majority embraced the right to privacy. It was the first time the Justices used the Ninth Amendment to reflect "the collective conscience of our people" against both federal and state action.

Not everyone was overwhelmed by the victory. The editors of Life wondered "what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the Supreme Court's recent gloss on his immortal handiwork." The right of privacy "may have an interesting future if the Court should apply it to such issues as wiretapping and homosexuality."

The Court soon found additional use for the newly articulated right of privacy. Federal and state agents entered the home of Robert Eli Stanley, a suspected bookmaker, and found three reels of stag movies. They arrested Stanley for "knowingly having possession of obscene matter."

The Supreme Court overturned the conviction: "Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity," wrote Justice Thurgood Marshall, "we do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole Constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."

•

Two years after the Griswold Planned Parenthood case was decided, Bill Baird was arrested while lecturing to a crowd of students in Boston about contraception. He had handed out samples of spermicidal foam to a female member of the audience, who may have been single.

State law prohibited the distribution of articles designed to prevent conception. Massachusetts argued that it had the right to protect morals through "regulating the private sexual lives of single persons."

The case would make its way to the Supreme Court, supported in part by funds from the Playboy Foundation. The Justices scoffed at the idea that the state could hold over its citizens the threat of pregnancy and the birth of an unwanted child as punishment for fornication. In 1972 the Court would argue: "If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child."

The following year, this rationale would provide a basis for one of the most controversial decisions of the century. In Roe vs. Wade, the Court would extend the right of privacy to include a woman's right to get an abortion.

Liberating the Language

Hugh Hefner was not the only American to turn a term paper into a publishing empire. In 1941, as a freshman at Swarthmore, Barney Rosset had written on "Henry Miller vs. Our Way of Life."

Rosset sided with the iconoclastic. As the head of Grove Press, he published the first unexpurgated U.S. edition of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Along battle had resulted in a surprising victory that would free language forever and remove the brown-paper wrapper from literary sex.

In the Lady Chatterley case, lawyer Charles Rembar persuaded the Court that an appeal to sexual interest was different from an appeal to prurient interest. To be sexually stimulated by a work of art was no crime. "A novel, no matter how much devoted to the act of sex, can hardly add to the constant sexual prodding with which our environment assails us," argued Rembar. "Apart from the evidence offered, the Court may take judicial notice of the fact that our advertising, our motion pictures, our television and our journalism are in large measure calculated to produce sexual thoughts and reactions. We live in a sea of sexual provocation."

Into this sea of provocation Rosset tossed more than two million copies of Tropic of Cancer, Miller's exuberant account of a writer fucking his way across Paris. Published in 1934, the book had become an underground classic, smuggled in from France by expatriates and students.

The paperback topped the charts for two years, despite the fact that nervous dealers returned 600,000 copies. The book was banned in more than 19 cities and two states, as police visited bookstores, physically clearing shelves and intimidating shop owners.

Rosset promised to pay the legal costs of any bookseller arrested for offering the book. Defending Tropic would cost his company in excess of $250,000.

Not all judges wanted to burn Tropic. In Chicago a professor at Northwestern University brought suit, claiming the police had bullied bookstore owners into dropping the work, thus denying him his freedom to read.

Judge Samuel Epstein weighed the content of the pornographic passages against the overall value of the book and decided against censorship, writing, "Let the parents control the reading matter of their children; let the tastes of the readers determine what they may or may not read; let not the government or the courts dictate the reading matter of a free people. The Constitutional freedoms of speech and press should be jealously guarded by the courts. As a corollary to the freedoms of speech and press, there is also the freedom to read. The right to free utterances becomes a useless privilege when the freedom to read is restricted or denied."

Judge Epstein became the target of crank calls and poison-pen letters. Catholics demanded that he be impeached. The Illinois Supreme Court overruled his decision on June 18, 1964, only to change its mind four days later.

On June 22, 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that Tropic of Cancer was not obscene.

In years to come, critics and would-be censors of erotica would avoid the term obscenity, using in its place the even less well defined word pornography. A Jesuit labeled as pornography anything that caused "genital commotion." Charles Rembar noted that, according to the law, literature was that which moved one above the waist. Porn was in the groin of the beholder.

Next to rise through the judicial gantlet was John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure--known simply as Fanny Hill. Published in 1749, Fanny was, according to an article in Time, "the first deliberately dirty novel in English." In a decade in which Americans devoured everything English--from James Bond to the Beatles--Fanny Hill was hard to swallow. The Reverend Morton Hill of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City went on a hunger strike, which ended when the mayor launched an antipornography drive.

The prosecutor who tackled Fanny attacked the book thusly: "Described in lurid detail are repeated meticulous recitals of sex acts, including acts of sexual perversion, set forth in a style which is a blow to the sense of the reader, and for the evident purpose of teaching the reader about sins of impurity and arousing him to libidinousness. In its 298 pages, the book describes in detail instances of lesbianism, female masturbation, the deflowering of a virgin, the seduction of a male virgin, the flagellation of male by female and female by male and other aberrant acts, as well as more than 20 acts of sexual intercourse between male and female, some of which are committed in the open presence of numerous other persons, and some of which are instances of voyeurism."

Fanny Hill won the court decision, upheld on appeal. Attorney Rembar had to fight the same battle in Massachusetts and New Jersey, building a trial record of experts testifying that Fanny Hill possessed literary merit and psychological value. When Fanny reached the Supreme Court, Rembar told the Justices that they did not even have to read the book--that both the critics and the lower courts felt the book had value, thus placing it outside the reach of the law. The Court agreed.

On the same day that they freed Fanny Hill, the Justices sent publisher Ralph Ginzburg to jail. Ginzburg's soft-core quarterly, Eros, was not sexually explicit nor patently offensive--but the way in which he advertised the publication seemed to convey the "leer of the sensualist."

According to the Court, Ginzburg had requested bulk-mailing privileges from Blue Ball, Pennsylvania and Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Twice rejected, he was successful in his effort to mail five million advertisements for Eros from Middlesex, New Jersey. Ginzburg, said the Court, was an expert "in the shoddy business of pandering." An outside observer remarked that Ginzburg's only crime was being a smartass. Not a very good reason for sending a man to prison.

But the floodgates had opened. By the end of the decade Fanny would be joined by Candy, The Story of O, The Memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and My Secret Life--as well as Sex Life of a Cop, Sex Kitten and College for Sinners.

Philip Roth gave us Portnoy, with his fist flying, coming in the wrapper of a Mounds bar in the balcony of a theater, coming in an old sock, using a cored apple as a masturbation aid, coming on liver ("I fucked my own family's dinner"), ejaculating on lightbulbs, exercising the only part of his body that was his, that was free.

Literature used sex as a window on the soul: Writers took us inside the sex act, filling it with other meanings. The hero of John Updike's Couples would muse on oral sex: "To eat another is sacred." The protagonist of Norman Mailer's An American Dream would murder his wife, then sodomize the maid, experiencing "the pure prong of desire to bugger."

Kate Millett would find in that three-page scene the seeds of her feminist manifesto Sexual Politics. Where some women found liberation in the sex act, others found a microcosm of oppression.

Sexual writing revealed what Malcolm Cowley had called the secret language of men--"words that were used in the smoking room, in the barroom, in the barbershop"--words that no respectable woman would admit knowing. Now those words came to symbolize for some not freedom but the howls of the beast.

Keating and the CDL

The battle over obscenity was not limited to courtrooms and the dry arguments of lawyers and judges. Barney Rosset would walk to work one day and find that someone had thrown a grenade into the Manhattan offices of Evergreen Review magazine, a product of Grove Press that combined erotica with left-wing politics.

As free expression gained support in the courts, there were those who organized new forms of repression. In 1958 Charles Keating, a Catholic businessman in Cincinnati, created Citizens for Decent Literature. By 1964 there were 200 chapters of the CDL scattered across the country. By 1965 300 chapters claimed a combined membership of 100,000. Some 1000 delegates would attend a CDL conference in 1965.

Keating was an odd bird. Charles Bowden and Michael Binstein, authors of Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions, report that when Keating met Mary Elaine Fette, the woman who would become his wife, he took her to a striptease joint. He pounded a cane on the floor, shouting, "Take it off. Take it off." But he would "not let Mary Elaine lift her eyes and see the naked woman who dances before them."

In the Fifties, the local FBI office briefly investigated Keating for possible fraud and espionage (involving a deal with atomic scientists) and warned J. Edgar Hoover to distance himself from Keating. More than one state looked at the CDL's cost-to-cause ratio, and decided that the group was raising money for self-indulgence, not decency.

Keating was a one-man crusade. Before a speech he would cruise newsstands to buy Love's Lash, Sensational Step Daughter and Lesbian Lust. He would wave magazines in the faces of church groups, offer to read the most offensive passages aloud to congressmen. By 1969 he had recruited four senators and 70 representatives to the honorary committee of the CDL. The authors of Trust Me point out that one of those, Representative Donald Lukens, would be convicted 20 years later of having sex with a minor.

Delegates to conventions got to stroll through the CDL's private stash of smut: nudist magazines, paperbacks, a year-book showing high school students reading Playboy and, finally, a cheap novel called Youth Against Obscenity. The novel claimed to be an exposé of a CDL-type movement: "In the crowded auditorium they preached and screamed about obscenity in magazines, but on secluded beaches and in private bedrooms they enjoyed their sex in about every imaginable way."

Keating cloaked his crusade in apocalyptic visions. On a 1963 television show called News Impact: Eyes of the Storm he said, "If the filth peddlers are allowed to freely infiltrate and deprave our community, pervert an entire generation, if they have their way, then I think our civilization is doomed, as 16 of the 19 major civilizations in the history of the world have been doomed."

Hefner called attention to the CDL in the twelfth installment of the Philosophy, calling it a front for the National Organization for Decent Literature, a Catholic group that had tried to expand its power from declaring books unfit for Catholics to banning books for all denominations.

Keating was a classic fearmonger. He told Congress that mail-order porn "causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in boys and wantonness in girls and weakens the morality of all it contacts."

He dismissed the expertise of Kinsey and sexologists Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, claiming that they wanted only to disseminate "dirty bleatings and pagan ideas."

He embodied the 19th century attitude toward masturbation. "I take for granted that most people think that it is a very bad thing and very dangerous to the physical and mental health and the moral welfare of the people who have the habit." he testified. "But we had a psychiatrist [a defense witness for adult magazines] on the stand in Cincinnati recently who said, 'Sure, these magazines stimulate the average person to sexual activity, but it would be sexual activity which would have a legitimate outlet.' The prosecutor said to him, 'Doctor, what is a legitimate or socially acceptable outlet for an 18-year-old unmarried boy?' The doctor answered, 'Masturbation.' When you are met with that kind of situation, you begin to wonder."

Keating traveled from city to city, encouraging and inciting militant action, letter-writing campaigns and good old-fashioned political pressure. One news paper gave the CDL credit for 400 arrests, among them those of Lenny Bruce and Hugh Hefner.

He Died for our Sins

Lenny Bruce's bawdy, unabashed humor had attracted the attention of police in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Yes, he used words such as cocksucker and talked about men fucking mud. But he raised serious issues about sexual morality, religion and other subjects of controversy. Hefner could write about the same topics in the privacy of his Mansion. Bruce was in your face, and he paid the price.

The Chicago bust in December 1962 at the Gate of Horn nightclub was clearly religiously motivated. Bruce took on organized religion with lines such as "Let's get out of the churches and back to religion."

Police also threatened Alan Ribback, the owner of the Gate of Horn. After the bust, one of the cops cornered Ribback and told him, "I want to tell you that if this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? I'm speaking as a Catholic. I am here to tell you your license is in danger."

Lenny Bruce was the last victim of the blacklist mentality, one of the last political prisoners of the sexual revolution. The Gate of Horn bust and others that followed made him unemployable. The collusion of state and church deprived him of the right to work, the right to speak, the right to live. He died of a drug overdose in 1966. After his death, higher courts overruled his convictions, but it was too late.

Hefner in Handcuffs

Hefner became the target of behind-the-scenes CDL intrigue in June 1963. One late afternoon, police rousted him out of bed and charged him with publishing and distributing an obscene publication. The obscenity in question? Pictures of a nude Jayne Mansfield from the film Promises, Promises!

Chicago Corporate Counsel John Melaniphy claimed that captions describing the actress as "she writhes about seductively," or as "gyrating," aroused "prurient interests and defeat any claim of art."

Say what? The Supreme Court had held that nudity was not in itself obscene. The city fathers surely knew that, but Melaniphy went ahead with the arrest and subsequent legal charade to appease the CDL. At least one newspaper detected the ruse. An article in The New Crusader declared: "The Citizens for Decent Literature, a group of Victorian housewives, still smarting from the effects of a recent edition of Playboy magazine's Philosophy that hailed the Supreme Court for liberalizing obscenity tests, prevailed upon the office of John Melaniphy, city prosecutor, to secure a warrant for Hefner." The creation of an enemies list was central to the CDL.

In 1968 Chief Justice Earl Warren volunteered to step down during the current term so that President Lyndon Johnson could promote Justice Abe Fortas to the top spot. The CDL arranged a counteroffensive that became known as the Fortas Obscene Film Festival. Collaring legislators and members of the media, the CDL projected Target Smut, a 35mm slide-and-film history of 26 Supreme Court decisions that were, it said, "directly responsible for the proliferation of obscenity in this country." Senators got to view films such as Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith's classic tribute to transvestites) and assorted porn loops.

Senator Strom Thurmond acted as projectionist, feeding quarters to a coin-operated movie projector. Bruce Allen Murphy, author of Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice, tells how some 20 reporters and editors watched as "an attractive young girl was doing a striptease down to her garter belt and transparent panties. For 14 minutes the actress undressed and writhed erotically, with the camera repeatedly focusing on various parts of her anatomy, ensuring that no viewer missed the point."

Edward De Grazia, in Girls Lean Back Everywhere, credits Keating and the CDL for renewing a national crusade against obscenity. Within the course of a year, lawmakers introduced 23 bills targeting smut. Columnist James Kilpatrick would say: "Boil the issue down to this lip-licking slut, writhing carnally on a sofa, while a close-up camera dwells lasciviously on her genitals. Free speech? Free press? Is this what the Constitution means?"

The CDL helped to block the Fortas nomination. Under pressure from religious groups, Lyndon Johnson appointed a National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Social scientists would spend nearly $3 million in the first serious study of the presumed effects of explicit erotica. President Richard Nixon declared the Commission "morally bankrupt." Upon election he declared, "So long as I am in the White House there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life."

In one of his first acts in office, Nixon appointed Charles Keating to the Commission.

I Am Curious

America witnessed a changing of the censorial guard. As the CDL gained power, the old order of Catholic bluenoses, the Legion of Decency, disbanded. Formed in the Thirties, the Legion had once been able to fill the streets of Chicago with 70,000 followers carrying signs that read An Admission Ticket to an Indecent Movie is an Admission Ticket to Hell.

The Legion forced Hollywood to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code that banned sexuality from the screen. During the Fifties, the power of the Code had been challenged--first by artful foreign films, then by adventurous American directors.

Monsignor Little, the executive secretary of the Legion, retired in late 1965, saying that he preferred "to die in the stations of the cross, not looking at Gina Lollobrigida."

In 1965 when Sidney Lumet directed The Pawnbroker, the film was denied Production Code approval, and was banned by the Legion of Decency (which would soon call itself the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures). The film was a serious study of a Jew haunted by his experiences in a Nazi prison camp. A critical scene showed a black prostitute baring her breasts for Rod Steiger. The event triggered a flashback to a concentration camp scene, where Steiger's character had been forced to watch his wife be raped by soldiers. History had one truth, the Production Code another. Since 1934 Hollywood films had included not a hint of nudity. What made this ludicrous was that nudity was now commonplace in independent and foreign films and in mainstream magazines such as Playboy.

Lumet appealed. The Motion Picture Association of America relented. The MPAA scrapped the Production Code, replacing it with a simple formula "designed to keep in close harmony with the mores, the culture, the moral sense and the expectations of our society." Jack Valenti introduced a warning for films that were "suggested for mature audiences only."

To get a sense of the arc of the Sixties, consider the careers of individual stars. Natalie Wood, having grown from the little girl in Miracle on 34th Street, began the decade with the steamy Splendor in the Grass. She played a teenager driven to attempt suicide by social taboos that forbade an illicit affair with Warren Beatty. (Offscreen the two consummated the relationship and broke up Natalie's marriage to Robert Wagner.) In 1969 she played a would-be spouse-swapper in Paul Mazursky's hilarious look at extramarital sex, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (The film depicts middle-aged couples trying to pass as swingers and gave us the memorable line: "OK, first we'll have an orgy, and then we'll go see Tony Bennett.")

Jane Fonda debuted in Tall Story in 1960--a light comedy about a cheerleader who goes to college to catch a husband. But she followed that with the role of a prostitute in Walk on the Wild Side, and the sci-fi fantasy Barbarella, made in France for Roger Vadim in 1968. The movie opens with a weightless striptease, then follows Fonda through one sexual misadventure after another. Strapped into a torture device called the Excess Pleasure Machine, she defeats the villain (and destroys the machine) with the best orgasm scene since Hedy Lamarr's triumphant Ecstasy.

Hollywood filmmakers were still nervous about sex and nudity; they would imply oral sex and impotence in a film like Bonnie and Clyde, but celebrate new levels of explicit violence.

Foreign films filled the art theaters and we saw things we had never seen before. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestled naked in Women in Love. Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up provided a glimpse of pubic hair when David Hemmings wrestled with two models in a photo studio. I Am Curious (Yellow) showed an unabashedly nude Lena Nyman casually stroking Börje Ahlstedt's postcoital penis, not to mention simulated intercourse in trees and ponds and on city streets. These examples are vivid because they are rare. While major writers explored themes such as masturbation, sodomy and sadomasochism, filmmakers tested boundaries, then withdrew from the field.

Independent filmmakers tackled nudity head-on. The phenomenon was most visible on the grindhouse circuit--the outlaw theaters that showed Adults Only fare. Russ Meyer created a whole genre of "nudie cuties," beginning with 1960's The Immoral Mr. Teas. The hero had the uncanny ability to undress women with his eyes--a simple enough plot, on which Meyer hung the sort of pin-up nudity found in Playboy. Indeed, Meyer had worked as a photographer for Playboy. His wife, star and co-producer, Eve Meyer, was Miss June 1955. He churned out films that featured big-breasted women and square-jawed men, with titles such as Eve and the Handyman, Lorna, Mondo Topless, Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! Nudity filled theaters by showing what television and mainstream films could not--the naked female form.

The nudie cutie films created stars such as Marsha Jordan. According to the authors of Grindhouse, "She had no qualms about doing Adults Only movies because at the time it meant she only had to show her body, not do anything particular with it. Within a few years Jordan was headlining films by most of the major Adults Only producers: The Golden Box, Lady Godiva Rides, Brand of Shame, Office Love-In--through them all Marsha performed make-believe sex with numerous men and women."

Hollywood sex stars from the Fifties such as Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren made similar films, baring all in Promises, Promises! and Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt when their careers began to fade.

And the nudie cuties provided a training ground for filmmakers. Before Francis Coppola completed studies at UCLA, he directed Tonight for Sure--a nudie Western.

But something else was going on in the grindhouses. When real sex is taboo, the impulse becomes perverted and crops up in bizarre, fetishistic images. A whole legion of films called roughies subjected the female form to abuse. Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris, in Grindhouse, explain the thinking behind a film called Blood Feast: "In 1963 the sight of a single pubic hair could bring out the riot squad. A penis penetrating a vagina? Showing that was absolutely inconceivable. But what about a knife? Or better yet, an ax?" The film starred fresh-faced Playmate Connie Mason and featured dismemberment and blood-splattered human sacrifice. Blood Feast, of course, made millions.

Film fare became kinkier. White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) would show young girls manacled and whipped by Olga the dominatrix. Olga returned with her whip in Olga's House of Shame. Nazis appeared as sadistic beasts in Love Camp 7 to torture female prisoners.

The animosity was not directed solely at women. As the authors of Grindhouse point out, sometimes the victims were men. Lila, the heroine of Mantis in Lace, was billed as "just another psycho stripper with a meat ax."

During the silent era, mainstream filmmakers had combined sex and horror. Low-budget horror films had placed women at risk for decades. Alfred Hitchcock traumatized a whole generation with the unforgettable shower scene in his 1960 hit Psycho. He left a great deal to the imagination. But by the end of the decade, filmmakers built slow-motion ballets of blood and bullets in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.

Tom Wolfe called it pornoviolence. "In the new pornography," he wrote, "the theme is not sex. The new pornography depicts practitioners acting out another murkier drive: people staving teeth in, ripping guts open, blowing brains out and getting even with all those bastards."

He traced the phenomenon to the aftershock of the Kennedy assassination, the "incessant replay, with every recoverable clinical detail, of those less than five seconds in which a man got his head blown off."

The authors of Grindhouse make the same point: "Before the rifle's report had faded, the nation seemed hopelessly lost in nightmarish terrain. The jungles of southeast Asia consumed American boys, and no one could explain why. Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were all murdered by gunfire. Outraged African Americans tore apart Watts. Paranoia struck deep. Conspiracy theories suggested that maybe we weren't the good guys anymore. Charles Manson babbled and fresh-faced California girls slaughtered people for him. With all this roiling through the culture, is it any wonder that Adults Only movies, almost overnight, went from bouncy frolics to brutal rapes?"

Jack Valenti responded to the tumult by creating a new rating system for Hollywood films, dividing them into four categories: G, PG, R and X. The last category proved to be a mistake. The MPAA wanted a rating system that would allow legitimate filmmakers to tackle mature topics without their works being confused with Adults Only exploitation flicks. The rating scheme backfired.

Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger's tale of a hustler, earned an X. The film proved that sex and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Midnight Cowboy won three Academy Awards.

Russ Meyer filmed the soft-core Vixen for $72,000, slapped on his own X and took the rating all the way to the bank. (The film grossed $6 million in two years.)

The independent filmmakers usurped the X rating. By the next decade, X and XXX would represent hard-core. The X floated like crosshairs on a scope--it was only a matter of time before a film would go all the way.

Gay Power

If sex was the politics of the Sixties, it wasn't a two-party system. The changes that swept the country--the revolutions toward racial equality and gender equality--took longer to liberate sexual minorities.

The numbers started small. At the beginning of the decade, the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society (viewed as a gay counterpart to the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League) could claim 200 members. Its monthly magazine, filled with articles and fiction on homosexuality, reached 2500 readers. A Los Angeles-based magazine, One, reached 5000.

The growing awareness of the gay community can be traced in headlines. A September 11, 1963 issue of The Christian Century asks: Homosexuality: Sin or Disease?

By the end of that year, The New York Times would assign a reporter to cover "the city's most sensitive open secret"--that gays had become visible. In 1964 Life published "The Gay World Takes to the City Streets"--a pictorial essay on modern gay life, complete with an article that seemed like a road map to the territory staked out by homosexuals. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, the authors of Intimate Matters, suggest that the media created beacons for gays--these exposés sparked migrations to Greenwich Village, Times Square, Chicago's Bughouse Square, Hollywood's Selma Avenue, San Francisco (which had more than 30 gay bars), and the warmer climes of New Orleans and Miami.

Increased visibility in turn began to draw more gays from the closet. In 1967 The New York Times Magazine ran an article that proclaimed: "A Four Million Minority Asks for Equal Rights."

Drew Shafer, an officer of the North American Homophiles Conference, declared: "The average homosexual is a person who spends his entire life in hiding. He would really like to feel like a citizen, like every other person. Not ill but free. A real human being."

According to Shafer, a gay person wants "to be free to pursue homosexual love, free to serve in the armed forces, free to hold a job or advance in his profession, free to champion the cause of homosexuality."

Shafer also championed the cause of gay marriage, but the Times concluded that "professional scholars of homosexual culture cannot foresee any institutional equivalent of matrimony for homosexuals. The average homosexual marriage lasts at most three or four years."

Gays picketed the White House and began to forge political alliances. In 1955 the ALI had voted to decriminalize gay sex: "No harm to the secular interests of the community is involved in atypical sexual practice in private between consenting adult partners. This area of private morals is the distinctive concern of spiritual authorities."

In 1967 the ACLU would come out for gay rights, saying: "The state has a legitimate interest in controlling, by criminal sanctions, public solicitation for sexual acts, and particularly sexual practices where a minor is concerned," but that "the right of privacy should extend to all private sexual conduct and should not be a matter for invoking penal statutes."

By the end of the decade gays had begun to take their place at the cultural table. The play and subsequent movie The Boys in the Band presented a thought-provoking portrait of homosexual men.

And gays found unexpected allies. The National Institute of Mental Health formed a task force on Human Sexuality, with a "special focus on homosexuality." The FBI, which for years had hounded gays under J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Deviants program, broke up a 70-man antigay extortion ring. Gang members would entice victims into hotel rooms, then associates would break in posing as police officers. According to The New York Times the victims included "two deans of Eastern universities, several professors, business executives, a motion picture actor, a television personality, a California physician, a general and an admiral, a member of Congress, a British theatrical producer and two well-known singers." To maintain silence, the victims (some 700 homosexuals and bi-sexuals scattered across the U.S.) had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A gay man's sexual preference came fully equipped with paranoia. Articles pointed out what gays had known throughout the Fifties--that every approach might result in arrest, humiliation or worse.

Police might claim tolerance, and point to declining arrest statistics. (Between 1965 and 1969 annual arrests dropped from 800 a year to fewer than 80 in New York.) Illinois may have decriminalized sodomy in 1961, but Chicago police still made 100 arrests in one year for public solicitation. Los Angeles police, armed with an educational pamphlet that warned that homosexuals wanted "a fruit world," made 3069 arrests in 1963. A "token number," said Inspector James Fisk.

On June 28, 1969 a squad of police entered a bar in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street was a well-known gathering place for gay men, lesbians and transvestites. It was said that the owners of the bar paid off the police; that in return, the police staged only token raids in which they would stop the dancing, ask for IDs and cart off the most vivid of the queens. But the raid on June 28 broke the pattern for all time.

Angry patrons filed out of the bar, only to linger in Sheridan Square. They picked up rocks, bottles and garbage and began to hurl them at the bar and the startled officers still inside. The cops barricaded the door. Projectiles shattered the window. Someone threw a firebomb through the window. Another squirted lighter fluid under the door.

Chanting "gay power," the crowd uprooted a parking meter and tried to batter down the door. The effort ended when police reinforcements arrived.

For nights thereafter, gays gathered at the site. They held meetings, formed committees and finally staged a Gay Power march up Sixth Avenue.

Today, the annual Pride march attracts almost half a million gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenderists and their supporters. They paint the stripe down Christopher Street lavender.

The sign for Gay Street--situated a few doors down from the Stonewall--is one of the most frequently stolen artifacts in the city. You can see the bands where previous signs were attached to posts and streetlights rising ever higher, like a carnival indicator of pride.

Radical Sisters

The sexual revolution swept through the culture, but by mid-decade there were some who felt slighted. The leaders of the various movements fighting for change were men. Civil rights workers and antiwar activists, yippies and rock stars were charismatic spokesmen who could dominate and inspire a rally, or "fuck a staff into existence," as Marge Piercy confessed in an essay on women's experiences within the movement. "Yet always what was beautiful and real in the touching becomes contaminated by the fog of lies and half-truths and power struggles until the sex is empty and only another form of manipulation."

Women in the counterculture found themselves in the same old roles: Girlfriend. Dishwasher. Typist When they demanded that the leaders acknowledge their many contributions, they received daunting, chauvinist replies.

In 1966 black activist Stokeley Carmichael brushed off women's libbers with a remark heard round the country: "The only position for women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is prone."

Abbie Hoffman crowed, "The only alliance I would make with the women's liberation movement is in bed."

Eldridge Cleaver, in 1968, joked: "Women? I guess they ought to exercise pussy power."

Women's equality was treated as a joke in the Sixties. Indeed, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia had added the category of sex to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on a political whim, to distract liberals and make the bill harder to pass. The law prohibited discrimination on the basis of an "individual's race, color, religion, sex or national origin." But what exactly did that mean?

Radical women began talking to one another in "bitch sessions" about consciousness raising. Sexual dissatisfaction was at the core of the new political rhetoric. Anne Koedt delivered a paper in Chicago on "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" at the first National Women's Liberation Conference, Thanksgiving weekend in 1968. Taking a cue from Masters and Johnson, she proclaimed, "Although there are many areas for sexual arousal, there is only one area for sexual climax; that area is the clitoris.

"All this leads to some interesting questions about conventional sex and our role in it. Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does. Women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men. Our own biology has not been properly analyzed. Instead we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm, an orgasm which in fact does not exist."

She condemned men who used the clitoris only for foreplay, to create sufficient lubrication for penetration. A clitoral sexuality would make the male expendable. The whole Kama Sutra needed to be rewritten. "We must begin to demand that if certain sexual positions now defined as standard are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they no longer be defined as standard," said Koedt. "New techniques must be used or devised that transform this particular aspect of our current sexual exploitation."

In Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties, Sara Davidson tried to re-create the moment: "At her women's group, they talked about their problems in the movement and they talked about sex. Sex, sex, the very word made Susie sweat and turn red. 'I'd never heard people talk about this stuff. I didn't even know women masturbated.' The group read Masters and Johnson--that was a mindblower--to see proof that all orgasms are centered in the clitoris and that the vaginal orgasm, that holier-than-holy super-come, was a myth. Susie had to ask where the clitoris was. Jeff had never touched her there because Freud and his father had informed him that mature women have vaginal orgasms."

Robin Morgan found she could no longer stand to fake vaginal orgasms (though she admitted she'd become "adept at faking spiffy ones"). She feared confronting pornography for fear of being labeled a "bad vibes, uptight, unhip chick." She became a refugee from the male-dominated left, or what she called "the boys' movement." But she and others had learned much from the movement's style of electric drama.

On September 7, 1968 New York Radical Women organized a protest against the Miss America Pageant. Morgan wrote: "The pageant was chosen as a target for a number of reasons: It is of course patently degrading to women (in propagating the Mindless Sex Object Image). It has always been a lily-white, racist contest; the winner tours Vietnam, entertaining the troops as a Murder Mascot. The contestants epitomize the roles all women are forced to play in this society, one way or the other: apolitical, unoffending. Passive, delicate (but drudgery-delighted) things." The protesters denounced the quest for male approval, saying women were "enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards. Miss America and Playboy's Centerfold are sisters over the skin. To win approval we must be both sexy and wholesome, delicate but able to cope, demure yet titillatingly bitchy. Deviation of any sort brings, we are told, disaster: 'You won't get a man!' "

Sex object? Degrading? In one article are the first drops of poisoned rhetoric that would reignite the battle between the sexes. The protesters tossed dishcloths, steno pads, high-heeled shoes, false eyelashes, hair curlers, girdles and bras into a Freedom Trash Can, along with copies of Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle. They did not, as some media claimed, burn bras.

Make war, not love? A strange message with which to end the decade.

What would women become in the Seventies? Joan Terry Garrity, taking the nom de plume J, wrote a book called The Sensuous Woman. In lighthearted prose she extolled the wonders of oral sex and described various techniques such as "the Butterfly Flick," "the Hoover," "the Whipped Cream Wriggle" and "the Silken Swirl."

The book sold nine million copies. Stick out your tongue.

Steinem's Bunny costume was troublesome. The satin had to be taken in two inches for a proper fit.

The Times They are A-Changin'

tunes from the Sixties

Teen Angel • Are You Lonesome Tonight? • It's Now or Never • Nice 'n' Easy • I'm Sorry • Alley-Oop • The Twist • Save the Last Dance for Me • The Second Time Around • Puppy Love • Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini • Georgia on My Mind • Playboy's Theme

You're 16 • Tossin' and Turnin' • Pony Time • Moon River • Will You Love Me Tomorrow • Runaway • Where the Boys Are • Hit the Road Jack • Runaround Sue • Peppermint Twist • Quarter to Three • Shop Around • The Lion Sleeps Tonight • Calendar Girl • Blue Moon • Please Mr. Postman • Cryin' • Let's Twist Again

If I Had a Hammer • Where Have All the Flowers Gone • Soldier Boy • Duke of Earl • He's a Rebel • Days of Wine and Roses • What Kind of Fool Am I? • I Left My Heart in San Francisco • Breaking Up Is Hard to Do • Once in a Lifetime • I Can't Stop Loving You • You Don't Know Me • Twistin' the Night Away • The Loco-Motion • Monster Mash • The Wah-Watusi • Playboy • Twist and Shout • Teen Age Idol • I'm in Love With a Bunny From the Playboy Club

Blowin' in the Wind • The Times They Are A-Changin' • My Boyfriend's Back • Busted • I Wanna Be Around • Louie Louie • He's So Fine • Call Me Irresponsible • Surfer Girl • Surfin' USA • Wipeout • Be My Baby • Please Please Me • More: Theme from Mondo Cane • Blue Velvet • Charade • Wives and Lovers • The Good Life • Hey Paula • Go Away Little Girl • It's My Party • You're the Reason I'm Living • We Shall Overcome • I Want to Hold Your Hand • Can't Buy Me Love • Baby Love • My Guy • Oh Pretty Woman • The Girl From Ipanema • People • She Loves You • Everybody Loves Somebody • A Hard Day's Night • Dancing in the Streets • Mr. Lonely • I Get Around • The House of the Rising Sun • The Leader of the Pack • Goin' Out of My Head • Where Did Our Love Go • Baby I Need Your Loving • Love Me Do • I Feel Fine

Help! • (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction • Yesterday • I Got You Babe • You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' • Stop! In the Name of Love • My Girl • The Shadow of Your Smile • Downtown • Goldfinger • Ticket to Ride • What's New Pussycat • Mr. Tambourine Man • The Eve of Destruction • Like a Rolling Stone • It Was a Very Good Year • The Ballad of the Green Berets • We Can Work It Out • When a Man Loves a Woman • California Girls • (You're My) Soul and Inspiration • The Look of Love • Strangers in the Night • Wild Thing • Mellow Yellow • Yellow Submarine • These Boots Are Made for Walkin' • Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 • What the World Needs Now Is Love

Secret Agent Man • Groovin' • Nowhere Man • Happy Together • Respect • What Now My Love • The Impossible Dream • Alfie • All You Need Is Love • Soul Man • (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman • Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds • With a Little Help From My Friends • Winchester Cathedral • That's Life • California Dreamin'

Stand by Me • (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay • Hey Jude • Mrs. Robinson • Love Child • People Got to Be Free • MacArthur Park • Harper Valley PTA • Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me • Up, Up and Away • Windmills of Your Mind • Somethin' Stupid • Light My Fire • Ode to Billie Joe • Can't Take My Eyes Off You • Gentle on my Mind • By the Time I Get to Phoenix • I Heard It Through the Grapevine • Love Is Here and Now You're Gone

All Together Now • Little Green Apples • I've Got to Be Me • This Guy's in Love With You • Those Were the Days • For Once in My Life • Abraham, Martin and John • Stoned Soul Picnic • The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde • Born to Be Wild • Revolution

Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In • Honky Tonk Women • Everyday People • Proud Mary • A Boy Named Sue • Sugar, Sugar • A Time for Us • My Way • Spinning Wheel • Everybody's Talkin' • Leaving on a Jet Plane • Marrakesh Express • Give Peace a Chance • Is That All There Is?