Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution, Part VIII: The Joy of Sex, 1970-1979

Wire me up and fuck me wired!" Grace Slick's voice, even bleeped, grabs your attention. The Dick Cavett Show has just lurched out of control.

The guests are Hugh M. Hefner, psychologist Rollo May (looking and sounding like a benign Barry Goldwater), the Jefferson Airplane and Susan Brownmiller and Sally Kempton "for the women's liberation movement."

The night begins harmlessly.

There is light banter about the Big Bunny jet, about the impracticality of installing a bath onboard a converted DC-9, about how a mistake by an Italian translator started a rumor that Hefner was getting married. (The translator had substituted the word fiancée for girlfriend, girlfriend being a dirty word in Italian.)

Rollo May, the author of Love and Will, takes a seat. "The trouble with love in our day, as it comes out in, say, the hippies, is that they have spontaneity, but they don't have fidelity. They don't have commitment, responsibility. And these are all matters of will."

There is too much freedom, May says. Too many choices.

He takes exception to Hefner's hedonism: "Playboy takes the fig leaf off the genitals and puts it over the face. The faces of these lovely girls have no expression. They are withdrawn, detached. And this goes along with the feeling in Playboy that the aim is to play it cool, not to commit yourself, don't get caught."

Cavett asks Hefner if he wants to respond. "It would be a short show if I just let it go," he says.

Hefner reduces The Playboy Philosophy to a single paragraph: "The best kind of sex and the best kind of love includes involvement. But I also think there should be a period of discovery, of self-discovery, immediately after the teens, to find yourself as a human being. A time of exploration and play. Playboy is devoted to those years."

The talk drifts to the subject of impotent men and whether frigid women are becoming extinct. When Hefner invokes the names Masters and Johnson, Slick joins the conversation with her remark about "fuck me wired."

Cavett then introduces Susan Brownmiller and Sally Kempton, saying, "Maybe we can find out what the women are all (text continued on page 70) upset about."

The women's liberation movement, you learn, is hot copy. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics has set fire to the bestseller list. It will be followed by Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex, Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful and a dozen other titles. The sisterhood-is-powerful SWAT teams travel in pairs, but their message is the same: Men don't deserve power. Men don't deserve women. Women deserve women.

Asked what men were doing wrong, Brownmiller replies, "They oppress us as women. They won't let us be. And Hugh Hefner is my enemy. Hefner has built an empire based on oppressing women."

Hefner concedes that Judeo-Christian culture has treated women as second-class citizens and chattel. But the magazine has tried to humanize women as sexual beings and put an end to the Madonna-whore duality of the past. He agrees that society has offered more limiting roles for women, but the challenge, he says, is to find more demanding roles for both men and women.

Brownmiller rails on: "The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings."

Grace Slick joins the conversation, expressing deep skepticism at sisterhood's precious view of men: "Some of them are great, some of them are crummy. Why do you have to form a theory? Some of them look at you as a sex object, fine. You fuck them. The ones who like to both go to bed with you and talk to you, you do both of those things. The ones who like to make music and talk to you and go to bed with you and write, whatever you do--draw?--you do all those things with. I don't see where the problem is, maybe because I don't see what you're talking about. Yet. I don't see the problem. Yet."

The audience applauds. Cavett invites the Airplane to do another song, but has to explain that it will not be White Rabbit, because the FCC won't allow ABC to broadcast a song that contains drug references.

The audience doesn't realize it, but in one hour the show captures the great themes of the Seventies: Permission. Play. Love. Will. Choice. Freedom. Or, simply, different strokes for different folks. There is no single script. The sexual revolution has not made things simpler.

The Great Permission

Bathroom graffiti announces A Little Coitus Wouldn't Hoitus. Bumper stickers invite strangers to Honk If You're Horny. The staid Oxford English Dictionary, after almost a century of silence, finally includes the word fuck in its pages.

Rock star Janis Joplin tells a reporter that life at the edge is everything: "Maybe I won't last as long as other singers, but I think you can destroy your now worrying about tomorrow."

The sexual revolution is in full swing. But there are numerous skirmishes. Joan Terry Garrity, the "J" who penned The Sensuous Woman, startled the world by declaring that "oral sex is, for most people who give it a try, delicious."

A woman recently converted to oral sex writes The Playboy Advisor and asks an obvious question: Oral sex may be delicious, but what, exactly, is the caloric content of ejaculate? The Advisor finds the answer (approximately one to three calories). When the magazine tries to run the letter in 1970, the head of production and the printer refuse to publish the offending passage. It will be two years before the answer finally sees print.

Sex is in the music, in the great hits of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder. Love to Love You Baby is described by Time as a "marathon of 22 orgasms."

Sex is in the fashion. The midiskirt joins the Edsel. The miniskirt becomes a micromini. Hotpants is a noun and an adjective. Norma Kamali popularizes Lycra spandex, a fabric so formfitting that "it's like wearing your body on the outside."

Male nudity goes mainstream when Cosmo publishes a centerfold of Burt Reynolds. In January 1974 students across the nation abandon clothes (with the exception of running shoes) in mad cross-campus dashes. A streaker at Texas Tech sets a record for five hours of uninterrupted nude jogging. At the University of Georgia 1548 bare-assed students stage a group streak. Lone streakers disrupt graduation ceremonies and the Oscar awards.

Men are peacocks. Commenting on a green velour Edwardian suit, one man says wearing it on a date is like starting foreplay early. "And when you're alone, you just turn it inside out." The whole world, it seems, sleeps on satin sheets.

In 1972 FBI agents arrest Philip Bailley, a Washington, D.C. defense attorney, on 22 morals charges, including violation of the Mann Act. The agents find 164 photographs of nude women, four address books and various sexual devices. Bailley's defense is classic: "Women get a thrill out of having their pictures taken in the nude. You take them up to your apartment, make love to them, take their picture, make love to them again. It sure as hell beats watching television."

He explains the sexual paraphernalia this way: "Hell, anybody who digs sex has stuff like that around his apartment. Those Justice Department bureaucrats just don't understand my lifestyle, which is the lifestyle of half the people in America my age."

Welcome to the Permissive Society, the Me Decade, the Whee Decade. In The Sexed-Up, Doped-Up, Hedonistic Heaven of the Boom-Boom Seventies, Tom Wolfe describes the moment: "It was in the Seventies, not the Sixties, that the ancient wall around sexual promiscuity fell. And it fell like the wall of Jericho. It didn't require a shove. By the mid-Seventies, any time I reached a city of 100,000 to 200,000 souls, the movie fare available on a typical evening seemed to be two theaters showing Jaws, one showing Benji and 11 showing pornography of the old lodge-smoker sort, now dressed up in color and 35mm stock. Two of the 11 would be drive-in theaters, the better to beam the various stiffened giblets and moist folds and nodules out into the night air to become part of the American scene."

Sex is a visible part of the landscape, inescapable, in your face. A December 1970 Newsweek article describes the wall map of a New York City vice squad: "Pink pins for the 55 dirty bookstores, silver for the 16 theaters showing sex films, yellow for the six emporiums of lewd eight-millimeter movies, black with white crosses for the six burlesque houses, green for the eight figure-modeling studios, red for the one live peep show and blue for the five live sex exhibitions." Newsweek notes that the phenomenon is nationwide: "Within seven blocks of the White House, 27 adult bookshops and moviehouses are currently in business."

Storefront operations offering coinfed porn projectors and private booths are as popular as the nickelodeon had been at the turn of the century--only now, instead of watching a man and a woman kiss, men watch a man and a woman copulate. Or two women. Or a woman and a dog. Men are turned on by the idea that sex (or at least masturbatory relief) can be obtained with a handful of quarters.

The idealism of the Sixties, the vast tribal frenzy, seems to disappear overnight. Abbie Hoffman leaves a courthouse in Chicago and realizes that the Movement is over.

Image: A girl kneeling over the body of a slain student at Kent State. Image: A lone helicopter on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Headlines: Jimi Hendrix Dead. Janis Dead.

Baby Boomers move the wild-in-the-streets energy of the Sixties into the bedroom. And millions embark on a decade of adventure.

(continued on page 78)

The Joy of Sex (continued from page 70)

The Joy of Sex

Alex Comfort was an unlikely hero of the sexual revolution. A tweedy, owlish Englishman, he was reminiscent more of Q than of James Bond. (In fact, a boyhood fireworks accident had obliterated four fingers on Comfort's left hand.) Comfort had tinkered around the edges of the topic for years. The Anxiety Makers, a 1967 look at the history of sex manuals, had condemned the medical profession's treatment of sex, suggesting that doctors unjustifiably assumed a mantle of expertise on moral conduct.

Comfort was known in England as the Doctor of Fun, in part for his suggestion that 15-year-old boys should carry contraception. He had announced two new commandments: "Thou shalt not under any circumstances produce an unwanted baby. Thou shalt not exploit another's feelings." He had written a comic novel about a couple who open a sex clinic in Paris and a chemist who invents a drug called 3-blindmycin that reduces inhibitions.

When a friend at a London hospital complained that sex was not being taught properly, Comfort set out to write a serious text on the sexual customs of different cultures. After a few days he became bored with the project. The world didn't need another tour of the Trobriand Islands. He decided to write something slightly funnier instead and in two weeks had cobbled together Cordon Bleu Sex. The metaphor was inspired. Here was a menu of delight that, like a cookbook, was "a sophisticated and unanxious account of available dishes."

Comfort defined permission this way: "As to the general repertoire, the whole joy of sex with love is that there are no rules, so long as you enjoy, and the choices are practically unlimited."

The Joy of Sex, published in 1972, would sell more than ten million copies. The book took sex out of the bedroom and put it on the coffee table: It was above all a thing of beauty. In a series of illustrations, artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss captured the stations of lust. A bearded man and an equally hairy, uninhibited woman kiss, caress, fondle, tug, tease and ride each other through worlds of obvious pleasure. The drawings were inviting--the couple seemed to live in a private kingdom, infused with permission. The trust, the willingness to explore--be it using vibrators on each other or tying one partner's ankles and wrists to a bed to boost her orgasm or inviting the neighbors over for "foursomes and moresomes"--were pure propaganda for pleasure.

The main dish was "loving, unselfconscious intercourse." The spice rack was filled with exotic variations. Beyond the full matrimonial (man on top) lay cuissade (half-rear entry with one leg between), croupade (squarely from behind), flanquette (half-facing) and inversion (letting one's partner hang upside down off the bed). Pattes d'araignée was fancy talk for a fingertip caress of body hairs, postillionage the insertion of one finger into your partner's anus just prior to orgasm. Florentine was the adjective to describe lovemaking in which the woman stretched her partner's foreskin to the point of tautness, and never let go. Pompoir encouraged a woman to milk the penis through vaginal contractions. On the last of these, Comfort quoted the explorer Richard Burton: "This can be learned only by long practice and especially by throwing the will into the part affected."

Throwing our will into the part affected could be the motto of the decade.

Comfort had odd biases: a mere 11 paragraphs on "mouth music," almost seven pages on bondage. Another segment celebrated the big toe as a sex organ. "The pad of the male big toe applied to the clitoris or the vulva generally is a magnificent erotic instrument." He gave readers the naughty image of a man removing shoe and sock in a dark restaurant to keep his partner in almost continuous arousal with their hands still in view on the table. Dining out thus became a sexual adventure.

Comfort included erotic art from Japan and India that prompted one female reader to comment, "If you've seen one Persian penis, you've seen 'em all." He tantalized readers with various techniques described by ethnographers. Put a goat's eyelid on your cock to stimulate your partner's clitoris? Let's go back a few pages to feathers, dear.

And there were the pure put-ons. The Grope Suit was a "diabolically ingenious gadget which has just come on the Scandinavian market to induce continuous female orgasm." It supposedly consisted of a "very tight rubber G-string with a thick phallic plug which fits in the vagina and a roughened knob over the clitoris. The bra has small toothed recesses in the cups which grip the nipples and is covered all over inside with soft rubber points." Every movement would touch a sensitive area. The Grope Suit was a figment of Comfort's imagination, but hundreds of people wrote The Playboy Advisor to ask where one might obtain the attire.

Comfort moved to America to work for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He became a frequent guest at Sandstone, an erotic retreat near Los Angeles. He wrote a follow-up manual, titled simply More Joy. He told us "that there is nothing to be afraid of, and never was, and that we manufacture our own nonsenses." He rarely gave interviews and came to view Joy as "frankly, an albatross." It was just one of 50 books he would write. He devoted most of his energy to the study of aging.

But he had taught the band to play. We never learned the identity of the couple who let us witness their sexual coupling in Comfort's books. Christopher Foss, one of the artists who illustrated Joy, having made the world safe for sex, went on to become a "visualizer" for such movies as Alien, Dune and Superman.

Women on Sex

Alex Comfort told an interviewer that "the trouble with the English was that the men didn't mind reading about it but didn't want to do it, and that the women didn't mind doing it but didn't want to read about it." Americans, it seemed, had the opposite problem.

The Sixties had unleashed literary lust--but most of the disputed classics had been written by men. Now women abandoned centuries of silence and tried out what had been an exclusively male vocabulary. Coeds looking for role models devoured the diaries of Anaïs Nin.

In Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs tracked the return of the female voice. The sexual revolution was a war of words, carried out in essays, term papers, magazine articles and pamphlets.

In the Seventies, radical feminists attacked Freud. He was the perfect paper villain, the father of repression and creator of the myth of the vaginal orgasm. He had single-handedly queered sex for a century, they said. Now women wanted to find a sexuality based on (continued on page 82)The Joy of Sex (continued from page 78) their own experiences of what worked. In 1971 feminist Alix Shulman told women to "think clitoris." According to Re-Making Love, "If the vagina was the stronghold of Freudian, male-dominated sexuality, the clitoris was the first beachhead of feminist sexuality."

The rage against doctors and psychiatrists unleashed not sexual anarchy but sexual self-reassessment. A women's collective in Boston put together Our Bodies, Ourselves, a sort of Whole Earth Catalog of female sexuality.

Betty Dodson, an artist born in the Bible Belt, had already produced exhibits of erotic art when she became an advocate for masturbation. She promoted body-sex workshops and urged women to become "cunt positive" by showing color slides of the genitals of 20 different women. Students would examine their genitals in mirrors, would learn techniques of noncoital pleasure. Dodson wrote and illustrated a booklet called Liberating Masturbation.

"Masturbation," she wrote, "has been a continuous part of my sex life since the age of five. It got me through childhood, puberty, romantic love and marriage and it will, happily, see me through old age."

Her instructions were lyrical: "When I masturbate, I create a space for myself in the same way I would for a special lover--soft lights, candles, incense, music, colors, textures, sexual fantasies, anything that turns me on. If I use my hand I also use oil or cream. The slippery, moist feeling of oil on my genitals is very sensuous. I use one finger or my whole hand, making circular motions above the clitoral body, below, on top or to the side. I experiment with several techniques--going slow, fast, soft, firm, observing the arousal potential of each. I'll lie on my stomach, side, back; put my legs up and stretch them out. I have also experimented with watching myself in a mirror. I saw that I didn't look awful or strange--I looked sexual and wonderfully intense."

Germaine Greer blazed into our consciousness in 1971 with the publication of The Female Eunuch. "The feminist who loves men," Greer was a jill-of-all-trades--a Ph.D. who lectured on Shakespeare at Warwick University, a motor-cyclist, a performer on comedy shows on English TV, an editor of an underground journal called Suck, a model who posed nude for the same magazine. She was six feet tall, beautiful and an advocate of free love.

Journalist Claudia Dreifus tried to explain Greer's popularity in terms of other feminists: "Betty Friedan had no appeal for the literary lions--she was too old, too bourgeois, too organization-conscious. Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex and organizer of New York Radical Feminists, was strikingly attractive; but, alas, antilove, perhaps even antimen. Ti-Grace Atkinson, an advocate of extrauterine birth, was considered too far-out for a whirl through the major networks. For a while it seemed as if the brilliant and beautiful Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics was for a short time on the bestseller list, might be star material. But she made the mistake of openly asserting her bisexuality. Greer was everything those messy American feminists were not: pretty, predictable, aggressively heterosexual, media-wise, clever, foreign and exotic."

Greer attacked the ancient role of the passive female. She challenged the new tyranny of the clitoris favored by American feminists. In The Female Eunuch she complained: "If we localize female response in the clitoris we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male's response. The male sexual idea of virility without languor or amorousness is profoundly desolating: When the release is expressed in mechanical terms it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina."

Arguing for the restoration of female sexual energy, Greer declared that personality was inseparable from sexuality. Whether you called it élan vital or libido, without it you were a female eunuch.

She opposed the institution of marriage. She thought women should have the same right to be promiscuous as men had. "The acts of sex are themselves forms of inquiry," she wrote, "as the old euphemism 'carnal knowledge' makes clear. It is exactly the element of quest in her sexuality which the female is taught to deny."

The old formula for lovemaking would not do: "The process described by the experts, in which the man dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones, spends an equal amount of time on each nipple, turns his attention to the clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the stages of digital or lingual stimulation and then politely lets himself into the vagina, is laborious and inhumanly computerized."

Greer wanted to reawaken the cunt. "Any woman can be a good fuck lying on her back," she wrote, "but poised over her man and his rigid penis she must proceed with sensitivity and control and with all her strength. Now she must cooperate, responding to her lover's spasms and trembling with delicate alterations in the speed and pressure of her movements. She can control the degrees of penetration, drawing herself up so that the smooth lips of her vagina nibble at the velvety head of her lover's penis, letting herself down again, slowly or swiftly, violently or softly, fluttering and squeezing him with her vaginal muscles, which are now free to respond to her desires, instead of being deadened by the impact of the heavy male body. She is at last conscious of female potency, the secret power of her lovely, complex genitals." Say amen, somebody.

In an essay on the politics of female sexuality, Greer declared, "It is time to dig cunt, to establish a woman's vocabulary of cunt--prideful, affectionate, accurate and bold."

The Female Eunuch sold more than a million copies.

Greer was fearless. She told Playboy that "every man should be fucked up the arse as a prelude to fucking women, so he'll know what it's like to be the receiver. Otherwise, he'll think he's doling out joy unlimited to every woman he fucks." She debated Norman Mailer, who'd described feminists as "legions of the vaginally frigid, out there now with all the pent-up buzzing of a hive of bees, the souped-up, pent-up voltage of a clitoris ready to spring!" And spring they did. That evening climaxed when two lesbians rushed the stage to demonstrate do-it-yourself-without-men lovemaking.

Women learned the consequences of being outspoken. Nancy Friday explained what made her write about sex in My Secret Garden. Her lover had, midstroke, invited her to "tell me what you are thinking about."

"As I'd never stopped to think before doing anything to him in bed (we were that sure of our spontaneity and response), I didn't edit my thoughts, I told him what I'd been thinking."

She told him that while they were fucking she was imagining that she was at a Colts-Vikings game. She was wrapped in a blanket, watching Johnny Unitas race down the field. While she was screaming with excitement, a male fan standing behind her pulled his cock out and somehow put it between her legs.

"He's inside me now, shot straight up (continued on page 104)The Joy of Sex (continued from page 82) through me like a ramrod. My God, it's like he's in my throat. We scream together, louder than anyone, making them all cheer louder, the two of us leading the excitement like cheerleaders, while inside me I can feel whoever he is growing harder and harder, pushing deeper and higher into me with each jump until the cheering for Unitas becomes the rhythm of our fucking. My excitement gets wilder, almost out of control, as I scream for Unitas to make it as we do, so that we all go over the line together. And as the man behind me roars, clutching me in a spasm of pleasure, Unitas goes over and I..."

Her lover, wrote Friday, "got out of bed, put on his pants and went home."

Friday placed an ad in newspapers and magazines that read: "Female Sexual Fantasies wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed."

The letters began to arrive, filled with fantasies that depicted women having sex with an octopus, sex with delivery boys, sex with strangers. In their erotic daydreams women performed before audiences at Madison Square Garden and in the courts of eastern potentates. They masturbated with "the familiar finger, dildos, the increasingly popular vibrators, cucumbers, vacuum cleaner hoses, battery operated Ronson toothbrushes, silver engraved hairbrush handles, exotic phallocrypts made by native house-boys, down to simple streams of water."

Friday discovered there were many rooms in the house of fantasy, some devoted to faceless strangers, some to incest, some to pain, domination and terror. Fantasy was an exercise in sexual power, no matter what the script. Almost every scenario culminated in ecstasy. Indeed, throughout her book, orgasm becomes a form of punctuation, the perfect way to end a paragraph.

My Secret Garden appeared with an introduction by J. The original sensuous woman warned readers they might "have to fight off shock, prurient interest and distaste," but that the final message was "it isn't freaky to fantasize."

The book and its sequel, Forbidden Flowers, were million-sellers.

Ironically, idiotically, Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine scoffed at Friday's work. "This woman is not a feminist," said a reviewer, after an editor had declared, "Ms. will decide what women's fantasies are."

The Zipless Fuck

The most famous fantasy of the century was yet to come. Erica Jong had published two volumes of poetry filled with quirky observations. ("Beware of the man who praises liberated women; he is planning to quit his job.") While living in Germany she had commuted by train to visit an analyst in Frankfurt. Years later she would describe the inspiration for one of the most famous novels of the Seventies. "The train became my life. I read, wrote in my notebook, scribbled poems and stories. The rocking motion soothed me and erotic fantasies came. I scrawled them down, made fables of them, explored them with Doctor M.

"Fear of Flying was conceived on those train rides. On trains you can dream that the man opposite you will take off his thick glasses, strip to his savage loincloth and make passionate love to you in an endless tunnel, then disappear like a vampire into the sunlight. The train rocks you back and forth on your wettest dreams; it merges the moist divide between inner and outer. I have come on trains without touching myself. It is only a matter of concentration. The impossible he (or she) comes into me. The fantasy takes over. Time stops as the train rocks. Suddenly my lap is full of stars."

Fear of Flying described a young woman who finds her identity through sex. Isadora Wing, as a child, had avoided boys: "Like all good nuns, I masturbated. I am keeping myself free of the power of men, I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night."

Wing married a psychoanalyst. "He was mercurial, too. Not wings on his heels but wings on his prick. He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvelous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever, and he was the only man I'd ever met who was never impotent--not even when he was depressed or angry. But why didn't he ever kiss? And why didn't he speak? I would come and come and come and each orgasm seemed to be made of ice." Not finding herself satisfied with one man, Wing moved between men, and exercised her freedom through affairs.

Jong gave us the zipless fuck. "The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover."

Wing describes a scene from an Italian movie, where a widow has sudden sex with a soldier.

"The incident has all the swift compression of a dream," Jong muses, "and is seemingly free of all remorse and guilt, because there is no talk of her late husband or of his fiancée, because there is no rationalizing, because there is no talk at all. The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not taking and the woman is not giving. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn."

Permission. Fear of Flying sold more than three million copies in two years. Jong was hailed as the matron saint of adulteresses. She moved from novelist to the nation's resident expert on women's sexuality. A Playboy Interview recorded Jong's famous response to porn films: "After the first ten minutes I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes I never want to screw again as long as I live."

Total Woman

Perhaps the oddest permission giver of the decade was Marabel Morgan, author of The Total Woman and founder of Total Woman, Inc. The Christian wife of an attorney and mother of two children, she created legions of apostles dedicated to putting the fun back into fundamentalism.

She found her sex advice in the Bible. "That great sourcebook, the Bible, states, 'Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.' In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese."

You can't get more middle America than cottage cheese.

"Your husband wants a warm, comforting and eager partner. If you're stingy in bed, he'll be stingy with you. If you're available to him, you need not worry about him looking elsewhere. Fulfill him by giving him everything he wants, and he'll want to give back to you."

Total Women would call their husbands at work to say, "Honey, I'm eagerly waiting for you to come home. I just crave your body."

Total Women prepared for sex, every night of the week: "For a change (continued on page 150)The Joy of Sex (continued from page 104) tonight, after the children are in bed, place a lighted candle on the floor and seduce him under the dining room table. Or lead him to the sofa. How about in the hammock? Or the garden? Even if you can't actually follow through, at least the suggestion is exciting. He may say, 'We don't have a hammock.' You can reply, 'Oh darling, I forgot!'"

Morgan encouraged women to dress like pixies, pirates, cowgirls and show-girls, to risk even the "no-bra look." One Total Woman greeted her husband at the door in black mesh stockings, high heels, an apron and nothing else. The husband "took one look and shouted, 'Praise the Lord!'"

The Total Woman sold more than two million copies, many through Christian bookstores. Of course, Morgan offended feminists. Joyce Maynard looked at Total Women and mused, "It is quite a different kind of liberation these women long for. How distant Gloria Steinem in her aviator glasses must seem; how unreal this talk of open marriage and bisexuality and vibrators that free women from male tyranny. Faced with a choice between certain safety and a decidedly uncertain chance for ecstasy, they will choose safety. If it is the aim of Steinem and Greer and Abzug and Millett to wage a war, it is the heartfelt aim of this other kind of woman to keep the peace."

But Morgan was part of a wave of sexual permission within the church. As the authors of Re-Making Love discovered, there was no shortage of sex advice in the Bible. The Reverend Tim LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, found that the Song of Solomon seemed to approve clitoral manipulation: "Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me" described the best position for fondling.

The Reverend Charles and Martha Shedd, authors of Celebration in the Bedroom, admitted on The Phil Donahue Show that they had "a whole drawerful" of vibrators, which were also "inspired" by God.

Helen Andelin, a competitor of Marabel Morgan, headed her own movement, called Fascinating Womanhood. Andelin encouraged her followers to pretend they were little girls, even to the point of buying mary janes, anklets and ruffled gingham dresses inspired by the children's department.

All the permission givers had one goal: greater pleasure.

Rx for Sex

Thea Lowry, a sex therapist in San Francisco, summed up the lesson of the sexual revolution in one sentence: "Although sex is perfectly natural, it is not always naturally perfect."

What JFK had once said about the economy, that a rising tide floats all boats, both large and small, simply was not true for sex. The people drowning in the sea of provocation were legion.

In 1970 Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson released Human Sexual Inadequacy, the second volume based on their landmark research. Volume one, Human Sexual Response, had described the physiology of healthy sex. The second volume focused on dysfunctional sex. The St. Louis--based research team estimated that half of all marriages in the U.S. were crippled by one type of sexual inadequacy or another. But most problems could by cured by education or through two-week interventions. Masters and Johnson developed techniques for treating impotence, frigidity and premature ejaculation.

Masters and Johnson insisted on treating couples as units: A sexual problem did not involve just the individual. Take premature ejaculation, or coming too quickly. This had not been exactly a household affliction or a topic of discussion at the bridge club. Masters and Johnson defined the term not with a stopwatch, but in its effect on the female partner. A man was premature if, during intercourse, he reached orgasm before his partner at least half the time. Her satisfaction was as important as his. Conversely, a woman wasn't simply frigid--she may have felt too guilty to give herself permission to enjoy sex, or her partner may have been ignorant of sexual anatomy. There was no one way to reach orgasm, no right way. Finding something that worked for the couple was the goal of therapy.

Masters and Johnson claimed their therapy had an 80 percent cure rate after just two weeks. Critics such as psychiatrist Natalie Shainess complained that "teaching 'push here' and 'rub there' is not going to change people."

But apparently it could. The squeeze technique could stop in his tracks a man about to ejaculate. Something called sensate focus--a kind of total body massage--could relieve the performance demand on impotent men and restore erections. An awareness of the clitoris could make the earth move for formerly nonorgasmic women.

The Playboy Foundation gave a grant to the Masters and Johnson Institute to train therapists, and within a few years there were 30 certified Masters and Johnson sex therapists in practice across the country.

The pair penned articles exploding sex myths, such as the notions that masturbation causes physical or mental harm, that penis size really matters, that the missionary position is the most satisfying, that anal intercourse is perverted or dangerous and that there is any kind of meaningful difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms.

Sex clinics spread like mushrooms: Some 5000 opened within the decade. Linda Wolfe, writing for Playboy in June 1974, gave a glimpse of the new Yellow Pages. Have a problem? Dial up the Center for Intimacy and Sexuality. The Institute for Sensory Awareness. The Institute for the Advancement of Sensuality. Discovery Institute. Human Sexuality Foundation. The Center for Sex Therapy and Education. Wrote Wolfe: "Often a California sex-therapy institute is nothing more than a male or female therapist with towels, a jar of coconut oil or petroleum jelly and a telephone answering machine."

At the National Sex Forum in San Francisco, Ted McIlvenna grossed $40,000 a month providing something called Sexual Attitude Restructuring. The forum staged a fuckarama and desensitized clients by projecting old stag films, then showing the same behavior performed by loving couples. Some clinics offered group massage, some found the meaning of life in eroticized foot massage, some introduced couples to the power of the vibrator. A few used surrogates--letting a sexually experienced woman or man show an anxious client how to experience arousal and release. Masters and Johnson had used this Arthur Murray approach to sex, until the husband of one of the women used as a surrogate sued for $2.5 million.

The Equal Orgasm Amendment

In 1972 Shere Hite, a former model, sent out questionnaires on National Organization for Women stationery. "Do. you have orgasms?" she asked. "When do you usually have them? During masturbation? Intercourse? Clitoral stimulation? Other sexual activity? How often? Is having orgasms important to you? Do you like them?"

She published the responses from more than 3000 women in The Hite Report on Female Sexuality. She declared that "the purpose of this project is to let women define their own sexuality--instead of doctors or other (usually male) authorities. Women are the real experts on their sexuality; they know how they feel and what they experience."

Hite announced that 70 percent of the women who responded to her questionnaire did not regularly reach orgasm as the result of intercourse only. They did not reach orgasm without clitoral stimulation. Hite declared that men had constructed sexuality to benefit themselves: The penis-in-vagina formula was cultural, not biological. If sex was for pleasure, rather than just for procreation, men must worship at the altar of the clitoris.

One wondered if Hite's astonishing statistic (one that contradicted every study from Dr. Alfred Kinsey to Morton Hunt's Sexual Behavior in the Seventies to Redbook magazine) was biased by the sample. Were women who were dissatisfied in bed turning to feminism, or were feminists, through frustration with men, unable to participate fully in the heterosexual sex act? The Hite Report was as much kvetch as kaffeeklatsch consciousness-raising. Still, the premise was intriguing. Intercourse resembles male masturbation. Hite declared that men and women must find acts that resemble female stimulation.

She wanted to redefine sex, and she started with the basic terminology: "Why orgasm should be a verb" was the heading of one section: "What is the difference between 'to orgasm' and 'to have an orgasm'? This idea that we really make our own orgasm, even during intercourse, is in direct contradiction to what we have been taught. Most of us were taught that you should relax and enjoy it--or at most help him out with the thrusting--because he would give you the orgasm."

She noted that the 30 percent of the women who reached orgasm did so because each took "responsibility for and control of her own stimulation."

Such women made the best of a less than adequate situation: "We do give ourselves orgasm, even in a sense when someone else is providing us with stimulation, since we must make sure it is on target, by moving or offering suggestions and by tensing our bodies and getting into whatever positions we need--and then there is a final step necessary in most cases: We need to focus on the sensations and concentrate, actively desire and work toward the orgasm.

"The ability to orgasm when we want, to be in charge of our stimulation, represents owning our own bodies, being strong, free and autonomous beings."

Lonnie Barbach, a San Francisco-based therapist, saw a flaw in Masters and Johnson's therapy. The St. Louis model treated couples. She thought therapy should begin at home, with individual women. She was optimistic, calling the women who came to her groups "preorgasmic" rather than nonorgasmic. Barbach would give women daily homework exercises, asking them to spend at least an hour each day getting to know their genitals, stimulating themselves, then going for the orgasm. Barbach's insights were reflected by the titles of her two landmark books: For Yourself (learn the basics through masturbation) and For Each Other (take what you've learned on the road).

Sex Toys

If you encourage do-it-yourself sex, it is only a matter of time before you ask for better tools.

What began as a cottage industry making prostheses for surgical companies progressed to selling novelty items for adult book and porn stores, and then turned into a national phenomenon. Ventriloquist Ted Marché had taken to carving dildos at the dining room table in the middle Sixties. Setting up a small factory in North Hollywood, he was soon turning out dildos by the truckload. In March 1978 D. Keith Mano sat down with the first family of fun for a Playboy article, Tom Swift Is Alive and Well and Making Dildos. Steve Marché told this story: "Basically we had three sizes: small, medium and large--five, six and seven and a half inches in length. They were prosthetic; they strapped on. Then people requested larger. So we went from five by one and a half inches to nine by two."

The Marchés moved on to other novelty items: a penis pacifier ("for women who talk too much"), blow-up Judy dolls, penis-shaped walkie talkies, penis-shaped erasers, breast-shaped doorbells, a combination dildo and harmonica (called a Mouth Organ) and the ever-popular Peter Heaters ("hand-knitted in Pasadena by a little old lady from memory"). On the occasion of the nation's bicentennial they produced a red, white and blue dildo. Then there were the versions of French ticklers (rubber-spiked devices that fit around the shaft of the penis) that the Marchés simply fashioned out of doormats. By the mid-Seventies Marché Manufacturing was selling almost five million units a year.

These were not the items that would take sex toys to the mainstream. The Seventies spun on Good Vibes--the little bullet-shaped personal vibrators that the magazine ads said were excellent for relieving neckache (of which there seemed to be an epidemic). Sex shops introduced a line of Doc Johnson's Happy Helpers--ben-wa dancing eggs, French ticklers and vibrators.

In 1971 Duane Colglazier and Bill Rifkin opened the first Pleasure Chest, an erotic boutique, in New York City. They sold water beds and erotic toys--including a dildo that was 30 inches long and three and a half inches in diameter. There were Emotion Lotions, flavored body lotions and salves that grew heated when breathed upon. For more serious explorers, the store offered a complete line of head harnesses, labia spreaders, handcuff belts, blindfolds, ball gags, cock rings, harnesses and shackles. Before the end of the decade the Pleasure Chest was a national phenomenon, with many variations on the theme. Thirty percent of the customers were women.

That statistic, more than any other, reflects the spirit of the Seventies. Women in hot pursuit of pleasure had become a major force in the marketplace. In 1974 Dell Williams opened Eve's Garden, a sex boutique and mail-order business. Joani Blank followed with Good Vibrations, a store, catalog and vibrator museum in San Francisco. Vibrators came in all shapes and sizes--from cute imported snake charmers with hooded-cobra clit stimulators to baseball bat--sized Hitachis (called, appropriately, Magic Wands).

There was some reticence. A March 1976 Redbook article, "Plain Talk About the New Approach to Sexual Pleasure," apologized to readers: "The following article may make a number of readers uncomfortable. Their feelings of discomfort or embarrassment are completely understandable and virtually inevitable. Until very recently the subject--the use of vibrators for self-stimulation--has been considered unworthy of serious consideration. But in the past few years, on the basis of knowledge gained from studies of human sexual response, some of the country's most reputable sex therapists have reconsidered the matter and have come to new conclusions." Vibrators were "the only significant advance in sexual technique since the days of Pompeii." The same magazine found in a 1976 survey that one in five women had "used some device during their lovemaking"--and half of those devices were vibrators.

Autoeroticism was in, and what's more, it had horsepower. Not many people forked over $299 for the AccuJac, a toolbox-sized device that probed women or sucked off men. The original was powered by a washing-machine motor that could be heard halfway down the block.

The Golden Age of X

Stanley Kauffmann, a literary critic, was one of the first writers to pick up on the revelation that sex had gone public. And it had moved from fantasy--the fevered imagination of writers and artists--into the actual, the world of "performed pornography." Fanny Hill could romp in print, but now one could watch other people have sex--the flood of Danish imports had given way to homegrown X-rated features in the space of a few months. And, reported Kauffmann in The New Republic, for $5 you could watch a live sex act: "Porno (performed) tells the truth about sex: that it is impersonal, that the complete identification of love with sex is a romantic fabrication. Porno is ruthless. It proves that love or anything remotely like it is not essential to sex; that love is an invention and has a limited congruence with sex."

In 1970 San Francisco hosted the first International Erotic Film Festival. Some saw new possibilities. Instead of a single two-minute glimpse of silent anonymous sex, entrepreneurs tried to weave sex throughout a feature-length film. In 1968 Alex de Renzy spent $15,000 on a documentary called Pornography in Denmark. The film grossed $2 million. Sensing the profit potential, he put together a collection of vintage stag films, The History of the Blue Movie, with Bill Osco. (Osco is credited with making the first hardcore feature film, Mona: The Virgin Nymph--about a young girl addicted to oral sex.) De Renzy opened the Screening Room and began producing more extravagant features. Across town, the Mitchell brothers opened the O'Farrell Theater. America would soon get used to the sight of 40-foot penises probing wide-screen vaginas.

In New York City, Gerard Damiano was filming hard-core loops for the Times Square bookstore circuit. One day he interviewed a couple named Chuck and Linda Traynor. "Linda had on this old Army jacket," he recounted, "Army boots, dungarees and a wool hat pulled down over her face. She looked like a mess, but when she lifted the wool hat, she had these bright, innocent eyes. I liked her. She was nervous, but so was I. They were nervous about coming up to audition for a fuck film. I was nervous because I was making the fuck film and trying to be very open and free and matter-of-fact about the whole thing."

The following day, Damiano filmed the two with another couple. "I made them switch partners, Rob with Linda and Chuck with Rob's old lady. Rob was really hung, and he had no trouble getting it right up to 11 inches when Linda started sucking him. In two seconds, she had swallowed the whole thing.

"I dropped my script, my cameraman's eyes bugged and we stared at each other. 'What was that?' I asked. It was the most fantastic thing I'd ever seen. Right down her throat."

Damiano worked all weekend on a script about a girl whose clitoris is located deep within her throat.

Unable to reach orgasm from intercourse, the heroine would tell her friend that she wanted to hear rockets, bombs, dams bursting.

"Do you want to get off or do you want to destroy a city?" the friend asked.

The film would destroy more than a city. It would make porn chic.

Filmed in Florida for about $25,000, Deep Throat would make more than $100 million. It would also make a legend of the star.

Consider this fevered review: "Faster than Raquel Welch, more powerful than Gloria Steinem, able to swallow tall men in a single gulp. Look! Up on the screen! It's a sword swallower! It's a vacuum cleaner! It's Linda Lovelace. Yes, Linda Lovelace, strange visitor from Bryan, Texas, who came to the World Theater with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal women. Linda Lovelace, who can change the course of film history, bend flesh in her bare throat, and who, disguised as a mild-mannered nymphomaniac for a small metropolitan film company, fights a never ending battle for free speech, free love and the French way!"

Linda radiated innocence, even as a roomful of men tried to bring her to orgasm. The camera kept cutting from shots of anal sex, oral sex and intercourse to a dreamy smile on her face. The title act, when Linda first swallows the entire shaft of Harry Reems' cock, seemed almost Wagnerian. But equally memorable was the calm, nonchalant way she shaved her pubic hair, an image that touched millions.

Nora Ephron interviewed Linda for Esquire, creating this memorable exchange: "'Why do you shave off your pubic hair in the film?'

"'I always do,' Linda Lovelace replies. 'I like it.'

"'But why do you do it?'

"'Well,' she says, 'it's kind of hot in Texas.'

"That stops me for a second. 'Well,' I say, 'I think it's weird.'

"'Weird? Why?'

"'Well, I don't know anyone who does that.'

"'Now you do,' says Linda Lovelace."

Ephron hung up the phone feeling like a "hung-up, uptight, middle-class, inhibited, possibly puritanical feminist."

Looking back at the film years later, reviewer Bruce Handy spoke of "the lingering hippie notions of free love and liberating sensuality that inform the film, the idea that indiscriminately getting it on served some kind of social good."

The film was "pruriently playful."

Staid critics such as The New York Times' Vincent Canby faced the difficult question "What are we to think of Deep Throat?" What made this film chic? Canby saw it as "at best only a souvenir of a time and place." The name of the theater where it played seemed to offer the best answer. It was called the New Mature World Theater.

Busloads of middle-class tourists were pouring into Manhattan to see the nude revue Oh! Calcutta! Now mainstream America made its way to see Throat. It became a source of humor on Johnny Carson's show; sidekick Ed McMahon had been seen holding court outside a screening of Deep Throat. Two Washington reporters used the movie title as the code name for a source in a series of articles they wrote on the Watergate break-in. The New York Times announced the era of Porno Chic and reported that Mike Nichols, Sandy Dennis, Ben Gazzara, Jack Nicholson and Truman Capote had been seen in the audience of Throat. Linda posed for Playboy, hung out at the Mansion with Hefner, appeared at the premiere of Last Tango in Paris and socialized with Sammy Davis Jr. in Las Vegas.

In August 1972 police arrested the owner and a cashier at the New Mature World Theater. Judge Joel Tyler listened to film critic Arthur Knight defend the movie as the "first film of this genre to acknowledge the importance of female sexual gratification."

Other experts debated the difference between prurient and normal eroticism. Dr. Edward Hornick, a New York psychiatrist, said simply, "An erection in the male or the female is a sign of sexual arousal. Such arousal may take place on the basis of normal, natural appeal or prurient appeal. The same erection is going to be there." A woody is a woody. A stiff dick does not make moral distinctions. A wonderful argument.

When Tyler ruled against the film, the theater marquee read: Judge Cuts Throat--World Mourns.

Gene Shalit said Judge Tyler took "another step toward making Deep Throat the best-known movie in America."

On the West Coast, the Mitchell brothers interviewed Marilyn Briggs, a model and actress. The two brothers had shot more than 330 loops for the growing crowds at the O'Farrell Theater. Now they wanted to film a full-length feature based on a porn classic called Behind the Green Door. Taking the name Marilyn Chambers, the young actress joined the project.

The story line was simple: A young girl is kidnapped and taken to a private club. A coven of female attendants in black robes prepares her body in a cross between an Esalen massage session and a lesbian feeding frenzy. Johnny Keyes, a black actor wearing a bone necklace, war paint and white tights, ravages her onstage. A set of trapeze swings descends from the ceiling, and Chambers has sex with four guys at once--one in each hand, one in her mouth, one in her cunt. The on-screen audience--a weird collection of dwarfs, fat women, transvestites, masked men in tuxedos, stewardess types and street people--breaks into an orgy. Hands reach for genitals and nipples as casually as they would for popcorn. A truck driver in the audience rescues the girl and the movie ends with an almost tender act of one-on-one intercourse.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a standing ovation. Then, in one of those moments that show the marketing gods move in mysterious ways, Procter & Gamble unknowingly shipped a couple million boxes of Ivory Snow soap adorned by the smiling face of Marilyn Chambers. The Mitchells sent out a PR release that touted the star as "99 and 44/100ths percent pure."

Porn had arrived. It was no longer part of the underground, no longer wrapped in shame or anonymity. Performers became stars. Directors put their names (or pseudonyms) on films and developed cult followings. Alex de Renzy produced Baby Face and Pretty Peaches. Damiano turned out The Devil in Miss Jones and The Story of Joanna, an early S& M classic. Bill Osco filmed a ribald version of Alice in Wonderland and the camp classic Flesh Gordon. Radley Metzger contributed Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann and The Opening of Misty Beethoven.

In 1976 Sony introduced the first home video recorder. Not surprisingly, porn drove the conversion to the new technology. Fans paid up to $300 for a private copy of Deep Throat.

Porn's argument was subtle and seductive. Who could say the girl next door would never do this or that, when the girl next door was obviously doing just that on a giant screen? Couples would see a movie and bring the images home, and join that audience of dwarfs and clowns at an orgy.

Commercial Sex

In New York, Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley's fledgling newspaper was developing a following. Founded at the end of the previous decade, Screw was a guide to the changing sex scene. Goldstein provided a consumer's report on porn movies, scoring films on the Peter Meter. He gave three-penis and four-penis ratings to massage parlors, peep shows and bookstores. America, it seemed, had rediscovered commercial sex. It was Storyville with Emotion Lotion and Kama Sutra massage oil replacing the gin and jazz of turn-of-the-century brothels. Entrepreneurs turned studios into sexual spas that had theme rooms featuring hippie fantasies with beads and pillows or the toga-clad attendants of a Roman orgy. The Pink Orchid, the Perfumed Garden and Caesar's Retreat suggested ancient erotic sites. The massage parlor in the Biltmore Hotel had a mirrored Infinity Room, complete with Jacuzzi, champagne and up to three attendants.

Gay Talese, who spent most of the Seventies researching a book on the Sexual Revolution, briefly managed two parlors. In Thy Neighbor's Wife, he wrote that the masseuses were college students, aspiring actors and dancers, "the adventurous young divorcées, the drifting dropouts, the grisettes with an aversion to straight office work, the Belle du Jour wives, the girlfriends of the owners, the pretty lesbians and bisexuals." Although the majority of customers were old enough to be the masseuses' fathers, Talese wrote, "there was a curious reversal of roles after the sexual massage had begun. It was the young women who held the authority, who had the power to give or deny pleasure, while the men lay dependently on their backs, moaning softly with their eyes closed, as their bodies were being rubbed with baby oil or talc. For these men it was possibly their first intimate contact with the sexually emancipated youth movement they had read and heard so much about, the world of Woodstock and the Pill."

There were thousands of Green Doors across America: No longer was the bedroom door the only gate to heaven.

Public Sex

Porn offered one form of public sex. Couples learned that sexual energy was a movable feast, that watching sex was a turn-on. For some, the cinematic version wasn't enough. They wanted to break the fourth wall, to participate. The Seventies unleashed an unprecedented wave of exhibitionism, of public sex, of shared sex.

In 1971 Gilbert Bartell wrote Group Sex: A Scientist's Eyewitness Report on the American Way of Swinging. He had spent three years in the pools and rec rooms of wife-swapping middle-class adventurers.

Bartell estimated there were up to one million people involved in organized swinging. (A less authoritative book on wife-swapping clubs that appeared in the mid-Sixties had put the figure as high as eight million.) Some couples belonged to organized clubs such as the Wide World of Contemporary People and met swingers at annual Lifestyles Conventions, or on cruises sponsored by Lifestyles Tours and Travel. Others placed ads in magazines such as Select and Kindred Spirits:

• "Seek girls or young couples who like French culture and all things exotic. AC/DC girls welcome."

• "Discreet couple, late 40s, desires to meet discreet, kind, broad-minded couples of any age for fun and pleasure. Discretion an absolute must."

• "Couple, early 30s, interested in threesomes, foursomes, parties and photography. She's versatile, loves all but B& D. Send photo, phone number and address."

Bartell described a ritualized subculture: "Every swinging host has a radio, phonograph or hi-fi set with a selection of mood music that is preferred as background. We never heard rock or other modern styles--just melodious tunes, mostly from the Forties or Fifties. Mantovani and Mancini are popular."

There was closed swinging, with couples switching and moving off to private bedrooms; and open swinging, where everyone shared the same bed or rec room. Almost two thirds of the women admitted to having sex with other women, and Bartell claimed that 92 percent of the women he saw interacted while their husbands watched. Another favorite activity, known as more-on-one, would make one person the center of attention, pouring the energy of three or more lovers into one.

The invention of the Polaroid SX-70 underscored the trophy nature of swing clubs. Couples would take pictures and divide the shots at the end of the evening. Bartell claimed 99 percent of the males involved in swinging were Playboy readers. Many had taken the magazine's philosophy to heart: They would not allow marriage to end sexual exploration. George O'Neill called the concept "open marriage," and, according to one study, some 15 percent of husbands and wives practiced it. Among unmarried couples living together (another lifestyle choice) the figure rose to 30 percent.

Americans clearly had developed a taste for sexual adventure. At Sandstone, the erotic retreat outside of Los Angeles, up to 275 couples gathered in a kind of sexual commune. In California, one couldn't breathe without developing an accompanying philosophy, and Sandstone was no different. The brochure for potential members gave this message: "The concepts underlying Sandstone include the idea that the human body is good, that open expressions of affection and sexuality are good. The strength and lasting significance of the Sandstone experience lies in human contact divorced from the cocktail party context, with all its games and dodges and places to hide. Contact at Sandstone includes the basic level of literal, physical nakedness and open sexuality."

Alex Comfort was a regular visitor and described Sandstone in More Joy. Gay Talese spent time there as well, offering this description of the typical orgy: "After descending the red-carpeted staircase, the visitors entered the semidarkness of a large room, where, reclining on the cushioned floor, bathed in the orange glow from the fireplace, they saw shadowed faces and interlocking limbs, rounded breasts and reaching fingers, moving buttocks, glistening backs, shoulders, nipples, navels, long blonde hair spread across pillows, thick dark arms holding soft white hips, a woman's head hovering over an erect penis. Sighs, cries of ecstasy could be heard, the slap and suction of copulating flesh, laughter, murmuring music from the stereo, crackling black burning wood."

Talese continues in this vein for several more paragraphs, trying to capture the Hieronymus Bosch vision: "It was a room with a view like none other in America, an audiovisual aphrodisiac, everything that Puritan America had ever tried to outlaw, to censor, to conceal behind locked bedroom doors, was on display in this adult playroom, where men often saw for the first time another man's erection and where many couples became alternately stimulated, shocked, gladdened and saddened by the sight of their spouses interlocked with new lovers."

Sandstone was not the only place in America with a view. There were party homes scattered across the country. Blake Edwards' hilarious movie 10 had a subplot wherein Dudley Moore spies on a house of orgiasts. When they meet, the host, who has his own telescope trained on Moore's house, complains, "I've been providing X-rated entertainment and you reciprocate with PG." And a far more physically attractive guest list graced the weekend orgies at Hefner's Mansion West.

In New York, gays had turned bars and bathhouses into underground sexual arenas. At the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel, Bette Midler performed while towel-clad males jousted about in the pool and on the dance floor. At Hudson River haunts such as the Anvil, the Sewer and the Cock Ring, the sex was of a no-holds-barred variety. The clientele found off-label uses for Crisco and axle grease. The fist became a sexual organ. Some say gays were leading the way, that lines between straight and gay were blurred. Pop culture flirted with androgyny.

•

The club phenomenon crossed over in the mid-Seventies. In 1976, on the nation's bicentennial, Larry Levenson opened Plato's Retreat in Manhattan. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54 in 1977, cashing in on the disco craze. The two clubs reflected different approaches to permission. Rubell cordoned off the entrance to his club with a velvet rope, and the politics of the door were something to behold. He said he was casting a play. Celebrities such as Mick and Bianca Jagger were admitted; celebrity was almost as liberating as anonymity.

A gossip column was more discreet than a police blotter. Many reporters were so blinded by big names that they didn't notice the favors at the door--pockets filled with quaaludes, packets of cocaine.

Jim Fouratt told Anthony Haden-Guest that "Studio 54 gave license. That was what the door policy was about more than anything else. It was to make you feel that if you got in, you were in a world that was completely safe for you to do whatever you wanted."

So women danced in sleek outfits, perky little nipples popping like flashbulbs. (When Playboy ran a photo of an unidentified woman dancing at Studio 54 without panties, she filed a suit claiming invasion of privacy. She insisted we had airbrushed out her underwear and added the pubic hair.)

And there was on-premises sex. Photographer David Hamilton told Haden-Guest: "You would look around and you'd see somebody's back. And then you'd see little toes twinkling behind their ears." The celebrity set played at adventure, flirting with the darker side of sex. Rubell had to rescue one socialite from the basement of the club, where she had allowed herself to be handcuffed to the pipes. Her sex object, a boy who tended bar, had rushed back to work without unlocking the cuffs.

At Plato's, fitness counted more than fashion. You earned celebrity through what you did on the mats, in the pool, on the dance floor, in the shower rooms and in private cubicles. You put on an attitude when you walked through the door with a partner, paid $30 for a one-night admission and a six-week membership.

Screenwriter Buck Henry recalls that when he and a companion signed in, they used the names Scott and Zelda. The maitresse d'hôtel looked at the names and said, "Oh, yeah--Scott and Zelda. You've been here before."

Plato's took the outside world, the bold experiments in promiscuity and license that filled the singles bars, and condensed them into a single night. A filmmaker recounted his first impressions of the club to a Playboy writer, how you walked through the door to be overwhelmed by the almost psychedelic aroma of orgy. You focused on what you were seeing and became a connoisseur of techniques. Then you'd study personalities: "You single out a beautiful girl and watch her for the whole evening, trying to figure out from her behavior why she's there. Last week I watched a woman in the pool go through 21 guys. She was into underwater oral sex. Maybe she was training to be a pearl diver. Maybe she had always had the fantasy of giving head to a crowd."

Near the end of the decade Tara Alexander set a goal--to get into The Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of partners in an evening. The event, dubbed the Spermathon, was filmed for cable television. Alexander brought 83 men to orgasm and tallied 24 orgasms herself. Larry Levenson made a bet with Al Goldstein that he could come 15 times in one day. Spouting his 15th orgasm, he staggered across the finish line with ten hours to spare.

Depersonalized? You bet. Demonic? Dionysian? Here's one veteran on the role of quaaludes, or disco biscuits, in creating sexual oblivion: "I was in the mattress room, wailing away, really in sync with the music, when I noticed that there were a lot of people standing in a circle around me, watching. Strange. I looked down at the girl I was with. She was waving her legs in the air, screaming, scratching my back. I still got the scars. She was totally out of her mind. I guess she was enjoying herself. I went back to what I was doing, and when I finished everyone applauded."

Plato's drew some 6500 amateurs a month. It was like open-mike night at a folk club. But the club died from overexposure. A Playboy article suggested that there were so many reporters present it looked like a branch of the Columbia School of Journalism. Forgive us our press passes.

Instead of a place where strangers came to share sexual energy, it became a tourist haunt where middle-class couples came for voyeuristic thrills. When the club moved to a site near the Port Authority bus terminal, the staff had to show porn movies to get something started. In the bathrooms, gallon jugs of Mountains of Mouthwash graced the counters. The more adventurous moved on to other scenes. As one of the founders of on-premises swinging had dictated, Swans fly with swans, and ducks fly with ducks.

Looking for Mr. Goodfilm

To compete with these new explicit forms of entertainment, Hollywood became increasingly permissive. Many films of the Seventies were fueled by a fascination with the kinkier aspects of sex. Myra Breckinridge (1970), Gore Vidal's comic account of a sex change (in which Rex Reed becomes Raquel Welch), earned an X. So did Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), for its futuristic pornoviolence. Major studios also released X-rated soft-core films such as Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974).

Sexual issues became dramatic plot concerns in major motion pictures. Jane Fonda earned an Oscar for her portrayal of a high-class callgirl in Klute (1971), in which she confesses to her analyst that she prefers her life as a hooker to that of a model, because she is more in control of the relationships. In Coming Home (1978), Fonda leaves Bruce Dern, a gung ho Vietnam officer, for Jon Voight, a disabled vet who brings her to climax through cunnilingus. War is phallic; peace is a warm tongue.

Major Hollywood stars bared their bodies and their souls. In Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider have an alienating, anonymous affair without bringing in the outside world, without even telling each other their names. "Maybe we can come without touching" is one of the games they play. Anal sex with the aid of a stick of butter is another. Bertolucci could claim simultaneous discovery of the zipless fuck--but as with Erica Jong's characters, the illusion was hard to maintain. At the end of their relationship, Schneider shoots Brando. In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a Japanese film about a real relationship between two lovers who leave their families and disappear into an exhausting affair, presented a similar message. Lust is not sustaining: She strangles her lover to produce a heightened orgasm, then castrates the corpse.

Cinematic sex ranged from an exuberant trailer-park fuck between Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces (1970) to the explicit scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now (1974). Warren Beatty established himself as Hollywood's leading cocksman in Shampoo (1975). (The scene in which Christie goes down on him at a political fundraiser, while on television sets in the background Spiro Agnew speaks of Nixon's stand against permissiveness, is a classic.) Beatty's character, a hairdresser who sleeps with his clients, delivers a soliloquy that sums up the Seventies:

"Let's face it--I fucked them all! That's what I do. That's why I went to beauty school. I go into that shop and they're so great-looking, you know, and I'm doing their hair and they smell great or I could be out on the street and I just stop at a stoplight or I could go on an elevator and there's a beautiful girl. That's it. It makes my day, makes me feel like I'm going to live forever. Maybe that means I don't love 'em. I don't know. Nobody's going to tell me I don't like 'em very much."

Just as the Sixties could be traced in the career of one actress (be it Natalie Wood or Jane Fonda), two films featuring Diane Keaton came to summarize the Seventies. As the title heroine in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), she portrayed a quirky, adventuresome city girl. The film explored the questions of a modern relationship. Woody and Diane discussed their sex problems while standing in line for movies, with friends, with analysts. Why did something that bound you to one lover (an escaped lobster and the resulting chaos) seem completely meaningless when tried with another? Why were men's and women's expectations so different? When asked by their analysts how often they have sex, Allen says, "Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week." Keaton says, "Constantly. I'd say three times a week."

Annie Hall changed the way American women dressed, but Looking for Mr. Goodbar, made the same year, changed women's nightmares. Director Richard Brooks took Judith Rossner's novel and turned it into a scary cautionary tale about the dangers of promiscuity.

The movie and the novel were based on a true crime. Katherine Cleary, an Irish Catholic schoolteacher, was murdered by a man she had picked up in a bar called Tweeds on New Year's Day. The victim had been stabbed repeatedly. Police found a red candle stuffed up Cleary's vagina.

Each of the men Keaton brings home in the film version represents a walking dysfunction. The English professor who sleeps with his student is a premature ejaculator who cheats on his wife. The overprotective welfare worker who insinuates himself into her family has a problem with Keaton's sexuality. The Richard Gere character never seems to reach a climax and is abusive. Tom Berenger, as the man who kills her, is a troubled bisexual who has just abandoned a relationship with a queen. When Keaton taunts him for not being able to get it up, he becomes enraged. The film climaxes in a strobe-lit orgy of bloodletting.

The press had been filled with war stories from the sexual frontier. Nora Ephron wrote about books that caught perfectly "the awful essence of being a single woman in a big city. False pregnancies. Real pregnancies. Abortions. Cads. Dark bars with married men. Rampant masochism." She reviewed a tape-recorded tell-all called The Girls in the Office, in which women living in the city were "surrounded and tormented by exhibitionists, flashers, rapists, muggers, goosers, breathers, feelers and Peeping Toms. The acts of violence become so commonplace in this book that at one point, when one Vanessa Van Durant is locked in her apartment by her boyfriend and beaten and buggered for two weeks, I found myself shrugging and thinking, Ah, yes, the old 'lock her in the apartment and beat her and bugger her' routine."

Writer Jane Howard, reporting from the front for Mademoiselle in July 1974, spoke of a woman who had admitted to "a recent attack of free-floating lust." The friend had considered going to the lobby of the Americana Hotel and hanging around as if she were a hooker, to see whom she might pick up. "I thought of answering one of those 'Unlicensed Masseur' ads in the Voice. There was a Cowboy Ken whose ad sounded interesting, but how could I know he wasn't an ax murderer?"

Lord deliver us from premature ejaculators and from ax murderers. Some rallying cry.

The Pubic Wars

The November 1976 cover of Esquire shows Hugh Hefner, pipe clenched between teeth, glowering at a copy of Hustler magazine. "What have they done to the girl next door?" asks the cover line.

The feminist movement had tried to free itself from male definitions of womanhood. And, not surprisingly, it had singled out Hefner, a man who had spent two decades defining new roles for both sexes. Hefner believed the girl next door was a sexual being, and the men who read Playboy approved.

Playboy became the most imitated magazine in America, but each men's magazine celebrated its own variations on the theme. The girls of Oui magazine were the Continental sisters of Brigitte Bardot. The girls of Club magazine were English. Sturdy, with a slight taste for fetish, leather boots and whips.

In 1969 Bob Guccione brought the UK's Penthouse to America. His ads declared, "We're going rabbit hunting" and showed the Playboy Rabbit Head caught in the crosshairs of a gun sight.

Penthouse Pets were the girls next door--if you lived next door to a massage parlor. Some chroniclers of the sexual revolution make a lot of the so-called pubic wars. Playboy had first published pubic hair in a pictorial of Sweet Charity's Paula Kelly in August 1969. The first Playmate to show pubic hair was Liv Lindeland in the January 1971 issue, nine months after Penthouse Pets went pubic. Pubic hair had long been considered obscene, but full frontal nudity was a natural progression.

Larry Flynt, owner of a series of strip clubs in Ohio and Kentucky, turned his club newsletter into Hustler magazine in 1974. He expressed contempt for the romantic images of Hefner's girls next door and Guccione's soft-focus strumpets. Their coyness was hypocritical; Hustler would deliver raunch. Flynt's battle cry was "Think Pink." His models were the girl next door if you lived next door to a low-rent gynecologist's office. Laura Kipnis, in Bound and Gagged, describes Flynt's approach to publishing: "From its inception, Hustler made it its mission to disturb and unsettle its readers." If Penthouse was a more explicit imitation of Playboy, Hustler found inspiration in Al Goldstein's Screw.

Kipnis catalogs Hustler's "Rabelaisian exaggeration of everything improper," its "partial inventory of the subjects it finds fascinating: fat women, assholes, monstrous and gigantic sexual organs, body odors (the notorious scratch-and-sniff centerfold), anal sex and anything that exudes from the body--piss, shit, semen and menstrual blood, particularly when it sullies public, sanitary or sanctified sites. And especially farts: farting in public, farting loudly, Barbara Bush farting, priests and nuns farting, politicians farting, the professional classes farting, the rich farting."

In June 1978 Flynt, after a highly publicized but short-lived religious conversion, announced, "We will no longer hang up women like pieces of meat." That month's cover proclaimed, Last All-Meat Issue--Grade A Pink and showed a woman's body passing through a meat grinder. Feminists turned the image into a recruiting poster.

The Great Porn Debate

Like a 20th-century Tocqueville, French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet visited 42nd Street and discovered "a kind of great national theater of our passions" where we could "at last contemplate quite openly our hidden faces, thereby transforming into freedom, play and pleasure what was merely alienation and risked becoming crime or madness." He happened to be looking at the cover of a magazine depicting a naked woman tied to a cage, her breasts exposed to ravenous rats.

Why did men need these images? "No bull, however deprived, will let its gaze be attracted by the photograph of a cow's rump," Robbe-Grillet wrote. "Man is fully human only if everything passes through his head, even (and especially) sex. An adult needs pornography as a child needs fairy tales." Porn was a way of dealing with things that go bump in the night, uniting both the pleasure and the danger of sex in a fantasy format.

Peter Prescott, reviewing Peter Michelson's Aesthetics of Pornography for Newsweek in March 1971, asked, "Can anything intelligent be said about pornography? Like prayer, it causes an alteration in our brain waves and our blood. In both prayer and pornography, sparks are struck from some part of our cortex that knows no language. The sparks from prayer fly up, the sparks from pornography fly the other way."

Michelson had suggested that pornography was "the imaginative record of man's sexual will."

Margaret Mead, no fan of the genre, said that "pornography is fantasy material about forbidden activities put together by people who probably never have experienced what is depicted, in order to meet the needs of other people who are unlikely to carry out in reality the fantasized activities shown. So pornography in all its various hard-core and soft-core forms plays upon the ignorance, the impotence and the feeble reveries of persons--women or men--for whom lusty sexual activities in the past, present or future pose a threat or are inaccessible." Porn, Mead felt, was "an exploitation of sexual weakness or of unmet sexual needs, for the purpose of financial gain." But now she saw healthy people embracing porn at their own peril, using it to take their sexual lives into new terrain. She said porn gave "some illusion of participation" in something beyond the individual.

West Coast porn came right out of the counterculture, with the Mitchell brothers filming loops with hippies high on controlled substances.

One of the legacies of the Sixties is the belief that sex combined with an exuberance for public display is perfectly natural. If you expressed politics by marching 100,000 strong, by going tribal, what would be the best way to express sex? When you look at the early porn community you see an X-rated equivalent of the Provincetown Players--a small group of sexual radicals, volunteers whose pure willingness to get it on infiltrated the American scene. They were pruriently playful, willing to do it in or out of costume, in chains, swings, beanbag chairs, swimming pools, hot tubs, on trapezes, covered with oil in gas station garages, flung over motorcycles, tossed into piles of straw or on banquet tables covered with fine silverware. The early porn films that were shot on elegant estates seem to invoke and taunt old-world urbanity.

The best had an air of instruction. The Opening of Misty Beethoven was a prurient retelling of the Pygmalion story, with Jamie Gillis teaching Constance Money, a street whore, the finer details of sex. The instruction on cunnilingus: Approach your partner as you would a ripe mango. These films showed women in control. (Misty depicts a woman strapping on a dildo and taking a man.)

The films made a man's ejaculation a banner event--the special effect shot in Behind the Green Door caught the come and strung it across the screen like northern lights. The come shot would become a cliché, but the original impact was like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. This is how sex feels for a man. This is how it looks to feel this good.

Porn showed sexual liberation and the extinction of Victorian prudery. The backlash had to attack the apparent willingness of women to participate in such male fantasies.

Snuff and Feminism

If porn was a fairy tale for adults, there had to be monsters. Puritan America has a talent for creating moral panics around nonexistent threats. The White Slave Trade hysteria that resulted in the Mann Act is one such example, the snuff film another.

In 1969 reporters covering the Tate-LaBianca murders repeated a rumor that the Manson family had filmed home movies of their brutal slayings. Press accounts coined the term snuff film.

No Manson film ever surfaced, but the idea clawed at the dark side of the American psyche. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had seen "the real thing." The New York Post did much to tantalize the gullible, running the headlines Snuff Porn: The Actress is Actually Murdered And Snuff: Turning on to the Last Taboo.

No matter that police were unable to locate a copy. The press invented details: "There are apparently more than one sex and murder films circulating," wrote the Post. "The films are distributed by pornography merchants associated with organized crime and they are offered only to trusted customers." Sources told of one film made in Latin America, possibly Argentina. The film was said to begin with an assortment of sex acts between a woman and one or more actors. "But soon a knife is produced," writes the Post, "and the horrified woman--clearly unaware of the true nature of her role--is stabbed to death and then savagely dismembered."

The film supposedly sold for $1500 a set. Private screenings cost viewers $200. The Post reported with a straight face that a producer had offered "a large amount of money to someone who would be murdered on film." Would you mind talking to my agent first?

In 1975 Alan Shackleton purchased The Slaughter, a trashy girl-gang biker movie shot by Roberta and Michael Findlay in South America. He tacked on a scene at the end in which a film crew kills and disembowels a script girl. The special effects can be summed up in one sentence: Pass the ketchup. Shackleton tacked on a new title, Snuff, and a tag line: "From South America, where life is cheap."

Murder for entertainment was a chimera, but fake murder for entertainment made tons of money. And feminists flocked to the theater--to picket and protest the abuse of women. (Never mind that there were other, more gory films playing just up the street--The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an equal-opportunity exploitation flick with victims of both sexes.)

America has always toyed with a domino theory of debauchery. At the turn of the century, one kiss placed women on the road to ruin. By the Seventies, the acts had escalated. Customers of commercial pornography, it was feared, would tire of fuck films and want something more outrageous. And once you crossed the line, anything was possible.

It was an unusual hysteria, a case of rhetorical hemorrhage. Susan Brown-miller, author of Against Our Will, a powerful indictment of rape, was the first to wed the issues of porn and power. Clearly, she was offended by explicit erotica, elevating "the gut distaste that a majority of women feel when we look at pornography" to a political mandate. "Hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom," she charged. "It is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, dirty."

Her distaste came from the "gut knowledge" that "our bodies are being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to bolster that masculine esteem which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing females as anonymous panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanized objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded. This, of course, is also the philosophy of rape. There can be no equality in porn," she wrote, "no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of bawdy fun. Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition." Porn, she wrote, "is the undiluted essence of antifemale propaganda."

Brownmiller took the serious issue of rape and used it as a cattle prod. She compared porn to the gassing of Jews and the lynching of blacks.

Robin Morgan, editor of Sisterhood Is Powerful, pushed the same buttons. In 1974 she offered this formula: Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. "Knowing our place," Morgan said, "is the message of rape--as it was for blacks the message of lynchings." She fanned the terror, saying that for four years, feminist students had been the prey of "lesson rapes"--committed with the idea that all frustrated feminists needed was a good rape to show them the light.

And then she expanded the definition of rape to include all unwanted male desire: "For instance, I would define rape not only as a violation taking place in the dark alley or after breaking into and entering a woman's home. I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."

Morgan decried the Madison Avenue image of the liberated woman, "a glamorous lady slavering with lust for his paunchy body." And argued that most women relented to sex out of fear--"fear of losing the guy, fear of being a prude"--and that "the pressure is there, and it need not be a knife blade against the throat; it's in his body language, his threat of sulking, his clenched or trembling hands, his self-deprecating humor or angry put-down or silent self-pity at being rejected." Picture a WANTED poster of Woody Allen as your rapist next door.

Morgan went from lesson rapes to snuff movies in the same rap. "The New York Post carried a story about a nationwide investigation into snuff films, or slashers--pornographic movies which culminate in the actual murder and dismemberment of the actress. These movies, shot for the most part in South America, appear to be circulating, according to the Post story, on the pornography connoisseur circuit, where the select clientele can afford $1500 for a collection of eight reels. A porn movie called Snuff opened at a first-run movie theater on New York's Broadway. Advertised as the bloodiest thing ever filmed, this print was priced to make it available to Everyman. As usual, the message is clear through the medium."

Except that Snuff was a hoax, with ketchup for blood.

Gloria Steinem addressed the issue frequently in the pages of Ms. She tried to distinguish erotica from porn, with all the success previous generations had in distinguishing nice girls from bad ones. "Look at any photo or film of people making love," she commanded. "Really making love."

OK.

"The images may be diverse, but there is usually a sensuality and touch and warmth, an acceptance of bodies and nerve endings. There is always a spontaneous sense of people who are there because they want to be, out of shared pleasure."

OK.

"Now look at any depiction of sex in which there is clear force, or an unequal power that spells coercion."

Her list of bad sex included whips and chains, torture and murder, wounds and bruises, body poses that convey conqueror and victim and--brace yourself--"unequal nudity."

These two sorts of images, she wrote, "are as different as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain."

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In 1979 Susan Brownmiller opened a storefront on Times Square. The brainwashing began. Women Against Pornography ran two tours a week, taking groups of women into bookstores, live sex shows, peep shows. The tours began with a slide show of the most concentrated hard-core, a witless sampler of women bound, gagged, poked and prodded--all selected with the avowed purpose of raising the level of outrage. What offends Brownmiller should offend the world: An August 27, 1979 article in People shows Brownmiller standing dourly outside the Show World Center. "The basic content of pornography is male violence against women," she says. "It makes men feel that it is normal and rational to be sexually hostile to women and makes women define themselves through sexually masochistic images. We're all for sex, but we're for healthy, equal sex."

Not quite. The feminist movement had lost its major issues. The Supreme Court had legalized abortion. Lawsuits brought by Now had done much to lessen discrimination in the workplace. Rape laws had been changed to aid prosecution. In 1973 Esquire had dismissed the movement with an article called "302 Women Who Are Cute When They're Mad." In 1976 a Redbook survey found that "seven out of ten men say the women's movement has had little or no effect on them." In 1974 a Newsweek editorial wondered in print, "Is Gloria Steinem dead?" Michele Wallace, writing in the February 1978 issue of Ms., was honest about the new agenda. Men must be "made so uncomfortable by the lunacy of sexism that they feel compelled to do a few things males seem rarely to do--explore their motivation and become suspicious of their desires in regard to women."

Like the Puritans, these feminists dealt in guilt and shame. They wanted to poison the well of eros.

The President's Commission

At the outset of the decade, the nation seemed to be moving toward sexual maturity. Reason and research had triumphed over America's fear of sex. Science seemed to give the green light. Sexual information would set us free.

In 1970, after three years of research, the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography completed its report. Social scientists had spent nearly $3 million observing the effects of erotica. They had wired college students and had shown them sex films for 90 minutes a day, five days a week, for three weeks. They found "no evidence that exposure to or use of explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of social or individual harms such as crime, delinquency, sexual or nonsexual deviance or severe emotional disturbances."

Sometimes it takes a ton of tax dollars to affirm common sense. The report found that people who were aroused by pornography did not become sexual predators. They simply masturbated or had sex in the usual ways with their regular partners. Indeed, the report found that there was a positive side to sexual material. People who were exposed to "erotic stimuli" tended to talk about sex, and sexual material could "increase and facilitate constructive communication about sexual matters within marriage." Erotica was used as "a source of entertainment and information by substantial numbers of American adults."

Studies of sex offenders found that most had sexually deprived childhoods, that they had less exposure as adolescents to erotic material than normal citizens did. The one image that most convicted pedophiles recalled was a billboard for Coppertone suntan lotion that showed a tiny dog pulling down the bathing suit of a young girl.

The report confirmed a generation gap. Young people were more likely to become aroused by erotica than their elders were. People who were college educated, religiously inactive and sexually experienced were more likely to report arousal than persons who were less educated, religiously active and sexually inexperienced.

The Commission noted the Danish experience: When laws against sexually explicit materials were eliminated in 1969, the rate of sex crimes dropped. By a vote of 12 to 5 the President's Commission voted to repeal all federal, state and local laws prohibiting the sale, exhibition or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults. One commissioner openly questioned "the wisdom and validity of encasing its moral and social convictions in legal armor." The government should get out of the business of trying to dictate sexual morality: "Governmental regulation of moral choice can deprive the individual of the responsibility for personal decision, which is essential to the formation of genuine moral standards. Such regulation would also tend to establish an official moral orthodoxy, contrary to our most fundamental constitutional traditions."

Not all commissioners were so enlightened. Charles Keating, Nixon's belated appointee to the Commission, tried to have the report suppressed. Failing that, he wrote a bitter dissent. So did commissioners Father Morton Hill and the Reverend Winfrey Link. "For many of us who have been battling smut," Keating cried, "these words are no less than a Magna Carta for pornographers."

President Nixon rejected the Commission's conclusions outright. "American morality is not to be trifled with," he declared. "Smut should be outlawed in every state of the Union. So long as I am in the White House there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut. The Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting, harmful effect on man's character. Centuries of civilization and ten minutes of common sense tell us otherwise."

William Hamling, a California publisher, released an unauthorized illustrated version of the Commission's report. The Greenleaf Classic volume featured 546 hard-core illustrations that ranged from engravings by Pablo Picasso to child pornography. Photographs showed couples in poses that could have been lifted from temple carvings in India to a gut-wrenching shot of a woman fellating a horse.

Hamling printed 100,000 copies of the report and sent out a brochure to 55,000 citizens. On one side of the brochure were samples of illustrations--women with come on their faces, lesbian shots, orgies and the horse lover. On the flip side was the provocative Thanks a lot, Mr. President.

Attorney General John Mitchell dusted off the Comstock Act and arrested Hamling and three others on charges of using the U.S. mail to deliver an obscene book (as well as the brochure). Two of the commissioners testified on Hamling's behalf, saying the illustrated report was actually better than the original. The jury agreed, but found that the brochure, which simply printed explicit pictures with a tirade against Richard Nixon, was obscene. Hamling was sentenced to four years in prison and a $32,000 fine. His conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Sex became a national issue as President Nixon campaigned against permissiveness. Nixon became the most actively antisexual president of the century. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst put together 680 pages of proposed changes in the Federal Crime Statutes. The statutes defined obscenity as "an explicit representation or detailed written or verbal description of an act of sexual intercourse, or violence indicating a sadomasochistic sexual relationship; an explicit close-up representation of a human genital organ." The proposed changes also defined as obscene devices "designed and marketed as useful primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs." There go our sex toys.

Shirley MacLaine wrote an editorial for Newsweek in May 1973 decrying Nixon's repression. She pointed out that the Nixon administration's definition would outlaw Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, Last Tango in Paris, Cries and Whispers, Carnal Knowledge, A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs. It would suppress the fiction of John O'Hara, Norman Mailer, John Updike, James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. "As a citizen, I resent being told what I can or cannot see, read or enjoy. These choices belong to me. Not to the FBI. Not to the Justice Department. Not even to the President of the United States." The President felt otherwise.

The Nixon Court

Even as President Nixon was being driven from office by the Watergate scandal, his strategy for a moral America was taking shape. In 1973 the Supreme Court, stocked with four Nixon appointees, heard a series of cases involving obscenity.

In the first, a California man had been found guilty of knowingly distributing obscene material. He had advertised through the mail four books entitled Intercourse, Man--Woman, Sex Orgies Illustrated and An Illustrated History of Pornography and a film entitled Marital Intercourse. A manager of a restaurant and his mother opened their mail (what kind of family opens mail together?) and complained to the police, setting into motion Miller vs. California.

Previous Supreme Court cases had ruled that if a work was to be judged obscene and beyond the protection of the Constitution, it had to be "utterly without redeeming social value." The Burger Court closed that loophole.

The Supreme Court conceded that "the sexual revolution of recent years may have had useful by-products in striking layers of prudery from a subject long irrationally kept from needed ventilation. But it does not follow that no regulation of patently offensive hard-core materials is needed or permissible; civilized people do not allow unregulated access to heroin because it is a derivative of medicinal morphine."

The Nixon Court voted five to four to turn matters of taste over to local prosecutors. While the First Amendment does not vary from community to community, "this does not mean that there are, or should be or can be, fixed uniform national standards of precisely what appeals to the prurient interest or is patently offensive. These are essentially questions of fact, and our nation is simply too big and too diverse for this Court to reasonably expect that such standards could be articulated for all 50 states in a single formulation."

Justice William O. Douglas was outraged. "What shocks me may be sustenance for my neighbor," he wrote in his dissent. "What causes one person to boil up in rage over one pamphlet or movie may reflect only his neurosis, which is not shared by others. Obscenity--which even we cannot define with precision--is a hodgepodge. To send men to jail for violating standards they cannot understand, construe and apply is a monstrous thing to do in a nation dedicated to fair trials and due process."

The Court handed down a second ruling that further threatened sexual expression. The owners of the Paris Adult Theater in Atlanta had been arrested for showing two explicit films, Magic Mirror and It All Comes Out in the End. The theater posted warnings: "Atlanta's Finest Mature Feature Films" and "Adult Theater: You must be 21 and able to prove it. If viewing the nude body offends you, Please do not enter."

In an earlier case, Stanley vs. Georgia, the Supreme Court had held that a man had the right to own and show stag films in the privacy of his home. Did that same right to privacy not give the Stanleys of the world the right to enjoy the same films projected for consenting adults outside the home?

The Supreme Court thought not. Chief Justice Warren Burger declared war on "sex and nudity," saying that "ultimate sexual acts" were not protected in public just because they were allowed--in some places--in private.

The Court ignored the recommendation of the President's Commission, citing instead the minority report of Father Hill and the Reverend Link. The Court agreed there is a "right of the nation and of the states to maintain a decent society." Privacy rights and public accommodation rights were mutually exclusive. It was ridiculous to suggest the Constitution protected the public showing of a movie that shows explicit sex acts, more than it would "a live performance of a man and woman locked in a sexual embrace at high noon in Times Square. It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depictions of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City."

At most, the Court was willing to accept that sexual pictures might have serious value if used in "medical books that necessarily use graphic illustrations and descriptions of human anatomy for the education of physicians and related personnel." Anything else was fair game for the porn vigilantes.

Nathan Lewin, writing in The New Republic, saw the strategy: "Caught in the vise are those who are in the business of expression--book publishers, movie distributors and even booksellers. Chief Justice Burger's ruling leaves them at the mercies of hundreds of local jurisdictions. What is there now to prevent the institution of criminal proceedings in one or several small Midwestern towns against the publishers of Playboy or Penthouse or against those who print or market Madam Xaviera Hollander's memoirs?"

•

The first film attacked under the new standard was Carnal Knowledge--a dark comedy directed by Mike Nichols, starring Candice Bergen, Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margret. A jury in Albany, Georgia convicted a theater operator for showing the film, which evidently did not possess the seriousness of an anatomy textbook.

Russ Meyer, king of the nudies, canceled production plans for a movie called Foxy, telling U.S. News and World Report, "I think I'll go fishing."

Charles Keating wrote an article for Reader's Digest, "Green Light to Combat Smut." Concerned citizens now had a legal weapon to stamp out "rampant erotica." Local vigilantes went to work.

The federal government's antiporn crusade had deep pockets. Prosecutors would spend more than $2 million on several highly publicized trials. And their strategy--forum shopping--was obvious. Choose a jurisdiction where the community standard was something just this side of Old Testament. Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Parrish hauled the producers and distributors of Deep Throat to Memphis on charges of conspiracy to distribute porn on an interstate scale. Those indicted included actor Harry Reems (who had never been to Memphis) and director Gerard Damiano. A later trial went after Georgina Spelvin, star of The Devil in Miss Jones. The Bible Belt jurists found the defendants guilty. When those verdicts were overturned on a technicality, Parrish retried the major players--Louis Peraino, Anthony Battista, T. Anthony Arnone, Bryanston Distributors and Gerard Damiano Film Productions. With the conviction, they were sentenced to prison terms of less than six months and fines of up to $10,000.

The feds also targeted Al Goldstein, editor and publisher of Screw and Smut, for geographical entrapment. Postal inspectors in the Kansas cities of Lawrence, Salina, Hutchinson and Pratt subscribed to Screw and Smut under assumed names.

When copies arrived, a local jury indicted Goldstein and Jim Buckley, his former partner, on 12 counts of obscenity. Mind you, the tabloids were not sold in Kansas and, indeed, only 11 people in the state other than the postal inspectors had ever bothered to subscribe.

At the first trial, in Wichita, the prosecutor called Goldstein "the mayor of 42nd Street" and accused him of trying to introduce degeneracy and indecency into the state of Kansas. Newsweek reported that a woman juror burst into tears when she saw the evidence. A federal judge declared a mistrial. A second trial in Kansas City resulted in a plea bargain. Goldstein and Buckley remained free, but Goldstein would have to pay a $30,000 fine.

The government could not stop pornography, but it could raise the cost of doing business. The strategy took a darker turn in 1978.

Police in Lawrenceville, Georgia bought copies of Hustler and Chic, and then the county solicitor filed charges against Larry Flynt. On March 6, 1978, as Flynt returned to the Fulton County Courthouse after lunch, he walked into an ambush. A sniper fired several rounds, felling Flynt. A bullet lodged in Flynt's spinal cord and left him paralyzed for life. (Never prosecuted for the crime, the sniper, Joseph Paul Franklin, was a white supremacist who had reportedly been offended by a Hustler pictorial showing interracial sex.) The judge declared a mistrial, but Georgia was not done with Flynt. In 1979 he was found guilty on 11 counts of distributing obscene material. He was fined $27,500 and given an 11-year suspended sentence on the stipulation that he observe Georgia's obscenity laws. Clearly, he did not.

Family-Value Fascists

One year after the 1969 riot at the Stonewall, gays in New York City held the first Gay Pride week. Up to 15,000 newly visible gays marched from Greenwich Village to Central Park for a gay-in. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago saw similar celebrations.

The same public visibility that sparked the heterosexual revolution flared among gays. A 12-hour PBS series on the typical American family introduced the country to Lance Loud. According to reviewers, he was "too witty and attractive to be repellent," or simply "everything you were afraid your little boy would grow up to be." His silver hair and blue lipstick were a shock to some, who saw him as the "evil flower of the Loud family." But there it was: The boy next door might be gay. Aren't we supposed to love our neighbor?

The Boys in the Band (1970) explored the complexities of homosexual relationships. Films like Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and Cabaret (1972) showed love triangles with men seducing both men and women. That the latter film was set in Nazi Germany tended to equate homosexuality with decadence.

In 1973 gay activists challenged the American Psychiatric Association to re-evaluate its diagnostic definition of homosexuality, which labeled it a "sexual deviation"--along with sadism, masochism and fetishism. Judd Marmor, a sexologist from the University of Southern California, argued, "It is quite clear that from an objective biological viewpoint there is nothing sick or unnatural about homosexual object choice." Psychiatrists, he said, had to take the blame for many of the stereotypes. "Let us base our diagnoses of psychiatric disorders on clear-cut evidence of serious ego disturbance or irrational behavior," he argued, "and not on the basis of alternative lifestyles that happen to be out of favor with the existing cultural conventions. It is our task to be healers, not watchdogs of social mores."

On December 15, 1973 the APA's Board of Trustees voted 13 to 0 to remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Charles Socarides demanded a full referendum. Marmor became president of the APA at the same time results were announced on April 9, 1974: Some 58 percent of the membership had voted to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses, while 37.8 percent had voted against.

Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, believes the vote was a landmark, converting the gay liberation movement's "most potent enemy into an important ally."

"There was no reason why a gay man or woman could not be just as healthy, just as effective, just as law-abiding and just as capable of functioning as any heterosexual," Marmor concluded. "Furthermore, we asserted that laws that discriminated against them in housing and in employment were unjustified."

Gays may have won an important ally, but they had provoked a more ancient enemy. In 1977, the Metropolitan Dade County Commission passed an ordinance that would allow qualified homosexuals to teach in private and parochial schools. Onetime Miss America contestant Anita Bryant had a vision. Homosexuality was a sin, she said, and if homosexuals were permitted to glamorize their deviant lifestyle, the American family would be destroyed and the American way of life would disappear forever. The entertainer formed a group (which would eventually be called Protect America's Children) and launched a crusade against gays.

In response, homosexual activists staged a gaycott of Florida orange juice. (Bryant had served as the official spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission.) In the ensuing controversy, Bryant lost bookings and sponsors for a television show.

Bryant told Playboy her views on a kind of sexual domino theory in a May 1978 interview. "God says the wages of sin is death and one little sin brings on another, live homosexual act is just the beginning of the depravity. It leads to--what's the word?--sadomasochism. It just gets worse as it goes on. You go further and further down the drain and it just becomes so perverted and you get into alcohol and drugs and it's so rotten that many homosexuals end up committing suicide."

She was disturbed that homosexuals "ate the male sperm," which she compared to the "forbidden fruit of the tree of life." Her opinion of the ordinance was based on religious intolerance: "The ordinance the homosexuals proposed would have made it mandatory that flaunting homosexuals be hired in both the public and the parochial schools. If you believe that adultery, homosexuality, drunkenness and things like that violate your religious standards, you have a right to prevent a teacher from standing up in front of your children and promoting sin. We were fighting religious bigotry. What gives the homosexual any more right to stand up in front of children and talk about his sexual preferences than a man who has a Great Dane as his lover has?"

She said that if we allowed gays to consider themselves a legitimate minority, we would have to condone minority status for "nail biters, dieters, fat people, short people and murderers."

Protect America's Children wrapped itself in the mantle of Christian family values. (Bryant was similarly offended by unmarried couples who lived together.)

Homophobia was still alive and well across America. Bryant was accused of printing bumper stickers that declared Kill a Queer for Christ. On November 27, 1978 another conservative defender of family values, named Dan White, shot and killed George Moscone, San Francisco's mayor, and Harvey Milk, the city's first openly gay city supervisor.

White's lawyer offered what became known as the Twinkie defense (too much junk food had made his client deranged). White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but served just five years for the double homicide.

The following year, a Lynchburg, Virginia minister named Jerry Falwell would help to launch an association called the Moral Majority.

The backlash had begun.

The main dish was "loving intercourse." The spice rack was filled with exotic variations.

"The slippery moist feeling of oil on my genitals is very sensuous. I use one finger or my whole hand."

"The man opposite will take off his thick glasses, strip to his savage loincloth and make passionate love."

They admitted they had "a whole drawerful" of vibrators, which were also "inspired" by God.