Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution, Part IX: 1980-1989, The Great Repression

The pitch begins with a Sensuality Quiz: "If you've ever greeted your mate in the nude, give yourself ten points.

"If you have ever had sex outdoors, give yourself another ten points.

"If I say 'whipped cream' and you blush, give yourself 20 points."

Sales reps for Undercover Wear Inc. and Just For Play tour the nation staging sex toy Tupperware-type parties. A reporter who covers an event expresses shock at "women who would look at home in a Betty Crocker ad" snatching up crotchless panties and lacy brassieres with the nipples snipped out, telling one another their sexual preferences like patrons at an AA meeting. "My name is Linda, and I like luscious lip service."

Marabel Morgan, author of The Total Woman, may have told Time magazine that she is too busy these days to greet her husband at the door each night, naked and wrapped in Saran Wrap, but housewives are arming themselves for delight.

And sharing what they learn. A group of women in the Bay Area form the Kensignton Ladies' Erotica Society to pen homespun porn. The resulting collection, Ladies' Home Erotica, starts a cottage industry.

In television ads, Brooke Shields informs the world: "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins." Billboard bodies barely clad in underwear stare down onto Times Square. Magazine ads show bodies entwined in ménages à trois, and sultry voice-overs whisper about Obsession. In store windows, posters of Nastassja Kinski wearing only a serpent embody temptation, the union of sex and danger.

On radio and TV a silver-haired mother figure dispenses sex advice. Dr. Ruth asks a caller, "Are you having good orgasms?" trilling her Rs, swinging her feet off the floor. She talks of "brue balls," the joys of masturbation, the delights of throwing fried onion rings on an erect penis. There's a book, Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex. A board game, Dr. Ruth's Game of Good Sex. If you land on the wet spot you lose a point. And if good sex isn't enough, there's a video, Terrific Sex.

The great permission unleashed during the Seventies continues to pulse through the culture. In bookstores, authors describe new physical wonders. Alan and Donna Brauer reveal How You and Your Lover Can Give Each Other Hours of Extended Sexual Orgasm. Naura Hayden divulges the secrets of How to Satisfy a Woman Every time and Have Her Beg for More. John Perry, Alice Kahn Ladas and Beverly Whipple, authors of The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality announce a new erogenous zone. An inch or so up the anterior wall of the vagina is a small bean-shaped area that when stimulated supposedly produces a profound orgasm (and sometimes a female ejaculation). At least six book clubs offer the title, including the Better Homes and Gardens Book Club and the Cooking and Crafts Club. For lovers whose sexual fondling had been gridlocked at the clitoris, the discovery creates a new quest. At the very least, it is a peace offering, a distraction from the anatomical war between clitoral and vaginal orgasms.

Not everyone can locate the elusive trigger. A stand-up comic, after months of exploration, announces the discovery of the Y spot. "You touch it and your partner asks, 'Why are you doing that?'"

"What's the difference between the G spot and a golf ball?" another comedian wonders. "A man will take half an hour trying to find a golf ball."

College students discover a sexual use for Pop Rocks, a candy that fizzes when wet. Fellatio and cunnilingus end in a grape-flavored foam. On LA Law, scriptwriters create a running gag around a sex technique known as "the Venus butterfly." The trick, never described, involves something you order from room service. Female recipients of the technique have been known to pass out from the pleasure.

Lust grows new tentacles, new eyes. Broadcast television, which had long been the bland wasteland of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet-Father Knows Best family values, faces competition from cable. For a few dollars a month viewers can connect to the sexual underground, experience adult programming in the privacy of their homes. Time describes the fare as "the first programming made directly for people who still own waterbeds."

The programming ranges from the exotic (Private Screenings and Escapade are two of the options) to the curious. In The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence, a lone cameraman with a video backpack sprouting a parabolic microphone tours Manhattan, asking women to disrobe for their 15 minutes of fame. In doorways, stairwells and apartments, a surprising number comply. Why not?

Cable gives birth to MTV, a 24-hour world of music videos. At first considered a novelty, MTV becomes a hypnotic art form. The stars don't just lip-synch, they body-synch, fashion-synch and sex-role synch. Videos teach America how to look, how to move (Michael Jackson's moonwalk draws more attention than Neil Armstrong's), how to yearn. In Brass in Pocket, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders describes the ammunition of desire: "Gonna use my arms, gonna use my legs, gonna use my style, gonna use my sidestep, gonna use my fingers, gonna use my, my, my imagination." The Pointer Sisters sing of wanting a lover with a slow hand, someone who will spend some time, not come and go in a heated rush.

Cyndi Lauper tells the world that Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Madonna wears thrift shop lingerie, crucifixes and a belt buckle proclaiming Boy Toy and becomes an international sensation, a sexual role model for millions of girls. Like a Virgin and Material Girl sell millions. America discovers the power of the exposed midriff.

The music channel presents unprecedented sexual diversity. No matter your preference, somewhere on MTV there's a band to match, from the androgynous to the ridiculous. Video producers are the journalists of the sexual revolution. There are songs about teenage pregnancy and domestic violence with a beat you can dance to. Some songs seem to capture the aura: Phil Collins sings, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord. And I've been waiting for this moment, for all of my life, oh Lord." The song finds its way into the pilot of Miami Vice--a show about narcs driving Ferraris and wearing designer clothes while in pursuit of bad guys. The show kills Friday night, with 20 million people staying home to watch the war on drugs--at the same time many of them do the drug in question. Cocaine has replaced the user-friendly drugs of the Sixties with a substance that defines appetite and greed. George Carlin jokes about it, saying you do a line of coke and you feel like a new man. Then the new man wants some. Richard Pryor, while free-basing cocaine, sets himself on fire. Scientists report that monkeys, given free access to cocaine, will forgo all other pleasures--including food, sleep and sex--until they die.

Something in the air tonight. In 1983, Risky Business uses the Phil Collins' song to set up a late-night ride on the Chicago Transit Authority. The scene between Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay suggests that if you ride the train long enough, you can have it all to yourself, have the best sex of your life and get accepted into Princeton.

The VCR takes the public sex explosion of the Seventies private. One video exec boasts, "The VCR put porno where it belongs: in people's bedrooms." Bruce Taylor, a lawyer for a Cleveland-based antipornography group, complains that "people are bringing home the kind of movies people used to go to jail for." Exactly.

At the start of the decade, some three million homes have the ability to turn their TVs into sex toys. The X-rated film industry responds. Between 1969 and 1979, porn directors had shot features on film. In 1979 some 1000 titles were available on video. Switching to less costly video their output quintupled; more than 5000 titles were available by 1990. They now turn out 5000 titles a year. Before the end of the decade, Americans will be renting 100 million X-rated tapes a year. Some 40 percent of the devotees will be women.

Lovers grapple with one eye cast toward the blue light, making love in the presence of someone else's fantasy. It is a shift no less profound than when the phonograph and radio allowed Americans to make love to music.

Technology evolves to tempt long neglected senses. The telephone company relaxes its hold on 976 numbers; suddenly you can have 57 seconds of heavy breathing and short recorded sexual scenarios at the touch of a finger. Dial-A-Porn competes with Dial-A-Prayer and wins, hands down. One company gets 500,000 calls a day. An audit of the Virginia state phone bills revealed that in one month alone, state employees made 2509 calls to a porn line. None, reports the spokesperson, came from the Governor's office.

Almost immediately, aural sex becomes interactive. Americans, long familiar with the heightened intimacy of radio and records, find that phone sex creates a sense of sexual conspiracy. Voice-activated lust. An article in Rolling Stone gave a sample of the art of "giving good phone."

Girl: Hi, baby, where are you?

Caller: In the bedroom. On the bed.

Girl: What are you wearing?

Caller: Just some underwear.

Girl: Mmmm. I'm wearing a black silk robe, and nothing else. You can see my tits. They're so big. Do you want them?

"You're very close now. I can feel your breath. I want you to kiss me."

"I want to do it so badly it hurts."

"You are now biting my nipples."

"I'm coming."

"I love you."(Click)

•

It's out-of-body sex, where a voice can sound blonde, where everything is permitted, no one is harmed and the caller is in complete control of the relationship. It costs a dollar a minute. Phone bills of $2000 a month, the press reports, are not uncommon.

For every out-of-body experience, there is an inner-body equivalent. The sexual revolution ignites a fitness revolution. Hedonists locate their world in the pleasures of their bodies. Now it's time to see what the suckers can do. We're not talking about entering the New York Marathon. The ads for Soloflex home gym equipment tease, "A hard man is good to find." Jane Fonda's workout tape does for the leotard what Frederick's of Hollywood did for lingerie. Millions follow her instructions to "feel the burn." And millions just watch.

Gyms replace singles' bars and discos as the place to meet. In the locker rooms, the conversation has switched from sex to success, how to survive on $100,000 a year.

Flashdance, a 1983 Hollywood hit, captures the sexuality of the fit. (continued on page 86)The Great Repression(continued from page 74) Jennifer Beals, playing a welder who moonlights as a cabaret dancer, becomes famous for "that thing with the bra." Young women cut the shoulders off T-shirts and sweatshirts, master the art of taking off bras without removing an outer garment. Insouciant sexuality. Beals is an independent woman who has a rule about sleeping with the boss. She breaks that rule, but, hey, this is the Eighties. After a knockout audition, she gets into the school of her choice.

The obsession with the body knows no limits. Body artists rediscover piercing and tattoos. David Letterman asks the Playboy Advisor what's the weirdest letter he's ever received.

"A guy wrote in and said, 'I masturbate with sandpaper. Do I have a problem?' I said, 'Yes, but not for long.'"

The Advisor continues: "The guy went to two therapists out in California. They cured him of the habit by switching him to lighter grades of sandpaper. Then velvet. Then a real woman."

The progression seems to convey the message of the sexual revolution, that no one really gets hurt. It's all right to go to the edge, we'll bring you back.

The revolution is in full roar. But there's something in the air.

Is Sex Dead?

A September 1980 poll of readers of Cosmopolitan magazine reports the beginning of a backlash. So many readers wrote negatively about the sexual revolution--expressing longings for vanished intimacy and the now elusive joys of romance and commitment--that we began to sense there might be a sexual counterrevolution under way in America."

By December 6, 1982 New York magazine would ask, "Is Sex Dead?" and proceed to answer the question: "In popular culture, the sexual backlash is readily apparent." The article tells of a post-casual sex syndrome known as Windows: "You look at the woman sleeping next to you, then you look out the window and you want to jump."

Some veterans of the sexual revolution speak of changing attitudes. "The rule of thumb for sleeping with someone in the Sixties and Seventies was, you'd sleep with them if you couldn't think of any reason not to. Now, you don't sleep with them unless you have a compelling reason to."

The author notes that "on The New York Times' bestseller list, Leo Buscaglia's Living, Loving and Learning has superseded Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex."

Esquire announces "The End of Sex," illustrated by a tombstone with the legend THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION--R.I.P. Alas. George Leonard writes, "As it has turned out, the sexual revolution, in slaying some loathsome old dragons, has created some formidable new ones."

A July 1983 Psychology Today article bemoans "A Revolution's Broken Promises." An April 9, 1984 Time cover story announces, "The Revolution Is Over." According to writer John Leo, "There is growing evidence that the national obsession with sex is subsiding. Five-speed vibrators, masturbation workshops, freshly discovered erogenous zones and even the one night stand all seem to be losing their allure. Veterans of the revolution, some wounded, some merely bored, are reinventing courtship and romance and discovering, often with astonishment, that they need not sleep together on the first or second date. Many individuals are rediscovering the traditional values of fidelity, obligation and marriage." Caution and commitment are the new buzzwords.

Who celebrates the end of sex? Could you conceive of a magazine announcing the end of civil rights? The end of freedom? What made writers so willing to capitulate, to surrender the gains of liberation?

The Scarlet Letter

As the sexual revolution reached its peak, doctors began to notice and comment on the rise of venereal infections. The Pill had removed the threat of conception. Penicillin had defeated the specters of syphilis and gonorrhea. Promiscuity flourished without consequence. That complacency was soon to be shattered. An article in the May 1980 McCall's echoed turn of the century VD warnings about sin. "Sexual Freedom: The Medical Price Women Are Paying."

Scientists had reclassified a disease, isolating two viruses called herpes simplex. But herpes was not simple. The affliction had been around for centuries, but it was not identified as sexually transmitted until 1967. Dr. Walter Dowdle, a virologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and Dr. André Nahmias, a physician at Emory University School of Medicine, identified the cause of cold sores as Herpes Simplex I. They announced that a related virus, Herpes Simplex II, could cause a sometimes painful rash on the genitals. The two viruses could change places through oral sex. A disease that had been as morally neutral as the common cold would become a new plague.

At first, the discovery languished. Most doctors had ignored cold sores as harmless, and had even misdiagnosed the rashes as the heartbreak of psoriasis. Genital herpes was at worst a medical curiosity, something the body seemed able to cure by itself. No one kept track of the disease; while doctors were required by law to report the more familiar syphilis and gonorrhea, no one collected data on herpes.

Dr. David Reuben, the man who had told us everything we wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask--including much that was wrong--tried to sound the alarm in the mid-Seventies, telling readers about "the grim new venereal disease in our midst." Dr. Reuben claimed that conservative estimates indicated 300,000 cases per year.

"If a pregnant woman is actively infected with venereal herpes, there is a one in four chance that her child will die or be seriously damaged." The sins of the mother could be passed to the innocent. And "six of every 100 women with HSV-2 of the cervix will develop cervical cancer."

There was no cure, he said. The virus lingered in the body and could, without warning, multiply and produce a vigorous recurrence.

As wave after wave of Baby Boomers became sexually active, doctors were seeing more of everything. The young and the restless--those walking point for the sexual revolution--were turning up with bacterial vaginitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, yeast infections, chlamydia, trichomoniasis, venereal warts. Rumors circulated about bugs brought back from Vietnam, of new strains that resisted antibiotics. A doctor told the readers of Harper's Bazaar to toss their lingerie in the microwave.

But only herpes infected the imagination. On August 2, 1982 Time magazine ran a cover story on herpes titled "The New Scarlet Letter."

John Leo and Maureen Dowd reported that herpes was "the scourge, the new scarlet letter, the VD of the Ivy League and Jerry Falwell's revenge."

The Centers for Disease Control had new estimates: Up to 20 million Americans had genital herpes, with as many as half a million new cases each year.

"Those remarkable numbers are altering sexual rites in America," claimed Leo, "changing courtship patterns, sending thousands of sufferers spinning into months of depression and self-exile and delivering a numbing blow to the one night stand."

Time magazine concluded: "The herpes counterrevolution may be ushering a reluctant, grudging chastity back into fashion."

The article produced a former swinger who said he would go to Plato's Retreat only if he could wear a full wet (continued on page 114)The Great Repression(continued from page 86) suit, and a prostitute who claimed to have given herpes to 1000 clients. Another woman angrily stated she had infected 75 men in three years. One man bragged he had infected 20 women. "They were just one night stands, so they deserved it anyway."

The article described the "leper effect," the feelings of guilt, of feeling "unclean, dirty," of being "damaged goods." (The last phrase echoes Eugène Brieux's 1913 play Damaged Goods, which dramatized the plight of syphilis victims.)

Just as Prince Morrow had described the impact of VD on innocent wives in 1905, Time wrote: "In a monogamous relationship the unsuspecting person who picks up herpes from a partner is hit with a double whammy: evidence of betrayal and a lifelong disease as a memento of the event." Herpes is the gift that keeps on giving.

As evidence that the disease had changed behavior, Time dragged out Stan the pickup artist. "When the chitchat has moved far enough along that the woman is peering his way with bedroom eyes, he caresses her right hand, then presses his thumb sharply down on her wrist and barks, 'You have herpes, don't you?' 'If her pulse jumps, she has it,' he says. 'If she doesn't, she just laughs.' Sometimes, of course, a woman is offended by his personal lie-detector test. 'I lose a few women that way,' he says with a shrug, 'but at least I don't have herpes.'"

The final sermon was Puritan Newspeak: "For all the distress it has brought, the troublesome little bug may inadvertently be ushering in a period in which sex is linked more firmly to commitment and trust."

Phyllis Schlafly brought up the article at a meeting of the Moral Majority and got a round of applause when she said the herpes epidemic could again make virginity something to be prized.

Dressed to Kill, a Brian De Palma film, captured the panic. Angie Dickinson portrayed a wife dissatisfied with her marriage. She pursues a stranger at an art museum, then, with barely a word, follows him into a taxicab for a scorching act of oral sex and an afternoon of pleasure at his apartment. Wanting to leave a note, she opens his desk drawer to find a letter from the Department of Health, Lower Manhattan District that reads: YOU HAVE CONTRACTED A VENEREAL DISEASE. The zipless fuck was not what it seemed in the Erica Jong version.

She recoils in horror and flees the apartment, only to be slaughtered in the elevator by her analyst's alter ego--a preop transsexual who is wearing a wig and sunglasses.

Transgress the boundaries of marriage and you die.

A Walk on the Wild Side

In the 1980 film Cruising, Al Pacino portrayed an undercover cop who dons leather to hunt for a serial killer prowling Manhattan's S&M bars.

The director had recruited leather boys from the bars. Pacino walked through crowds of bodies buffed by hours on Nautilus machines. In nooks and crannies of underground bars, men were fondling, sucking, fucking, fisting. In apartments and on walks, someone was killing and dismembering victims.

Gays protested the film. "The most positive benefit of Cruising," one extra said, "would be for it to make gay men examine their promiscuity, the areas they frequent, the type of sex they seek out, even the thrill of danger. The life we save may be our own."

Writer Arthur Bell defended the clubs. "These places are not hellholes of murder. It is all theater and these guys are pussycats."

Gays were not the only ones testing life on the edge. In 1983, Playboy assigned a writer to take A Walk on the Wild Side. Attending Mistress Belle's S&M theater in a loft in downtown Manhattan, he witnessed the following: "A girl is forced to perform a pagan ritual, to hold a skull above her head. A man who is swathed in a tattoo of indecipherable design lights a candle and then, with a sweep of his arm, throws hot wax across her body. The act is exact, graceful, succinct. As the drops of wax meet her skin, she does not flinch. He takes the skull from her hands, binds her feet, then hoists her upside down till she spins free of the floor. He works his way through a ring of candles, splashing her body with wax, then extinguishes each one in turn. He removes a knife from his belt and slips it beneath her panties. Blood flows down her stomach in rivulets. He lowers her and they leave the stage.

"A man comes out and sits on a chair. He places a board between his thighs. Mistress Belle approaches. She swabs a nail in alcohol, then proceeds to drive it through his scrotum into the board. She follows with a second nail. The man wails, in mock horror. 'My cock! You've ruined it! It will never work again!'

"Belle answers, 'That's just a piece of flesh. You still have a mind.' The man stands up, holding the board, and walks off the stage. His genitals look like a tray of canapés."

The act was not something the writer had read about in The Joy of Sex. It was underground theater. Perhaps it was a response to the confused sex roles in the world above ground. Participants explained that the blood was calf's blood, that the descending hammer was a test of trust. In the world of sadomasochism, trust became the ultimate aphrodisiac.

But trust would be betrayed from within.

The Uninvited Guest

Something was killing gays. A headline in The New York Times in 1981 gave the first mainstream indication: RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.

Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien had noted outbreaks of Kaposi's sarcoma in New York City and San Francisco. Most of the victims were "homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as ten sexual encounters each night, up to four times a week."

Many reported having used amyl nitrate inhalers and LSD to heighten sexual pleasure. The article cautioned, "Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group."

Dr. Friedman-Kien reported that some of the patients had severe defects in their immunological systems.

Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis: 1940--1996, says that "at the beginning, in Manhattan, it was known town discotheque favored by the most beautiful and sought-after men--because so many of the best-looking were among the first to die."

On May 11, 1982 The New York Times reported that a serious disorder of the immune system had afflicted at least 335 people, of whom 136 had died. Researchers called it gay-related immune deficiency or acquired immunodeficiency disease. The disorder had been identified in 13 heterosexual women. The number was "just the tip of the iceberg."

"Preliminary results of immunological tests," reported Dr. Lawrence Altman, "have led some Federal health officials to fear that tens of thousands of homosexual men may have the acquired immune dysfunction."

Magazines such as Us and New York called it the Gay Plague. Rolling Stone asked, "Is There Death After Sex?" The Saturday Evening Post declared, "Being Gay Is a Health Hazard."

The hunt was on. Epidemiologists discovered that the median number of male sexual partners for an infected man was 1100. Journalist Randy Shilts recorded the moment one researcher was told some victims had had as many as 2000 sexual contacts: "How on earth do they manage that?"

By August 8, 1982 the disease had killed more people than toxic shock syndrome or the original outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. It had appeared in Haitians, hemophiliacs, IV drug users and homosexuals. Researchers spoke of risk groups and routes of infection. They had somehow managed to identify one man, a Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas, whom researchers made famous as "Patient Zero." Dugas, who viewed himself as "the prettiest one," had jetted back and forth between France, New York and San Francisco. At least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS before April 1982 "had either had sex with Dugas or had had sex with someone who had." Doctors spoke of avoiding bodily fluids--blood, urine, saliva and semen. Bill Kraus, a San Francisco gay activist, wrote a warning: "We believe it is time to speak the simple truth--and to care enough about one another to act on it. Unsafe sex is--quite literally--killing us. Unsafe sex with a number of partners in San Francisco today carries a high risk of contracting AIDS and of death. So does having unsafe sex with others who have had unsafe sex with a large number of partners. For this reason unsafe sex at bathhouses and sex clubs is particularly dangerous."

"The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children," wrote Pat Buchanan in the spring of 1983. The former speechwriter for Nixon, and an archconservative, saw AIDS as Old Testament revenge: "The poor homosexuals--they have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." He warned that Democrats who traveled to a convention in San Francisco were putting their spouses and children at jeopardy by exposing them to homosexuals "who belong to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous communicable and sometimes fatal diseases."

The Moral Majority urged the government not to waste tax dollars on research, to allow the wages of sin to be death.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell spoke of a "perverted lifestyle" and "subanimal behavior." "When you violate moral, health and hygiene laws," he thundered, "you reap the whirlwind. You cannot shake your fist in God's face and get by with it."

A Baptist minister in Reno was less subtle: "I think we should do what the Bible says and cut their throats."

We faced two epidemics: one involving an unknown agent that wreaked havoc with our immune system, the other an epidemic of fear. So little was known about routes of transmission that police and firemen began wearing face masks and rubber gloves at accident scenes. Conservatives spoke of quarantining gays, or of tattooing carriers of the disease.

AIDS presented scientists with a medical mystery. In the spring of 1983, Dr. Luc Montagnier isolated a virus at the Pasteur Institute in Paris from patients suffering the immune disorder. A year would pass before Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announced that a team of U.S. scientists led by Dr. Robert Gallo had discovered the culprit. (Later, it would be revealed that Gallo had actually cultured a sample of lymphadenopathy-associated virus sent by Montagnier.) The discovery held promise of a blood test for antibodies. Heckler boldly announced that a vaccine would be forthcoming.

When an antibody test was finally developed it indicated that more than half the men in one San Francisco test were already infected, that 35 percent of gays tested on the East Coast harbored the virus, that 87 percent of intravenous drug users at one clinic in New York had tainted blood.

On July 23, 1985 headlines reported that actor Rock Hudson was fatally ill with cancer of the liver. The star of Pillow Talk, the square-jawed hero forever linked with professional virgin Doris Day, had contracted AIDS.

In the fall of 1986 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued a blunt 36-page report. AIDS was a major public health issue. He recommended AIDS education at the "lowest grade possible." He advised that people restrict themselves to "mutually faithful, monogamous sexual relationships." Everyone else should use condoms.

The report ignited a firestorm. According to Randy Shilts, Phyllis Schlafly claimed that the "disgusting, embarrassing, pornographic, offensive descriptions of sexual activity forced on children in the classroom are a major factor in the problem of promiscuity." Koop, she said, wanted to teach elementary schoolers "safe sodomy."

Church leaders condemned condoms as promoting perverse lifestyles, as a "shortsighted, self-defeating and ultimately false solution to a serious moral problem."

Koop addressed the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in February 1987. He wanted broadcasters to join in the "fundamentally moral crusade [against the] brutal, humiliating and fatal disease."

The virus was the enemy. He would not condemn the people who "engage willingly and knowingly in sexual and drug-taking practices that risk their own lives."

The "moral bottom line," he said, was to save lives.

Condommania

Americans got the message. Between 1980 and 1986 annual condom sales rose from $182 million to $338 million. Women bought half of the estimated 800 million condoms sold yearly.

Ads for Life Styles condoms showed a lovely young woman saying, "I enjoy sex, but I'm not ready to die for it."

You did not see the ads on television until 1987. Networks were more afraid of offending viewers than losing them. Planned Parenthood ran an ad that claimed television characters had sex 20,000 times a year without ever mentioning the C words (condoms and consequences).

Cagney and Lacey worked condoms into a script. Tyne Daly tells her husband to advise their 16-year-old son about protection, then does the job herself: "Harv, if you care enough about a girl to make love with her, you should also care enough to keep safe."

Talk shows carried the message: "On Donahue, we're discussing body cavities and membranes and anal sex and vaginal lesions," said the host of America's leading talk show. "We've discussed the consequences of a woman's swallowing her partner's semen. No way would we have brought that up five years ago. It's the kind of thing that makes a lot of people gag."

The porn industry produced Behind the Green Door: The Sequel in which the actors all wore condoms or otherwise practiced safe sex. The movie bombed. People interested in fantasy did not want to be reminded of caution.

Hollywood movies didn't call the prop department. In Broadcast News, Holly Hunter drops a condom into her purse before going out with William Hurt. In Cross My Heart Annette O'Toole plays a condom-packing, self-assertive heroine. In bed, she asks Martin Short, "If I sleep with you, am I going to die?" He responds: "I don't think so, I'm not that good."

On the other hand, fear of AIDS gave us a new lens through which to view movies. Some viewers saw Fatal Attraction (1987) as a disguised AIDS movie. When Michael Douglas had an affair with Glenn Close the audience knew that he was putting his family at risk--although the plot had Close portray a psychopathic career woman, who slaughters the family's pet rabbit and goes after everyone with a butcher knife. AIDS lurked outside the plotlines of a rash of nouveau film noir hits.

On college campuses activists handed out T-shirts that proclaimed DON'T (continued on page 126)The Great Repression(continued from page 116) SWING YOUR BAT WITHOUT A PARTY HAT. Or Sammy Safe Sex (a cartoon condom) said SLIP IT ON BEFORE YOU SLIP IT IN! Another cartoon condom cropped up on T-shirts with the slogan WRAP THAT RASCAL. Schools handed out matchbooks containing condoms and the message SLEEP WITH A LIFEGUARD.

Dorms stocked condom machines. Some schools handed out safe sex kits with condoms, spermicidal foams with Nonoxynol 9 (it appeared to kill the virus on contact), K-Y jelly and dental dams. The last was a three-inch square of plastic. Those who practiced rimming--anilingus--were supposed to cover the anus before tonguing. Heterosexuals and lesbians were supposed to use the dam over the vagina before oral sex.

Complained one student: "It's like going down on Tupperware."

Activists intent on salvaging sex became creative. Pleasure was still possible. The Boston Phoenix published a guide to alternate activities.

"Try talking to each other about safer sex. Kissing and hugging. Back rubs, foot rubs and body rubs while still partially dressed. Listening to music and/or dancing together. Caressing, tickling, pinching and nibbling each other through clothes. Reading erotic literature together. Looking at erotic pictures. Watching erotic movies on the VCR. Talking sexy or sharing fantasies. Showering together. Petting with no clothes on. Stroking, caressing and fondling your partner's body (including the genitals and anus). Mutual or simultaneous masturbation to orgasm with your hands (with or without condoms, with no exchange of semen or vaginal fluids). Body painting with non-petroleum-based body paints. Holding each other. Talking to each other. Sleeping together. Eating breakfast, lunch or dinner in bed. Starting over."

In San Francisco, an enterprising young man organized the first Jack-and-Jill-Off, a coed safe sex orgy.

Old-fashioned sermons against promiscuity took a new form. Although early reports showed that most heterosexuals who contracted the disease did so as a result of a long-term relationship with a single seropositive partner (an IV drug user or bisexual), the fear-mongers pulled out dossiers. "Now," said Dr. Otis Bowen, the Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1987, "when a person has sex, they're having it with not just that partner. They're having it with everybody that partner has had it with in the past ten years." This was group sex in the Eighties, a broad swipe at promiscuity. Freudians used to say that whenever two people had sex there were actually six people in bed--the lovers and their respective parents. Now sex was a chain letter. A company manufactured safe sex videos that actually showed past lovers climbing into bed with a reckless couple. Should that happen in real life, someone might die, but not from AIDS.

The religious right used the public health threat to push their own agenda. Sex Respect: The Option of True Sexual Freedom was developed in 1983 by a former Catholic school teacher and anti-abortion activist. Her message was simple: "Just say no." The Sex Respect workbook told students, "There's no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone." As for AIDS: "Anyone can be carrying your death warrant." In direct mockery of the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ads, Sex Respect warned, "Keep all of your clothes all the way on all of the time. Don't let any part of anyone else's body get anywhere between you and your clothes. Avoid arousal." The program sold T-shirts that proclaimed STOP AT THE LIPS.

Sex Respect told teenagers, "You can choose to go on having sex before marriage with all its risks or you can choose to stop and gain sexual freedom."

The latter choice was called "secondary virginity." It was never too late to be a born-again virgin.

The Reagan-inspired Adolescent Family Life program pumped more than $26 million into chastity programs by 1992. Government sponsored pamphlets urged teens to "Pretend that Jesus is your date."

Panic in the Sheets

In a tour of campuses, the Playboy Advisor tried to calm a building hysteria. "You've heard the line about sleeping with every person your lover has slept with for ten years? No wonder I'm tired. Face it, though. Ten years ago you were sleeping with your teddy bear. Unless Teddy was shooting up drugs or getting butt-fucked in San Francisco, you're relatively safe. You can count your lovers on one hand, and, for many of you, the only lover was your hand."

We began to look at prospective partners as petri dishes. Robin Williams tried to make light of the paranoia. "In the Eighties, you meet someone you like and say, 'God, Helen, I really care about you. Can I have some blood and urine?'"

Casual sex, spontaneous sex, enthusiastic sex--all were signs of irresponsibility. AIDS enforced a new reticence. Bruce Weber, writing in Glamour, told of meeting an attractive woman at a bar. She scribbled her number on a matchbook: "'Call this number and change your life.' I carried it around in my wallet for a day or two, puzzling over what to do. I'm not saying what I finally decided, just that I regret it."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Mademoiselle reported on this friend-of-a-friend story in September 1987: "She told me about this friend of hers who lives in Chicago. Her friend went to a club one night and met a really attractive man and they got a little drunk and ended up going back to her place. He spent the night, but in the morning when she woke up he wasn't there. When she went into the bathroom she saw a message written on the mirror in her lipstick. Welcome to the Wonderful world of Aids."

The AIDS epidemic seemed to fall upon the country like a plague. There were those who were willing to exploit the tragedy.

The Rise of the Religious Right

Near the end of the Seventies the religious right launched a crusade to take over America. In a Playboy article entitled The Astonishing Wrongs of the New Moral Right, Johnny Greene reported on a secret meeting in Washington, D.C., where the Moral Majority created the agenda it would take to the Republican Party.

"When the Christian majority takes over this country," one of the planners said later, "there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more abortion on demand and no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil."

Religion had discovered the power of electronic media. The same cable channel that brought you blondes in lingerie also carried the bully pulpits of Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Jimmy Bakker and Pat Robertson. The new congregations numbered in the thousands. The collection plate was the size of a satellite dish.

The language of fire and brimstone collided with the sexual revolution. The preachers spoke in terms of pestilence and plagues. Robertson railed against such sins as "the plagues of abortion, homosexuality, occultism and pornography."

"We see a virulent humanism," he wrote, "and an anti-God rebellion of which blatant homosexuality, radical feminism, the youth revolt and the Year of the Child, drug abuse, free sex and widespread abortion are just symptoms."

Falwell used his Old-Time Gospel Hour to attack "secular humanism" and (continued on page 136)the great repression(continued from page 126) the burning issues of "pornography, homosexuality and obscene school textbooks." For $10, viewers could receive a Jesus First pin and join Jerry in the fight to stamp out "pornography at home and in the streets."

By 1980, the Moral Majority claimed it had recruited 72,000 ministers and four million laypersons, creating a political machine that rivaled the old Legion of Decency. It spent an estimated $5 million, sending volunteers door to door, targeting liberal Democrats and delivering the evangelical vote for Ronald Reagan.

Two days after his inauguration, Reagan welcomed Falwell to the White House--the first representative of a special interest group to be honored by the new President. Outside, more than 60,000 members of the New Right staged a March for Life.

At the meeting Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard Schweiker pledged to end funding for sex education and family planning information for minors and indigents. In the Sixties the John Birch Society had viewed sex ed as a Communist conspiracy; the religious right viewed it as the handiwork of Satan.

At the time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan bought the election for peanuts: a promise to appoint Supreme Court Justices who might undo Roe vs. Wade, a little seed money to social scientists to find evidence that pornography was related to sexual aggression and juvenile delinquency. Reagan appeared tolerant. His son, after all, wrote for Playboy; his renegade daughter, Patti Davis, would pose for a pictorial in 1994.

But he gave a bullhorn to the antisex forces and, wittingly or unwittingly, unleashed a reign of terror. The New Right had a scapegoat. Porn, the most visible expression of the sexual revolution, was evil incarnate. Porn was everywhere. The Right wanted to control the public image of sex, if not the actual behavior.

The Tupelo Ayatollah

Shortly after the Reagan landslide, a Methodist minister from Tupelo, Mississippi approached Jerry Falwell with a modest proposal. Would the Moral Majority be interested in a crusade to rid television of sex, profanity and violence? The goal: a boycott of companies that advertised on the most offensive shows.

Falwell signed on. The Reverend Donald Wildmon created a letterhead and a fund-raising machine called the Coalition for Better Television. Claiming to represent five million families in all 50 states, Wildmon was the ambassador for Christian couch potatoes.

Falwell and Wildmon took a page from the early years of the sexual revolution. Before the turn of the century, wealthy Protestants had funded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed national censor, was an honorary Postal Inspector who conducted a one-man inquisition. He confiscated "obscenity," which included dirty books, pictures and movies, along with information about birth control and abortion. Comstock, with the power to arrest and prosecute those who did not share his Puritan views, created havoc in the public discourse of sexuality. Wildmon, too, would wield the power to punish. He was well suited for the job.

Wildmon, the son of a venereal disease inspector, had experienced an epiphany one night in 1976, when he sat down to watch television and discovered it was "filled with sexual comments and skin scenes." The next show-contained "earthy language and unbelievable profanity." He decided then to devote his ministry to cleaning up television. He called for a national boycott, an idea that greatly amused the press.

The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter in November 1978, who recorded Wildmon's reaction to an ad for English Leather. Sitting in a motel room, the two watched a leggy blonde in white shorts and a white T-shirt lean toward the camera. "All my men wear English Leather," she says, loosening her hair, "or they wear nothing at all."

"Did you hear that?" the good Reverend asked the reporter. "Did you catch the suggestiveness in that?"

Wildmon had launched the National Federation for Decency. He'd recruited silver-haired church ladies to monitor television. He would publish the naughty bits (profanity, drinking, sexy ads and jiggly scenes) in the NFD Informer, a sort of fundamentalist version of TV Guide. The bias was pure Bible Belt. The Wall Street Journal wrote, "One monitor, a woman, cited the September 13 episode of Charlie's Angels for 23 jiggly scenes. Another monitor, also a woman, didn't note any such scenes. 'Obviously the other monitor didn't look for jiggly scenes,' Mr. Wildmon says, 'I'd just use the higher estimate and not bother with the other one.'"

The NFD listed among its tenets of faith, "We believe the Holy Bible contains all information necessary whereby man can be saved from his sins and live a godly life following the will of God." The National Federation for Decency existed "to promote the biblical ethic of decency in American society, especially--but not exclusively--in the communication media."

Apparently, the Bible's prohibition against bearing false witness was not part of the NFD's "ethic of decency."

Falwell promised $2 million to the crusade. Recruiting 4000 monitors from the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the American Life Lobby, Wildmon went after the networks.

In the spring of 1982, the monitors found prime-time filth on all three networks--2138 incidents of sex, 300 scenes that suggested intercourse outside of marriage, 71 scenes that suggested intercourse inside marriage and 831 skin scenes.

The CBTV/NFD Informer attacked such hits as Archie Bunker's Place, Cheers, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty, Fantasy Island, Hill Street Blues, Knots Landing, Magnum P.I., MASH, The New Odd Couple, Saturday Night Live and Three's Company, as well as movies and miniseries.

Wildmon told Time magazine that "everything on the air has a message. TV represents behavior modification, or monkey see, monkey do. A child sees it and it leaves an impression."

George Higgins, a former prosecutor turned novelist, scrutinized Dynasty, Hotel, Dallas and Falcon Crest to see if Wildmon's observers were accurate. In a Harper's article titled "TV Puritans: Who Killed J.R.'s Sex Life?" he announced the results: "What these shows don't offer is sex. There isn't any nudity--I didn't see a single naked nipple, not even a male one. The scripts don't tell how to do it and the camera doesn't show what to do with it. Any viewer subject to sexual arousal by such fare is so autoerotic as to need no television for the purpose, and should have an operation--for his or her own good, if not for the overriding reason of public safety. Lots of people watch this stuff. Statistically speaking, few of them misbehave."

Most people viewed the Reverend as harmless. The networks said Wildmon was trying to impose the will of the Moral Majority on the rest of America, that they would let the marketplace decide what was worth viewing. Americans would vote with the remote.

But Wildmon was far from harmless. He turned the NFD Informer into a kind of Red Channels. (In the Fifties, rabid anti-Communists had listed the names of performers, writers, composers and producers who were alleged to be friendly to the Communist cause. Red Channels became an unofficial blacklist. Advertisers, networks and program packagers who wanted to avoid controversy avoided names on (continued on page 140)the great repression(continued from page 136) the list.) Wildmon published lists of advertisers who sponsored "sex oriented programs," "violence oriented programs" or "profanity oriented programs."

The friends of sex were the enemies of the Reverend Donald Wildmon.

By the end of the Eighties, Wildmon and his crew (having changed their name to the American Family Association) had protested movies (The Last Temptation of Christ), taken credit, for forcing Pepsi to drop an ad campaign with Madonna and hounded advertisers of Saturday Night Live (30,000 letter writers protested that the word penis was used 23 times in one show). The AFA attacked Dr. Ruth: "For 60 minutes every night, Dr. Ruth gets to undo 2000 years of Christian teachings on the beauty and joy of sex." The diminutive sex therapist's "free sex philosophy is the ultimate in hedonism and antifamily, anti-Christian values." Wildmon protested the use of a blow-up sex doll on Night Court, implications of incest on The Golden Girls and Alf, bitchiness on Murphy Brown, bondage on LA Law, drug use in a Mighty Mouse cartoon and a made for TV movie on Roe vs. Wade.

Arthur Kropp, of People for the American Way, pointed out: "Wildmon can find an antifamily conspiracy in a test pattern."

Wildmon's journal revealed the demonic imagination of the religious right. In one 18-month period it offered up human sacrifice, sexual molestation, incest, child pornography, public masturbation, teen suicide, rape and/or murder caused by viewing pornography, porn addicts who commit crimes, abortion as a cause of insanity, abortion as a cause of the decline of Western civilization, transvestites, transsexuals, cohabitation, drugs, illegitimate children, Dial-A-Porn, Walt Disney, Ozzy Osbourne and, of course, Playboy.

Wildmon wasn't alone in demonizing Playboy. He would soon be joined by Judith Reisman, a former songwriter for Captain Kangaroo. The religious right turned amateurs overnight into experts. Instead of real science, they relied on rabid sound bites and overheated headlines. The propaganda machine was up and running.

Political Science

The headlines were unrelenting and unchallenged. The Eighties were a decade of slander against male sexuality, almost unprecedented in scope.

• A survey in San Francisco claimed 44 percent of women had been victims of rape or attempted rape.

• A study funded in part by Ms. declared that one out of four college females had been a victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. The figure appeared on protest buttons, on posters and in date rape literature that was handed out at freshmen orientations.

• At UCLA, Neil Malamuth asked college-age males: "If you could be assured that no one would know and that you could in no way be punished, how likely, if at all, would you be to commit such acts" as "forcing a female to do something she really didn't want to do" and "rape"?

The headlines screamed the shocking answer: 35 percent of males admitted some likelihood of rape.

Line up any four college women and one of them would have been a victim of rape. Line up any three college males and one of them was a rapist. And researchers seemed to know what would summon the beast.

As part of an ostensible learning experiment, University of Wisconsin researcher Dr. Ed Donnerstein put students into a situation where they could administer electric shocks to confederates. He then showed different groups neutral films, erotic films or slasher films. The students who saw violent films or violent erotica administered higher levels of shock. This too made headlines: "Sexually violent movies on TV and in theaters -- now at an all-time high -- increase men's willingness to inflict violence on women, including wife beating, random rape and forced sex in dating," read one summary. The New York Times leaped from the lab to the street in a single bound: "Violent Pornography Elevates Aggression, Researchers Say," reporting that "violence against women depicted in pornographic films may lead to criminal behavior."

And the same researchers sounded the alarm that violent content in mainstream men's magazines was on the increase. Neil Malamuth and Barry Spinner looked at five years of Playboy and Penthouse (from 1973 to 1977) and announced that violent images had increased. Such images, the authors warned, could contribute to a cultural climate that sanctioned violence against women.

No one questioned the scientists. The government funneled money into "victim research"--studies that would amplify danger or that would suggest a cause-and-effect relation between sexual expression and sexual violence. Many of the researchers came not from psychology departments, but from schools of communication, the reading of cultural messages.

Revisionist Chic

At first glance Judith Reisman seems a strange bedfellow. During the Seventies, as an antiporn feminist writing under the nom de guerre Judith Bat-Ada, she had warned that the moral arbiters of the sexual revolution were a "triumvirate--Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt--who are every bit as dangerous as Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito." Reisman made waves (and a friendship with conservative Pat Buchanan) when she charged (without evidence) that Alfred Kinsey was a child molester who was "involved in the vicious genital torture of hundreds of children" and who had cooked the books to make homosexuality look normal. Such a revisionist stance was just what the party needed.

She soon came to the attention of Al Regnery, son of conservative publisher Henry Regnery and crony of Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Robertson. Regnery had wound up as head of Reagan's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. That Regnery was completely uncredentialed and inexperienced did not seem to bother anyone. Reporters noted that he drove an automobile with a bumper sticker that read: HAVE YOU SLUGGED YOUR KID TODAY?

In December 1983 Regnery approved a grant for $798,531 to allow Reisman to study "images of children, crime and violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines." If she could link mainstream erotica to antisocial activity, the Sexual Revolution would be over.

The size of the grant (but not the topic) sparked a controversy. Congress, accustomed to paying $640 for a toilet seat, could not comprehend the cost of cartoon counting (especially when an internal memo noted that the "research" could be done for between $20,000 and $60,000).

At a Congressional hearing into the need for such a study, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said he had "never seen pictures of crimes against children appear in those magazines" and asked Reisman for an example. She offered a cartoon showing people at a beach. "A man is underwater with his hands" on a girl, she explained.

"You're seeing a different picture than I am," said Specter.

When Regnery suggested cartoons that depicted child fairy-tale characters might "affect the mind of the adult," Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) stated, "It's difficult to understand how an adult gets turned on by Dorothy or the Wizard of Oz or Snow White."

Regnery trimmed the grant slightly, and Reisman went to work. After 22 months, Reisman's staff came up with "a total of 6004 photographs, illustrations and cartoons depicting children in the 683 magazines from 1954 to 1984. These 6004 images of children were interspersed with 15,000 images of crime and violence, 35,000 female breasts and 9000 female genitalia."

The report was loopy. Reisman accused Playboy of creating "cut and paste female images" with older faces on adolescent bodies. And you thought airbrushing was bad? A model pigtails or holding a teddy bear was a "pseudochild." Little Annie Fanny, a cartoon character with breasts the size of bazookas, was "an image of a child." Reisman counted each panel as a separate child image. Go figure.

The Justice Department shelved the study as worthless. Dr. Robert Figlio, a University of Pennsylvania criminologist who served on a peer review panel, critiqued the manuscript and questioned the researcher. "Quite frankly," he said, "I wondered what kind of mind would consider the love scene from Romeo and Juliet to be child porn."

This was terrible social science, but totally effective political science.

Reisman would tour the country with her slide show and her executive summary. An unquestioning press generated doomsday headlines: KIDDIE PORN MAY BE TIED TO SEXUAL ASSAULTS, EXPERT SAYS. Reisman would become a "consultant" for various right-wing groups.

Regnery resigned before The New Republic revealed his secret life as a porn consumer. A reporter investigating his background had uncovered a fantastic story. In Madison, Wisconsin, while running for district attorney in 1976, Regnery told audiences he was the target of "Watergate-style" dirty tricks. One night his wife called the police to say she had been attacked by two men (one white, one black), that she had been cut repeatedly with an embroidery needle, violated with a can of feminine hygiene spray and forced to perform oral sex. The police did not believe her story.

Doctors who examined her found 73 faint scratches, none of which required medical attention. There were no signs of rape. When police searched Regnery's house they found a cache of pornography under the bed.

When you follow the trembling finger of the self-appointed moral guardian back to the mind behind the call to censor, you inevitably uncover a nightmare.

Take Back the Night

In 1982 a group of prosex feminists met at Barnard, concerned about the direction in which radical feminists were taking the movement. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin saw America descending into a moral panic akin to the white-slavery hysteria of the turn of the century or the antihomosexual frenzy of the Fifties: "During a moral panic, the media become ablaze with indignation, the public behaves like a rabid mob."

The target of the latest moral panic was demon porn. "This discourse on sexuality is less a sexology than a demonology," Rubin said. "It presents most sexual behavior in the worst possible light. Its descriptions of erotic conduct always use the worst available example as if it were representative. It presents the most disgusting pornography, the most exploited forms of prostitution and the least palatable or most shocking manifestations of sexual variation. This rhetorical tactic consistently misrepresents human sexuality in all its forms. The picture of human sexuality that emerges is unremittingly ugly."

The women's libbers who had tossed bras into trash cans at the 1968 Miss America Pageant now fired bullets into bookstores that sold men's magazines. Radical feminists stormed newsstands and poured blood over Playboys and films and sex toys. They protested screenings of Snuff (a film purporting to show the murder of a woman) and billboards for a Rolling Stones album that had a bound model proclaiming, "I'm black and blue from the Rolling Stones, and I love it." The zealots of the radical left were as antisex as the religious right. The posse called itself by different names (Women Against Violence Against Women, Women Against Pornography, Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media) but their target was clear. They were against images of sex. What the sexual revolution had made visible, they wanted burned. They hijacked the feminist movement, charging that sexual liberation was not the same as female emancipation.

Betty Friedan, the visionary whose Feminine Mystique created the modern feminist movement, was aghast at the direction taken by these daughters of the sexual revolution. In 1981 she published The Second Stage--a plea for sanity. Friedan warned that sexual politics "distorted the main thrust of the women's movement for equality and gave its enemies a powerful weapon."

The radical fringe, she warned, "directed too much of its energy into sexual politics, from personal bedroom wars against men to mass marches against rape or pornography. Sexual war against men is an irrelevant, self-defeating act of rage. It does not change the conditions of our lives. Obsession with rape is a kind of wallowing in that victim state."

"It was easier to liberate yourself from the missionary position," she lectured, "than to take the test for law school, to fight for parenting leave of lobby the state legislature to ratify 'he Equal Rights Amendment."

The daughters of the feminist revolution did not listen.

They had their own mantra of rage, a manifesto called Take Back the Night. "In the last few decades," the editor claimed, "women have been bombarded with ever increasing numbers of pornographic images in liquor stores, bookstores and drugstores; in supermarkets; in the hands of fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, husbands, lovers and boyfriends; in films and on street corner newsstands; on the covers of record albums, on the walls of poster stores and in shop windows. The media have subjected women to dramatized rapings, stabbings, burnings, beatings, gaggings, bindings, tortures, dismemberments, mutilation and deaths in the name of male sexual pleasure or sheer entertainment."

Cadres hit the college circuit with a blood-soaked slide show that could have been titled "Fear and Loathing in Times Square." A visual barrage of bondage shots, S&M fashion ads and clips from purported snuff movies assaulted the audience, while organizers read an account of a woman being raped. These performances had the subtlety and objectivity of a lynch mob.

Although they targeted porn as "antifemale propaganda," the shows were antimale and antisex. Women Against Pornography had its own notions of politically correct sex, its own versions of Orwellian Newspeak. Andrea Dworkin stated, "Sexual relations between a man and a woman are politically acceptable only when the man has a limp penis." Robin Morgan contributed a novel definition of rape: "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."

Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs issued a report on the sex crisis for Ms. The debate on porn was also really a debate among women about the future of female sexuality. Freud had once asked, "What do women want?" Now the question was, "What do liberated women want?" The radicals, however flamboyant, seemed to yearn for a return to the straitlaced Victorian era, a time when, women believed, "as the late-19th century feminist writer Eliza Duffey did, that women's sexual needs could be satisfied by six episodes of intercourse per lifetime." Or less.

Modern women wanted erotica that was "personal, emotional, refreshing, with an element of trust or caring or love, natural, circular."

Applying the new rhetoric of sexism, women were wary of images that catered to male desire. Porn "defined by the penis shows a power imbalance, suggests violence; is heavy, voyeuristic, linear and depicts bodies contorted."

At meetings of the National Organization for Women, Robert's Rules of Order collided with resolutions about female lust. Pat Califia, a lesbian and practicing sadomasochist, ridiculed the cuddly sex of her sisters. "Sex will consist of wimmin holding hands, taking their shirts off and dancing in a circle. Then we will all fall asleep at exactly the same moment. If we didn't all fall asleep, something else might happen--something male-identified, objectifying, pornographic, noisy and undignified."

Mackinnon and Dworkin Inc.

The campaign against male sexuality took a new form in 1983. Catharine MacKinnon, a graduate of Yale Law School described as an "itinerant lawyer/lecturer" (meaning she had not been granted tenure by any university), and Andrea Dworkin, a militant feminist known by her bib overalls and fiery rhetoric, were teaching a course in pornography at the University of Minnesota. The city council in Minneapolis asked their help in drafting a zoning ordinance that would restrict adult bookstores.

Instead, the two wrote a proposed ordinance that treated pornography as a form of discrimination based on sex and a violation of the civil rights of women. Wrote Dworkin, "We hallucinated those rights in a frenzy of hope, in a delirium of dreaming. We hallucinated that women could be recognized as human beings in this social system, human enough to assert those rights in the face of systematic sexual exploitation, brutality and malice."

Hallucination was the proper word.

The Hearings

The Sixties taught America the evils of discrimination. Bigotry and racism had denied millions the right to the American dream, be it employment, labor union membership, housing accommodations, property rights, education, public accommodations and public services. The Minneapolis ordinance was a catalog of biases, from race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual harassment, affectional preference, disability, age, marital status. These were weapons that degraded individuals, fostered intolerance and hate. They created and intensified unemployment, substandard housing, undereducation, ill health, lawlessness and poverty. They injured the public welfare and were against the law.

MacKinnon and Dworkin wanted to add pornography to the list of acknowledged biases. They completely bypassed the city's commissioners on civil rights, the men and women who dealt with real harm on a daily basis. They wanted the council to endorse a special finding-- that porn was central in creating "the civil inequality of the sexes," that porn was a "systematic practice of exploitation and subordination," that porn promoted "bigotry and contempt," that porn harmed women's opportunities for "equality of rights in employment," that porn "damages relations between the sexes [and restricts] women from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life."

Porn was the cattle prod, the attack dog, the high pressure hose, the burning cross that kept women in place. MacKinnon and Dworkin offered this definition of demon porn: "Pornography is the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following:

(i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or

(ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or

(iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or

(iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or

(v) women are presented in postures of sexual submission; or

(vi) women's body parts--including but not limited to vaginas, breasts and buttocks--are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or

(vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or

(viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or

(ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement or torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

Anyone who produced, sold, exhibited or distributed porn was guilty of discrimination. Any woman could file suit on behalf of all women.

Any person who claimed to have been coerced into performing for pornography could sue, whether or not she had appeared in other porn, had appeared to cooperate in the production, had signed a contract or otherwise showed a willingness to perform.

Any woman, man, child or transsexual who had pornography "forced on him/her" could sue.

Any woman, man, child or transsexual who was assaulted, physically attacked or injured as the result of a specific piece of pornography could file a claim for damages against the person who assaulted him/her/it as well as the maker, distributor, seller or exhibitor of the porn.

Monkey see, monkey do, sue the monkey and the magazine or movie he rode in on.

The Minneapolis city council still had to be persuaded. The hallucination began. Dworkin and MacKinnon recreated in public the traveling horror show that had mesmerized women's studies groups.

Storming Town Hall

At public hearings on the ordinance, MacKinnon spoke of porn being used to season children, prostitutes, wives and girlfriends to make them more compliant sexually. She spoke of men consuming porn, forcing it on their partners, demanding that they perform sexual acts they had no desire to perform.

Dworkin followed with the boilerplate.

Porn was a "$7 billion industry that buys and sells women's bodies." She read into the record a magazine article that stated that "at least 25 percent of all heterosexual material sold in Washington's adult bookstores, for example, depicts explicit violence against women, torture of all kinds, whipping, beating, mutilation, rape and murder."

Then came the parade of witnesses. First was Professor Ed Donnerstein, who spoke about his research into the effects of sex and violence. Donnerstein said that violence, not sex, begets violence. MacKinnon and Dworkin, however, seized on the interrelation between images and action.

Speaking over images of the Rolling Stones billboard, a Hustler layout, scenes from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Toolbox Murders, Donnerstein informed the politicians about lab findings. To him, R-rated films posed a greater threat than X-rated films, which contained almost no violence. He read from the cassette of one film: "See bloodthirsty butchers, killer thrillers, crazed cannibals, zonked zombies, mutilating maniacs, hemoglobin horrors, plasmatic perverts and sadistic slayers slash, strangle, mangle and mutilate bare-breasted beauties in bondage." Dr. Fredric Wertham would have been proud.

Donnerstein talked about desensitization, which allowed people who watched enough of this stuff to actually find humor in it. Donnerstein was a dupe of the feminists; neither group saw that slasher films were repeating a cultural message as old as Cotton Mather. America had always linked sex and punishment. The sex hadn't changed, just the means and degree of punishment, which had escalated from stocks and public dunkings to death by chain saw and nail gun. Donnerstein's slasher films weren't antifemale--they were antisex. But the hearings were obviously not the place for fine distinctions.

Next up was Linda Marchiano, a.k.a. Linda Lovelace. The former porn star had rewritten her life story in a 1980 biography titled Ordeal. The book recounted her path from porn star to born-again prude. Overnight she became the darling of Gloria Steinem, who passed her along to MacKinnon and Dworkin.

Marchiano told the commissioners that for two and a half years she had been held captive and forced to perform as Linda Lovelace, "the sex freak of the Seventies."

The happily married housewife now blamed Chuck Traynor for her previous excesses. Her first husband and manager had dragged her from "prostitution to porn films to celebrity satisfier." She told of being forced to have sex with five strangers in a motel room and of her ultimate degradation, having sex with a "D-O-G."

She said Traynor had hypnotized her and taught her to perform deep throat, that he had beaten her after the first day of filming. "So many people say that in Deep Throat, I have a smile on my face, and I look as though I am really enjoying myself. No one ever asked me how those bruises got on my body.

"Virtually every time someone watches that film," she said, "they are watching me being raped."

Traynor had created the Linda Lovelace doll, but the hands manipulating the Linda Marchiano doll belonged to MacKinnon and Dworkin.

The celebrity porn victim was followed by feminist experts, who entered into the record Diana Russell's sexual assault research. Russell had asked, "Have you ever been upset by anyone trying to get you to do what they have seen in pornographic pictures, movies or books?" Ten percent of the women answered "yes" to the question.

One might wonder about the 90 percent who had not been upset, and being upset is not exactly being raped. Another witness itemized in alphabetical order some of the supposed victims of porn: Miss B was upset by group sex. Miss F drew the line at spanking. Miss G protested oral sex. Miss K resisted a lout who wanted to pour champagne on her vagina. Miss M was upset by anal sex.

Tim Campbell, a gay activist, challenged the Minneapolis ordinance, saying it would allow people to bring suit against the Bible. "Cinderella is a myth that would not pass the test. In fact, I defy the city council members to sit down now and write a three-sentence story involving a woman and sex that would pass the test of this ordinance. I don't think you would be able to write anything. It is un-American, it is fascist, it is antisexual and it is antiheterosexual. Basically, the missionary position is no longer acceptable storytelling. The only thing you can do is Jack met Jill, maybe, and neither one pursued the other and they lived happily ever after. That's the only love story you could write now."

MacKinnon and Dworkin paraded witnesses who claimed to have been harmed in the making of porn. One told of being photographed naked by an art student boyfriend, of being cast in plaster with her arms tied over her head (which had caused some other models to faint). After that, she said, he switched to watercolors.

MacKinnon read into the record a letter from actress Valerie Harper, star of Rhoda, who had been mortified to find that a company called Shock Tops was selling T-shirts with the images "of seven famous women pictured in the nude," that a porn magazine had run a likeness with her head on a full-length figure, naked except for high-heeled shoes and stockings, taking off a shirt.

"I felt upset, ripped off, diminished, insulted, abused, hurt, furious and powerless," wrote the actress. She spoke of casting-couch horrors and the fear of the ultimate audition, for a snuff movie--a film in which a woman's actual murder would be presented as pornographic entertainment.

The parade continued. A county attorney told of a stepfather or boyfriend who had a young girl hold up nude photographs while he masturbated. A woman from a battered-women's shelter spoke of a husband who had "two suitcases full of Barbie dolls with ropes tied on their arms and legs and with tape across their mouths."

The testimony was unrelenting. One of the last to speak gave her name and address and said, almost apologetically, "I have not yet been raped."

Dick Marple, a member of the audience, grew tired of the litany of abuse. Approaching the microphone, he had the courage to complain about the unremitting slander. "If we have a civil rights ordinance trying to discourage presenting women as whores by nature," he said, "then I believe that men have a civil right not to be presented as rapists by nature."

On December 30, 1983 the city council passed the ordinance by a vote of seven to six. Almost immediately, Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed the bill, saying it was "probably" unconstitutional.

On July 10, 1984 Ruth Christenson, a witness in the hearings and a devoted follower of Dworkin's, walked into Shinder's, a bookstore in downtown Minneapolis. Dousing herself with gasoline, she set herself afire, then ran through the store. Her backpack was filled with antipornography brochures.

The Road Show

William Hudnut, the mayor of Indianapolis, had followed the Minneapolis hearings with great interest. Self-described as "just a dumb preacher who fell from grace and went into politics," Hudnut saw the appeal of the MacKinnon-Dworkin argument. He invited MacKinnon to introduce similar legislation in Indianapolis.

MacKinnon staged a streamlined sideshow of vice cops, incest victims, prostitutes and pontificators. Although she billed the ordinance as a necessary step in women's rights, she did not enlist the aid of local feminists. Indeed, some accounts hinted that MacKinnon had made an unholy alliance with fundamentalists and right-wing politicians. Beulah Coughenour, a political conservative who had fought to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, sponsored the bill in Indianapolis.

On May 1, 1984 the bill passed by a vote of 24 to 5. Within two hours of its passage, the American Booksellers Association and the Media Coalition filed suit. The constitutionality of the anti-porn statute would at last be tested in courts.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task-force filed amici curiae briefs opposing the ordinance. Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law argued that "die ordinance vests in individual women a power to impose their views of politically or morally correct sexuality upon other women by calling for repression of images consistent with those views."

They said that the ordinance ignored the rights of prosex women: "It makes socially invisible women who find sexually explicit images of women in positions of display or 'penetrated by objects' to be erotic, liberating or educational. These women are told that their perceptions are a product of false consciousness and that such images are so inherendy degrading that they may be suppressed by the state. At the same time, it stamps the imprimatur of state approval on the belief that men are attack dogs triggered to violence by the sight of a sexually explicit image of a woman. It makes socially invisible those men who experience themselves as gentle, respectful of women or inhibited about expressing their sexuality."

Judge Frank Easterbrook, in overturning the statute, agreed. "This is thought control. It establishes an approved view of women, of how they may react to sexual encounters, of how the sexes may relate to each other. Those who espouse the approved view may use sexual images; those who do not may not."

The MacKinnon-Dworkin road show was terrible law, but great politics. And it was the answer to Republican prayers.

The Meese Commission Follies

The religious right began to pressure President Reagan for more dramatic action. In March 1983 he had told representatives of the Moral Majority that porn was a form of pollution. His Administration had "identified the worst hazardous waste sites in America. We have to do the same with the worst sources of pornography."

In May 1984 he outlined his war on sex. The enemy, he declared, was the 1970 President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the landmark research that said pornography had no significant effect on crime or delinquency. Nixon had rejected the report, but America had gone on to enjoy the Seventies anyway. Now something more was needed.

"I think the evidence that has come out since that time, plus the tendency of pornography to become increasingly more extreme, shows that it is time to take a new look at this conclusion," said Reagan, "and it's time to stop pretending that extreme pornography is a victimless crime. And so I want to announce that the Attorney General is setting up a new national commission to study the effects of pornography on our society. We consider pornography to be a public problem."

The original President's Commission had spent nearly $3 million on original research. Reagan could soothe the religious right for a mere $500,000. He would create a national hearing on porn, similar to that conducted by the feminists. Eleven handpicked commissioners would travel the country like war correspondents touring a battlefield. One glance at the lineup and you knew there could be only one possible verdict.

Henry Hudson, a smut-busting county attorney from Arlington County, Virginia, was chosen to head the Commission. Father Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan who ran Covenant House, a shelter for runaway kids on Times Square, revealed his bias: "I would say pornography is immoral, and the source of my statement is God, not social science." James Dobson, described by one reporter as a "professional Christian," was an author, radio commentator and founder of the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family. He viewed the sexual revolution in apocalyptic terms, as a struggle between ultimate good and evil. At one point he would announce that Satan, in retaliation for Dobson's role on the Commission, had pursued members of his family in a black Porsche. Frederick Schauer, a professor of law, believed the First Amendment was irrelevant. Porn was more like a dildo than a form of speech. It was simply sex. Dr. Park Dietz was a psychiatrist and criminologist who believed that detective magazines were more harmful than Centerfolds. A judge, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, a child abuse expert, a women's magazine editor, a psychologist who worked with sex offenders and a community activist rounded out the panel.

Kurt Vonnegut called the Commission "sewer astronauts." They would go where no man had gone before, or, rather, where enough men and women had gone to create a multibillion-dollar industry. Like the vice investigators of the 1910s, who chronicled licentious behavior in dancehalls and red-light districts, the team of handpicked citizens visited peep shows, adult bookstores and mom-and-pop video stores, and heard about warehouses filled with dildos. They sat through slide shows, listened to so-called victims of porn speak from behind curtains. Just as Anthony Comstock had weighed confiscated porn, the Commission tabulated titles of 2325 magazines (from Big Tit Dildo Bondage to Wham Bam Window Washers), 725 books (Bound, Whipped and Raped Schoolgirls, Daughter Loves Doggy Fun, Mom's Golden Shower Nights) and 2370 X-rated films (from Adam Foreskin Fantasy #1 and #2 to Wet Shorts and Wrestling Meat).

Asked to define a porn-related injury, Dr. Judith Becker, a psychologist tapped to serve as a commissioner, suggested "a paper cut from turning porn magazine pages."

The hearings presented a stacked deck of antisex witnesses. Barry Lynn, an observer from the ACLU, gave this tally: "Of the 208 witnesses before the Commission, at least 160 were urging tighter controls over sexually explicit material. These included 68 law enforcement officers, eight elected officials, 30 alleged victims of pornography, 14 representatives of antipornography groups, eight representatives of local or national organizations whose policies include opposing pornography, ten individuals who are prominent antipornography activists, and 22 clinicians or social science researchers who have seen patients or collected scientific data that they conclude would support suppression of some or all pornography."

Philip Nobile and Eric Nadler, authors of United States of America vs. Sex: How the Meese Commission Lied About Pornography, noted a more crucial bias. Only one witness out of 208 spoke positively about porn as an aid to masturbation.

Moving from Washington to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York, the Commission provided a platform for the weird. Recruiters sought witnesses who would make their presupposed point that there was a causal relation between porn and social ills. An agent of the Commission approached Dr. Lois Lee, head of Children of the Night (a Los Angeles-based organization devoted to rescuing teenagers from street life and prostitution). The agent wanted Lee's kids to testify that pornography had been used as a tool when their parents molested them and that this experience had led them into prostitution. Lee replied, "None of our kids got started turning tricks because their fathers started using pornography. None. Even if you got rid of all the pornography in the world, you couldn't get rid of abusive or drunk fathers."

The agent said, "I don't think we're going to need your kids."

Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a statement warning that, "Pornography may be dangerous to your health." The world contemplated warning stickers on erections.

Koop, an outspoken foe of abortion, spoke from the heart, unsupported by any research. "Pornography is a destructive phenomenon. It does not contribute anything to society, but rather takes away from and diminishes what we regard as socially good." For Koop, pornography "intervenes in normal sexual relationships and alters them." When asked if he had scientific studies to support such conclusions, Koop admitted it was just his hunch. He promptly convened a body of social scientists to produce The Report of the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public Health. It would conclude that the evidence still showed no direct harm.

The Commission buried itself in the grotesque. They listened while a born-again Christian claimed that seeing a deck of pornographic playing cards at the age of 12 warped him for life. Soon he was shoplifting Playboys from the local grocery store. "From the pictures, I was stimulated to practice oral and finger stimulation on my parents' dogs."

FBI agent Kenneth Lanning gave a presentation of child porn and fetish magazines. The Commission looked at pictures of nails driven through foreskins, pins driven through scrotums, nipples pierced by rings, men and women having sex with dogs, a young girl disemboweled by fist-fucking.

The closest thing to normal porn was a close-up of "a vagina surrounded by a woman."

Judith Reisman gave a slide show and warned about the danger of shaved genitalia. Linda Lovelace repeated her testimony from Minneapolis. Andrea Dworkin told the Commission about snuff films in which "a woman is killed and the orifices in her head are penetrated with a man's penis--her eyes, her mouth and so on." Of course, she could not produce a sample. "This information comes from women who have seen the films and escaped," she said.

The Commission toyed with definitions, trying to distinguish between the brutal images they had uncovered in their tour of the sewer, and mainstream erotica. One bystander of the debate, a vice cop, suggested this difference between porn and erotica: "It is erotic when you stroke a woman's naked body with a feather. And it is kinky when you rub her with the whole chicken."

A Convenient Target

Dr. Victor Cline, an outspoken critic of the 1970 President's Commission, claimed that sexual expression was a slippery slope. Porn, he said, was physically addictive: After getting hooked, porn users moved to harder stuff. Soon, he said, they began acting out their fantasies. Seduction, sexual aggression against women, group sex and partner switching, voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism and necrophilia--all were inevitable outcomes.

The Commission played a shell game. Although it seemed to focus on the extreme world of fetishes and child porn, its real target became clear.

The Reverend Donald Wildmon pulled the trigger. The head of the NFD and crusader for clean television had a new cause. With Jerry Falwell he organized pickets outside 7-Eleven stores and retail outlets that sold Playboy and Penthouse. A legion of old ladies sent postcards emblazoned with charges such as "Why do Revco drugstores sell pornography?" to chief executives. On the backs of the postcards was the statement "Pornography is a cancer that warps minds, corrupts morals and destroys souls." The truly zealous phoned retailers and advertisers in the magazines and sent them postcards calling them Pornographer of the Month. Some harangued advertisers at home, terrorizing whomever answered the phone, including children.

Now Wildmon told the Commission, "The general public usually associates pornography with sleazy bookstores and theaters. However, many of the major players in the game of pornography are well-known household names. Few people realize that 7-Eleven convenience stores are the leading retailers of porn magazines in America. Indeed, 7-Eleven is perhaps the most important key to successful marketing of pornography in the family marketplace."

He gave the Commission his enemies list. Alan Sears, executive director of the Commission, acted on Wildmon's testimony, sending an ominous letter on Justice Department stationery to the heads of the named companies in February 1986. "During the hearing in Los Angeles in October 1985, the Commission received testimony alleging that your company is involved in the sale or distribution of pornography. The Commission has determined that it would be appropriate to allow the company to respond to the allegations prior to drafting its final report section on identified distributors."

Sears included Wildmon's testimony without naming the source. The Commission never considered Playboy to be pornography, and Attorney General Edwin Meese would later explain that the magazine was not what the Commission had been established to investigate. But the damage was done.

Lawyers from Southland Corp. (parent corporation for 7-Eleven) had probably heard that the commissioners were planning to recommend applying racketeering charges to the porn industry. A company identified as a distributor stood to forfeit all its assets. On April 10, Southland's president, Jere Thompson, announced that 7-Eleven would no longer sell Playboy. More than 10,000 stores across the country cleared their shelves of the most popular men's magazine in America.

Hugh Hefner attacked the Commission's tactic, calling it sexual McCarthyism. Playboy Enterprises filed a lawsuit against Meese, Sears, Henry Hudson and the members of the Commission and won a small victory: Sears wrote a second letter affirming that Playboy was not obscene, and the companies targeted by Wildmon's testimony would not be listed as pornographers in the final report. To show that Jere Thompson was not in touch with even his own employees, Playboy's editors put together a nude pictorial celebrating The Women of 7-Eleven.

A Declaration of War

The Commission released a 1900-page report, initially printing 2000 copies and offering them to the public at $35 apiece. In one of the clumsiest photo ops of the century, Attorney General Ed Meese stood before a bare breasted statue of the Spirit of Justice when he met the press. In 1970 William Hamling published an illustrated version of the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and went to jail for his troubles. In 1986 Michael McManus, a syndicated columnist on religion and ethics, released his own version of the Meese Commission Report, selling more than 30,000 copies to conservative ministers and antiporn groups.

Barry Lynn, who had dogged the Commission, issued a 188-page rebuttal, noting that the report clearly tried to tar sex with the brush of the grotesque. Time called the Commission "a kind of surrealist mystery tour of sexual perversity, peeping at the most recondite forms of sexual behavior known--though mostly unknown--to society."

The Commission's report was easily the steamiest document of the decade. Susie Bright, the resident sexpert of On Our Backs (the magazine billed as entertainment for adventurous lesbians), announced proudly that she had masturbated to the Meese Report. Most readers were battled by the endless list of movie, book and magazine titles. But the tome serves as a time capsule. In it are recorded some of the first erotic chats on computers:

"Slick: Do you wanna come all over my titties and my pretty face? Maybe I should get out my instant camera so I can take a picture of your come shooting out.

"Lust: Do you really have a camera? I think the keyboard would look great covered with your come."

The report contained a description of 63 photographs in the magazine Tri-Sexual Lust, scene by scene descriptions of Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, Debbie Does Dallas, a pictorial in Pregnant Lesbians, and lengthy transcriptions of a novel called Tying Up Rebecca.

The report stapled together personal statements from different commissioners. Father Bruce Ritter admitted that "one man's nudity is another man's erotica is another man's soft-core pornography is another man's hard-core obscenity is another man's boredom."

He was saddened that the Commission had not been tougher on sex. "I think it fair to say that by its refusal to take an ethical or moral position on premarital or extramarital sex, either heterosexual or homosexual, the Commission literally ran for the hills."

Ritter found that pornography "degrades sex itself and dehumanizes and debases a profoundly sacred relationship." Other commissioners saw porn as propaganda for the sexual revolution, a banner for promiscuity. Porn depicted sex "outside of marriage, love, commitment or affection. There are undoubtedly many causes for what used to be called the sexual revolution," the Commission reported, "but it is absurd to suppose that depictions or descriptions of uncommitted sexuality were not among them. Although there are many members of this society who can and have made affirmative cases for uncommitted sexuality, none of us believes it to be a good thing."

The report attempted to draw distinctions between erotic material. The Commission asserted that sexually violent material was harmful. Images that were nonviolent but degrading were condemned. Explicit material that was neither violent nor degrading, was, well-- damn the evidence--not "in every instance harmless."

The Commission made 92 recommendations. It called for an all-out war on porn, including appointing a national porn czar. It encouraged boycotts, pickets and letter-writing campaigns by citizens action groups.

It seems that while on their cross-country circus, the commissioners must have watched MTV in their hotel rooms. The report suggested monitoring rock lyrics. "Many popular idols of the young commonly sing about rape, masturbation, incest, drug usage, bondage, violence, homosexuality and intercourse."

Following the release of the report, the nation saw a wave of censorship. Store owners pulled from their shelves copies of Vogue, American Photographer, Ms.--at the mere sight of a nipple.

Ed Donnerstein, one of the social scientists quoted by the Commission, publicly declared that the report was "bizarre," that it had misrepresented their research, but, once again, it was too late. The lie was taken as truth.

The Truth Squad

Eventually, more-objective scholars exposed the ghosts in the machine, the flaws that guaranteed headlines. Diana Russell's study--which claimed the real rape rate was 13 times higher than the official FBI estimate--included in her definition of rape such acts as "unwanted sexual experience, including kissing, petting or intercourse" or attempts at such behaviors. Augustine Brannigan, a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, and his colleague, Andros Kapardis, called the flaw over-inclusion and asked simply: "How meaningful is it to collapse intercourse, kissing and petting, as well as attempts at these things? There appears to be an interest in letting virtually anything count as rape for the purposes of establishing an epidemic, while at the same time treating it all as the same, grave, undifferentiated harm. Surely this mystifies the very thing we are trying to understand."

Similarly, the Ms. study on college sex had an overinclusive definition of rape. Included in the survey were questions that asked if a woman had had sexual intercourse when she didn't want to after a man had served her alcohol or drugs, and if she had "given in to sexplay (fondling, kissing or petting but not intercourse) when you didn't want to, because you were overwhelmed by a man's continual arguments and pressure." Whining is not rape.

Only 27 percent of the women Ms. said had been raped labeled themselves as rape victims. If three quarters do not believe what happened to them was rape, it wasn't. Some 42 percent of the so-called rape victims continued to have sex with the so-called rapist.

Neil Malamuth was another researcher who would not take no for an answer. College-aged males who answered the hypothetical "Would you rape?" question did so on a scale that ranged from one (not at all likely) to five (very likely). The vast majority who circled one were not exempt--they were classified as having a low likelihood of rape. Anyone who scored two or higher was said to have a high likelihood of rape. Malamuth over-included. Only three to five percent circled the five option. That figure (three to five percent of males say they are very likely to rape) just doesn't have headline appeal.

Similarly, the headlines that suggested the violent content of porn was on the increase were clutching at straws. Malamuth's study claimed the increase was fivefold--from one percent to five percent. A more exhaustive study by Joseph Scott and Steve Cuvelier at Ohio State University examined the so-called violence in Playboy from 1954 to 1983: They found there was no increase--indeed, there was something of a decrease--if you could find images to begin with. Overall, they noted, sexual violence occurred in about one page out of every 3000 and in less than four out of every 1000 pictures.

Ed Donnerstein's lab experiments at the University of Wisconsin were tempting to liberals and conservatives alike: At last there was science that seemed to support their politics. Feminists used the "shock the attractive lab assistant" model to crow that these sexually violent materials increased violence toward women. Liberals seized upon the finding that it was violence, not sex, that increased aggression.

Both of these assertions were nonsense. Watching violent material increased overall agitation or arousal, and that found its way into increased aggression. But other things produced the same effect. Loud noise "caused" the same increase in "violence toward women." Watching a movie of eye surgery had the same effect as watching a movie about bestiality.

Working out on an exercise bicycle increased aggressive behavior. Humor increased aggressive behavior. In the lab, Brannigan pointed out the folly of trying to base laws on such flawed research: "Would we prevent jogging and issue noise bans on the pretext that this would make the world safer for women?"

And, of course, the government overlooked the evidence that certain factors (tropical heat, marijuana and mild erotica) reduced aggression against women. Should the government make it mandatory to smoke weed and look at girlie calendars?

The government had its own agenda.

The Supreme Court on Sodomy

Within a week of the release of the Meese Report, the Supreme Court betrayed the sexual revolution. In a series of landmark decisions throughout the r Sixties and Seventies, the Court had upheld a right to privacy, defined succinctly as "the right to be let alone." Under that fundamental liberty, a man had the right to enjoy erotica in the home, men and women had the right to birth control, women had the right to determine when and whether to reproduce. "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness," the Court had said. "They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations."

If a man were not free in his bedroom, in his most intimate affairs, then freedom was meaningless. Unfortunately, lawbooks were filled with statutes dating from the colonial era, blue laws that intruded into intimate relationships. The classic argument against reform was simple: The laws were symbolic and never enforced. Through the late Seventies and early Eighties a number of cases had come to light, indicating that the sex police were still active. Playboy chronicled the exploits of Officer Green Knees, a cop in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin who liked to crawl up to couples in parked cars. (The resulting stains on his uniform prompted the nickname.) In one summer, he made 16 arrests for "lewd and lascivious" conduct. When challenged over a verdict that threatened to send a couple to jail for having sex in a vacant house they had been hired to paint, the circuit court judge said he was drawing on the "law of Moses." The defense attorney tried to point out that "going to hell was one thing. Going to prison is quite another."

The Constitutional guarantee of the right to privacy was meaningless if it didn't protect behavior between consenting adults. Lower court judges had ruled in a consensual sodomy case that "the right of two individuals to choose what type of sexual conduct they will enjoy in private is just as personal, just as important, just as sensitive," as the decision "to engage in sex using a contraceptive to prevent unwanted pregnancy."

By 1989 some 25 states had overturned laws forbidding sodomy, that infamous crime against nature. Some thought it was time to free the remaining states.

On July 5, 1982 Atlanta police officer Keith Torrick saw Michael Hardwick leave a gay bar with a bottle of beer in his hand. He cited Hardwick for drinking in public. When Hardwick missed his court date (there was a mistake on the ticket), Torrick went hunting.

On August 3, Torrick entered Hard-wick's house and, peering through a bedroom door, observed Hardwick engaged in "mutual oral sex" with another man. He arrested them for sodomy and, after allowing them to dress, handcuffed them and dragged them off to jail. The ACLU contacted Hardwick and asked if he would join a suit challenging the Georgia statute--which forbade both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy.

After hearing arguments, the Supreme Court straw-polled and tallied five to four to overturn the statute. The majority included the champions of privacy--Justices William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, John Paul Stevens and Lewis Powell. Opposed were Justices Warren Burger, Byron White, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor. But Lewis Powell, who said he had "never met a homosexual" and was quoted by a colleague as saying "I hate homos," changed his mind.

The confusion of the Court was evident in the number of separate opinions. Burger declared, "In Constitutional terms there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy." In words that belonged more on Jerry Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour than in the nation's highest court, Burger thundered on: "Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards. Homosexual sodomy was a capital crime under Roman law." His loathing oozed through the brief. He cited those who called homosexuality "the infamous crime against nature" and "an offense of deeper malignity than rape."

For Burger, the crime "not fit to be named" was an act "the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature." To uphold the practice of homosexual sodomy would "cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

Harry Blackmun penned a passionate dissent: "Depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply rooted in our nation's history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do."

Justice White dismissed the right to privacy championed by the Court of the Sixties and Seventies: "None of the rights announced in those cases bear any resemblance to the claimed Constitutional right of homosexuals to engage in sodomy. No connection between family, marriage or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has been demonstrated," and "to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."

Critics of the logic pointed out that the nation's tradition had tolerated slavery, that the past was not a prison. The issue was not that the Constitution granted a special right to homosexuals, but rather that they deserved the same rights as all Americans. Laurence Tribe, the law professor from Harvard who had argued the case, said the Court had missed the point. The question before the Court was "not what respondent Michael Hardwick was doing in the privacy of his own bedroom, but what the State of Georgia was doing there."

The New York Times called the decision "a gratuitous and petty ruling, an offense to American society's maturing standards of individual dignity."

Time produced "Sex Busters," a cover story linking the Meese Commission and the Supreme Court decision as the "new moral militancy."

"If Jerry Falwell had a divine plan for America, then the Supreme Court's sodomy decision and the Meese Report would both be on his drawing board. Falwell views these two events as the trophies of the New Right's gradual rise to power,"

Falwell announced that the Court decision was "a clarion call that enough is enough."

The Army of God

The Meese Commission had encouraged vigilante action by private citizens' groups. The call for direct action was an implicit support for anarchy. The new moral militancy would turn ugly.

In 1974, one year after Roe vs. Wade, some 7000 right-to-lifers marched on Washington, D.C. In 1981, 60,000 came, carrying signs that stated: WANTED FOR MURDER: FIVE MILLION MOTHERS AND THEIR DOCTORS.

The pro-lifers' crusade had moved in halting, frustrating waves. The courts had whittled down a woman's right to abortion, ruling first that Federal funds could not be used for the procedure. Religious zealots were offended that their tax money was going to the slaughter of innocents.

In June 1982 The Playboy Forum reported on a bizarre case in which an 18-year-old pregnant woman tried to obtain an abortion. The cost ($1000) was beyond her means. No public funds would cover the operation. Distraught, she took a loaded .22 pistol and shot herself in the stomach. The court found her guilty, not of attempted suicide, but of illegal abortion. Abortion by bullet.

At the Federal level, conservative politicians drafted laws declaring that life began at conception. In Congress, Representative Bob Dornan (R-Cal.) invoked the Holocaust: "American citizens dying in their mothers' wombs have gone beyond the Herodian slaughter of the Hitler regime. And that's a conservative estimate. Only 30,000 were killed at Dachau. We kill 30,000 innocent citizens in their mothers' wombs every month!"

In April 1981 Representative Henry Hyde and Senator Jesse Helms proposed a congressional statute asserting that the fetus is a person. The Senate vote (47 to 46) was shy of the two thirds needed. An amendment proposed by Orrin Hatch, which would return control of abortion laws to the states (undercutting Roe vs. Wade), got 50 votes to 49, again short of the two thirds needed.

The religious right took its crusade outside the law. In 1982, three clinics were targets of bomb or arson attacks. A group calling itself the Army of God took credit for a Washington, D.C. clinic bombing. The violence escalated. A man who torched four clinics in the Pacific Northwest claimed he acted "for the glory of God." Bombings struck more than 24 clinics in 1984. A lay minister, Michael Bray, and two confederates were charged with planting bombs at seven Washington, D.C. clinics in 1985.

When police arrested four people who bombed clinics in Pensacola, Florida on Christmas day, Kaye Wiggins said the bombings were "a gift to Jesus on his birthday."

Time reported Falwell's response to the bombings. He called for a "national day of mourning" on the 12th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade and a right-to-life march in which followers would wear black armbands "in remembrance" of all aborted babies.

God Save the Child

The child was the centerpiece of the decade's sexual hysteria. One can trace the roots of this panic to the end of the Seventies. In 1977 Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, the founder of Odyssey House, pulled a trunkful of child porn into a Congressional hearing. Having scoured adult bookstores, she claimed there were 264 kid porn magazines produced each month. She said as many as 1.2 million children were victims of kid porn and prostitution. Some, she claimed, were sold to produce snuff movies.

By 1980, she had "arbitrarily doubled" that number to 2.4 million. Sergeant Lloyd Martin testified that 30,000 children were victims of sexual exploitation in Los Angeles alone. He alerted the nation to the Rene Guyon Society, part of a "vast network of pedophiles" whose motto was Sex Before Eight, or Then It's Too Late. The press fanned the hysteria. Ladies' Home Journal, for example, titled its exposé "Innocence for Sale" and said the kiddie porn industry was "estimated at" between $500 million and $1 billion annually. Father Bruce Ritter told the Journal: "This sickness exists because a small segment of society wants it, another segment profits by it and the rest aren't doing anything about it. Maybe we don't know enough--or care enough."

There were real monsters out there. In 1981 Adam Walsh, a six-year-old in Florida, disappeared. His body was found in a field, the head severed. Concerned citizens launched a campaign that put the pictures of missing children on milk cartons and posters in toll-booths. The new experts claimed that 50,000 children were kidnapped every year. If the figure had been true, our schools would have soon been empty.

The religious right seized upon the statistics. Donald Wildmon sent out newsletters claiming, "Each year, 50,000 missing children are victims of pornography. Most are kidnapped, raped, abused, photographed and filmed for porno magazines and movies and finally, more often than not, murdered." In another fund-raising letter the figure had soared. "The latest craze in filth is now child pornography. Each year some 600,000 youngsters--some just babies--are kidnapped or seduced for pornographic magazine photos."

At the turn of the century, the white slave hysteria raged for years before a thoughtful journalist published the real news--there was no traffic in souls. Halfway through the decade, journalists began to question the inflammatory figures on kiddie porn. The FBI reported that it investigated a total of 68 abductions by strangers in 1985 and 69 the year before. Most of the 30,000 (not 1.5 million) children reported missing every year were runaways who returned home within 24 hours. Most of the rest were taken by a parent during a custody dispute. FBI spokesman Bill Carter put it this way: "The high figures are impossible. More than 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam war. Almost everyone in America knows someone who was killed there. Do you know a child who has been abducted? That should tell you something."

The FBI conducted a 30-month investigation into child pornography. Agents simultaneously raided 60 warehouses where child porn was supposedly stored. There was none found. An independent three-year investigation by the Illinois Legislative Investigating Committee reached the same conclusion: "Neither child pornography nor child prostitution has ever represented a significant portion of the porn industry."

A study of Federal arrest records revealed this:

"Between January 1, 1978 and May 21, 1984, only 67 defendants were indicted under all the Federal statutes covering the creation, importation, mailing, production, receipt and exchange of child pornography. Many of those 67 were guilty only of buying one or two child pornography magazines or films from Europe for personal viewing. Since May 1984, around 600 defendants nationwide have been indicted on child-porn related crimes. It must be stressed that the increase in child pornography indictments--61 in 1984, 126 in 1985, 147 in 1986 and 247 in 1987--was not a result of better law enforcement or a rise in child pornography crimes. Instead, it is wholly attributable to the mass marketing of child pornography by U.S. Customs and the U.S. Postal Service. Anyone looking for a child-porn underground will find only a vast network of postal inspectors and police agents."

The legions of missing children haunted and twisted the American psyche. In 1980 Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, co-authored Michelle Remembers, a supposedly true account of satanic ritual abuse. The popular book pitted an innocent Christian girl against a satanic cult, whose members abused her, raping and sodomizing her with candles. They also sacrificed babies and butchered adults. The experience had been so traumatic that Smith had repressed the memories for more than 20 years. The horror was exposed during therapy, in the form of "recovered memories."

The FBI investigated the evidence in more than 300 alleged crimes by organized cults and found no satanic cults. Michelle may have glimpsed hell, but it could not be found on earth.

In 1988 Ellen Bass and Laura Davis created The Courage to Heal--what became known as the bible of the recovered-memory movement. The authors claimed that one third of American women had been abused as children. According to Bass and Davis, some girls forgot the experience in order to survive, others created multiple personalities. Within a decade, an estimated 40,000 patients would be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.

Survivors of abuse turned up on Donahue, The Larry King Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Celebrities such as Roseanne and LaToya Jackson came forward to chronicle past abuse. Gloria Steinem rallied around the movement. (Not only were women victims of inequality, they had been abused! Trauma dragged through a woman's life like an evil anchor. It seemed to fit.)

No one pointed out that the recovered memories all seemed to stem from a distant past--the very time when the sexual revolution took off. The symptoms were those of mass hysteria, not isolated disease. If you doubted such claims you were the enemy and possibly an abuser yourself.

It was only a matter of time before the hysteria claimed new victims. The call to arms was simple: Believe.

The McMartin Witch-Hunt

The story broke on February 2, 1984. A TV reporter in California sat in front of a large graphic of a mangled teddy bear and said that more than 60 children, "some of them as young as two years of age, who were enrolled in the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach have now each told authorities that he or she had been keeping a grotesque secret of being sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool's care--and of having been forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals to scare the kids into staying silent."

Less than a year earlier, a distraught mother called the Manhattan Beach police. She'd noticed blood on her two-and-a-half-year-old son's anus, she said. Her son had said something about a man named Ray at his nursery school. When police investigated, they could not get the boy to talk to them at all. But the mother, an alcoholic and paranoid schizophrenic, continued to talk. She told the police that Ray Buckey, an employee at McMartin, had sodomized her son while he stuck the boy's head in a toilet, that he had worn a mask and a cape, that he had made her son ride naked on a horse, and had molested him while dressed as a cop, a fireman, a clown and Santa Glaus. She claimed that McMartin teachers had jabbed scissors into her son's eyes and staples into his ears, nipples and tongue, and that Buckey "pricked [her son's] right finger and put it in a goat's anus and [that Buckey's mother] killed a baby and made the boy drink the blood." She charged that the three women at McMartin were witches who had buried her son in a coffin, that her son had watched a ritual in which one of the teachers had killed a real baby.

The police arrested Ray Buckey on September 7, 1983. Searching his house, they found two issues of Playboy, a camera and a graduation robe. No video cameras, no porn films, no pictures of children.

The police sent a letter to 200 parents of McMartin preschoolers, indicating that Buckey was a suspect. "Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she had been a victim. Our investigation indicates possible criminal acts include oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttocks or chest area, and sodomy, possibly under the pretense of taking the child's temperature. Any information from your child is important."

In McMartin: Anatomy of a Witch-Hunt, Playboy reported: "Not one parent reported abuse. Not one child disclosed anything suspicious."

Prosecutors referred parents to the Children's Institute International, an agency that cares for abused and neglected children. The McMartin parents who took their children to the institute initially did not believe they had been abused, and none of the children had indicated they had been abused. But suspicion flowed into concern, then panic.

By mid-1984 the CII had questioned 400 children. It filed reports indicating that 369 had been abused. The parents began to believe.

Rewarded for inventing stories, the children talked of underground tunnels, digging up coffins, of having sex at a car wash. "The children identified community leaders, gas station attendants and store clerks as molesters," noted Playboy. "They picked the pictures of the chief councilman of Los Angeles and actor Chuck Norris out of a stack of pictures as being abusers."

District Attorney Robert Philibosian brought charges against seven adults who worked at the school. Basing his case solely on the CII interviews, he filed 208 charges involving 42 children. He jailed Ray Buckey and his mother.

The pretrial maneuvering generated a media frenzy. Philibosian claimed that the "primary purpose of the McMartin Preschool was to solicit young children to commit lewd conduct with the proprietors of the school and also to procure young children for pornographic purposes." The DA's office claimed "millions of child pornography photographs and films" existed.

Despite an extensive investigation by the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service and Interpol, and despite the parents' offer of a reward of $25,000 for a photo, no picture of a McMartin child was ever found. No videotape or film turned up. Nothing.

The trial lasted 28 months--the longest such proceeding in American history. It cost an estimated $16 million.

A juror who watched the taped interviews saw immediately that the horror existed in the minds of the interviewers, not in the children. Social workers had brainwashed the supposed victims, planting ideas, rewarding fantasies. In the end Peggy Buckey was acquitted. Ray Buckey was found not guilty on 52 of 65 counts (the jury was hung on the rest of the charges).

We had believed and innocents had suffered. The McMartin tragedy was repeated al school after school across the country. Papers continued to fan the flames through the decade, with headlines SUCH AS MOMMY. DON'T LEAVE ME HERE! THE DAY CARE THAT PARENTS DON'T SEE AND WHEN CHILD CARE BECOMES CHILD MOLESTING: IT HAPPENS MORE OFTEN THAN PARENTS LIKE TO THINK.

In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi argues that the hysteria seemed to burn along party lines, centering on the favorite targets of the New Right. The witch-hunt obscured the true abuse. "In 1985," she writes, "there were nearly 100,000 reported cases of children sexually abused by family members (mostly fathers, stepfathers or older brothers), compared with about 1300 cases in day care."

Those who fanned the flames soon became engulfed in scandals of their own. A box in The Playboy Forum pointed out the hypocrisy of Donald Wildmon's newsletter: "Average number of soft-porn readers who commit violent crimes and are reported in the AFA Journal each month: 3. Number of ministers currently facing sexual child abuse charges in America: 200. Number of ministers accused of sexual child abuse who are reported in the AFA Journal each month: 0."

Jim Bakker, televangelist superstar and head of the Praise the Lord ministry, confessed to "one afternoon of sin in 1980" with Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary. He had been caught using church collections to pay her hush money. The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, another televangelist who railed against sex, claimed the Bakker scandal was a "cancer that needed to be excised from the body of Christ." Swaggart would soon find himself in disgrace, when he was caught visiting prostitutes in Louisiana.

Father Bruce Ritter, a moral conscience of the Meese Commission, was forced to resign when four former residents came forward to say he had molested them when they were in his care at Covenant House. Ritter traded sex for favors, paying his favorite kids out of church funds.

Charles Keating, the self-appointed protector of decency, tottered toward self-destruction. At the annual Children's Ball that he staged at his Phoenician Resort in Arizona, he told "sad stones about depravity against children" and raised money for moral mercenaries like Alan Sears (hired fresh from the Meese Commission) and Bruce Taylor. He used other people's money (from the teetering Lincoln Savings and Loan) to help the soon-to-be-disgraced Ritter buy a Times Square hotel for runaway children. Keating surrounded himself with attractive, large-breasted women, handing out bonuses that would pay for breast implants, dresses and jewelry, and prepared to fight the government lawyers who accused him of stealing millions.

Those most opposed to the sexual revolution would themselves reap the whirlwind.