The Revolution Is Over

“It’s terrible to wake up and wonder why this person’s head is on the other pillow,” confesses a New York City writer who slept with about two dozen women in the first months after his divorce. “It was painful for them and me too.” Says a Chicago bar owner: “All the happy-go-lucky singles in my place tell me that they do not want a relationship. Then six months later they are engaged.” A businessman in the Boston area, currently in mid-divorce, is swearing off the one-night stand. “I don’t want it, don’t need it and don’t believe in it,” he says. “I hope to find one person to share my life with. Who doesn’t?”

After the sexual revolution, the voices of Thermidor. From cities, suburbs and small towns alike, 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 even rediscovering the traditional values of fidelity, obligation and marriage. Or as one San Francisco sex therapist, Lonnie Barbach, puts it, “We’ve been going through a Me generation; now I see people wanting to get back into the We generation.”

The buzz words these days are “commitment,” “intimacy” and “working at relationships.” There is much talk of pendulum swings, matters coming full circle and a psychic return to prerevolutionary days. “We are in a ’50s period again,” says Miami Psychiatrist Gail Wainger. “People are looking for more lasting relationships, and they want babies.” In the ’70s Wainger’s case load was predictably heavy with patients complaining about sexual inadequacies. “Not having an orgasm was an O.K. reason to come in for therapy. Now they come in because they are not happy with their lives, their jobs, their inability to find relationships.”

Fear of herpes obviously prods the trend along but explains the new caution only in part. In 1980, when herpes was just beginning to impinge on the nation’s consciousness, a Cosmopolitan survey found that “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 that there might be a sexual counterrevolution under way in America.” Cosmopolitan Editor Helen Gurley Brown, never one to miss a sexual trend, says, “Sex with commitment is absolutely delicious. Sex with your date for the evening is not so marvelous—too casual, too meaningless.” The tide of conservative prose, in fact, has become too much for Playboy. An article in the December issue grumpily complains that scribbling erotophobes are out to restore Puritanism in America. Playboy’s most recent campus poll found more sex than ever among collegians but also signs of the new traditionalist trend. Most of the sex took place in stable relationships, and a third of the students said that they had to be in love before going to bed with someone.

One problem in gauging the nation’s sexual temper is that those in charge of the effort seem to know very little about what is really going on. On the subject of the sexual revolution, the specialists divide into three categories: the experts who think the revolution has ended, those who insist that it is still continuing, and a small group who say it never existed at all. In the last faction is John Gagnon, a sociologist who says the idea of a sexually permissive society was basically a construct of American journalism.

Sex polls do not settle the matter. Sampling is often flawed, questions may be sloppily phrased, and results sometimes vary erratically. More important, all the pollsters have to goon is what people say. New York Psychologist Mildred Newman reports that a close friend was interviewed for the Kinsey report on women. The friend, who led a robust and varied sex life, gave chaste and virginal answers because she was not willing to let anyone know how she really behaved. Nowadays many people may offer up attitudes designed to depict themselves as properly liberated. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, while studying a kibbutz in Israel, noticed that kibbutzniks whose daily conduct was clearly liberal almost always checked off conservative attitudes, and many conservative men and women reported liberal attitudes. This led to Tiger’s First Law of Polling: “Attitudes are antidotal to actual behavior.”

Even so, some statistics indicate that a glacial shift toward conservatism is under way in sexual matters, and probably has been since the mid-’70s. Weddings and births are up, divorce is down, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. A record 2.5 million couples were married in 1982. It was the seventh annual rise in a row and an increase of 16% over 1975; the marriage rate, with the exception of two years in the early ’70s, was the highest since 1950. The number of divorces dipped slightly, to 1.2 million, in 1982; that was the first decline in 20 years. The total number of births, as well as the birth rate, was the highest in a dozen years. Births to women in their 30s are still on the rise, one sign that doubts about motherhood are fading among females exposed to the heaviest antifamily criticisms. The birth rate for women 30 to 34 stands at 73.5 per thousand, up from 60 per thousand in 1980.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, marriage, motherhood and the “nuclear family” were scorned by the counterculture, feminists and radicals. Psychiatrist David Cooper denounced the family as a “secret suicide pact” and “an ideological conditioning device in any exploitative society.” Yet by the late ’70s, says Writer Fran Schumer, “marriage became something hip, ambitious women could do.” Most of those now divorced can hardly wait to get back into the game: some 60% to 70% of younger divorcees remarry within five years. One national poll taken in 1978 found that 23% of Americans said they would welcome less emphasis on marriage. Four years later, a follow-up poll showed that only 15% wanted marriage de-emphasized. Those who wanted traditional family ties rose 3%, to 86%, while people who wanted general acceptance of sexual freedom fell by 4%.

The shift in behavior extends to the young. Premarital sex is still prevalent—youngsters are starting earlier and marrying later—but some polls are picking up signs of sexual conservatism. A July 1983 reader survey by Psychology Today reported considerably more conservative attitudes, particularly among the young, than a similar poll taken in 1969. Half of those under age 22 felt that sex without love is unenjoyable or unacceptable. A survey of a group of juniors and seniors, selected last year from Who’s Who Among American High School Students, found that only 25% had experienced sexual intercourse. A similar survey in 1971 found that 40% were nonvirgins. In 1976 one-fourth of the 300 Yale students who enrolled in Philip and Lorna Sarrel’s course, Topics in Human Sexuality, said they were virgins. In 1983 one-third of the 259 students in the class said they had never had sex. Says Mary Olsen, director of the health center at Wheaton College in Massachusetts: “When you reach a certain age, it’s a natural thing to explore your sexuality. The difference now is that things are not so casual. The women I speak with seem to want to know their partners.” At Northwestern University, the director of the student health service, Helen Wilks, says, “Students on campus today are just more serious in general.”

The sexual revolution was born in the mid-’60s, the product of affluence, demographics and the Pill. Women had been pouring into the work force since World War II, and the Pill offered sexual liberation to go with growing social and economic freedom. The baby-boom generation shaped its culture around sex, drugs and defiance of traditional values. The California therapies, chiefly those derived from the ideas of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, supplied much of the rationale for the sexual revolt. Fulfillment and growth came from close attention to the needs of the self. Maslow taught that the self is a hierarchy of inner needs and that culture and tradition push people toward inauthentic selves; living for others is a trap. At the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy stood the self-actualized person, virtually independent of culture or troublesome ties to others. Rogers too stressed the goal of self-actualization and personal growth.

Daniel Yankelovich’s study New Rules showed how the self-fulfillment ethic, largely confined to the campuses in the late ’60s, had pollinated much of America’s culture by the late ’70s, wafted along by a score of pop-psych books, from How to Be Your Own Best Friend to Passages and Your Erroneous Zones. By the late ’70s, according to polls conducted by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, 72% of Americans spent a great deal of time thinking about themselves and their inner needs. “The rage for self-fulfillment,” wrote Yankelovich, “… had now spread to virtually the entire U.S. population.”

In the sexual arena, self-fulfillment converted almost every sexual itch into a sexual need. Acts that had traditionally been viewed as perversions, like sadomasochism, were now proclaimed “alternative life-styles,” presumably self-fulfilling for those attracted to them. Joseph Epstein, in his book Divorced in America, argued that for those on a lifelong mission of self-fulfillment, the very thing that led individuals into marriage—more growth—was bound to lead them right on out; the ties and obligations of wedded life blocked the proper unfolding of the self. But, points out Carlfred Broderick of the University of Southern California’s marriage and family therapy program, “total growth, total narcissism, which is supposed to fix everything, doesn’t.”

Yankelovich’s study, published in 1981, captures the theology of the revolution at its peak. Future historians of the movement, in fact, may set the years of sexual revolt at roughly 1965 to 1975. Since the mid-’70s, according to some small surveys, the revolution has decelerated or reached a plateau. One such study shows that rates of premarital intercourse for students at the University of California at Davis rose sharply to 62% by 1977 and then increased to only 64% by 1981. Said Ann Clurman, a vice president at Yankelovich, Skelly & White: “In the latter part of the decade, we see a slowing down in support for the sexual revolution. People are reassessing. They’re moving away from the extremes.”

Polls on nonsexual attitudes trace the same trajectory during the ’70s, suggesting that the softening of support for the sexual revolution owes something to the softening of support for liberalism in general. The National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, which has been surveying liberal and conservative attitudes since 1972, reports that the dominant social views in America are still liberal, but not so solidly as they once were. Tom W Smith of N.O.R.C. writes that in most categories, liberal sentiments “either leveled off or slowed their rate of increase around 1973-75. Instead of a conservative tide, the period since about 1973 can be better described as a liberal plateau.”

Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of Stanford’s Hoover Institution thinks the “destabilization of belief systems” wrought by the Viet Nam War helped propel the sexual revolution along. The end of the war and the onset of a recession, he says, brought “a movement back to more stability” and a turn away from far-out sex in the mid-’70s. British Journalist Henry Fairlie, an astute observer of the American scene, thinks the tinkering with personal life-styles that characterized the ’60s and early ’70s inevitably bred distaste for further social change. “Endless questioning of all aspects of life from food, dress, dropping out, child rearing and commune living led to mere exhaustion,” he says. “There simply was no energy left. People found it an isolating and cutoff way to live.” Yankelovich too thinks the turn away from sexual adventuring is a byproduct of other change. It is, he says, “only one part of a larger phenomenon of society going through a sober, responsible phase.”

An uncertain economy may also have helped quiet the sexual scene. Though no one can demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship, sexual caution and money troubles seem to go hand in hand, in the ’30s as in the ’80s. A common saying among sex therapists is “sex goes up with the stock market.” The free spirits of the ’60s are the busy careerists of the ’80s, hustling for a dollar in a competitive job market. “The students you talk to want to do well,” says retired Harvard Sociologist David Riesman. “They want to do more than pass their courses, and they want more than a job. They want a career. Sex and drugs are distractions, things that are no longer new and exciting.” Robert McGinley, of Buena Park, Calif, head of the North American Swing Club Association, believes the economy is probably the major factor in the recent decline of swinging, a euphemism for mate swapping and group sex. Attendance at swing parties, he says, dropped 15% to 30% in early 1983, and attendance at Plato’s Retreat, a Manhattan sex parlor, was down 40% in the same period.

According to Sociologist William Simon, “The affluence of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s gave us courage to experiment with our lives. With the present economy, there is a sense of cautiousness. There is more commitment to careers and coupling because we are hedging our bets for social and economic security. We think, ‘How can I financially and emotionally budget my energies?’ and the career is winning out over thoughts of sex.”

Another important but unwelcome accelerator of the conservative trend is herpes. Since the late ’70s, when it was often misdiagnosed as psoriasis, genital herpes has emerged as a major sexually transmitted ailment. Some 10 million to 20 million Americans have genital herpes, and an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 new cases appear each year. The one-night stand is now so risky that a couple interested in casual sex must get to know each other well enough to pop the herpes question—and believe the answer. Many sexologists think herpes is the chief reason for the new conservatism. Others consider it more of a symbol or the capping of a trend that began before herpes came to full public attention. Says California Sexologist Harvey Caplan: “In a funny sort of way, some people are actually relieved by the threat of herpes. It’s a good excuse for them to give up a life-style that had become unsatisfying.” Yankelovich thinks the rise of herpes has revived feelings of guilt and the idea of disease as a form of moral punishment for promiscuity. Beneath the veneer of liberation, he says, “we have a residual guilt, and the idea that promiscuity breeds disease falls on prepared ears.”

Age is another contributor to revisionism. As many of the baby-boomers begin to hit their middle years, they are following the normal course of settling down, devoting more energy to their work and in general becoming more conservative. Caroline Stewart, 34, a Philadelphia journalist, managed to juggle both the new morality and the old during the ’70s. As she grew up in Pittsburgh, her father blinked the message “Stay a virgin at all costs.” She headed to Washington and became a grudging conscript in the sexual revolution. After her first romance broke up, she recalls, “I was wild, for me. Many people had a great smorgasbord of relationships. You had them without giving thought to what you needed instead of what you wanted.”

Like some other female veterans of the revolution, Stewart thinks she was tricked into playing the male’s game of easy sex. “Men compartmentalize their feelings. They can be casual about their sex lives,” she says. “For women it’s more of a bonding experience. Men use intimacy to get sex. Women use sex to get intimacy.” She thinks men are so cavalier that the only sensible female strategy is the one her mother recommended: “Keep mysterious, play hard to get and never give in.”

Some analysts think the history of the sexual revolution is the story of the ever ready male gaining access to a larger pool of willing women. “There hasn’t been a change in male sexual patterns in the 20th century,” says Vern Bullough of the State University of New York at Buffalo, a historian of sexual trends. Though most analysts in the field would not go that far, studies tend to agree that changes in male premarital sexual behavior since the ’30s have been rather modest. Premarital sex rates for women more than doubled between the 1930s and 1971, and sharply rose again to a new peak in 1976.

“In sex,” says Tiger, “women are the gatekeepers.” At least some slowing of the sexual revolution seems traceable to the reassertion of traditional values by women. As always, women have more to lose in casual sex than men: they are left with the unwanted pregnancies, the abortions, the possible damage from contraceptives and the risk of cervical cancer associated with having multiple sex partners. To many women, random sex seems more and more a pointless diversion or a trap.

One female television personality in New York, a veteran of the sexual scene in the early ’70s, later joined a loosely structured “celibacy club” of women who went out socially in groups of six or eight to avoid sexual entanglements. Says she: “It’s hard enough for a woman to get ahead in this business without waking up in a different bed every morning.”

A University of Kansas study of college women over the past decade found a significant increase in sexual activity during the years 1973-78 but almost none in the past five years. Says Meg Gerrard, the psychology professor in charge of the survey: “I think we have reached a ceiling with 50% to 60% of college women active sexually.”

Sex is alive and well on campus, but it seems to be subdued by the standards of the early ’70s. Says Louis A. Pyle Jr., director of university health services at Princeton: “Although some freshmen boys arrive here asking, ‘Where’s the party? Where’s the orgy?,’ students today are more monogamous. There’s not a lot of promiscuity. This is substantiated by the fact that we see very little gonorrhea and no syphilis.” At Mount Holyoke, Senior Jennifer Shaw observes: “The trend for women is not to sleep with men they meet at parties.” The one-night stand is as potentially entangling for men as in prerevolutionary days. “The women who have one-night stands are really looking for further commitment,” she says. Nancy Boltz, a nurse at the University of Southern California, says students age 20 and over want long-term relationships. Some younger students sleep around, but in these encounters the trappings of commitment are common. “They may only stay together six months,” says Boltz, “but during that time they think they are in love.”

Counselors describe today’s students as sexually sophisticated but wary. Says Julianne Baffin, a dean of campus life at Atlanta’s Emory University: “They have already had their share of heartbreaks in broken relationships. They have already been the dumpee or dumper, and they don’t want that any more.” Instead of floating into relationships, she says, students are more likely to go out socially in groups. “It isn’t that sex as recreation has gone back into the closet,” she says. “It’s just that it’s not considered a primary pursuit any more.”

One Chicago graduate student, 37, now in her second marriage, echoes that uneasy change. Says she: “Many of us are unable to break the habit of self-absorption, unable even to live with someone else because it interferes with our own space.” She still has trouble with commitment, but feels a push toward it because she wants children and does not care to have to raise them by herself. “I can still regress, but I don’t want to,” she says. “The only time I get really nostalgic is when I get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd and think about when everyone was everyone else’s lover. But it just doesn’t work.” With her first husband, she experimented with open marriage. “The trouble is that emotionally you spread yourself too thin. What women who tried to break out of traditional relationships found is that it doesn’t work.”

Judy Meyer, a marketing executive for several Houston nightclubs, observes that “ten years ago, I would walk into a nightclub and be literally pinched by men, and guys would ask me pointblank if I wanted to get laid. Today there is a general softening in attitude. The days of the hard hustle are gone.” Says Stephen Greer, 33, co-owner of three Chicago nightclubs: “If you don’t work in a candy store, every piece of candy looks great. But today everybody works in a candy store—it’s so easy for everybody to have sex. So people are becoming more selective: holding out for just the right candy, just the right person.”

Manhattan Sex Therapist Shirley Zussman says that her patients these days complain about the emptiness of sex without commitment. “Being part of a meat market is appalling in terms of self-esteem,” she says. “Fears, of both loneliness and intimacy, are a backlash against the ‘cool sex’ promoted during the sexual revolution.” Psychiatrist Domeena Renshaw, director of the Sexual Dysfunction Clinic at Chicago’s Loyola University, has a waiting list of 200 couples seeking help. “Many have tried group sex and the swinging scene, but for them it has been destructive and corrosive. Often the partner who suggested it first is the one who suffers most.”

For sexologists these days, the new frontier is inhibited sexual desire (ISD). The problem accounts for 30% to 50% of the case load for many therapists. “We didn’t look for excitement problems in the mid-’70s,” says Therapist Stephen Sloan in Atlanta. “It was assumed that everyone desires sex.” Some therapists, accustomed to reporting 75% to 90% success rates in treating other sexual difficulties, report a 10% to 30% success rate in treating ISD. Philadelphia Sexologist Harold Lief has estimated that 20% of all adult Americans are afflicted with ISD. “It is clear that we are talking about enormous numbers,” he says.

Most therapists believe that these sexually apathetic people are not casualties of the revolution. They are simply showing up for help now because the new freedom, besides raising expectations, has made it easier for people to admit to sexual problems. Sexologist Caplan is not so sure; he thinks that the sexual revolution has been a highly significant factor in the spread of ISD. Because of boredom, satiation and the elimination of taboos, he says, “it is becoming increasingly clear that the excitement value of average sexual practices is diminishing.” Psychologist C.A. Tripp argues that sexual excitement depends on obstacles and barriers. As barriers fall, so does pleasure. Caplan says that he knows many men who carry out sexual seduction on a purely mental level: once they have psychologically won a woman, excitement fades, and they dread having to go to bed with their conquest.

America has been through it all before. In the ’20s another generation shaken by war, disillusioned with authority and fueled by easy affluence conducted its sexual revolution. The flapper symbolized a sharp break with prewar Victorian morals. In one poll of 2,200 women, taken during the ’20s, more than half said they regularly masturbated. By the end of the decade, a prominent gynecologist said, “sexual experience in some form has been known by 100%” of his unmarried patients. The divorce rate soared, and according to one estimate, up to 1 million illegal abortions took place each year during the Roaring Twenties.

Rapid urbanization, the growing intellectual and economic independence of women and the dislocations of World War I had all helped loosen traditional morals. As Americans read Sigmund Freud’s dark warning about the effects of suppressed desire, writes Historian Geoffrey Perrett, “sexual freedom appeared to be scientific, more or less.” By 1926 F. Scott Fitzgerald testily complained that “the universal preoccupation with sex had become a nuisance.”

Though some researchers say the sexual spree of the ’20s was confined to big cities and campuses, the famous study, Middletown, by Robert and Helen Lynd, found otherwise. By the middle of the decade, their typical American town (Muncie, Ind.) was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile. A team of sociologists, reassessing Middletown from 1976 to 1978, concluded: “The Middletown studied by the Lynds during the 1920s was in the throes of a sexual revolution as far-reaching as the one we have experienced during the past two decades.” There were differences, of course. Many women in the 1920s stopped short of intercourse. Those who “went all the way” often convinced themselves that they were in love, and the hasty or shotgun wedding was common.

Says Boston Psychiatrist Henry Abraham: “We are now seeking a balance. We realize that revolving-door sex is not the answer to true love and commitment. The ’60s kids brilliantly saw the problems facing us, but their solutions were the solutions of children. After all, a roll in the hay does not a sexual relationship make.”

Sexologist Wardell Pomeroy of San Francisco, a co-author of the Kinsey studies, predicts that sexual conservatism will not last. “In another three or four years, we’re going to go back again,” he says. “This is inevitable. I don’t think it can be bottled up.” Few other analysts, however, see any sexual energies being repressed.

The new conservatism is no victory for puritans. No sexual counterrevolution is under way. The sexual revolution has not been rebuffed, merely absorbed into the culture. America is more relaxed and open about sex, but also blessedly a bit tired of the subject. A sexual revolutionary at a party, chattering on earnestly about sex as a natural function, a panacea and the cutting edge of social change, would quickly end up standing alone. Many sexual techniques and practices that were shocking a generation ago—oral sex, for instance, or living together—have been widely accepted. So has premarital sex, particularly in urban areas. Girlie magazines, which have long since gone gynecological, circulate freely, and adult access to sexually explicit novels, movies and video cassettes is rarely questioned. Attitudes toward masturbation have shifted too: it is hardly seen as the triumphant act of self-love heralded in some of the quirkier sex manuals, but fewer and fewer Americans view it as morally repugnant, much less as a health hazard.

In the gray area is homosexuality, increasingly tolerated but not approved, as well as porn on television and teen-age sex. Other practices and proposals, along with their advocates in the heady days of the ’60s and early ’70s, have been firmly rejected: “open marriage,” group sex and child sex. Though many values are still being sorted out, most Americans seem stubbornly committed to family, marriage and the traditional idea that sex is tied to affection or justified by it. “Cool sex,” cut off from the emotions and the rest of life, seems empty, unacceptable or immoral. “The whole culture is on a swing back to more traditional expectations,” says Dr. David Scharff, a psychoanalyst and authorof The Sexual Relationship. “There is a return to the understanding that the main function of sex is the bodily expression of intimacy.” —By John Leo. Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Elizabeth Taylor/New York