The Sexual Revolution

Make Love, Not War by David Allyn

Make Love, Not War is David Allyn's "unfettered" history of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. It was a time which this blogger lived through, though when Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl appeared in 1962, he was not quite old enough to know what all the fuss was about.

Looking back, I see it was a truly nutty, schizophrenic time. There were weird people such as the founders of the League for Sexual Freedom running around New York City proselytizing for an agenda that included things like "the legitimacy of public masturbation" (p. 46). One, the possessor of one of the great names of all time, Tuli Kupferberg, was a member of a folk-rock band called the Fugs. Their songs included such all-time favorites as "Group Grope," "Boobs a Lot," "Kill for Peace," "What Are You Doing After the Orgy?" and "Dirty Old Man" (p. 45).

Another Sexual Freedom League founder, Jeff Poland, was "one of the first hippies" (p. 42). He, Kupferberg, and others who included the soon-to-be-famous poet Allen Ginsburg took up the cause of Professor Leo Koch, fired by the University of Illinois for a 1960 letter he wrote to the Daily Illini, a student newspaper, advocating (gasp!) premarital sex (p. 43).

As advanced as Koch's views seemed to be at the time, today he could very easily be deemed a galloping sexist, a male-chauvinist pig, and worse. A footnote Allyn includes (p. 43) notes that Koch's letter was in rebuttal to

... an article written by two male students condemning premarital petting. The students argued that the average college man treated every college woman as "a simple female sex unit" rather than as "a living individual — as an organic complexity of personality and character, emotion and intellect, and passion and reason." (This was some eight years before radical feminists would make the very same claims about the "objectification" and sexual exploitation of women.)

In retrospect, in fact, I realize the entire launching pad for the sexual revolution was basically sexist, if sexist means not coming to terms with the realities of women, their bodies, their needs, and their wills. We had Hugh Hefner airbrushing the pubic hair out of his Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month photos. We had the Pill — the first oral contraceptive, appearing in 1960 and gaining phenomenal acceptance by 1965 — making it for the first time

... possible to prevent pregnancy without ever touching one's vagina or penis. It was ultimately a technological accommodation to the deepest dualism of American culture: the belief that the mind was pure and noble while the body is dirty and base. Ironically, the single most revolutionary invention of the 1960s was a tiny, timid little pill ... secreted away in a purse or a pocketbook without anyone ever knowing about it. No wonder the pill did little to erase Americans' ambivalence about sex. (p. 40)

As I read these early pages of Allyn's book, I find I can't wait for radical feminism to assert itself. How odd that is ... at the time, I thought "women's lib" was much ado about nothing!