In many ways it can be argued that ‘tolerance’ around the sexual revolution has in many ways grown both oppression and repression.  Today’s post exploring this comes from David Allyn’s Make Love, Not War.  

The overwhelming success go Oh! Calcutta!., Hair, and I Am Curious (Yellow) suggested that many were eager to participate in the production of a new, sexually liberated society.  They were willing to wear the costumes, speak the lines, and follow the stage directions of the sexual revolution.  But the more Americans joined in the collective performance of sexual freedom, the more frustrated some felt.  In an article in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968, writer Arno Karlen declared his disappointment with the superficial changes taking place:

“Four-letter words and mini skirts don’t mean people act very differently in bed.  Anyone who thinks the most basic sexual values have changed might try  . . . announcing publicly that he is currently enjoying adultery or homosexuality . . . We need a real (sexual revolution) badly – a real one that will allow people to live healthy, expressive sexual lives without legal penalties and social obstacle courses.  As in another emotion-laden issue, the black man’s fight for progress, the smug cant of progress lets people evade the need for deep, difficult change.”

For Karlen, the sexual revolution was about much more than nude shows on Broadway.  It was about translating the principles of secular humanism into significant social reform.  If one really wanted to transform society, one would have to abolish all obstacles to personal self-expression.

The celebration of nakedness in the late sixties could be seen as a direct assault on the ‘power structure’. By allowing society to gaze upon the naked human form, artists hoped to topple the entire social order.  If every man from the the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to the local police sergeant, if every woman from the first lady to one’s own sister, could be revealed as Shakespeare’s “poor, bare, forked animal,” then all of society’s illusions would be open to inspection.

The sexual revolution, as Karlen (and many others) saw it, was a revolution against shame. Shame kept people from being honest with one another.  Shame kept people from enjoying themselves.  Shame kept people from resisting laws they opposed in private.  Shame kept people from being fully alive.

But abolishing shame was no easy matter.  It was not nearly as simple as eliminating censorship or promoting contraception.  Western culture was shot through with shame about sex.  As a result, children were taught to be ashamed of their bodies and their desires from the first moments of cognition.  They carried this shame into adulthood and learned never to admit their fantasies and fears.  But to root out shame would require an attach on one of the most basic tenets of bourgeois morality: the prohibition of “self-abuse”.  So long as individuals were afraid to admit to the practice of masturbation, the rest of sexual revolution  amounted to a sham.  As the patrons filed out of the Eden Theater after the opening-night performance of Oh! Calcutta! in June 1969 which one of them was willing to confess to a desire to go home and masturbate to the memory of what was shown on stage?

From Make Love, Not War: the sexual revolution, an unfettered history David Allyn, Little, Brown and Company New York, 2000.

We will return to the subject in hand, that of masturbation in due course.  Until then keep calm.