Screw and Kiss exploited the politics of eroticism. Sexuality and open nudity became prevalent on the avant- garde stage. Sex was often fused with drug use, and many claimed to enjoy their sexual experiences more when high on marijuana, mescaline, or LSD. Group sex and orgies became commonplace in some circles. Singer Essra Mohawk recalls, "It was real easy to find an orgy in the sixties, if you were a girl. I always remember being recruited for them. People would say, 'Hey, let's get in a pile.' My first awakening was to that kind of thing -- open, multisexual situations. To me that was perfectly normal." 86 To some degree, of course, the appearance of pervasive sexuality and experimentation was the product of the mass media's gravitation toward anything provocative. "The rebels of the 60's are adrift in a sea of permissiveness," observed a Time cover story as early as 1964.

Like other countercultural phenomena, sexual experimentation rebelled against the utilitarian ethic of postponed gratification and the whole array of social taboos that restricted personal expression. "Why wait?" queried the young, who were beginning to sense that postponed gratification meant hypocrisy, deceit, and atrophy of the self. In emphasizing the natural and open enjoyment of sexuality, the counterculture struck a blow against society's repressive desublimation, the combination of sexual titillation and social control built on messages of personal inadequacy that pervade mass marketing in the capitalist culture. 87 In the mainstream culture, sexual energy is intensified, yet sexuality is distorted and channeled into the quest for material acquisition; accordingly, the erotic landscape is diminished while pornography spreads. Although the practice did not always live up to the ideal, the counterculture opened the way to a more erotic connection with self and others, a quest continued by feminism.

Despite its emphasis on sexual enjoyment, the counterculture deviated from the sexual commoditization represented by the Playboy mentality. Like the norm of postponed sexuality, the latter played into the stimulus-and- denial, consumer dynamic of the mainstream culture. As Jeff Shero of the underground Austin Rag commented, "The real Playboy philosophy . . . appears throughout the magazine in the cartoons, photos, and advertising. This advertising-promoted view of sex is so blatant and sterile that one would think it would be taken as a joke." 88 At its core, the counterculture rejected the repression, titillation, and distortion of sexuality endemic in the American mainstream. Yet, not surprisingly, the counterculture itself was not free of sexually-based commercialism; Screw and Kiss were only the most blatant examples. The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Contributors: Edward P. Morgan - author. Publisher: Temple University Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1991. Page Number: 202. David Dellinger: WWII-Era Draft Registration Resister

When the first so-called Peace-time draft was passed in 1940, I was attending divinity school and exempt from military service if I registered. But to me and seven of my colleagues, the exemption was a bribe intended to make sure that people who objected to killing their fellow humans would not speak out against war. We refused to register. Our advocacy of nonviolent methods for resolving human conflict resulted in prison sentences and subsequent arrests and jail terms. While incarcerated, I learned that even prisoners who had committed vicious crimes harbored a spark of divinity in them that was capable of asserting itself in response to the loving treatment that is at the core of nonviolent resistance. http://www.objector.org/donate.html#anchor317021

Things were not always this way. We need to talk to the aging members of America's Greatest Generation to get a picture of how things can be today. During WWII, hundreds of thousands of men and women left college to serve in the military. My father was in Lawrenceville prep school in Princeton, NJ when America entered the war. When he reached 18, he enlisted (before graduating high school). His professor encouraged him in this choice. But he was not alone. Even before America entered the war, many of his elite prep school classmates signed up with the Canadian and British air forces to fight against the tyranny of the Nazi's - several of them died in the Battle of Britain. These were college bound, rich kids who could have easily secured safe billets for themselves. But, they saw the evil of the Nazi's for what it was and wanted to do their share in fighting for a better world. Posted by: Tom Dalzell | March 3, 2005 08:18 AM http://www.blackfive.net/main/2005/03/the_draft_quest.html THE U.S. AFTER WORLD WAR II: DOMESTIC ISSUES Copyright © Henry J. Sage 1996-2005

The Postwar World: The Baby Boom. It is no secret to anyone familiar with the lives of men in war that aside from the desire to stay alive-which waxes and wanes depending on the proximity of the enemy or the likelihood of being shot at in one form or another-the thing that preoccupies men most is their deprivation from the company of the opposite sex. In fact, it may even be true that repeated exposure to danger over prolonged periods of time may intensify one's natural biological urges. Whatever the case, returning GIs were not hesitant to express their intention to make up for lost time. As one "deprived" British soldier put it when asked what was the first thing he intended to do upon returning home, he answered, "The first thing I'm going to do is make love to me wife; the second thing is take off these &^%$# boots!"

Thus, the baby boom. It wasn't all sex. Both men and women longed to get back to a "normal" existence, which for many meant starting a home and family, or resuming the life they had been forced to abandon when the war began and millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were shipped overseas, not to return for two or three years or more. There was no stateside R&R during World War II, no Christmas leave, no relief from the tedium and occasional terror of the military life. Except in case of grave personal emergency or a serious wound, the average GI or Marine knew he was not going home until it was over-and so did his wife, his fiancee, his girlfriend. The difficulty was that when those men returned, they had changed, often drastically, and so had the women they had left behind. The men had gone off as boys of 18 and returned as old men of 21. The girls had gone to work in factories, businesses, USOs and Red Cross or other patriotic agencies and were now independent-minded women, not necessarily ready to resume the status quo. The end of the war was indeed a time for celebration, and the returning GIs were treated as heroes. But getting back to a "normal" life was more difficult, and casualties occurred here as well. Men and women who had married during whirlwind courtships of weeks or even days before the men shipped out discovered that their spouses were strangers, and even what little they had learned about the other before the war was often changed. The result was that marriage, birth and divorce rates all rose dramatically in the postwar years.

 See the film: "The Best years of Our Lives" for a dramatic account of the problems of postwar readjustment.  "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" also deals with the way in which wartime experiences continued to intrude on people's lives long after it was officially over.

The Postwar Economy. Another thing that was obviously true after the war was that the Depression was over. Massive government spending during the war-twice as much as in all of America's prior history combined-had ended unemployment and created tens of thousands of new jobs for men and women. Dust bowl farmers who had arrived in California destitute in the 1930s had found jobs in aircraft and ship building plants and were well off by 1943. Soldiers with families sent their paychecks home-there was little to spend them on in many places where they were stationed-and those paychecks went into savings accounts because their wives were working and little to spend the extra income on: no appliances, no new cars, very few luxury items, for industry had devoted its full attention to the war effort. Fears that the returning GIs would cause economic hardships did not materialize, for the need to shift the economy back to peacetime production demanded a lot of labor, and although local conflicts occurred over hiring priorities and preferences for veterans, there was plenty of work to go around. Americans spent, but not wildly, for memories of the Depression returned as those of the war faded, and though the economy boomed, it did not get out of control. Fear of another Depression gradually waned, but the postwar agonies historically faced by many nations-rampant inflation, rioting, labor disorders-while not completely absent in the U.S. from 1945-1955-did not rise above manageable proportions. For one thing, the demands of the cold war and other factors kept government spending at high levels, and the demand for consumer goods and new homes kept the economy moving upward. Americans had never had it so good, and they knew it and were proud and happy about it-feeling they had earned it. The Housing Boom. The critical need as the returning men married and they and their wives started families was housing. University campuses provide an interesting glimpse of how different effects of the war came together. The G.I. Bill of Rights, which included provisions for college tuition assistance, as well as job training and help with home loans, helped create a new phenomenon. Veterans who might never have thought about going to college decided that it was worth a try, since Uncle Sam was footing part of the bill. Whereas in prewar times men going off to college had generally postponed marriage until after graduation, these postwar college men had already done enough postponing and were therefore often already married. They might delay having children so that their wives could work, but they were still families, and around the fringes of college campuses makeshift structures such as tin Quonset huts, old military barracks or other temporary building were converted into cheap apartments. The married college student-until 1945 an oddity for the most part-was now a fixture on the campus. Elsewhere the demand for housing was equally strong, and thousands of young families were willing to move into new suburban communities such as Levittown, Long Island, where prefabricated houses were constructed from one set of plans in row after row, even to the placing of a single tree in the same place in every yard. Some social critics found such communities appalling in their sameness, but the occupants, who perhaps remembered growing up in the 1930s, found that paint, do-it-yourself landscaping and other improvemetns-where permitted by community rules-could create some sense of identity. All the same, cartoonists and song writers had fun with this "ticky-tacky" life style. The Age of the Automobile. One extra that did not come with suburban houses but which was often indispensable to this new suburban way of life was the automobile. In the immediate postwar years, once Ford, GM, Chrysler, Kaiser, Studebaker and the other manufacturers had retooled their plants from making trucks, tanks and jeeps, they dusted off prewar designs and began producing cars that looked very much like 1939 and 1940 models. But within two or three years newer, sleeker, more streamlined and modern designs appeared, and the automobile age took off. Cars and gasoline were cheap-and in fact the gas war became a roadside feature in the 1950s, as did the drive-in restaurant with curbside service, the drive-in movie theater and a new form of temporary lodging- the motel. At first few new cars had air-conditioning, fancy radios or automatic transmissions-which through the 1950s were often expensive extras-but they were bright, shiny and colorful, and when the Interstate highway system was begun under President Eisenhower in the 1950s, they would take you almost anywhere in unprecedented comfort and speed. Life in the 1950s in America had about it rather glaring inconsistencies. On the surface, much seemed well. People were making more money than ever before, men and women were going to college in far greater numbers than ever before, television was a new form of entertainment which by the mid-1950s was a feature of a majority of households, sports were more popular than ever, popular music was going off in new directions and industries like aircraft changed people's transportation habits almost as much as the train or automobile. As nostalgic films have shown, the 1950s, while bland and often uninteresting, were seen as good-comfortable, at least , maybe even boring, but overall, still good. But there were dark sides. In the South, and in parts of the North as well, racial tensions that had been smoldering since Reconstruction began to emerge with the birth of the modern civil rights movement. And while the world was relatively at peace, various crises in Europe, Asia and the Middle East kept tensions high. And above all-there was the bomb. Until 1949 the U.S. was the only nation that had produced (and used) atomic weapons. When the Soviet union, aided many believe by secrets stolen from the U.S. exploded its first atomic device, the atomic (later nuclear) arms race was on. The two superpowers established what became known as the balance of terror as more and more powerful weapons were produced and tested. School children were drilled on what to do in case of a nuclear attack, subterranean bomb shelters were built (sometimes in people's back yards), and for a long time the assumption was that sooner or later World War III-more horrible than World Wars I and II put together-was bound to start. One did not have to be a pessimist to think the unthinkable-that it was not "if" but "when." Note: See sections on Civil Rights and the Cold War. The Sixties. While the fifties were a "laid back" time, the 1960s were in many ways the opposite. Whereas in the 1950s a popular television program proclaimed that "Father Knows Best," by the end of the 1960s young people had convinced themselves that father did not know much of anything. Beginning with the "free speech" movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, a series of rebellions spread from campus to campus and dealt with an ever- widening variety of issues, from women's rights, to the Vietnam War, to the nature of the university itself. Although in retrospect people think of those rebellions in terms of the "anti-war" movement, the student protests were much wider in their scope. In fact, Vietnam protests comprised only a minority of campus disturbances, many of which were directed at societal problems in general. (See the "Port Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society.) While often high-minded, the student demonstrations were ferquently violent, and they triggered responses from university officials that ranged from acquiescence to forcible resistance to what many students perceived as outright oppression. When college police forces proved inadequate to handle the growing level of disruption, local police forces and even national guard troops were called in, with predictable results. Taunted by what they viewed as foul-mouthed, "spoiled brats" of the upper classes who shouted epithets such as "pigs," at them, the police often reacted with violence of their own, and the riots often turned bloody, even deadly. The more strongly the police reacted, the more rebellious the students became, and the larger their numbers grew. Across the nation, at hundreds of campuses, buildings were damaged or even destroyed, offices were ransacked, and professors who were unsympathetic to the students demands were driven from classrooms. In many cases the university was obliged simply to shut down. While cynics may have noted that the level of student protest seemed to rise the closer it got to exam time, the students were often addressing serious issues in thoughtful manner. On the other hand, many leaders of the student movement-men and women whose names became well known beyond their own campuses-had fairly obvious political agendas and sometimes seemed to be exploiting the rebellious conditions for their own purposes. In the best sense, the students and their sympathizers were trying to bring about positive change in American society. They saw themselves as friends of the working classes, a voice for the oppressed, and many of them made positive contributions to the civil rights movement. In the South, Black students led the sit- ins and freedom marches and were on the front line when things got rough, as they usually did. For most white students the Vietnam War, while not the only issue, was the biggest issue, and their feelings were probably complicated by the fact that as college students they were deferred from the draft. Draft eligible young man had to remain in good standing, however, and professors often went out of their way to see to it that they did. The Vietnam protests also called attention to what many saw as an unholy alliance between universities and government-more particularly the military establishment. Weapons research, for example, was attacked by students who felt that such work was morally objectionable in a university setting. The outcomes are hard to assess. The Vietnam War did come to an end, and substantial progress was made in civil rights and other areas. Perhaps those changes would have come about anyway, maybe more slowly, but maybe without arousing as much resentment. One outcome is certain: the university was changed forever. It no longer stood "in loco parentis," but was obliged to recognize that its students were adults, that they had rights, and that it was not proper for college officials to rule their charges with too heavy a hand, no matter how well intentioned such guidance might have been. The Space Race. During the mid 1950s most Americans were aware that the government was doing research on the exploration of space and that one day, probably in the far distant future, men would go to the moon and beyond. But when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, an artificial satellite, into Earth orbit in 1957, Americans were stunned. Russian scientists had been portrayed as less capable than their American counterparts, and Soviet successes were supposedly based on borrowing of western ideas. But when the Soviets leaped out on front in space exploration, even with a primitive vehicle, Americans

reacted with a combination of disbelief and panic. Articles with titles like "Why Johnny Can't read-And Why Ivan Can" began to appear, and the entire U.S. educational system was hauled into court and placed under scrutiny. Reflecting people's attitudes, Congress passed legislation that created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and passed additional laws meant to improve American science and math curricula. The Space race was seen as part of the cold war, and Americans felt they had to win. No one played this theme more strongly than President Kennedy. Early in his administration he dedicated that nation to putting a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade, defined as January 1, 1970. With the assistance of former German V-weapon rocket scientists and an aviation industry with much talent, the American caught up with and passed the Soviets and reached Kennedy's goal: Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in July, 1969.

 See Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" and the film of the same title;  Norman Mailer, "Of A Fire on the Moon";  Also dramatic and historically sound are the film "Apollo 13" and the HBO series, "From the Earth to the Moon."  The NASA site is one of the most popular and frequently visited on the World Wide Web. President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 was another shock to the nation. Young and vibrant, with a lovely wife ands two small children, the President was extremely popular among young Americans. When he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, the sixties as they are remembered may be said to have begun. Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was a powerful President who achieved a great deal of what Kennedy had intended, and much more. His "Great Society" even went a step or two beyond the New Deal in terms of fundamental reform, but lingering doubts over Kennedy's death remained alive. To this day, many believe a Kennedy's murder was part of a conspiracy, one in which the government itself may have been involved. Achievements of Lyndon Johnson included:

 The Civil Rights Act of 1964  Voting Rights Act of 1965  Medicare and Medicaid  The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964  The Job Corps  The Elementary and Secondary Education Act  The Head Start program

Johnson also sponsored legislation that revised immigration policies, toughened anti-crime systems, and sought to improve public housing and clean up urban slums and the environment at large. Although many of these programs failed to meet their objectives, it was the greatest reform movement since the early days of FDR's New Deal. Watergate. Like his predecessor, Richard Nixon was distracted by the Vietnam War. Well versed in foreign policy matters, Nixon made considerable progress in that area. He also streamlined many Great Society programs and attempted to shift the burden of and responsibility for much government action from the federal government to the states. As the Vietnam War seemed to be winding down in 1972, and Nixon's “Vietnamization” program was brining American fighting men home, Nixon was a strong bet for reelection, which he qon by a huge landslide. In June, 1972, a group of overzealous underlings broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington in order to bug the phones and were caught and arrested. The actual events of the burglary would had little if any impact on the election results, and if the incident had been handled swiftly and properly, the story would have gone away. Nixon's staff, however, panicked and began what eventually became a massive cover-up of the “Watergate” events and their aftermath, and the President himself became deeply involved, even though he had nothing to do with the break-in beforehand. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had covered the original break-in and had written follow-up articles from time to time, stayed with the story, even after it stopped being interesting following President Nixon's landslide reelection and inauguration on January 20, 1973. Soon thereafter the break-in offenders were found guilty and sentenced to jail terms, but it was obvious to many that the story didn't end there. as additional White House staff members were found to have been involved in the process, the story began to grow rapidly. By June, 1973, the Senate had convened a special committee under the leadership of Senator Sam Ervin to investigate the Watergate charges and the White House involvement in all that had happened. The hearings were broadcast live on television and widely watched. Top Nixon officials were forced to resign, and following the lengthy senate hearings and subsequent debates in the House, it became clear that President Nixon would be impeached and perhaps convicted of various "high crimes and misdemeanors." In order to avoid the embarrassment and distraction of a House impeachment and Senate trial, President Nixon resigned in August, 1974. Thus Vice President Gerald Ford became president of the United States. Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were widely praised for their dogged persistence in following the story, the Post won a Pulitzer Prize, and many young Americans came to see investigative journalism as a career that they hoped to pursue. On May 31, 2005, the identity of Woodward and Bernstein's confidential informant known as “Deep Throat” was revealed. He turned out to be W. Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI at the time. Thus some 30 odd years after the original story broke, Watergate was once again front-page news. http://www.sagehistory.net/history122/topics/PostWorldWarIIDom.htm

The Sixties Experience

We shall overcome, we shall overcome We shall overcome some day. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome some day. -- "We Shall Overcome" by Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger. ©

On February 3, 1960, one month after the junior senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, announced his candidacy for President, the New York Times reported in a brief, back-page article from Greensboro, North Carolina, "A group of well-dressed Negro college students staged a sitdown strike in a downtown Woolworth store today and vowed to continue it in relays until Negroes were served at the lunch counter." Ten years later, the Times devoted four front-page columns to a lead article headed, "4 Kent State Students Killed by Troops." Most startling of all was the photograph that appeared nationwide of a young woman screaming for help while kneeling over the body of a slain student. These two events framed the decade of the 1960s. The Greensboro sit-in evolved out of the civil rights activities of the 1950s and was the spark that ignited a wave of student sit-ins across seventy cities of the South. The Kent State killings occurred during one of several hundred campus protests against the American invasion of Cambodia. After the shock of Kent State, and the subsequent deaths of two black students at Jackson State in Mississippi, over 450 college and university campuses shut down -- fifty-one of them for the remainder of the academic year -- in what proved to be the largest strike action in United States history. An estimated four million students were involved in the protests of May 1970. Each event represented The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Contributors: Edward P. Morgan - author. Publisher: Temple University Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1991. Page Number: 3. 6 New Beginnings Feminism, Ecology, and a Revived Left Critique

We refuse to remain on the margins of society, and we refuse to enter that society on its terms. . . . The human values that women were assigned to preserve [must] expand out of the confines of private life and become the organizing principles of society. . . . The Market, with its financial abstractions, deformed science, and obsession with dead things -- must be pushed back to the margins. And the "womanly" values of community and caring must rise to the center as the only human principles.

-- Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good

Consumed by the war overseas, rebuffed by a resistant mainstream culture, battered by repression at home, and spinning out of control, the Movement lost its sense of euphoria, its belief that it could save the world while simultaneously saving its soul. Despite the countercultural quest for community, the late Sixties and early Seventies were a time of chaos and division rather than purpose and unity. Yet new Movement energy was being born in the midst of this chaos. As the black power movement and New Left spiraled into their apocalyptic phases, women claimed center stage in the evolution of the Sixties' vision, embracing and extending the fusion of prefigurative and instrumental politics. Women in the civil rights movement and New Left challenged their male counterparts' failure to live up to their political values. The counterculture was fertile ground for women to liberate themselves from mainstream cultural constraints. Yet, as Michele Ryan recalled, it was a double- edged liberation:

It came in with the hippie thing, that we're all free, men and women, there should be no inhibitions. You could make love as and when you

felt like it. As a woman one really believed that at the time. And for a while it was liberating to feel you no longer had to obey any conventions or inhibitions, that you could sleep with anyone because you were on the pill. If you fell in love or felt desire, you could actually say it. But the other side of the coin was that, having said it, it was used totally to the man's satisfaction. Nothing seemed to have changed very much. 1

With its emphasis on sexual expression and domestic communality, the counterculture provided small, symbolic openings for both genders' liberation from confining sex stereotypes. Struggles between men and women on the editorial boards of underground papers or in communal kitchens set in motion dynamics that, for some, led to more fundamental attitude changes. At a theoretical level, much of the counterculture's opposition to mainstream values was an assertion of the same "domestic" values -- nurturance and love, feeling, kinship and family, the natural -- with which feminists later countered male dominance and female subordination in a patriarchal society. Indeed, the counterculture's instinctive hostility toward technocracy and scientific objectivity was consistent with the feminist critique that evolved during the 1970s.

Publication Information: Book Title: The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Contributors: Edward P. Morgan - author. Publisher: Temple University Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1991. Page Number: 218.

Where had the stagnationists gone wrong? The answer is that the engines of economic progress that Hansen had identified in 1938 had not expired but merely stalled. Population growth rebounded dramatically, as the vaunted baby boom in the years 1946-64 gave America the largest absolute population increase in its history. 3 The frontier experience was replicated in the explosive growth of the crabgrass frontier of suburbia and in the emergence of the Sunbelt. Innovation continued to exert a

In 1957 America's favorite TV couple, the safely married Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, slept in twin beds. Having beds at all was probably progressive--as late as 1962 June and Ward Cleaver did not even have a bedroom. Elvis's pelvis was censored in each of his three appearances on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in 1956, leaving his oddly disembodied upper torso and head thrashing about on the TV screen. But the sensuality in his eyes, his lips, his lyrics was unmistakable, and his genitals were all the more important in their absence. 1 There was, likewise, no mistaking Mick Jagger's meaning when he grimaced ostentatiously and sang "Let's spend some time together" on "Ed Sullivan" in 1967. Much of the audience knew that the line was really "Let's spend the night together," and the rest quickly got the idea. The viewing public could see absence and hear silence--and therein lay the seeds of the sexual revolution.

What we call the sexual revolution grew from these tensions between public and private--not only from tensions manifest in public culture, but also from tensions between private behaviors and the public rules and Page Number: 235. ideologies that were meant to govern behavior. By the 1950s the gulf between private acts and public norms was often quite wide--and the distance was crucial. People had sex outside of marriage, but very, very few acknowledged that publicly. A woman who married the only man with whom she had had premarital sex still worried years later: "I was afraid someone might have learned that we had intercourse before marriage and I'd be disgraced." 2 The consequences, however, were not just psychological. Young women (and sometimes men) discovered to be having premarital sex were routinely expelled from school or college; gay men risked jail for engaging in consensual sex. There were real penalties for sexual misconduct, and while many deviated from the sexual orthodoxy of the day, all but a few did so furtively, careful not to get "caught." 3

Few episodes demonstrate the tensions between the public and private dimensions of sexuality in midcentury America better than the furor that surrounded the publication of the studies of sexual behavior collectively referred to as the "Kinsey Reports." 4 Though a dry, social scientific report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ( 1948) had sold over a quarter of a million copies by 1953, when the companion volume on the human female came out. The male volume was controversial, but the female volume was, in Look magazine's characterization, "stronger stuff." 5 Kinsey made it clear that he understood the social implications of his study, introducing a section on "the pre-marital coital behavior of the female sample which has been available for this study" with the following qualification: "Because of this public condemnation of pre-marital coitus, one might believe that such contacts would be rare among American females and males. But this is only the overt culture, the things that people openly profess to believe and do. Our previous report ( 1948) on the male has indicated how far publicly expressed attitudes may depart from the realities of behavior--the covert culture, what males actually do." 6

Kinsey, a biologist who had begun his career with much less controversial studies of the gall wasp, drew fire from many quarters, but throughout the criticism is evident concern about his uncomfortable juxtaposition of public and private. "What price biological science . . . to reveal intimacies of one's private sex life and to draw conclusions from inscriptions on the walls of public toilets?" asked one American in a letter to the editor of Look magazine. 7

Much of the reaction to Kinsey did hinge on the distance between the "overt" and the "covert." People were shocked to learn how many men and women were doing what they were not supposed to be doing. Kinsey found that 50 percent of the women in his sample had had premarital sex

-236- Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: The Sixties: From Memory to History. Contributors: David Farber - editor. Publisher: University of N Carolina Press. Place of Publication: Chapel Hill. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 236.

(even though between 80 percent and 89 percent of his sample disapproved of premarital sex on "moral grounds"), that 61 percent of collegeeducated men and 84 percent of men who had completed only high school had had premarital sex, that over one-third of the married women in the sample had "engaged in petting" with more than ten different men, that approximately half of the married couples had engaged in "oral stimulation" of both male and female genitalia, and that at least 37 percent of American men had had "some homosexual experience" during their lifetimes. 8

By pulling the sheets back, so to speak, Kinsey had publicized the private. Many people must have been reassured by the knowledge that they were not alone, that their sexual behaviors were not individual deviant acts but part of widespread social trends. 9 But others saw danger in what Kinsey had done. By demonstrating the distance between the overt and the covert cultures, Kinsey had further undermined what was manifestly a beleaguered set of rules. Time magazine warned its readers against the attitude that "there is morality in numbers," the Chicago Tribune called Kinsey a "menace to society," and the Ladies' Home Journal ran an article with the disclaimer: "The facts of behavior as reported . . . are not to be interpreted as moral or social justification for individual acts." 10

Looking back to the century's midpoint, it is clear that the coherence of (to use Kinsey's terms) covert and overt sexual cultures was strained beyond repair. The sexual revolution of the 1960s emerged from these tensions, and to that extent it was not revolutionary, but evolutionary. As much as anything else, we see the overt coming to terms with the covert. But the revision of revolution to evolution would miss a crucial point. It is not historians who have labeled these changes "the sexual revolution"--it was people at the time, those who participated and those who watched. And they called it that before much of what we would see as revolutionary really emerged--before gay liberation and the women's movement and Alex Comfort The Joy of Sex ( 1972) and "promiscuity" and singles' bars. The term was in general use by 1963--earlier than one might expect. 11

To make any sense of To make any sense of the sexual revolution, we have to pay attention to the label people gave it. Revolutions, for good or ill, are moments of danger. It matters that a metaphor of revolution gave structure to the myriad of changes taking place in American society. The changes in sexual mores and behaviors could as easily have been cast as evolutionary--but they were not.

Looking back, the question of whether or not the sexual revolution was revolutionary is not easy to answer; it partly depends on one's political

(defined broadly) position. Part of the trouble, though, is that the sexual revolution was not one movement. It was instead a set of movements, movements that were closely linked, even intertwined, but which often made uneasy bedfellows. Here I hope to do some untangling, laying out three of the most important strands of the sexual revolution and showing their historical origins, continuities, and disruptions.

The first strand, which transcended youth, might be cast as both evolutionary and revolutionary. Throughout the twentieth century, picking up speed in the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1960s, we have seen a sexualization of America's culture. Sexual images have become more and more a part of public life, and sex--or more accurately, the representation of sex--is used to great effect in a marketplace that offers Americans fulfillment through consumption. Although the blatancy of today's sexual images would be shocking to someone transported from an earlier era, such representations developed gradually and generally did not challenge more "traditional" understandings of sex and of men's and women's respective roles in sex or in society.

The second strand was the most modest in aspect but perhaps the most revolutionary in implication. In the 1960s and early 1970s an increasing number of young people began to live together "without benefit of matrimony," as the phrase went at the time. While sex was usually a part of the relationship (and probably a more important part than most people acknowledged), few called on concepts of "free love" or "pleasure" but instead used words like "honesty," "commitment," and "family." Many of the young people who lived together could have passed for young marrieds and in that sense were pursuing fairly traditional arrangements. At the same time, self-consciously or not, they challenged the tattered remnants of a Victorian epistemological and ideological system that still, in the early 1960s, fundamentally structured the public sexual mores of the American middle class.

The third strand was more self-consciously revolutionary, as sex was actively claimed by young people and used not only for pleasure but also for power in a new form of cultural politics that shook the nation. As those who threw themselves into the "youth revolution" (a label that did not stick) knew so well, the struggle for America's future would take place not in the structure of electoral politics, but on the battlefield of cultural meaning. Sex was an incendiary tool of a revolution that was more than political. But not even the cultural revolutionaries agreed on goals, or on the role and meaning of sex in the revolution.

These last two strands had

Number: 237.

The Sixties: From Memory to History. Contributors: David Farber - editor. Publisher: University of N Carolina Press. Place of Publication: Chapel Hill. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 12.

The point here is that some scientists were once among America's heroes; they were recognized as heroes by the government and by the public.

Science in the United States in its several forms was perhaps at its peak beginning in the late 1940s. In the aftermath of the Second World War new areas of expertise were in demand and various sciences were used to meet those demands. The social sciences, for example, had reached new levels of acceptance in American society by the early 1950s. As the United States became increasingly consumer-oriented, people became increasingly aware of the social and psychological causes of human behavior and of the social and psychological causes of people's spending habits. For this reason business in the post-war era was quick to adopt several of the views and especially the methodologies of the social sciences, for example, survey research and experimentation. Attention was also given to studies concerning a variety of social issues, such as racial prejudice, poverty, and stability within the American family.

The social sciences, however, could not produce heroes of the stature of Einstein or Edison. The closest the social sciences came to producing a hero was Alfred Kinsey, who conducted research in human sexuality. In pre-World War II America, sex and sexuality weren't even discussed in polite company much less clinically analyzed. Because of his work and the recognition it received, Kinsey was regarded as a hero, despite his resistance to such recognition. His enemies--and because of the nature of his work he had many-- were forced to view him as "a heroic figure." His scientific integrity and his demand that his efforts be regarded as true scientific inquiry evoked admiration, even if it was given reluctantly. 2

The rise of the status of both social and natural science in the postwar era reflected America's awareness of the social changes that had ensued since World War II. To some degree it also reflected a realization of the failure of other areas of American expertise and the weakening search for new American heroes. But that was all right. Everything from the Cold War to the baby boom now seemed amenable to scientific analysis--and for many people to scientific analysis alone. Even if businesspeople, politicians, and all of our other heroes had vanished or were in the process of failing as heroes, science and scientists would save us and protect us and provide us with heroes. 3

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Publication Information: Book Title: Everybody Is Sitting on the Curb: How and Why America's Heroes Disappeared. Contributors: Alan Edelstein - author. Publisher: Praeger Publishers. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 132. In January 1961, for example, Time magazine had not a man of the year but fifteen American scientists as its collective men of the year, pointing out that everyone--priests, statesmen, builders, etc.--is at the service of science. "Science," Time said, "is at the apogee of its power."

But it should be noted that Time magazine honored scientists, not a scientist. The cover told of the men of the year, not of an Einstein or an Edison or even of a Kinsey, but of fifteen scientifically gifted people, a collective. And that is not unreasonable, for the fact is that since the Second World War science and technology have become too complex. No single scientist can master all that must be mastered. Consequently, today the scientific team, the collective, has replaced the individual scientist as hero. Robert Kargon has remarked that scientists today work on systems that are so complex that they "are made up of little steps." In consequence, one "cannot say that one person invented" the entirety, which is why in science today it is impossible to assign "credit [for an innovation] to a single individual." In science we can no longer have specific 4 heroes; we can only have heroes en masse. Alan Edelstein - author. Publisher: Praeger Publishers. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 133.

In contrast to the marital advice literature of the nineteenth century, post- Victorian sexual discourse was strikingly innovative in its affirmation of conjugal erotic desire. Arguing that love between husbands and wives was increased through physical contact, marriage and advice books proclaimed that "sex and all that it implies is a perfectly natural, normal fact of life with nothing intrinsically unholy or perverse about it."(12) If the literature of the nineteenth century had permitted sexual expression, the literature of the early twentieth positively promoted it. Marital advisors after 1900 argued not only that women had the potential and right to experience pleasurable sex but that husbands were responsible for providing it. "There is no hope for widespread married happiness till men learn that love is the art of understanding and pleasing women," Walter Gallichan wrote in 1922; "The art of marriage is the art of perennial love-making."(13) Furthermore, advisors began to claim for the first time that precoital erotic activity was an essential part of normal sexuality.(14) In his study of Victorian popular medical texts, Steven Seidman found no mention of sexual foreplay. By the mid 'teens, however, many authors described foreplay as critically important to sexual satisfaction.(15)

66. Although my focus in this paper is on the ideological functions of the discourse about sexual foreplay, it is unclear to what extent discussions of foreplay helped create class distinctions or reflected them. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey found that pre-coital love play was more common between partners among the upper classes of those individuals who had become sexually active between 1900 and 1925. See Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948): 369-70 and Regina Markell Morantz, "The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and American Culture," American Quarterly 29:5 (Winter, 1977).

By simultaneously enabling and constraining men and women as sexual actors, marital advisors writing for a bourgeois audience created a new arena for contests over sexual pleasure and responsibility.(18) At the same time, foreplay and the larger narrative of which it was a part constituted a set of rules which allowed middle-class married couples to negotiate a novel terrain of expressive sexuality - rules which did not work exclusively or entirely to the advantage or disadvantage of either sex. The modal narrative of sex in the early twentieth century is striking as much for its explicit format as for its content. Sex was depicted not as a single event but as a series of acts whose satisfying consummation required careful activity at every step. Some advisors even used a scripting metaphor to describe the pleasures and dangers of love- making. Walter Gallichan, for example, began his argument for foreplay by analogizing sex to the theater, noting that "Man, the prime partner in passion, the valient [sic] wooer, the sole initiator, is accountable, in the great majority of cases, for the disastrous second act in the drama of love."(19) Two key elements of this new narrative were the notions that pleasure, not procreation, was a worthy goal of marital sex and that a satisfying sex life was crucial to a happy marriage.(20) William Robinson made the "bold, unequivocal statement" that "every case of divorce has for its basis lack of sexual satisfaction;" William Fielding argued that marriage "is fundamentally a sexual union, and its success or failure, all things considered, is largely determined by conditions arising from the actual problems of sex."(21) In recasting pleasurable sex as central to marital happiness, advisors stressed that it was a process to be enjoyed at leisure, not an act to be accomplished in haste. In contrast to the nineteenth-century preoccupation with timeliness and punctuality, twentieth-century writers counseled relaxation and patience.(22) As one author declared: Regarding the first part of the act, let it be said that here, above all other situations in the world "haste makes waste." Put that down as the most fundamental fact in this whole affair! Right here is where ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the troubles of married life begin!(23) The new modal narrative of marital sexuality not only justified sex as a pleasurable pursuit but recast men's and women's responsibility as sexual actors. In the nineteenth century advisors claimed it was a woman's "duty to her husband, her children, and herself to heartily enjoy with her husband sexual intercourse, and to keep herself in such condition that she may enjoy it."(24) In the twentieth, the authors of advice literature stressed the responsibility of the husband to make sex a delight. "No woman is so glacial that she will not respond to the tactful insistence of the right man," Dr. Walter Robie wrote. "The husband should not rest easy, nor should his wife allow him to, until they have discovered the methods and positions which give her greatest pleasure and completest orgasm."(25) In describing the correct methods by which a man could kindle his wife's sexual interest, advisors often suggested that the ideal sexual act was a recapitulation of courtship. Just as a suitor was attentive to the interests and desires of his intended when he wooed her, so should he remain aware of her needs after he had wed her. "Between husband and wife there must always be mutual concessions, forbearance, and sympathy;" Anna Galbraith counseled, "a mutual helpfulness to all that is best."(26) Although such language evokes the "union of hands and hearts" one historian has described as the nineteenth-century romantic ideal, it assumed a specifically sexual meaning in the early twentieth century. (27) Marie Stopes declared that "a man does not woo and win woman once and for all when he marries her: he must woo her before every separate act of coitus." Charles Malchow likewise insisted that "every act of copulation should be undertaken with an abbreviated courtship."(28) Walter Robie, advising his readers that women continued to require courting after marriage as before, advised men to "control (their) erotic feelings for a time, even if they seem overpowering.... Embracing and kissing and, gentle handling are preliminaries to further intimacy with all normal women."(29) As Robie's language suggests, a third element of the new modal narrative of marital sexuality, and especially of foreplay, was an emphasis on the polyerotic potential of the female body and the permissibility of 'unorthodox' sexual acts. In Sex and Life, Robie expressed his enthusiasm for "the art of love" when he encouraged husbands: Kiss without shame, for she desires it, your wife's lips, tongue, neck; and, as Shakespeare says: 'If these founts be dry, stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie'.... Kiss her nipples, arms and abdomen. Hold tenderly and manipulate softly her breasts, and delicately, when she yields nestlingly, caress her nipples.(30) Despite this emphasis on the multiple sites for female pleasure, the new sexual script had the same final act as the old one: climax. Although they suggested that sex should be more playful, the authors of marital advice literature maintained the orgasmic teleology of the nineteenth century. Even Robie, one of the most progressive of the early twentieth- century sexologists, defined foreplay primarily as a means to the end of orgasm. "Woman is ... slow," he wrote, requiring, as a rule, a long sequence of endearments and gentle caresses, and final specific manipulation of nipples and clitoris, and perhaps adjacent structures, to produce the overwhelming erotic feelings and the free flow of precoital mucus which are necessary to make coitus mutually pleasurable and simultaneously climactic, both of which are necessary if it is to be scientifically correct.(31) Assuming that a man needed no warm-up, marital advisors' discussion of pre-coital activity concerned itself almost exclusively with preparing a woman for intercourse. "A man can fully enjoy sexual intercourse without any preliminaries," Dr. William Robinson wrote; "With a woman the preliminaries are of the utmost importance, and when these are lacking she is often incapable of experiencing any pleasure."(32) Harold Long concurred: "[F]or the most part, it is true that women are much slower in making ready for the sexual act than men are."(33) The literature attributed the different sexual roles largely to the constitutional differences between the sexes. Man, whose part it was "to 'seduce,' to allure, to woo, to charm the woman's imagination with entrancing visions," was indisputably the more carnal, even "liable to sudden gusts of passion;" he naturally "(had) more powerful sex- desires than the female."(34) Woman, by contrast, with her "highly sensitive, delicately adjusted nervous system," often was not even aware of her sexual nature.(35) Yet every normal woman was capable of sensuality, and it was the husband's challenge and responsibility to awaken her dormant passions. In fact, advisors asserted that a man's sexual initiative was absolutely critical to a woman's self-realization of her erotic potential. "Women's innate coyness keeps her from giving way to her natural impulses which often need the active stimulation of a lover before they are brought into conscious evidence," Salomon Herbert wrote, while Havelock Ellis asserted that a woman's sexuality usually remained "latent until aroused by a lover's caresses." A girl, he continued, "must be kissed into a woman."(36) Given statements like these, it is no surprise that questions of power and agency have occupied the attention of most students of changing sexual mores in the early twentieth century. The conventional account of changes in prescriptive literature about sex in the early twentieth century is that women's assertion of their sexual nature was an act of feminist resistance to male oppression - a claim to autonomy - that ultimately was coopted by men, who subverted the feminist agenda by appropriating claims of female desire. Producing a new conception of normative female sensuality that attributed to men greater knowledge about sexual matters, this new advice only reaffirmed male gender dominance.(37) Implicit in this argument is the assumption that a "real" or "true" sexuality underlies all the discursive formulations that obscure or reveal it, an assumption shared by many historians who have tried to explain the changes in sexual norms in the early twentieth century.(38) Thus, according to this model, the emphasis on heterosexual desire within companionate marriage constituted a kind of false consciousness which frustrated women's attempts to shift the basis of power relations in society. As Foucault and others have shown, however, "sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries to uncover."(39) Rather, new historical circumstances evoke new articulations of sexuality, none of which is more inherent than those preceding. Christina Simmons has shown the inadequacy of the "hydraulic model of sexuality" (in which a natural sexuality is thought to be repressed or expressed) in an essay tracing the history of the "myth of Victorian repression" and analyzing how it served in the 1920s to legitimate innovative sexual norms. Observing that "the new sexual discourse of the 1920s and 1930s represented not 'liberation' but a new form of regulation," she writes: [The myth of Victorian repression] rehabilitated male sexuality and cast women as villains if they refused to respond to, nurture, or support it. And by identifying women with Victorianism and men with a progressive and realistic understanding of sex, it confirmed men's sexual dominance as normative in modern marriage.(40) Simmons is certainly correct in noting that post-Victorian sexual discourse produced mores as restrictive as those of the Victorian era. Less certain, however, is her claim that "the assumption in most writings that men had greater knowledge and sexual experience also showed an acceptance of continued male power."(41) Advisors' discussion of sexual foreplay indicate that many writers assumed men were painfully ignorant of how to please their wives, or even of their obligation to do so. Rather than being simply an instantiation of male hegemony, the new sexual script was a site of gender contestation. The emergent ideology of sex did constrain and regulate women's sexual behavior, not only by making a woman's pleasure contingent on her husband's evocation of her "latent" sexual nature but by labeling as deviant any woman who did not desire sexual intercourse with a man. Yet it constrained and regulated men's sexuality as well by assigning husbands responsibility for their wives' sexual satisfaction and blame for lack of it. Predicating a wife's fulfillment on her husband's ability to stimulate her erotic desires meant that the man, not the woman, was to blame if she did not like sex. Advisors made clear that the act of stimulation was fraught with tension for man and woman alike. For the woman, the sensual delight only a man could arouse was critical to healthy development. Of the pitiful woman who had not achieved sexual pleasure, Havelock Ellis wrote, She has not acquired an erotic personality, she has not mastered the art of life, with the result that her whole nature remains ill developed and unharmonized, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality - having indeed no achieved personality to bring - to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her.(42) For the man, stimulating his wife became a test of his virility. Although some physicians believed that frigidity was indicative of a woman's pathology - Dr. Wilhelm Stekel claimed that "unconscious homosexuality is a fact which explains many cases of anaesthesia sexualis feminarum" - most attributed a woman's lack of desire for sex to her partner. As one advisor wrote, "Women may never experience the gratification and relief of intercourse and become sexually frigid through the ignorance of the husband who, however kindly disposed, does not know how to proceed."(43)

The early-twentieth-century discourse of healthy sexual expression, then, demanded that both women and men respond in very specific ways. As Dr. Walter Robie put it, a woman's greatest addition to her husband's happiness was active response in the sexual act and his contribution was self-restraint. (44)

"Kiss without Shame, for She Desires It": Sexual Foreplay in American Marital Advice Literature, 1900-1925. Contributors: Peter Laipson - author. Journal Title: Journal of Social History. Volume: 29. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 507+. COPYRIGHT 1996 Journal of Social History; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Meanwhile, veterans went from the adrenaline high of war and the dream of the girl in the snapshot to the low-grade stress of living with a real woman and a screaming baby in cramped quarters. The middle class among us see our parents preserved in the amber of the prosperous Fifties; it's hard to imagine them starting out young and poor, living in tiny apartments or trailers or with their parents. But that's how it was for millions of couples while the husband went to school on the GI Bill or worked at a low-paying job. Many young couples took these stresses in a spirit of high hope and adventure, but some new and reunited marriages were shaky during those early years. Marital friction was part of the climate into which many "first-wavers" were born. Writer Stephen King was two in 1949, when his ex-Merchant Marine father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Readjustment was tough on men, and it was also hard for women, millions of whom had enjoyed independence and held down wartime jobs before the men came home. My mother had left college to marry my father at eighteen; while he was overseas, she lived alone for the first and only time in her life, working in a machine shop and a pants-pressing plant. Just twenty-two in 1946, she may have been unready by today's standards to be a mother, but that was the urgent ideology of the time. Betty Friedan documented in The Feminine Mystique how the ideal of "woman in the home" was developed in the major women's magazines after 1945, displacing the spirited heroines of the Thirties and early Forties. In so many ways, the late Sixties would be a reversed mirror image of the late Forties. Our fathers came home from a glorious war; we refused to go to an inglorious one. Our mothers poured into the home; we would pour out of it. Our parents sacrificed personal dreams for family; we would do just the opposite.

If the post-war period was stressful for whites, it was disillusioning

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Publication Information: Book Title: Do You Believe in Magic?The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation. Contributors: Annie Gottlieb - author. Publisher: Times Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1987. Page Number: 24.

The angry pride of early feminism finally gave women some of the sexual "protection" we had lacked. With a source of self-esteem outside the approval of men, we didn't have to throw chairs to say no. With our new self-respect, we had a reason to. Some women became celibate for a while. Others had a revelation that the soul brother they'd been so forlornly looking for was really a sister. Kinsey and other researchers have estimated that 2-5 percent of American women have an exclusive homosexual orientation. In the early Seventies, like their male counterparts, they went public, joined by thousands of other "woman-identified women" who had a choice --and chose to be gay.

With the birth of feminism, gay and straight, women took the sexual initiative away from men. The ideology that "sex is good and more sex is better" showed no signs of waning, but now such books as Lonnie Barbach For Yourself appeared, teaching women how to masturbate, celebrating the beauty and individuality of female genitals in drawings more explicit than any Penthouse photograph. Mary Jane Sherfey published her treatise on women's near-infinite capacity for orgasms. We were instructed to go for our own pleasure, to tell our lovers how we liked it in bed (sunny side up or over easy?). On the positive side, we had finally learned to distinguish sex from love, and to know and like our bodies.

On the negative side, we'd learned to separate sex from love almost as cheerfully as men. Women became tough and invulnerable, or tried to. Severing the emotions from the genitals got rid of pain; the

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: Do You Believe in Magic?The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation. Contributors: Annie Gottlieb - author. Publisher: Times Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1987. Page Number: 246.

I repeat, don’t misunderstand me, I would never say that the era was heaven, and certainly it was better for some than for others. But, it is a question of how tawdry and how terrifying an era is for what percentage of people. We were going in largely the right direction. Kinsey struck in the midst of the most traumatic time in our nation’s history outside of the revolutionary and civil wars.

"Grammar school was horrible. Really rigid, traditional, Catholic. Nuns. I was punished by my parents and the nuns and the neighbors. If you masturbate you're blind; you can't sit at a dinner table with a white tablecloth 'cause it reminds women of sheets and beds. I'm serious! Nobody ever heard that one. It blows away the patent-leather shoes. But y'know, you don't make that crap up! Everything from the waist down is bad; you're basically bad; you have to fight to be good. In eighth grade the entire class was thrown out of school 'cause somebody had a mixed party.

"All the kids were all screwed up. I was nuts; I broke all the rules. They used to send things home: 'We believe in corporal punishment. Can we beat your kid up?' My father would write, Yeah! Kick his ass! and sign the back of it. Y'know, it's fine. He's a rotten kid, he needs it. I stopped going to church, I lied about that. We drank heavily in seventh and eighth grade.

"Then high school starts. Three or four of my friends weren't going to high school. One of them was already in jail. I grew up in a very punk-oriented attitude. Flaunt authority; going to jail is cool; getting in fights is cool; getting drunk and drinking till unconsciousness is cool. Education is out, tattoos are in. Long, greasy hair is really cool; pointed shoes, white socks. My heroes were people a few years older than me who were drunker than me most of the time and had nice cars. That was success.

"We were totally paranoid of women, of relationships other than --nuts: no relationships. Nobody had relationships with women. They were over there, we were over here, we'd get drunk, grab each other, and run home. The adults in my life were the same way. They were drunk. They were fighting in the streets; we were fighting in the

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Publication Information: Book Title: Do You Believe in Magic?The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation. Contributors: Annie Gottlieb - author. Publisher: Times Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1987. Page Number: 376.

In regard to culture, theories that hate beauty and order have undermined meaning, value, and conscience. Whether it is popular culture or high culture, they have led to ever stranger sins and more startling obscenities. Each year requires more baroque perversions to provoke society's jaded capacity for outrage. The National Endowment for the Arts, official arbiter of the avant garde, illustrates the change. In 1989, the NEA denied a modest request from the New York Academy of Art to provide young painters with skills in drawing the human figure. Susan Lubowsky, director of the NEA's visual arts program, explained, "Teaching students to draw the human figure is revisionist . . . and stifles creativity."

Recently, the distinguished sculptor Frederick Hart, who created "Three Soldiers" at the Vietnam War Memorial, applied for a grant to do a series of sculptures. To his surprise, the endowment turned him down. "The NEA," he said, "told me I was not doing art." Yet the NEA paid $70,000 to fund a show featuring Shawn Eichman's "Alchemy Cabinet," displaying ajar with the fetal remains from the "artist's" own abortion. Around the same time, it authorized $20,000 for a project in Lewiston, New York that was "to create large, sexually explicit props covered with a generous layer of requisitioned Bibles."

On the front line of the drug war, the news is even more grim. Everyone has seen the effect of drugs on the young, who are seldom more than a handshake away from any drug they can afford. The permissive treatment of drugs has spawned a violent subculture of gangs, guns, and random terror. It has squandered lives, talent, and hope in every school and every community.

The escape from religion and the triumph of secularism have left many Americans isolated, confused, and alone. They are disconnected from traditional sources of meaning, value, and love like the family and the church. Sociologists call them "loose individuals" who are free from traditional restraints, obsessed with self-fulfillment, but uncertain of whether anything makes much difference. They are sentenced, in the words of one writer, to "the dark little dungeon of the ego." Novelist George MacDonald once put it another way: "The one principle of hell is, 'I am my own.'" The ultimate result is a genuine social crisis -- a crisis, if you will, of cultural authority. How can we make any moral judgments? How can we draw dividing lines between sane and insane, noble and base, beautiful and hideous? How can we know anything about living a good life? How can we cry for reform when "form" has no meaning? Peter Collier and another former sixties' radical activist, David Horowitz, conclude, "In the inchoate attack against authority, we have weakened our culture's immune system, making it vulnerable to opportunistic diseases. The origins of metaphorical epidemics of crime and drugs could be traced to the sixties, as could literal ones such as AIDS." Publication Information: Book Title: America in the Sixties--Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History. Contributors: Peter B. Levy - editor. Publisher: Praeger. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 269.

Finally, radio fixed on the routine of everyday family life. Indeed, between 1929, when The Goldbergs and Mr. and Mrs. were first broadcast, and 1957, when The Couple Next Door first aired, more than 50 separate portrayals of mature married life appeared on the radio. Families such as the Goldbergs (The Goldbergs), Nelsons (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), Andersons

(Father Knows Best), Aldriches (The Aldrich Family), Bumsteads (Blondie), Ricardos (I Love Lucy), Rileys (The Life of Riley) and the Brown, Jones, and Stevens families from Amos'n'Andy, all of whom migrated to television, came to dominate radio. This mass of families was Black as well as White, rural and urban as well as suburban, ethnic as well as non-ethnic, poor as well as rich, and childless as well as with children, although, across time, the White, middle- class, suburban family with dependent children emerged as the archetype.

In summary, radio's family lexicon was relatively complex. Conventions, dealing with both character and context, were often inherited from vaudeville and comics but adapted to the serial nature of radio. Most obviously, in contrast to most previous efforts that had offered “slice-of-life” glimpses, radio's family narrative involved extended visions of courtship, marriage, and parenthood. Likewise, the radio family was relatively diverse. Although, by the mid-1950s, most radio families were White and decidedly middle-class, competing versions of the family were available. DEVELOPMENT OF THE POPULAR FAMILY: THE BUMSTEADS

There are several reasons to suppose that Blondie is a potentially rich public record of the American family experience. First, the familial adventures of the Bumsteads were extremely popular. Not only did Blondie and Dagwood appear as comic-strip characters, syndicated in more than 1,800 newspapers (Young & Marschall, 1981), but the couple, together with their children, were the subject of 28 movies, a radio series, and two television series, as well as a host of comic books and children's readers. Second, the comic-strip version, in particular, is often seen to reflect the routine of real families. Harvey (1990), for example, has characterized the Bumsteads as “ordinary folks” (p. 38) while Young and Marschall (1981) have suggested, more broadly, that Blondie became “America's reflection of itself” (p. 29). Even more explicitly, Waugh (1947) argued that, “When the boys came home and married, there were millions more Blondies and Dagwoods to experiment with the fascinations and frustrations of life in a cottage built for two or more. These are days when the young husband is apt to roll up his sleeves and help with the dishes, which is exactly what Dagwood would do, or at least what Blondie would expect him to do. This pair reflects the lives of a large group of people at the present time”(p. 105). Others have made similar arguments (McLuhan, 1951; O'Sullivan, 1990; Perry & Aldridge, 1971; Robinson & White, 1963), reinforc-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Television Families: Is Something Wrong in Suburbia?. Contributors: William Douglas - author. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 2003. Page Number: 54.

The redefinition of females' familial role was paralleled by revision of males' family rights and responsibilities. In some instances, male expectations changed as a function of those applied to women. Men, for example, were increasingly expected to provide support and sexual satisfaction and to play some part in childrearing and housekeeping, although both latter activities continued to be associated primarily with women, even those employed outside of the home. In other instances, however, male expectations changed in response to a more general feature of the postwar marriage arrangement.

After World War II, the family experience was increasingly a suburban experience. What is more, not only did many new suburbanites subscribe to a family model that defined the father as provider but, because suburbia routinely separated home and workplace, they inadvertently supported a model that distanced fathers from wives and children. The consequences of such an arrangement have been seen by some as catastrophic. Popenoe (1996), for example, has asserted that, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, “fatherhood again became a defining identity for many men, a fact that was highlighted by such popular television characters as Ward Cleaver and Ozzie Nelson, whose lives beyond the confines of their father role always remained vague and amorphous” (p. 128). Such involvement, Popenoe argues, was incongruent with the role of provider, which narrowed a father's place in the day- to-day routine, placing him at the periphery of family life and eroding family attachments, especially those between father and children. Working from a quite different set of social assumptions, Faludi (1999) has articulated a similar position. In her analysis of the American male, Faludi argues, first, that the strong father-son relations available in television programs, such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, were reflections of real-life family relations familiar in every suburb. Even more pointedly, Faludi claims that postwar America was “the era of the boy. It was the culture of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, of Pop Warner rituals and Westinghouse science scholarships, of BB guns and rocket clubs, of football practice and lettered jackets, of magazine ads where “Dad” seemed always beaming down at his scampy, cowboy-suited younger son or proudly handing his older son the keys to a brand-new tail-finned convertible. It was father-son Eden” (p. 24). According to Faludi, this closeness between fathers and sons together with fathers' rootedness in the family was destroyed because fathers, distracted by the need to provide, “so often seemed spectral, there and yet not there, ‘heads’ of households strangely disconnected from the familial body” (p. 597).

The similarities between Popenoe's (1996) position and that of Faludi (1999) are apparent. First, both reflect on a brief period during which fatherscontributed significantly to life and relations in the postwar family. Second, both argue that fathers became physically and emotionally separated from the family, confined by the limited rights and limiting responsibilities of their role as provider. And, finally, both Popenoe (1996) and Faludi (1999) invoke television portrayals of the time to illustrate and verify their arguments, again suggesting that television families do not function simply as entertainment but, in a variety of ways, may provide insight into real family life.

It should be added that this is especially important because the family experience has become increasingly privatized. Even in Willingboro, where similarities of age, income, and general circumstance induced relatively elevated levels of interaction among the first residents, Gans (1967) reported that there was a limit to persons' openness, that Levittowners subscribed to the social rule that “what people do inside their houses is considered their own affair” (p. 177). Indeed, even formal study of the contemporary family is more often based on examination of family structure than family life (Skolnick, 1991).

Publication Information: Book Title: Television Families: Is Something Wrong in Suburbia?. Contributors: William Douglas - author. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 2003. Page Number: 95.

As scholars look back at these eras, however, they understand them as complex and interrelated. The obvious tensions and anxieties of postwar America -- the cold war, fear of the atom bomb, McCarthyism and the specter of the witch-hunt -- are easily recalled; they undermine notions of a calm and peaceful era. Questions about race and gender have further demonstrated that the 1950s were not nearly so harmonious for minorities and women. We now understand more clearly the complexities of family life, the pressures on men and

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Publication Information: Book Title: Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader. Contributors: Alexander Bloom - editor, Wini Breines - editor. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 3.

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I really became socially aware in college," Lizotte says, "aware of the problems that were happening in our society. Because of that, I continue to be socially aware of what's going on around me, an awareness that I didn't have [before] I went away to school. My freshman year, I remember taking a sociology class. The teacher went on and on about ivory towers and how we were all into partying and surfing and going to the beach, and 'it's too damn bad that you kids aren't socially conscious of what's going on in our society.' We did become aware. And by my senior year, we were very much involved. I can't say I was. I mean, I wasn't burning the bank or rioting in the streets, but the school in general became very involved with what was going on in the real world. We weren't ivory tower types the way we were."

Unlike other nonactivists who have undergone a conservative retrenchment, Lizotte sees a clear and positive connection between her convictions and her experiences in Isla Vista. "I didn't think for myself in high school. I pretty much had conservative views. My father, who was a construction contractor, was extremely conservative in his beliefs, and I basically went away to college with dad's views and I came away exactly opposite of his views. I will always be a liberal because of what happened in Santa Barbara. Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up. Contributors: Richard Flacks - author, Jack Whalen - author. Publisher: Temple University Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1989. Page Number: 242.

Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. Its democracy was a "four-year dictatorship" and its economic commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy was positively evil. "By any objective standard," he wrote at the time, "the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation."

As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as "tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believe to be--I must add that I agree--the most hideous institution on this earth."

The Sixties demand for "student power" was a consequence of this brand of political thought. It allowed the New Left to persuade itself that it had invented a more pristine form of radicalism, untainted by the totalitarianism of the communist world. For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable." He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles: China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung's "relatively livable" and "just society." Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958-1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people. Nonetheless, if he was as genuinely aloof from totalitarianism as his political principles proclaimed, the track record of communism in the USSR--which was by then widely known to have faked its statistics of agricultural and industrial output in the 1930s when its own population was also suffering crop failures and famine--should have left this anarchist a little more skeptical about the claims of the Russians' counterparts in China.

Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong. Today, Chomsky's hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk. (1) September 11, by Noam Chomsky; Seven Stories Press, 96 pages, $8.95. Power and Terror: Post 9/11 Talks and Interviews, by Noam Chomsky, edited by John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu; Seven Stories Press, 144 pages, $11.95. Keith Windschuttle's latest book is The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 (Macleay Press).

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Publication Information: Article Title: The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky. Contributors: Keith Windschuttle - author. Magazine Title: New Criterion. Volume: 21. Issue: 9. Publication Date: May 2003. Page Number: 4+. COPYRIGHT 2003 Foundation for Cultural Review; COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

A once-in-a-decade survey of the mental health of Americans has found that disabling mental illness is as common as such chronic diseases as heart disease and cancer - but strikes people at a much younger age, with more lasting impact on their lives. The findings, reported in the June issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, were based on 10,000 face-to-face interviews with people 18 and older. The survey, known as the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, is taken every 10 years to assess the mental health of the country.

According to the survey, "About half of Americans will develop a mental disorder at some time in their lives - with half of those cases starting by age 14, and three- quarters by age 24."

Ronald Kessler, a Harvard Medical School epidemiologist and one of the study's leaders said "Mental disorders are really the most important chronic conditions of youth in America." Kessler goes on to say that "it is just staggering that many of these disorders are occurring so early in life."

The average age of onset for anxiety disorders and impulse-control disorders is just 11 years old, the survey found, while substance abuse and mood disorders start later -- at average ages of 20 and 30 years old, respectively.

Alex Barnum, staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the researchers say that "occurrence of these problems early in life interferes with achieving important milestones, such as graduating from high school or college, staying in a close relationship, or holding down a job. Those problems, in turn, can cause lifelong problems." Kessler added. "These illnesses have a fundamental effect on how people's lives turn out. They are impaired before they have a chance to get their adult life on track."

So here at the end of the "Freudian century" what can we learn about psychoanalysis and Freud's attempt to explain and resolve the human condition?

Recall that Freud put forth the theory that the repression of "natural" s-xual impulses regardless of how deviant was a principal source of "guilt and pathologies." Seizing this concept of "repressive s-xual morality" others soon began to build the case for the elimination of these "antiquated religious restraints" on the promise of better mental health.

Dr. Mary Calderone, co-founder of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) and architect of modern s-x education beginning in 1964 wrote this, "A new stage of evolution is breaking across the horizon and the task of educators is to prepare children to step into that new world. To do this, they must pry children away from old views and values, especially from biblical and other traditional forms of sexual morality - for religious laws or rules about sex were made on the basis of ignorance."

This point was recently reaffirmed at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in Atlanta where delegates approved a statement calling for the legal recognition of same-sex "marriage." They called same-sex "marriage" a way of "maintaining and promoting mental health."

Pitirim Sorokin, the Harvard sociologist whom I have referenced before points out, "If the Freudian approach is correct, then an increase of s-x freedom among members of a society should be followed by a decrease of mental disorders." Suffice it to say that the verdict is in. Freud's premise has proven to be completely false and contrary to human experience. Instead of ushering in an era of mental health we are experiencing epidemic levels of mental illness commensurate with the dissolution of traditional s-xual boundaries.

Sorokin points out (in 1956) that "in the U.S. our population has doubled since 1880. During the same period the number of patients in mental hospitals has increased by twelve times." Of course with the release of this most recent survey the problem has only continued to worsen.

Despite the dismal failure of modern psychology and its foundational Freudian premises regarding s-xual morality we as a culture continue to trust in pseudo- science as the means of addressing humanity's dilemma. The ancient Greeks defined insanity as "acting in contradiction to reality." Clearly, s-x outside the natural design for human relationships and procreation produces deleterious consequences and yet we, as a culture continue to act and promote a mode of living that continually demonstrates its contradiction to reality. Apparently mental illness is a far greater problem than we realize because according to the ancient Greeks our entire society is insane!

The National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families is a non-profit ministry dedicated to articulating, advancing and defending biblical truth in the area of sexual morality, marriage and family. Established in 1983, we are one of the largest pro-decency organizations in America committed to recapturing a Christian consensus in matters of moral philosophy and related public policy. June 2005.