by Ed Cohen
If you've never seen the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, and I hadn't until about a year ago, there's a scene that might surprise you. It surprised me.
The movie is about three World War II G.I.s, all returning to the same unnamed city and trying to readjust to civilian life -- topical stuff in 1946. Near the end, one of vets -- Homer, a sailor, played by a real-life war veteran, Harold Russell -- receives a nighttime visit in his bedroom from an attractive young woman. It's Wilma, his fiancee from before the war, who is literally the girl next door -- she lives next to Homer's parents' house, where he's moved back in. Ever since his return, though, Homer's been avoiding her. He doesn't even wrap his arms around her when she rushes to embrace him at their initial reunion.
Part of the reason is that he doesn't have any hands. He lost them in an explosion below decks during the war and now wears two mechanical hooks. He's pretty handy with them but more than a little self-conscious around his girlfriend. He thinks she'd be repulsed by his disfigurement and has decided not to hold her to the engagement.
You guessed it. Wilma has come over to tell him the hooks don't matter. She loves him the way he is and wants nothing more than to spend the rest of her life with him. They embrace.
And so, as they say, to bed.
But not together. Like a mother saying good night to her child, Wilma tenderly draws the sheet up to his chin (closeup: Homer crying with joy and relief), gives him a peck on the cheek and walks back next door.
I couldn't help remembering this scene a few months later when I was sitting in the family room with my 12-year-old daughter. NBC's Must-See-TV Monday lineup was just coming on. This is the estrogen refuge of female-oriented sitcoms the network airs each week opposite Monday Night Football. I was a little uneasy about letting Kelly watch because NBC had been promo-ing Suddenly Susan, the first show of the night, with word that this was it -- "the moment Jack and Susan have been waiting for, their first night together."
Maybe it was because I was feeling virtuous about just being in the room to provide the ever-advised "parental discretion." Maybe I was just too lazy to get up and change the channel or turn the TV off and possibly ignite a protest. Whatever the reason, I let her watch. I thought, how bad could it be?
This bad: Kelly and I got to see the couple in question, magazine co-workers played by Brooke Shields and Judd Nelson, lying between sheets after having done it on not just their first night together but their second one, too. The comedic angle to these encounters -- and mind you, this show airs at 7 p.m. in the central time zone -- was intended to come from their immediate postcoital thoughts, which we're allowed to hear. Contrary to their vocalized coos of satisfaction, each actually thinks this is worst sex they've ever had.
Lust triumphs in the end, however, as back at the office they agree to be adult about this and not force the issue of intercourse. It could jeopardize their relationship. They cement the understanding with a handshake, which -- surprise of surprises -- ignites the fires of passion missing from their planned-out romps. The last we see of J&S, they're climbing up from the floor behind Jack's desk, hair mussed, clothes disheveled, faces wearing goofy grins.
Was the Best Years of Our Lives about people in some imaginary country, on Neptune perhaps, or has society really changed so much since 1946?
It's changed.
In 1937, only about one in five Americans surveyed said they thought it was right for either or both parties to a marriage to have had previous sexual experience. The same question drew essentially the same response in 1959. Today's polls show that the majority of adults believe it is either not at all wrong or wrong only sometimes for people beyond teen years to experience sex before marriage.
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On TV," observed a U.S. News & World Report cover story from May 1997, "adult virgins are as rare as caribou in Manhattan." Openly gay and lesbian characters aren't yet shown in bed as often as the Jack and Susans of prime time, but they've become as common as plots involving amnesia in the bygone video era. Moderate profanities like "damn," "hell," "bitch" and "bastard," which in generations past would have earned children caught repeating them around adults a mouthful of Dial, can now be heard almost every evening, even during what used to be called the family hour (8 to 9 Eastern).In olden days, a glimpse of Elvis Presley's gyrating pelvis was looked on as something shocking. But heaven knows (even if you don't), on dance floors today in mainstream clubs, couples rub their bodies together in the closest thing there is to stand-up sexual intercourse with clothes on. In a generation or two, we've gone from long-haired rockers who suggested "Let's spend the night together" (dinner and a movie, perhaps?), to shaved-headed rappers who chant about doing violence to specific parts of the female anatomy.
Who would have thought that the nation's highest legislative body (Congress) would barely hesitate before deciding to place a document (the Starr report) containing descriptions of steamy sexual encounters (the Lewinsky testimony) within easy access of millions of children (via the Internet)?
It may be true, as writer and editor Russell Lynes once observed, that "Each generation believes that the manners of the generation that follows it have gone to hell in a handbasket."
But has anyone ever considered that the older generations are right, at least about the general direction of things?
When one thinks back over time about prevailing attitudes toward what has been acceptable to discuss or depict or, well, do, in regard to sex and personal freedom in general, it seems society has been marching up a kind of ramp of permissiveness. From our current vantage point at the high end, we look back down and see the strict and starched Puritans, their buckled hats symbolic of their close-minds. Tracing history uphill, we see restrictions and taboos falling away, generation by generation -- seemingly under the weight of their own foolishness -- until we arrive at our present state of perceived unprecedented liberation.
Scary thought: If permissiveness moves in only one direction, will the future see people walking around naked and copulating at intersections on the hoods of their flying saucers? First-graders enjoying an after-lunch joint in the school cafeteria?
* * *
Every day at work I walk past a long table in our office's reception area covered with other magazines we receive. In late summer, a couple of covers caught my eye.
One was on Vanity Fair. It showed an actress I hadn't heard of, Grethen Mol ("Is She Hollywood's Next 'It' Girl?"), wearing some kind of slip made of what appeared to be Charmin, only sheerer. The other was Esquire, with Helen Hunt cooperatively posed to give subscribers a clear view down the front of her frock.
Sexuality seems to be on display everywhere we turn these days, and that seems a departure from recent history. It is. But attempts to regulate sexual activity have been around at least as long as the institution of marriage. Two of the Ten Commandments (adultery and coveting thy neighbor's wife) speak to sex. The ancient Hebrews prescribed death by stoning for convicted adulterers, only to have Jesus suggest a more compassionate approach when a woman adulterer was brought before him. He declared the first stone ought be cast by "he among you who is without sin." Still, Jesus endorsed Jewish laws against adultery and fornication.
Conventional wisdom holds that sex was the furthest thing from the minds of the America's Puritan colonists, whose image as frowning prudes was cemented in the mid-20th century by editor and critic H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism: "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."
That spoilsport image has since undergone at least partial reconstruction by historians. True, the Puritans passed laws that made adultery a capital offense, and fornicators were subject to floggings, but scholars say New England's first colonists weren't really anti-sex. They recognized the sex act as not only essential for procreation but an earthly delight. They just wanted it confined to marriage.
The confinement wasn't always successful. As historian Edmund S. Morgan writes, in spite of the harsh penalties for sexual sins, "the impression one gets from reading the court records of 17th century is that illicit sexual intercourse was fairly common."
In her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, author Stephanie Coontz recalls a court case from Puritan days involving a wife who said she was forced to take a lover because her husband was spending all his time hunting and fishing. The judge not only sent the woman and her lover to the stocks, but the husband, too, since he had clearly driven her to it.
Coontz's book is full surprises about sexual attitudes in U.S history. For instance, while most adults today are reticent to use sexual terms in front of children, 18th century spelling and grammar textbooks often provided "fornication" as their example of a four-syllable word. In Concord, Massachusetts, a bastion of Puritan tradition, Coontz reports, one-third of all children born during the 26 years prior to the American Revolution were conceived out of wedlock.
Early teen sexual activity clearly wasn't the taboo in early days of the republic that it is today. In early 1800s the age of consent in some states was as low as 9. Nor was there as much of a stigma attached to bachelors gaining sexual experience via prostitutes. The sex-for-pay business boomed in the 19th century. New York City contained an estimated one prostitiute for every 64 men; in Savannah, Georgia, it was one for every 39 men.
Permissiveness took a famously sharp turn during the Victorian Age of the late 1800s. Social reformers bent on cleaning and purifying every area of society legislated or coerced changes ranging from the practical (installing city sewage systems) to the paranoid-obsessive. Fig leaves were placed over the genitalia of statues, and the terms "white meat" and "dark meat" were introduced to save poultry shoppers the embarrassment of asking for breasts and thighs.
The Victorian era is famous for its straitlaced sexual morality, elaborate manners and rigid social codes, but there also existed a sexual underground. Notre Dame's Gail Bederman, who teaches women's history and is the author of Manliness & Civilization, A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, says reports of sexual sinning were a staple of the new "penny press" (they sold for one cent a copy) that grew up in urban areas in the second half of the century. The stories described actions that would have been thought scandalous and immoral, but the accounts themselves were anything but sanitized. They went into great and lurid detail, which tells Bederman the editors knew there was widespread public interest in sex.
A more curious phenomenon of the Victorian era involved what Coontz describes as the "passionate" bonds that existed between many adult women friends. In a typical diary entry, Coontz says, a Victorian wife might accord her husband only a few lines but "rhapsodize for pages" about her feelings for an old school friend. And if the friend came to visit, "the husband would be banished to the parlor while the two women spent the night 'embracing,' 'pinching' each other and exchanging confidences." Males enjoyed similar same-sex touchy-feelie friendships, though these were usually confined to the period of late teens until marriage.
Attitudes began changing with what Coontz describes as America's first sexual revolution, which sprouted around the turn of the century, flowered during the Roaring '20s, and "was every bit as scandalous to contemporaries" as the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
As in the 1960s, the revolution was led by young people challenging attitudes toward premarital sex. Whereas during the Victorian era courting was confined to visits made by males to a porch or parlor following an invitation to "come calling," in the new century couples went out to the growing number of movie houses, dance halls and amusement parks. Steamy "petting parties," the rage of the 1920s, were where couples, to use a much later term, "made out." They weren't orgies, but they led to predictable results. A 1938 study of married women found that only one-fourth of those born between 1890 and 1900 had lost their viginity before marriage compared with two-thirds of younger wives born after 1910.
* * *
One can argue that the
sexual revolution began not in the '60s but in
the 1920s with only a brief revival of more conservative attitudes in the 1950s. Whatever
the timetable, attitudes toward sex outside of marriage and marriage itself underwent
radical changes in the 1960s. In surveys of white women only, 43 percent who wed between
1960 and 1965 said they were virgins on their wedding day, compared with just 14 percent
who married between 1980 and 1985. In 1957, 80 percent of Americans polled said they
believed people who chose not to marry were "sick," "neurotic," or "immoral." In 1977 only 25 percent felt that way. In 1962
the overwhelming majority of mothers agreed with the statement "almost everyone should have children if they
can." By 1985 only a minority felt that
way.
Social scientists point to several likely causes for the changes: the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960, the piggybacking of rebellion against sexual standards on top of a more generalized revolt against "the establishment," the growth in job and educational opportunities for women, and the sheer increase of the volume of singles caused by the first wave of baby boomers reaching their teen years.
What has received far less attention than the onset of the sexual revolution is the apparent cessation of hostilities. Surveys show that approval of premarital sex, as measured by polls, increased by about 20 to 30 points from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, but then the increase began to slow, and since 1982 it's been stable, according to Tom W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey. Time magazine, which in 1964 heralded the beginning of the sexual revolution, declared the revolution over with a cover story in 1984.
Even the best-known publication born of the revolution, Playboy, seems to have sensed the change in the wind. A study reported in the Journal of Sex Research that looked at (strictly for scientific purposes) the centerfolds in 430 issues of Playboy published from 1953 through 1990 found that the degree of explicitness increased over time until leveling off in the early 1980s.
When today's older Americans viewed footage of the topless, pot-smoking young women frolicking in the mud at Woodstock back in 1969, they may have imagined that by 1998 such concepts as fidelity and modesty would be as outdated as wooden teeth. They aren't. And social scientists believe that's not entirely attributable to fears about AIDS, which surfaced about the time that the growth of approval of premarital sex leveled off.
It turns out that Americans are simply a lot less adventuresome and experienced than we've been led to believe. According to "Sex In America, A Definitive Survey," reported by the National Opinion Research Center in 1995, 70 percent of adults have had only one sexual partner in the past year, and more than 1 in 10 have had zero. Eighty percent have never had an extramarital affair, and the average American woman during her lifetime has had a total of two sex partners (for men, the average is six).
Even teen sex is trending downward. Last September a federal survey found that for the first time this decade, slightly more than half of American high school students are virgins (or said they were on anonymous questionnaires). At about the same time, a survey of college students by Playboy found that the percentage who identify themselves as virgins has doubled from 1996 to a still-paltry 15 percent.
Finally, while we may have become more casual about discussing sex and less apt to think of marriage as a prerequisite to it, the sexual revolution has apparently not made U.S. society more tolerant of what has historically been viewed as sexual sins. According to poll results reported by U.S. News in 1997, for the past 25 years there has been almost no change in how Americans view adultery, homosexual relations or teenage sex -- "a substantial majority think all three are always or almost always wrong."
* * *
So why is it we
perceive illicit sex to be rampant?
As someone once suggested, half-seriously: "Stop blaming yourself. Blame the media."
In his fierce indictment of the entertainment industry, Hollywood Versus America, movie critic Michael Medved argues that TV and movie executives have been championing attitudes toward sexual relations that differ widely from most of their audience. The polls seem to bear out this assertion, as just 38 percent of Hollywood insiders surveyed say they are concerned about how TV depicts premarital sex, compared with 83 percent of the general public.
TV depicts premarital sex with increasing regularity. Medved sites a study reported in the 1981 Journal of Communication in which researchers examined one episode each from every network series -- 58 shows. They found 41 depictions of sexual intercourse outside of marriage and only 6 between married persons, a ratio of almost 7 to 1. Ten years later the researchers repeated the test during a spring ratings sweeps week, when networks aim to attract the largest possible audience to justify higher rates for commercial air time. This time they found 615 instances of sexual activity depicted or discussed, and the margin of unmarried to married encounters was 13 to 1.
On popular shows like Seinfeld, Friends and Melrose Place, characters frequently end up in bed after a first date or just hours after meeting someone, only to find a new partner the very next episode. Rarely mentioned is contraception or protection from sexually transmitted diseases. To parents, sex education teachers, religious leaders and others responsible for educating teens about the consequences of sexual activity, this makes their job a lot harder. They can talk preach abstinence, but on TV it looks like a policy that went out with Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea.
In their 1991 book Watching America, a review of 30 years of TV content, authors S. Robert Lichter and Linda Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Stanley Rothman, a government professor at Smith College, conclude, "Beyond simply reflecting our changing sexual mores, television has endorsed the changes, and may have accelerated their acceptance."
The major networks, like other commercial media, are in the business of making money. And they can do that only by drawing an audience. So no one should be that astounded that screenwriters tend to write about illicit sex more often than matrimonial relations. As psychologist Joseph Adelson observes, "the illicit is all but a sine qua non of the dramatic."
What concerns Adelson -- but doesn't surprise me, having been lectured as a cub reporter that news is "what doesn't happen every day" -- is that the same partiality toward focusing on extraordinary sexual relations is found, in Adelson's view, "throughout the public culture." Writing in the journal Commentary in 1995, he recalled a story that had appeared recently in his local paper about a new erotic practice called "playful sadomasochism," wherein the gestures and rituals of the real thing are mimicked without serious pain being inflicted. That followed a front page story in his favorite national newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, about "serial bisexuality," in which women switch back and forth between male and female sex partners.
Both stories had, in Adelson's view, "the tone and feel of fashion reporting, complete with the tacit assurance to the shy that, however odd it may appear at the moment, this is indeed the coming style."
* * *
Could it be that permissiveness itself is like fashion? Does it run in cycles, like hemlines?
Notre Dame's Donald P. Costello thinks so. The long-time Notre Dame English professor remembers when an experimental theater group performed a show in Washington Hall in the 1970s that included nudity. "I thought things were only going to become more open, that we'd see people having sex on stage someday."
That hasn't happened at Notre Dame or anywhere else in what we think of as the legitimate theater. Even nudity on stage has become less common. Costello sees that as evidence that societal attitudes toward not just sex but personal freedom in general move, not like a bulldozer up a ramp, but like a pendulum swinging between extremes.
"
When I was young all the complaints were about how everything was too restricted," Costello says. "The church's rules were too narrow. You didn't have any choices. Now you never hear complaints about how restrictive things are; it's that we've become too permissive."The pendulum theory of permissiveness, however, fails to account for what look for all the world like permanent changes. Among the most noticeable: the near disappearance of stigma from unmarried couples living together. Since 1970 the number of unmarried couple households has risen seven-fold to more than 4 million. In the 1950s, about nine out of 10 women got married without living with their partner ahead of time. Today only about three in 10 do so.
Neither today nor in a future New England are we likely to see consenting unmarried adults who sleep over at one another's apartments hauled off to the stocks. It's hard even to imagine a revival of the double standard of sexual relations by which men were expected to sow their wild oats while women saved themselves for marriage.
"The kernel of truth" about the sexual revolution, writes Smith from the National Opinion Research Center, is that the rising approval of premarital sexual relations leveled off in the early 1980s. "But the counterrevolution did not reverse the earlier gains in premarital sexual permissiveness."
Declared U.S. News in 1997, "Adult premarital sex, the little-noticed heart of the sexual revolution, is here to stay."
"I don't think anything ever changes back," says historian Bederman, looking beyond sexual mores. "It just changes."
* * *
At an open house at my son's high school this past fall, I noticed a quote hanging on the wall in the English teacher's homeroom. It said,
"
The highest result of education is tolerance." -- Helen KellerIf we've become a more permissive society -- sexually or otherwise C it's partly because we've always aspired to be a tolerant society. The Founding Fathers signed onto a document, the Declaration of Independence, asserting that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and one of them is a right to the pursuit of happiness. How we choose to pursue it is supposedly guaranteed to be no one's business but our own.
Tolerance is an ideal, and like any ideal, people don't always lived up to it. Realization of past failure, however, has only served to bolster tolerance's appeal. In their book Intimate Matters, A History of Sexuality in America, authors John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman recall the astonishment of Europeans explorers and colonists at discovering the sexual customs of Native Americans. The natives not only were nonchalant about nudity and attached no sinfulness to sexual intercourse, but many tribes accepted premarital intercourse, polygamy and homosexuality. There was even a category of men who acted on what the natives regarded as a Avisionary call@ to dress and live like women.
Amid such behavior, D'Emilio and Freedman inform us, sexual conflict was virtually nonexistent. Couples easily resolved marital discord by simply separating and forming new unions, without penalty, stigma or property settlements.
Our reverence for tolerance is also revealed in the public reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the weeks after the truth came to light about President Clinton's affair with the former White House intern, polls showed that a majority of people disapproved of his behavior, but they were far from outraged and didn't think he should be removed from office.
Many pundits were amazed by the public's indifference even as many high-profile leaders, elected and otherwise, suggested the commander-in-chief be tied to a burning stake.
"
What's going on?" asked columnist Froma Harrop of The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey. AWhy aren't the people following the directives from above? Why aren't they exhibiting blood lust per their instructions?"
Perhaps the public has a stronger sense of decency, a more nuanced view of morality, and better balanced set of priorities than society's designated sages. Clearly general opinion is going its own way, and that's good news for the quality of our civic culture."Maybe yes, maybe no. Like everything else, it appears too much of even a cherished principle like tolerance can be a bad thing.
Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education last year, Robert L. Simon, a philosophy professor at Hamilton College and the author of Neutrality and the Academic Ethic, told of what he sees as a growing national affliction: "absolutophobia." Having grown up in an increasingly multicultural society where the enlightened view is that just because someone is different from you it doesn't make them better or worse, many students now hesitate to make moral judgments, period. He told about a recent classroom discussion of the Holocaust in which one student commented, "Of course I dislike the Nazis, but who is to say they are morally wrong?"
Simon says he has seen an increasing number of students who hold similar disturbingly broad-minded views about apartheid, slavery and ethnic cleansing. It makes him wonder, ADoes a decent respect for other cultures and practices really require us to refrain from condemning even the worse crimes in human history? Does it make moral judgments impossible?@
Writing in the same issue of the Chronicle, Kay Haugaard, who teaches creative writing at Pasadena City College, told of leading a discussion on Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery."
The tale opens on a brilliant summer morning in an American country village. People are gathering in town for an annual public drawing, which is somehow connected to the growing season. As the good townspeople gather, we get to know a few of them, including a family, the Hutchinsons, with two children, 12 and 4.
As Haugaard points out, nothing prepares the first-time reader for what happens next. The ticket belonging to mother Tess Hutchinson is drawn, and everyone, including her little son, commences to stone her to death. The lottery is for a human sacrifice.
Haugaard writes that in her more than two decades teaching "The Lottery," the author's message about blind conformity never failed to appeal to students' sense of right and wrong. But not with her latest class. She at first had difficulty prodding any sort of response from students. Eventually one woman in her 40s asked if the lottery might be part of a religion.
"
Would that make a difference, if it were part of a religious ritual?" the teacher asked."
I don't know," said the student. "If it was a religion of long-standing. . . . "Another student described a psychological theory he had read about that theorized that occasional killings were necessary to keep a community in equilibrium.
Haugaard couldn't believe her ears. "No one in the whole class of more than 20 ostensibly intelligent individuals would go out on a limb and take a stand against human sacrifice."
She recalled walking out to her car after class. "It was a warm night . . . but I felt shivery, chilled to the bone."
* * *
What is there we can conclude about permissiveness, and what can we do?
I think we are situated on a ramp, but it is so long and our lives span so short a segment of it that at no given moment can we be sure how it's tilted. We're like people who stand on the shore of the Pacific. Even with an unobstructed view, we can't discern that the Earth is round.
It is a ramp that's flat in places and even dips occasionally. But we shouldn't worry about encountering any surprise drops or jerks upward. The news media, ever eager to get the scoop on what's out of the ordinary, are likely to declare radical changes have occurred well before they actually do. Academics, the clergy and any number of others who volunteer play-by-play on how the world is turning, can be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. There's never been a shortage of alarmists.
The most we can do as individuals is think about what we want to pass on to our children. We shouldn't care about manners going to hell in a handbasket. We should worry about concepts like kindness and compassion going the way of chaperones, the chastity belt, the dance card, the courting parlor.
On the other hand, we have to be mindful that when teaching tolerance, we don't hold it out as a wild-card for trumping moral dilemmas. When someone asks rhetorically, "Who are we to say?" what they usually mean is, "I don't want to think about it."
Ultimately, we need to recognize that it doesn't matter where we are or think we are along the permissiveness ramp. We still have the same hard job to do. And that is, sorting immutable truths -- right and wrong -- from mere intolerances.
How are we to tell them apart any better than our ancestors? By keeping our minds and consciences fully engaged. In the Old Testament the prophet Jeremiah said God would put his law within us, written on our hearts. A little internal reading can go a long way.
Also see The Catholic Church in a Sea of Change