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| 'SEX' BOOK ''Century'' is
a powerful portrait of the REAL sexual revolution |
THE CENTURY OF SEX
James R. Petersen
Wednesday, December 1, 1999
The sexual revolution was a miserable
failure, if you take it in the utopian terms mandated in the
'60s: We didn't make love, not war, happily ever after. But
drop the notion that the revolution was conjured out of thin
air in about 1967, and a different picture emerges. Take a
longer view, and the sexual revolution was both inevitable an
successful, maybe the only successful revolution of the
century. It was a slow but drastic transformation of culture
and society that began no later than 1912 and was closely
connected to two other developments, the urbanization of life
and the emancipation of women.
This is the picture you get from The Century
of Sex, journalist James R. Petersen's Hugh
Hefner-commissioned account of the sexual transformation of
American life and the frantic efforts to conceal, thwart, and
deny it. It's a lively, casual mosaic of anecdotes,
statistics, historical road markers, and preserved-in-amber
slices of sex life, with no room left to discuss psychological
or historical complexities. But within its basic
framework--the liberation of the libido--everything falls into
place.
And everything is here, from Evelyn Nesbit,
the 16-year-old beauty riding naked on a velvet swing in
Stanford White's love nest, to Monica giving Lewinskys in the
Oval Office; from Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed
turn-of-the-century censor and sex scourge, to his
contemporary dour feminist incarnation, Catharine Mackinnon;
from the "white slave" panic of 1910 to the
"satanic ritual abuse" panic of the 1980s.
By the time Petersen reaches the climax of
the revolution in the 1970s, he resembles a waiter in an
overcrowded restaurant, darting between orgies at Studio 54
and Plato's Retreat, ''The Joy of Sex,'' gays and lesbians,
sex shops, and Marilyn Chambers, an Ivory Snow model, in the
porn classic ''Behind the Green Door.''
And yes, Hefner, ''Playboy'''s founder and
philosopher, who contributes a foreword to the book, is also
one of its heroes, arriving with fanfare in the chapter on the
1950s. You almost expect, along with the book's engaging
illustrations, a centerfold of Miss 20th Century to pop out.
Hefner's brand of merchandised fantasy does come in for
criticism from some quoted feminists here, but he gets the
last word, because if this book proves something, it's that
the real sexual revolution and women's liberation are two
sides of the same American coin, a very civilized
multiplication of individual choices and freedoms.
Grade: A- -- L.S. Klepp www.ew.com
