The Blue Monkey Review

The average heterosexual on the street might assume that sex has no history, that it pretty much operates the same way in all times and places. True, sex acts have only a narrow range of possibilities (there are far fewer sex manuals than cookbooks in the world). But a moment’s reflection (or perhaps a look into Time magazine for pictures of Afghan women in burkhas or a National Geographic spread on Carnivale in Rio) should quickly consign the no-change notion to the list of intellectual Darwin awards.

Someone who thinks about sex as one element of larger social and cultural systems may arrive at some version of “sexual liberalization.” In this view, the 20th century begins in Victorian repression and then progressively, continuously, steadily becomes less repressed and more open to choice in sexual matters. Sexual choice has been aided and abetted by the expanding technology of birth control and abortion, by the growth of work opportunities for women, and the proliferation of divorce. The term works well whether you are a social conservative, who sees the liberalization of anything as bad, or socially liberal. But even someone who believes that decisions about sex and commitment should be made in a free market of desire and advantage will also agree that problems will arise if liberalization unravels all social constraints.

Liberalization provides an intuitively complete explanation for sexual change. Anyone who, as a teenager, argued with parents or other dim-witted adults about his or her apparel/piercings/music/politics/hairstyle or choice of companions will know that prior generations carry such backward, pernicious, and repressive ideas about life (and especially sex) that it should amaze us that the genus Homo still has a species to go with it. It's obvious that we are freer and generally better off today than ever. Even more compelling for adult members of the liberalization school is that almost any two-point measure irrefutably proves the theory. Compare 1910 or 1920 or 1930 to 1980 or 1990 or 2000 and you find that a) boys and girls are having sex as teenagers more frequently; b) that the average age for first intercourse has decline markedly (17 for white males, 18 for white females in the mid-1990s); c) more people use birth control and have abortions; d) more young women have children outside marriage; e) sexual minorities are more visible and have greater freedom to date and mate with the people they find attractive. In fact, the recent findings of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, that teenagers who take chastity oaths end up having sex as frequently as non-oath-taking teens, provides a perfect example of liberalization. Not only are lots of teenagers having sex—what is more compelling is the assumption, even among those who support and promote chastity, that teenagers will be the ones who make decisions about whether they have sex or not. At the turn of the century, almost no teenager would have been viewed as capable of that decision, and even the notion of decision-making in sexual matters would have seemed suspicious.

Pick at any strand of the liberalization idea, however, and the whole theory starts to unravel. Pre-marital intercourse always acts as a leading indicator in the free market theory of sexuality. Clearly, more people have sex before they marry these days. Yet, most men had sex before marriage through most of the 20th century, and the rates for women (even white middle-class women) increased very rapidly. (You can see this idea demonstrated graphically if you go to this chart.) In your mother’s generation, and even in your grandmother’s generation, at least half of women had carnal knowledge before marriage. Of course, all this knowledge existed within a well-accepted system (even though it didn’t accord with public morality) in which women generally gave sexual favors to men they expected to marry, and usually they did marry them. Men, you will be amazed to learn, generally assumed that they had a right to greater latitude in pre-marital sexual partners. The major change in this system began in the early 1970s as more women had sex with men they did not plan to marry. Even this change has not gone in only one direction. After a rise through the mid-1980s, percentages of women choosing to have sex outside marriage began to decline. For African-American women, those declines (albeit from a higher percentage) have been more dramatic.

Or, take the fact of rising rates of pregnancy among teenagers. This seemingly validates sexual liberalization in a manner that is not refutable (after all, knowledge of sexual activities depends on surveys, and everyone knows that the one consistent element of these surveys is that the people who take them lie, lie, lie). From the early 1970s, social scientists and policymakers identified teenage pregnancy as a huge and growing problem, leading to handwringing in the halls of Congress and in all the major media. The catchphrase “children having children” dramatized the situation, suggesting the health risks and social disintegration implicit in this alarming trend.

Yet, beginning with Maris Vinovskis in 1988, a string of historians and social scientists have eviscerated this “fact.” Teenage pregnancy rose rapidly, indeed, dramatically, from World War II until 1957, where it peaked. Since then teen pregnancy declined steadily until the mid-1980s and remained fairly stable for a decade. Sincel the mid-1990s both abortion and pregnancy rates for teens have steadily fallen, and are now at the level of the mid-1970s. What has changed has been the way that teens have managed pregnancy. In the 1950s teenaged mothers usually had husbands, and pre-marital pregnancy often led to short engagements and rapid wedding plans. Unwed mothers frequently gave up children for adoption. By the 1970s both of those approaches to pregnancy had declined. Fewer young women marry the fathers of their out-of-wedlock children, and an even more dramatic decline has taken place in the number of women who give up children for adoption. Even as the number of children born to teenagers has declined, the percentage of children being raised in non-traditional households has risen rapidly.

On the other hand, doesn’t teen pregnancy (today more than one-third of all illegitimate births are to teens) in itself undermine the premises of sexual liberalization? After all, choice should include the ability to control fertility, with greater control over time sustaining the growth of choice. The historical developments here could not be less sympathetic to a liberalization view. Abortion was legal everywhere in the United States in the 19th century, but was criminalized in state after state until the early 20th century. Illegal, clandestine, and therapeutic abortions continued, of course (millions during the decades when abortion was illegal) until in the 1960s California and New York liberalized their abortion laws. Roe v. Wade (1973), of course, overturned abortion statutes throughout the country. But abortion liberalization lasted only briefly. By the 1980s, anti-abortion activists managed to impose limits on public funding for abortions and to have states adopt parental consent laws. Even if parental consent is mitigated by judicial bypass, the process may seem too complicated for some minor women.

So far, of course, I’ve dealt only with heterosexual issues. For sexual minorities, the process of liberalization seems to hold the same clear direction and advantages. At the beginning of the last century, homosexuality could be famously referred to as “the love that dare not speak its name.” Most individual Americans would have assured you that s/he had never met a homosexual if, in fact, s/he knew what that was. Sexual categories were still vague in 1900—not that many years before the first medical article using the term heterosexual had referred to it as a sexual perversion. And people who didn’t fit the norm (i.e., marry someone of the opposite gender and have children) could be referred to as urnings, hermaphrodites, contrare sexualempfindung, or by any one of a dozen other names. I think we can all be happy that the term homosexual, popularized by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, took hold.

Although vibrant subcultures of gay men and lesbians existed in the large cities of the United States, individuals in small towns might never have a reference group or even a means of understanding him/her self. Autobiographies or novels from the early 20th century often depict moments of revelation when the young person opens up the work of Havelock Ellis or some medical text to discover an explanation and a source of identity. In fact, anyone finding his or her identity in Krafft-Ebing’s work (which, after all, was named Psychopathia Sexualis) would not likely leave with a very high self-esteem.

Although it is always dangerous and probably incorrect to say that nothing much changed during any period of history, the situation for homosexuals in the United States probably remained what I have characterized above until World War II. Military service gave unprecedented opportunities for gay men to meet other gays (and for some men to discover unexpected facets of their sexuality). The military, in fact, tried to screen out gay recruits with a brief psychiatric interview (with subtle questions, like, “Do you like girls?”) but Allan Berube has shown that this was relatively ineffective. After the war, homosexual activists began to work through organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis to change laws and to build networks among gays and lesbians. The Kinsey reports (on men in 1948 and on women in 1953) shattered the myth that homosexual experience was so rare it could be considered negligible. The controversial figures that Kinsey put forward of more than a third of American men having some homosexual experience during their lifetimes, and of approximately 10% of males who could be considered homosexual over some period of their lives, enraged conservatives and energized the gay organizations.

For gays and lesbians, it is tempting to draw a line from World War II to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and let sexual liberalization do the walking. Yet anyone who has a general view of that period knows that the line will not run straight. The Stonewall Riot at the end of the 1960s and the rapid growth of gay pride in the 1970s, and the rapid growth of vibrant communities of sexual minorities, ran into both conservative backlash and the chilling consequences of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Even though both gays and lesbians have far more acceptance in many areas today, and far more attention in the media, part of the drift toward acceptance has come as homosexual people act more and more like heterosexual people.

Take the following test:
They live in couples, they pay taxes, they buy homes, they raise children characterizes
a) heterosexuals; b) homosexuals; c) both; d) neither; e) all of the above.
The answer, of course, is E, which may, but probably does not, support a view of sexual change with expanding choice as its underlying reality.

Anyone with more than a few minutes on his or her hands, and the desire to salvage sexual liberalization, can reform the theory in a way that will work. As we know more and more about sexuality in the century of our birth, however, any theory of sexual liberalization must become more and more refined and complex, much like the epicycles of Ptolemy’s theory of planetary motion. To explain sexuality we need a new view, a whole new paradigm.

Stay tuned.