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That's a great story. I wish I'd interviewed you. I talk a little about that sense of possibility that people had at the time and the real desire to break down polar opposites, very simplistic notions of sexual identity.

Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History By David Allyn Little, Brown, 411 pages Nonfiction

People thought that it was really going to happen -- that you could find a rational approach to sex. That you could abolish jealousy. You could abolish all of our hang-ups and shame and fear. And that was the national conversation at the time. I think that is gone. I think people have found there are two ways to look at it. You could say people have gotten resigned, or you could say people got realistic.

I think there were two sexual revolutions in the 1960s/'70s. There was the practical revolution, which was gay rights and birth control and everything that meant in regard to dating. And the second revolution was all that theoretical "free love" stuff. Is there any historical parallel to this pair of revolutions?

There was a sexual revolution in the 1920s. It wasn't as widespread, deep -- wait, don't use that metaphor! [Laughs.] The 1920s didn't lead to as pronounced a change in behavior or in opportunity as the 1960s. You didn't have group sex clubs for heterosexuals springing up on the Upper East Side of New York. I think every historical moment is unique because it's shaped by different factors of that time that give a particular flavor and texture to it. But it wasn't the first time people advocated various forms of sexual liberation.

Do you think there's validity in the movement heralded by 1990s "modesty girl" Wendy Shalit, who wrote "Return to Modesty"?

In our popular culture there are all of these contradictions that we aren't willing to look at directly. The real revolution of the sexual revolution was the end of monogamy -- the idea that you're only supposed to have one sexual partner for life. Today, popular culture says, "You do that, and you're prudish and kind of weird." We're supposed to have multiple partners -- only one at a time -- but multiple. And not too many -- you're not supposed to have hundreds and hundreds. The culture sends out these messages.

How did the sexual revolution end?

In the late 1970s there was a very clear backlash from both the left and the right. I think that people felt the country was in decline for all sorts of reasons, from the decline of the economy and the decline of the inner city, and sex was an easy target. The right attacked sex-education books and gay rights and the left went after pornography. That's also part of the legacy -- anyone who's under 40 now grew up in a time when the left and right were going after sex. So sex was still very charged in that way.

The neglect you felt as a kid is reflected symbolically at the end of your book. The last gasp of sexual liberation -- "nothing is forbidden, everything is possible" -- was to demand the acceptance of pedophilia. You could almost say, metaphorically, all those sexually "liberated" adults were about to fuck you kids, but then -- just in the nick of time -- their revolution went kaput.

There were several radical feminists in the last of the '60s and early '70s who actually advocated eroticism between children and adults because they were trying to be philosophically consistent. Andrea Dworkin said that we needed to break down all of our taboos. We needed to allow for the natural eroticism between children and adults, and animals and adults, animals and children, and break down the incest taboo. When I read that in Andrea Dworkin, I thought, "Wow."

She backed down quite a bit since then.

She did. What happened was she got a phone call from Mary Daly, the professor at Boston College, who said, "'You don't really want to be saying those things. You have no idea how seriously the damage is that can be caused by this." Dworkin backed down. I'm of the belief if Andrea Dworkin hadn't gotten so famous for her anti-pornography campaign, she would have backed away from that as well.

But taboos have value, don't you think?

That sounds like a loaded question.

Sex wouldn't be as interesting as it is if there weren't taboos.

Maybe. I'm leery of taking that argument too far. Life may be more interesting under a Stalin-like regime -- it might be more exciting; there's the passion of being a true rebel. But I don't happen to want to live under Stalin.

But I don't want to live under anarchy either. In order to have democracy you do have to have some rules. Some taboos.

How old is your kid?

My daughter is 18 months.

So you've got a long time before you need to worry.

About her having sex?

And shepherding her through whatever they will be doing in 2018.

I definitely get confronted by that. I think of myself as easygoing and open-minded. Then I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and go, "Wow." I do believe in stasis. I don't think we should be trying to hide things from kids, but we need basins of innocence. I think that there is time for innocence. Do I sound like a conservative?

No. Believe it or not, I remember once being truly innocent myself. In seventh grade, me and my first girlfriend would play tennis in a handball court and kinda accidentally-on-purpose hit the balls over the wall so we could go back there and smooch a bit. That's all we did. It never occurred to us there was more to do than that.

That's so sweet.

I'm sure eventually we would have figured out the next steps, but my parents found out what was going on and freaked. They couldn't see that I was a true innocent.

Every time I watch a Disney film I feel that way. I love that stuff.

On the other hand, it's probably healthy that there's an opposition between your parents and your sexuality.

What do you mean?

I wouldn't have wanted my father to have been helping me out. You yourself couldn't actually have a girl spend the night, could you?

I never tried to do that. The first time I had sex I thought to myself, Wow! Now I see why parents don't want their kids doing this. It almost seemed so animalistic. Our whole civilization is built around this pretense that we don't go to the bathroom and we don't masturbate and we don't have sex like animals do.

The one thing in your book I think is completely wrong is the next to last paragraph: "Much if not most of the pleasure associated with sex comes not from having sex, but from talking about having sex."

That's what you started with. The Chicago Tribune didn't think I was right about that either.

I think you've truly missed the boat, my friend, if you think yakking about sex is more pleasurable than doing it firsthand.

I think what I wanted to stress there, and what I didn't stress, was talking about it mostly with yourself. I wrote, "Talking about ..." and then I put "even with one's self" in parenthesis. I should have dropped the parenthesis. It's the conversation with yourself where I think a lot of the pleasure lies. And you may not be aware of the conversation. Maybe the conversation has been around in your head for so long it's just part of who you are.

But the "animal nature" you mentioned earlier is beyond civilization, beyond words. Talking about sex is only necessary if you yourself aren't getting any, and your generous and wilder friends let you live vicariously through talking about their adventures.

I didn't mean it quite that literally -- the talking about it. The notion of the conversation. It's a little more metaphorical than that.
salon.com | April 22, 2000

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