reading John Heidenry's "What Wild Ecstasy" after "Sexplorations" illustrates just how short a distance we've traveled since Kinsey began questioning men about their experiences with bestiality in the 1950s and Masters and Johnson began filming women masturbating in the name of scientific knowledge. Radakovich now carries out her own version of their experiments on a less ambitious scale. Although her mass Gen-X readership may consider her daring or even cutting edge, little do they know how well-trod her libidinal forays actually are. "What Wild Ecstasy" traces the rise of the sexual revolution, focusing on scientific investigators like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, founding fathers of porn like Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione, and the cult of free love as embodied by porn star/performance artist Annie Sprinkle and author Marco Vassi. In mapping the revolution's decline, Heidenry recounts the numerous converging forces that ultimately doomed erotic experimentation: the rise of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the Christian right, anti-porn feminists, internal corruption in the porn industry and sexual burnout among an aging population of boomers. Whether he is charting debates over female orgasm or gay rights activism, Heidenry's multi-threaded, densely anecdotal narrative makes for absorbing reading for anyone interested in sexuality or pop culture. He tells it through the stories of many individuals -- focusing as much on their personal lives as their contributions to history. This intimate, tactile approach to history reminds us that no matter what people proclaim about sex publicly, their experiences sometimes run along very different paths: Christian televangelists hire prostitutes; sexual liberationists revert to celibacy. Any history of sexuality must look not only at sexual mores but at the intimate lives of real people. Some of the book's most compelling passages relate sex industry gossip. Here Heidenry exhibits a storytelling flair and a refusal to resort to stereotypes. From the abusive manager/pimp Chuck Traynor, who forced his wife, Linda Lovelace, into prostitution, to the angelic Annie Sprinkle, who emerges from pornography to resurrect herself as a performance artist, these chapters are alternately horrifying and inspiring -- and ultimately challenge us to revisit our two-dimensional notions of the sexual revolution. Throughout, Heidenry strives to relate the often extravagant and loathsome behavior of many of his subjects with a minimum of moralizing. Then, suddenly, in his excoriating passages about anti-porn feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, he launches into a diatribe. He describes Dworkin as propagating a "radical man-hating ideology" -- a common enough characterization but one that Dworkin has gone to great lengths to dispel. He ludicrously describes MacKinnon as the "Robespierre to Dworkin's pamphleteering, emotional Marat in the feminist Reign of Terror against men that was to wash over the country in the coming decade." (Remember the guillotine in every town square, folks?) After Heidenry has described the insensitivity and brutality of many pornographers' treatment of the women in their lives (forced fellatio, rampant infidelity and in one case changing the locks to shut a wife out of the family business) in neutral, non-judgmental prose, it looks like sheer bias when he decides to go ballistic on this topic. And, for all the color he brings to the tales he tells, Heidenry eschews the kind of analysis that would make this book more than a roller-coaster ride through an erotic wonderland. We learn about the news-making sex scandals and controversies of the day, but little about the subtler and perhaps more significant changes in ordinary people's sex lives. He sidesteps innumerable questions -- such as how the sexual revolution related to the economy, the civil rights movement or the average suburban family, and confines his own conclusions to the last two pages of the book and a brief preface. Here we learn that he believes that although the sexual revolution failed, we are poised on the verge of another that will be "worldwide, affecting all nations, large and small, rich and poor, and will strike at the very heart of deeply ingrained anti-sexual traditions whether cultural, tribal or religious."
Heidenry's background as an editor of Penthouse probably accounts for the book's heavy focus on the lurid peccadilloes of sex industry impresarios. Seen through this prism, the sexual revolution appears as a byproduct of pornography rather than its cultural impetus. In the end, Heidenry's version of the sexual revolution -- while riveting -- feels oddly uninhabited by regular people. We hear public voices from journalism, science, the sex industry and politics loudly declaring their various, often contradictory truths, while we are left to imagine (and remember) how individual acts of intimacy, happening below the sheets, wound up making history.
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