TWO VERY DIFFERENT SEXPERTS TRACE THE |
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BY CAROL LLOYD | when I was 15, my older brother wandered in from a long night of carousing to find my boyfriend and me snuggled into my single bed fast asleep. Though my young Romeo was supposed to stay in the guest room, we often fell asleep after our frantic adolescent orgasms. My brother rushed into my parents' bedroom and woke them with the scandalous news. "I trust Carol to do what's right for her," said my mother. My father barely opened his eyes. "I just hope she's got contradiction," he managed to mumble incoherently before falling back asleep. "But she's only 15!" my brother cried, "Don't you know what 15-year-olds do nowadays?" My parents ignored his hysteria and my hanky-panky. Since my brother had come of age, they'd served in the Peace Corps, joined a religious cult and studied P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training). My mother became a feminist and my father lost his patriarchal grip on the family. The year was 1978 and their lackadaisical reaction could not have occurred without the cultural upsurge known as the sexual revolution. While I slept in sweet, guilt-free defilement in the other room, history had spun its invisible thread through another American home. Though everyone agrees that the sexual revolution actually happened, most Americans have very different perceptions of it, depending on how it did or didn't affect their lives. Two recent books, "Sexplorations: Journeys to the Erogenous Zone" by Anka Radakovich, former sex columnist for Details magazine, and "What Wild Ecstasy" by John Heidenry, former editor of Penthouse Forum, have tackled the many facets of the erotic uprising and our current attitudes toward it. Both prove just how difficult it is to capture and define a revolution comprising so many essentially private acts. In a recent TV interview, conservative talk show host Judith Regan confronted self-styled "sexual anthropologist" Radakovich with a 1950s maxim. "The theme of my show is: Why buy the cow, if you can get the milk for free?" Regan queried, "What do you say to that?" Radakovich, who was there promoting her book as a wild ride through sexual extremes, looked a little stunned, then played right into Regan's anti-sex hand. It was true, she conceded, sometimes women don't get respect from men once they have slept with them. The sexual revolution did lead some people to overdo it sexually and to lose track of what's important -- namely love and self-respect. Instead of the naughty sexpert of the '90s, Radakovich came off sounding tentative and eager to please. When Regan asked her what conclusions she drew from her years of "research," Radakovich went out on a limb, stating that most men want sexy women, and most women want something more meaningful. In an era when the publishing industry has an insatiable appetite for sex-related confessionals, Radakovich is the perfect poster child for post-revolutionary excess/ambivalence. On the one hand, she harbors a voyeuristic fascination with all things sexual -- the more deviant and ridiculous the better. She travels to S&M clubs, goes undercover in Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings, attends wife-swapping conventions and hosts a "Win a Date with Anka Contest." She's even launched seductions just to write about them, and then recounted the trysts for her readers in a saucy, tossed-off tone. While in training as a dominatrix and whipping her first slave, she observes, "At this point it hit me that I was spanking a guy who looked like Frank Perdue ('It takes a tough man to tenderize a chicken')." Everything -- from watching her friends group grope to dating a born-again Christian -- is treated with a mix of breathless exclamation points and jaded aplomb. On the other hand, Radakovich often admits to not getting nearly enough sex herself and describes some of the people she writes about flippantly, characterizing them as types: "The Marin County Guy," "The Rajneesh Guy," "Mr. Long-Haired Rock Guy," "Over-sexed Ken-doll/ski bum (lifer)." When she dismisses swinging as "institutionalized cheating," her rah-rah-go-bed-'em philosophy cracks to reveal old-fashioned moral judgment throbbing just below the surface. That Radakovich calls herself a sexual anthropologist only underscores her distance from the people she has chosen as her subjects, and indicates how far the mainstream has moved away from the days of popular sexploration. In its tales of group marriage, nudism, cross-dressing, pornography and other wellsprings of horniness, "Sexplorations" titillates and amuses but never provokes intellectual arousal. Hearing a man recount how his compulsive masturbating caused him to lose his job, her only response is imagining the sufferer's excuse: "Boss, I can't come to work to day, because I sprained my wrist." As a columnist, Radakovich is bold, funny and revealing, but in a full-length book, her talents of concision and cleverness conspire against her, making the material feel as thin and insubstantial as the wee negligees she wears in the photos that kick off each chapter. Representing the generation that grew up knowing that everything had already been done with Kama Sutra zeal, Anka avoids embarrassing herself with anything approaching an earnest belief. When a bodybuilder asks Radakovich to join in a bit of group sex, instead of prompting embarrassment, self-reflection or enthusiasm, the moment is only fodder for punning. "Although this guy had an incredible (to believe) body, I was definitely tempted to 'pull his muscle.' But I passed. Call me old fashioned, but I didn't want to be the twentieth rep in his third set." Like many of her contemporaries who have made a name for themselves as bad-girl writers, for Radakovich, sex may be more of a tool to bushwhack a path to career success than a key to ecstasy. Faced with Judith Regan's anti-sex cant, Radakovich proved that -- despite her declarations that she's a sex-positive feminist -- she stands for little more than snappy copy. next page: Free love cultists and the fathers of porn |
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHIKO STEHRENBERGER
