Salon spoke with Petroski over the phone about human error in design tragedies, how the recession is influencing the future of design, and just how long a bridge can last.

It’s been two and a half decades since the publication of your first book, “To Engineer is Human,” which focused on mechanical and structural failures. Your new book, “To Forgive Design,” takes your original analysis a step further, focusing on the interconnectedness of technology and culture.

I wanted to talk this time about larger systems, things that are much more complicated than just a building or a bridge. Especially things that rely to a large extent on human operators that can make mistakes.

I have been fascinated with historic bridge failures, in part because they tend to be dramatic and in part because they are so revealing. Over the past century and a half or so, there has been a major bridge failure about every 30 years, which is about the length of time of an engineer’s career. The bridge failures, taken collectively, illustrate how a failure can shock us into paying much closer attention to design. But human beings sometimes have short attention spans, and so they soon forget the lessons learned from the last failure and become careless in designing new bridge types. This carelessness leads to another bridge failure, which occurs about 30 years from the last.

The 1940 failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is especially fascinating, because it occurred almost exactly a century after the engineer John Roebling figured out why early 19th-century suspension bridges were being destroyed in the wind. By studying the failures that did occur, Roebling figured out how to design and build suspension bridges that not only stood up to windstorms but also were able to carry railroad trains — something that no one before Roebling could figure out. Over the next century, suspension bridge designers took Roebling’s masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge, as a model of success and little by little eliminated the very features that made it work. Eventually, this led to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was so light and flexible that it was brought down by a moderate wind in 1940. Had the bridge designers of the 1930s remembered and heeded Roebling’s lessons learned, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge might be still standing.

The most famous bridge disaster in recent memory occurred in Minneapolis, in 2007, and it raised a host of questions about the strength of America’s bridge infrastructure. How long can a bridge last?

All bridges are designed to have a specific lifetime. Typically, highway bridges have about 50 years. But over in England, they have iron bridges approaching 250 years. In France there are Roman aqueducts that are approaching 2,000 years old. So a bridge can last a very long time if it’s built properly in the first place, and then maintained properly. Large suspension bridges are constantly being painted to prevent caustic air from reaching the steel. Maintenance is very important. Some engineers said you can build a bridge to last forever if you maintain it properly. That’s hyperbole, but it gets across the point. Bridges that tend to collapse by surprise are those that aren’t properly maintained or inspected.

Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same is true of bridges, buildings, or any structure or machine. Intellectually, we appreciate the achievement of a success, but after a while successes become commonplace and we do not pay very much close attention to them anymore. Failures, on the other hand, are dramatic. They also teach us a lot more than successes. When something succeeds, we learn little more from it than that it did succeed. When something fails, however, we are driven to try to understand why it failed. This leads us to investigate and study the failure until we get to the heart of the matter. The knowledge gained by studying failure enables us to design more successfully the next time.

Why should we as a culture learn to anticipate failure and focus less on success?

If you do everything exactly the same as the successful example you’re trying to follow, you’ll probably be successful, too. But mostly we make slight changes in what we think are improvements in any successful model, and ultimately that’s what leads us to fail. On the other hand, if we anticipate failure and think, “what will happen badly if I do this?” You can eliminate a lot of bad actions by thinking about failure. Chances of success are greater that way.

How does a recession affect our attitudes toward good design?

The recession has caused a lot of projects to be canceled. Tall buildings especially, even in areas like Dubai, which is booming, have either been canceled or put on hold. Designers are not likely to cut corners on design in this kind of environment, because having something fail or go wrong is more harmful to them. If they design something that turns out to be a failure, it’s not only an embarrassment and potential legal liability but it gives the engineer a bad reputation. There have been plenty of examples throughout history of engineers who have designed bridges that collapsed, and that engineer doesn’t get any more commissions.

There was a call to renew American infrastructure during the recession. Do you think this was a missed opportunity? Do you think it’s too late? And what projects do you think are the most important?

It’s not too late. The question is do we have enough money to answer all the calls to invest in infrastructure. I think the last number I saw for the U.S. alone to bring our infrastructure up to levels that experts think it needs would be $2.2 trillion over five years. That’s the kind of money that people are beginning to understand, it’s a lot of money. Right now in Congress there are a lot of debates going on about transportation, which is just part of the infrastructure. Even finding money for the transportation part of infrastructure is not easy. People are starting to look for alternative ways to fund infrastructure other than government. Back in the 19th century, most infrastructure projects were privately financed. People invested in a bridge with the expectation of getting a return on their investment through the toll charge. Some experts are looking at that kind of model again, as a way of improving the infrastructure while not trading public revenue sources. There’s been a lot of talk about high-speed rail in the U.S., but to do that properly would take so much money that nobody is really talking about it seriously. I think roads are such an important part of America. If the roads get deteriorated to the point where it’s going to cause increasingly much to bring them back, it will be a disaster. Roads and bridges, I would put at the top. Not necessarily a single project, but an all encompassing project.

Is design more or less important in our culture now that it has been in the past?

Design has been important throughout civilization, and I think it will always be important. Everything we do is designed whether we’re producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything. You could argue that a society that isn’t as advanced may be more into design than a country that is advanced. We (America) are sort of on automatic pilot right now, we’ve got plenty of design, design ideas and designers, but we don’t have the money to implement it. So if you interpret design in a much broader sense, to try to fix the system, we are in need of that kind of design. Can we come up with new ideas and new ways of keeping our society at a level of quality of life that we’ve become used to and we think is appropriate? That’s going to take some creative ideas, and creative ideas mean creative design.

When a design tragedy happens, how is it decided where the blame ultimately lies?

There’s no simple answer. First of all, it usually depends on how many people might have been killed. If a significant number of people have died or there is a large environmental impact, there usually will be a pretty high level investigation. Sometimes this even takes the form of a presidential commission as it did when the space shuttle exploded. Sometimes these commissions have a very difficult time pinpointing exactly who might be to blame. In part because of the complexity, but also in part because the sequence of what happened and how the accident progressed is sometimes very difficult to pin down.

I have a chapter in the book on the Deep Water Horizon explosion in 2010. Presently, there are a lot of court cases, and that’s part of what they’re trying to establish, who is responsible? Because in that case there were three or four companies involved. There was British Petroleum, which had a lot of the visibility, but also there was Halliburton, who was operating the rig. And then there was the owner of the drilling rig, Transocean. And each of these blames the others because that’s what happens with contentious legal battles. At any given point, it’s not totally clear who is to blame. In part, because the jury is still out — literally. And in some cases, there are ultimately out-of-court settlements, which close the record and the outside world can’t easily get to it.

Historically there have been examples of very dramatic failures where it was concluded that no one was to blame because everyone was doing their job as expected, it was just that the technology wasn’t completely understood. You’d almost have to look at it case by case to find out who is to blame. One of the things I try to do is point out that a knee-jerk reaction, say when a plane goes down, is to say the plane was badly designed. More often than not, that proves not to be as simple an answer as it might seem at first. That’s why I call the book, “To Forgive Design.”

What’s the golden age of American design?

That would depend on whether you’re talking about big bridges that carried the railroads in the late 19th century or the highway system in the middle 20th century; if you’re talking about industrial design, product design that might have been the early 20th century. To me, it would depend on what aspect of design you’re talking about. My book has a lot of examples of bridges, but I also talk about automobile design safety in the 1960s and ’70s when interior safety features became focused on, like seat belts. I don’t think there’s a single answer.

How does America’s relationship to design differ from other countries?

In Europe there tends to be much more checking of designs in an independent way. If someone designs a bridge, another company that’s totally unrelated will check the bridge in a very official way. In America, we tend to rely on self checking within the same company. Practices are becoming global, differences that used to exist are becoming fewer and smaller. So the way a bridge is designed in America or Europe or Asia today pretty much is the same, because the same companies are often involved worldwide. An American engineering company might design a bridge in China, or at least be involved as consultants. Though China is growing and becoming increasingly independent, so they can do everything on their own. A smaller country, if they want to build a tall skyscraper they would generally hire a firm from outside the country because that’s where the experience would be. When Malaysia wanted to build the tallest building in the world a couple decades ago, they hired architects and engineers from the West.

In her new book, “Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire,” Julie Berebitsky, professor of history and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Sewanee University and author, previously, of “Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood,” explores a vast array of sources, including advertisements, advice guides, archival sources and actual experiences of male and female office workers, to better understand which of our attitudes have changed, and which have stubbornly remained the same. It’s a dramatic reminder of the fact that men have claimed to be hardwired for sex — and women have been accused of being temptresses seeking special favors — long before Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas.

Salon spoke with Berebitsky over the phone about the evolution of sexual harassment, whether romance in the office is actually allowed, and the future of gender equality in the workplace.

Who coined the term “sexual harassment”? Why was there a need for the term then? How has sexual harassment in the office evolved since the term was coined?

Sexual harassment, the term, was coined in 1975 by a group of feminists at Cornell University who were working in the human relations office. They encountered a woman who had been sexually harassed in one of the science departments by her boss. He was doing things like putting his hand up her dress at office parties and trying to corner her. She was so distressed that she ultimately quit her job. When she couldn’t find another job she tried to apply for unemployment insurance but was turned down because they said she hadn’t quit for cause, she should have put up with her boss’s behavior. She complained to human affairs at Cornell where there were a number of feminists working. They had the first speak-out against sexual harassment in 1975 and the coin was termed. It became a term that activists and women could unite around and turn into a social movement. I argue that one of the reasons why it didn’t become a social issue before the 1970s is that it was too difficult for women who occupied a marginal place in the labor force to come forward.

How has it changed since then? How has sexual harassment in the office evolved since the 1970s when the term became something defined and a movement?

Laws have changed things dramatically. In 1986 the Supreme Court in Meritor v. Vinson declared quid pro quo sexual harassment and hostile environment sexual harassment to be a violation of Title 7. Certainly things have changed dramatically since then, especially in terms of quid pro quo sexual harassment, which is where bosses give favors or wield power in return for something sexual. That type of sexual harassment has dropped dramatically as companies have instituted various policies and awareness programs. Things have changed less in what’s referred to as hostile environment sexual harassment. Here, there’s a certain discourse that women are overly sensitive, that women are making things up, that sometimes women are using an accusation of sexual harassment to get back at a man. Overall there’s still a good deal of distrust towards women. After Herman Cain, the Washington Post did a survey where men were asked, “Are you worried about a false accusation of sexual harassment?” Fully one-quarter of men that were questioned said yes. So there’s still this belief that women lie.

You wrote that “Sex and the Office” isn’t so much a history of sex and the workplace but an attempt to answer the question: Who really needs protection from the predatory intentions of the opposite sex—women or men? This is the question that Americans have been debating since the early 19th century. What’s the answer?

I believe sexual harassment is about power. And I believe that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination because the way it works keeps women out of certain positions. It’s a given that men occupy powerful positions in the workplace. I think women are in more need of protection. I don’t deny that women can harass. And certainly there’s real harassment against gays and lesbians which is a whole other part of the problem—that anyone who doesn’t fit our gender norms can find him or herself under attack—so I think that we need to keep thinking about how our cultural values and a distrust of women in sexual matters work together to keep women down. For example, this whole notion of women as sexual temptresses existed from the minute women first entered the office to the present. Lots of successful women talk about how they have to worry if they’re promoted too quickly or if there’s a hint that have any sort of relationship with the man in charge, they’re going to get tagged that they slept their way to the top. We believe men are sexual creatures and that their sexual behavior, even when inappropriate, is natural. “The Male Brain” by Louann Brizendine M.D., has a chapter titled, “The Brain Below the Belt,” in which she says that men are hardwired in this sexual way. I think on one hand we have a cultural stereotype that women use their sexuality to take advantage of men’s sexual vulnerability. On the other hand we have: Men, that’s just the way they are sexually. I think those two cultural discourses hurt women more than they hurt men.

Why did you choose to focus on harassment of women working in white collar offices as opposed to institutions like schools, factories, hospitals, and private homes that have a longer history of employing women?

One of the things that makes the office so different is that it was widely understood that women and men who worked in the office were middle class. Already in the late 19th century people were saying: “Factory owners are coarse men, they might try to extort sex from the women who work under them, but middle class businessmen wouldn’t.”  I thought that was an interesting issue to examine. By the 1950s, a majority of American women who worked outside the home were employed in white collar jobs. I was interested in looking at cultural representations of behaviors that we would now define as sexual harassment. There are so many films about the white collar workplace, so many pieces of fiction about it, that it really allowed me to expand beyond the study of a more factual “this is what happens to women” approach, and also to talk about cultural representation. People always saw unwanted behaviors as the flip side of wanted behaviors. So we see sexual harassment as something distinct, but historically Americans haven’t made such a rigid distinction. It was just all part of the culture of the office.

Do women take the majority of the blame during instances of sexual harassment at work? If so, why do you think that is?

Before the 1970s, the only time that there had been widespread concern about sexual harassment was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when many people were saying middle class women were without sexual desire. So here we had these passionless women working in offices in one-on-one situations with men: Will those men take advantage of those women?

Even as some reformers were talking about that, we already had a kind of counter discourse that said, “No, these office women are lust pirates who will destroy a businessman’s marriage. Women use their power over men to get a day off or easier workload.” By the 1920s, that desire to protect women completely vanished. What we see happen historically is that in the 1920s society started to acknowledge that women have sexual desire. At that point it became expected that the modern working girl in an office would know how to handle a man’s attention. If you look at guidebooks in the ’20s and ’30s designed for women workers they say: “It’s likely you’ll encounter a Felix the Feeler, but it’s your job as a modern woman to know how to handle him.” They also advise: “if you can’t deal with Felix the Feeler on your own, you’re going to have to quit because men are the valued employees.” In addition, you see the rise of psychiatry, which diagnoses these men as suffering from a midlife crisis. The problem with that is it says: “This is temporary behavior; we as a society don’t need to see it as a social problem. This man is going through a midlife crisis, eventually he’ll come out of it, and meanwhile the modern girl should be able to handle it.” It absolves the man for any responsibility and says it’s up to the woman to handle his behavior. 

Can you talk a little bit about what happens to a woman in the workplace once she’s accused a co-worker of sexual harassment?

I’m a historian, not an attorney, so this is a place where I’m not quite as confident in my analysis. If an employee accuses a co-worker of sexual harassment, she can take it to her employer and see what he would like to do. If she signed a contract that said: “If I have any problems I agree to solve it through confidential arbitration,” then it would become an in-house process decided through arbitration and she would have to live with the results. This came up with Herman Cain, the arbitration and confidential settlement. If she hadn’t signed that contract she could file a claim with the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) which is the central agency that is charged with enforcing Title 7, which makes sexual harassment illegal. About 12,000 claims are filed each year. The majority of those EEOC cases are settled out of court through arbitration. And then the other option would be to file a private civil case. A lot of men and women still quit.

You mentioned Herman Cain. Presidents Kennedy and Clinton have been accused of sleeping with interns. Do you think that the political office is more prone to sexual harassment?

No, not at all. I think that those cases get a lot of publicity. It’s an understanding that powerful manhood includes sexual access to women. That version of masculinity encourages sexual harassment in some ways. In the 1950s, there was a big scandal where General Electric and other businesses — Edward R. Murrow did an expose of this — were using prostitutes to close deals. And it was just what it meant to be a white collar man. My argument in part is that our cultural understanding of masculinity for businessmen and politicians, that realm, is all about sexual success with women. Sex is part of our understanding of successful men.

In addition to gender in the workplace, you write about race. African-American women were prominent in the first efforts to use the new sexual harassment laws. Why was this group on the forefront?

Most scholars argue that African-American women, because of their experiences of racism and the long history of African-American women sexual assaults from slavery to the present, were more sensitized to the issue and saw it as something that was about power and discrimination before many white women did.

How are other industrialized countries dealing with unwanted sexual attention at work?

France has a different attitude towards sexual attention. It’s not handled legally in the same way, it’s not considered discrimination. All industrialized nations are tackling the problem in some way, and in the last couple of years people have been talking about sexual harassment in India as more and more women enter the labor force there. I think all industrialized nations have certainly acknowledged sexual harassment. Going back to the notion of culture, sex is treated differently in every place. The French, for example, think the U.S. treatment of sexual harassment is crazy, that of course there are going to be romantic relationships in the workplace, that’s just the way things are. Certainly there are prohibitions against sexual harassment in France, but they think we’ve taken it too far.

How do you respond to critics of sexual harassment laws, like Katie Roiphe who wrote in the New York Times, “In our effort to create a wholly unhostile work environment, have we simply created an environment that is hostile in a different way?”

I don’t think she takes it very seriously. Roiphe and others are not really critical of hostile environment sexual harassment. The people who dismiss it always return to the idea of women being overly sensitive or that women just can’t take a joke. In fact, the examples of hostile environment sexual harassment that I’ve found are not minor incidents. The thing to remember is that it’s actually quite difficult to make a sexual harassment claim. At most, 5 to 15 percent of women who experience sexual harassment legally do anything about it. And of those 12,000 cases that the EEOC investigates each year, only about 50 percent are found to have any cause. There’s this unfounded notion that we’re all living in fear of sexual harassment and feminists are making mountains out molehills. These instances are not trivial. One incident in the early 1970s was when a secretary has a co-worker who keeps asking her out. She tells her employer he’s hassling her, the employer tells the man to cool it. But he really doesn’t. It goes on for a number of months, six or eight, until she comes back to her desk after lunch and finds a glass soft drink bottle covered in vaseline, dead flowers in it, and a rambling completely discombobulated note. I think most women would assume that as a threat of rape. In my opinion, men should not be allowed to do that in the workplace. A way to ensure they don’t is to make it illegal. I’ve seen evidence from the late 19th century to the present of bosses who call in their secretary to take dictation and dictate sexually explicit material that has nothing to do with the business at hand, just to watch the woman squirm, to get a thrill. I found a couple of examples where the boss calls the secretary into the office, and he drops his pants in front of her. It’s so bizarre, but it happens. It happened historically, it happens now. We need to take it seriously.

What does the future look like for sex and the office? Will there ever be gender equality in the workplace?

Yes. Someday there will be gender equality in the workplace. The thing to know about sexual harassment is that feminists are not anti-sex. What they are trying to do is create a workplace in which consensual sexual relations are possible, but all of the coercive ones are gone. Where a power element didn’t color relationships in the office. Feminists are not really against consensual sex, they’re skeptical about relationships in which there’s a distinct power differentiation. But the idea is for men and women to be able to work together as equals who are able to enter into romantic and sexual relationships as equals. We just need to get rid of the unwanted and unwelcome relationships that work against gender equality.

Historian Nancy L. Cohen, author of the new book, “Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America,” explains how America’s conflicted attitudes toward the sexual revolution have fueled America’s political wars for the past 40 years, causing a deep divide that has remade the cultural landscape. Cohen describes how a minority of America’s population is making antiquated decisions about legislation that infringes dangerously on the rights of America’s majority.

Salon spoke with Cohen — who has held positions at UCLA and Binghamton University and is the author, previously, of “The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914” — over the phone about the sexual counterrevolution, how America has become polarized over sex and family values and whether there’s hope for our future. 

You coined the term sexual counterrevolution to describe the political reaction against the changes ushered in by the sexual revolution. Why do you think we need a term like this to understand our political history?

I think what’s been missing from the debate about why American politics are so polarized and really, frankly, so insane these days is this recognition that there has been a concerted, organized movement to turn back the changes brought about by the sexual revolution: feminism and gay rights. And it seemed to be logical to coin a term to talk about this broad shadow movement that’s been effecting our politics for 40 years.

Why is the sexual counterrevolution so key to solving our political and economic problems?

The voting base that has fueled the rise of the right cared most about these issues — of sex and gender and family and abortion and gay marriage. Their conservatism on those issues initially moved them into the Republican Party and has basically thrown anyone out of the Republican Party that disagrees with them. For other reasons, these people who I call sexual fundamentalists support small government except in your bedroom because they feel that liberals and secular humanists and Democrats have imposed these cultural values on the country that they don’t support. So they want to go back to a time when religious morality dictated the law on family and sex in America. They want to go back to a time when gay sex was illegal, abortion was illegal, and now they’re going after birth control.

I thought one of the most interesting parts of your book was the history of the Democratic shift toward the middle and the GOP change from a progressive party into what we currently have. You wrote that sexual counterrevolution is not a bipartisan affair, but do you think it’s as simple as Democrats for sex and Republicans against it?

No, I don’t. There was a conservative reaction in the Democratic Party in the ’70s — against feminism, and gay rights, and broad changes in the culture. That conservative reaction died out fairly quickly in the party in part because the people advocating it were quite old. When they passed away and the party adopted more progressive positions, it didn’t have that conservative wing anymore. But the Democrats have tended to overreact to this movement on the right and feel that being progressive on these cultural issues loses elections for them. I think generally Democrats have a kind of live-and-let-live attitude towards people’s family life and their sex life, but Democrats worry that they’ll lose elections, so they move to the right on these social issues. That’s exactly what we saw with the Obama administration retreating on its decision on birth control coverage.

All the evidence shows that this is just wrong, that Democrats win elections for standing up for progressive social values. The problem is, that Democrats really do believe, for example, that they’re going to lose white Catholics if they take a principled stand. And so you have these voices in the Democratic Party warning them that they’ll lose the election if they stand firm on this rule, and those voices trump the majority.

What makes sex such a central issue to Americans in particular? Other countries have managed to liberalize their attitudes successfully, what do you think makes America different, than say, England?

America is by far the most religious of the advanced nations. I think there’s a long history in America of puritanicalism, of excessive religiosity. The opposition to modern sexual mores, by this point, is really entirely concentrated among the most religiously orthodox people in the country and among the religions that take a particularly traditionalist view of sex: That it only belongs in heterosexual marriage, that sex outside of marriage is a sin, that homosexual sex is a sin, that even for someone like Santorum, sex that doesn’t lead to children is wrong.

What does the media’s emphasis on sex have to do with America’s sex obsession?

We have this kind of schizophrenic culture where sex is kind of all over the place, but sex remains something that’s difficult to talk about honestly and something that’s shameful for this small minority of the country.  I think the media, in terms of understanding how the sex issues play in politics, misses the point. Most of the media said that the debates over the government shutdown were about funding for Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, when in fact it was about Family Planning Services. The media allows the right to frame the debate in a way that obscures what motivations are behind it.

Teen sex is a hot topic in the U.S. Why is it such a flashpoint?

Generally, even though half of all 16-year-olds are sexually active, Americans still have discomfort over teenagers having sex. The right has been very effective at making our general debates about birth control, emergency contraceptive and abortion about teenagers — and not just teenagers, but very young teenagers. If you listen to newscasters on FOX news you’ll hear them talking about 13- and 14-year-olds having sex. Well, there are about 2 percent of 13-year-olds having sex. 

How do the successes of the gay marriage movement fit into the sexual counterrevolution?

[Sexual fundamentalists] dislike gays as much as they dislike unmarried women having sex, so it is one of the core issues. As with the abortion and birth control debate, they find the wedge where they’re going to attract voters beyond their tiny 15 to 20 percent of core supporters.

Which Republican presidential candidate hopeful do you see doing that (finding the wedge to attract voters) the most in this election?

There’s really no difference between them. The rhetoric is different. Gingrich is the most bombastic. Santorum is the most pompous. Romney is the one most willing to have it both ways, so that when centrist voters pay attention they don’t realize how extreme his positions are.

How do you see Obama using sexuality as a tool for votes?

I think Obama largely wants to stay away from it. On the other hand, he’s a little bit too reluctant to engage the opposition in a principled way. I have to say I find it astonishing that after the Prop. 8 ruling, Obama’s spokesman said that Obama is still evolving on gay marriage. Now, no one really believes that he thinks there’s a legal case to be made on outlawing gay marriage, but he’s still under the sway of the idea that he’ll lose the election if he takes a principled stand. The surveys of public opinion suggest that he would benefit from taking a principled stand in support of gay marriage.

Will we see a presidential candidate in the near future who will be pro-choice and in support of gay marriage rights and be able to win the election?

I think we’re already at a place where if a candidate did say that, he or she would win the election. The sexual fundamentalists, as I said, make up less than 20 percent of the population, and they’re outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1 in the electorate. The so-called middle of America is progressive on these issues — 54 percent of Americans still favor legal abortion. Only 19 percent want it outlawed in all cases like the Republican candidates promise this year. Whether we’ll see it has a lot to do with whether there is high engagement in the election and whether the people who believe in this stay involved. I think it’s also going to involve educating Democratic politicians that they’ve got it all wrong. That they can win elections on this.

Is there room for a third party, an extremely leftist liberal group, the opposite of the Tea Party? Is that something Americans would embrace?

Institutionally, there is not room in America for a third party, but I think there is room for a movement on the progressive end of the spectrum that would actually attract lots of people in the so-called middle to pressure the Democratic Party to take a principled stand on protecting civil rights and equal rights and human rights.

What do you see as the long-term outcome of the sexual counterrevolution? Do you think there’s hope?

I do think there’s hope. And I think there’s a way to hold it at bay, and in some ways defeat it if everyone stays informed about what’s going on and stays active, and votes in every election. In 2010, 40 million Americans who voted in 2008 stayed home, and that’s how the Tea Party elected these Republicans who want to outlaw birth control, abortion and gay marriage. If all those people who had voted in 2008 had voted in 2010, we would have never had this far-right Republican majority in Congress. The answer is to vote and stay informed, and we can put an end to this.