Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (52 page)

It was left to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an Indiana University entomologist, to focus these fears during the early 1950s. In 1948 he brought out his first book on American sexuality,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. Produced with little fanfare by a medical publisher, it relied on a host of interviews that Kinsey and his associates had been collecting for years. The book was 804 pages long, costly ($6.50), and full of jargon, charts, and graphs. Nonetheless, it soared quickly to the best-seller lists. His second volume,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, came out five years later. It ultimately sold some 250,000 copies and created a minor sensation.

It was not hard to see why, for Kinsey's books offered statistics that staggered Americans at the time. Between 68 and 90 percent of American males, he reported, had engaged in premarital sexual intercourse, as had nearly 50 percent of females; 92 percent of males and 62 percent of females had masturbated at least once; 37 percent of males and 13 percent of females had had at least one homosexual experience; 10 percent of males had led a more or less exclusively homosexual style of life within the previous three years; 50 percent of men and 26 percent of women had committed adultery before the age of 40. Kinsey added that around 8 percent of men and 4 percent of women had had some kind of sex with animals.
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Kinsey's volumes encountered angry criticism from virtually all directions. A few bookstores hid the volumes. Some libraries refused to buy them or to place them in general circulation, thereby forcing patrons to come up to the desk and openly ask for them. Many writers disputed Kinsey's statistics, contending that they were based on interviews with people, including large numbers of prisoners, who spun elaborate tales about nonexistent sexual exploits. In so doing, these reviewers said, Kinsey painted a falsely oversexed portrait of American society—one that thereby encouraged an "everybody's doing it" mentality. The Indiana Roman Catholic Archdiocese announced that Kinsey's studies helped "pave the way for people to believe in communism."
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A minister added that Kinsey "would lead us, like deranged Nebuchadnezzars of old, out into the fields to mingle with the cattle and become one with the beasts of the jungle."
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Other reviewers, including some who distanced themselves a bit from moralists such as these, joined in the fray, which spilled over into newspapers and magazines for months after each of the volumes appeared. Reinhold Niebuhr worried that the books would encourage excessive sexual freedom. Margaret Mead predicted that Kinsey's findings might "increase the number of young men who may indulge in 'outlets' with a sense of hygienic self-righteousness."
³⁶
Lionel Trilling, one of America's most respected literary critics, agreed that sensible talk about sex might dispel old myths and hang-ups. But he objected to the false pose of scientific objectivity that he thought Kinsey affected, and to Kinsey's simple-minded reduction of sex to physical activity, especially orgasm. Kinsey, he charged, used "facts" to celebrate an ideology of "liberation" and a "democratic pluralism of sexuality."
³⁷
The Rockefeller Foundation, which had financed many of Kinsey's researches, bowed to rising criticism of the reports and cut off his funding in 1954.
³⁸

Whether Kinsey's data were accurate remains controversial years later. He was probably correct, for instance, to conclude that homosexuality was more widespread than Americans at the time wished to believe. Indeed, some gay people were beginning to organize. A group of homosexual men in Los Angeles formed the Mattachine Society in 1951 with the hope of promoting more liberal understanding and arousing opposition against the vicious harassment of "queers" by police and other authorities.
³⁹
On the other hand, because Kinsey conducted many of his interviews with prisoners, he may have exaggerated the extent of homosexual behavior.
⁴⁰

Still, there was no doubting that Kinsey and his associates had done a great deal of research, including some 18,000 lengthy personal interviews. There were no better data at the time. Moreover, he was surely accurate in pointing out that various forms of amatory activity, especially premarital sex, had risen steadily in America during the twentieth century. Each new age cohort of young people was more sexually active—and at earlier ages—than the one that preceded it. This was as true for women as for men and for people in the middle classes as well as for those lower on the social scale. In reporting such trends Kinsey helped to demystify sex.
⁴¹

While
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
was still generating angry editorials,
Playboy
arrived on the newsstands, in December 1953. It was the creation of Hugh Hefner, a young college graduate who had worked for
Esquire
. Neither Hefner nor anyone else expected the issue to sell very well. But it did, in large part because its "centerfold" carried a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, who was already a well-known young star. The issue sold 53,000 copies, enabling Hefner (who had gone into debt to finance publication) to bring out more. Within a year
Playboy
issues were selling over 173,000 copies; by 1960 its circulation per month was over a million. By then Hefner had branched out to establish Playboy Clubs in major American cities. In 1961 his pre-tax profits from
Playboy
approached $1.8 million while his profits from the clubs were nearly $1.5 million.
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The rise of
Playboy
revealed the onrushing growth of America's consumer culture. Hefner deliberately and gleefully advertised a "playboy philosophy" of self-gratification. Like the expensive ads (many of them pushing cigarettes and liquor) that puffed up the size of his magazines, he equated satisfaction with hedonistic consumption. In so doing he appealed to two central fantasies of the modern consumer culture: first, that people should be free, and second, that happiness inhered in material things. The genius of Hefner, said sex researcher Paul Gebhard in 1967, was that "he has linked sex with upward mobility." Another critic added, "Real sex [for Hefner] is something that goes with the best scotch, twenty-seven-dollar sun glasses, and platinum-tipped shoelaces."
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The surging circulation of
Playboy
exposed how flimsy the floodgates of traditionalism were becoming, and others soon rushed through the gap to ride on the big business of sex. One was Grace Metalious, a thirty-two-year-old New Hampshire housewife who produced
Peyton Place
in September 1956. Until then Metalious had never published a line, and her prose was overwrought. But her novel was graphic for its time about sex and made good on the claim of its jacket: to "lift the lid off a small New England town." Thanks mainly to its sexual openness (and perhaps because of a quasi-feminist subtext that appealed to female readers),
Peyton Place
sold 6 million copies by early 1958. When it surpassed 10 million it became the best-selling novel ever, overtaking Erskine Caldwell's
God's Little Acre
(1933) (which itself focused on sex).
⁴⁴

The gates kept falling. Vladimir Nabokov, a highly regarded writer, brought out
Lolita
, a book that (among many other things) highlighted the adventures of a sexy "nymphet," in 1958. It sold more than 3 million paperback copies and rose to number three on the fiction best-seller list. Heartened by the flow of profits, publishers and civil libertarians joined forces to tear down the now crumbling barriers that had protected censorship of sexually explicit materials. In 1958 they succeeded, when the unexpurgated Grove Press edition of D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
appeared in American bookstores. By 1959 the book had risen to number five on the list of best-sellers.

To permit writing about sex was one thing; to have sex flashed on the silver screen, where it could be seen in the darkness by millions and millions of people, was another. For years states had censored movies. Since 1934 Hollywood had tried to honor a self-regulating Production Code that banned explicit handling of sensitive subjects, including homosexuality, incest, and interracial romance. Profanity was forbidden. Movies must not show the "intimate parts of the body—specifically the breasts of women." "Impure love," the Code said, "must never be presented as attractive and beautiful. . . . Passion should be so treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element."
⁴⁵

But Hollywood, too, became more liberal in its depiction of sexuality in the 1950s. In 1953 it had explored the theme of adultery in
From Here to Eternity. A
few months after publication of
Peyton Place
it brought out
Baby Doll
, featuring the sultry presence of Carroll Baker.
Time
called the film (which was tame by later standards) "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally permitted."
⁴⁶
Hundreds of theater owners, worried about the reactions of traditionalists, refused to show it. Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York was so incensed that he took to the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral, for the first time in seven years, in order to denounce it. Catholics who saw this "evil" and "revolting" film, the cardinal proclaimed, would do so under "pain of sin."
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Not even the Holy Mother Church could stem the tide, however. The Code, cut adrift under the rush of cultural change, gradually lost its force. Elizabeth Taylor, like Baker and Monroe, began to star in films that showed a good deal more female flesh than a few years earlier. The studios moved quickly to cash in on sexy books, putting out poorly made movie versions of
Peyton Place, Lolita
, and
Lady Chatterley's Lover
before the decade was out. They also began—very gingerly—to handle other controversial subjects: miscegenation in
Island in the Sun
(1957), homosexuality in
Compulsion
(1958), and abortion in
Blue Denim
(1959).

All these developments preceded yet another boon for sexual liberation in the United States. This was the decision of the Food and Drug Administration in May 1960 to approve the sale by prescription of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive for women. Although the decision at first attracted little attention—the
New York Times
carried the story on page 78—women reacted eagerly to arrival of "the Pill, "which promised at once to save them from unwanted pregnancies and to make them as free about sex as men had always been. The double standard, some imagined, might collapse. By the end of 1962, 2.3 million women were using the Pill. Clare Boothe Luce exulted, "Modern woman is at last free as a man is free, to dispose of her own body."
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The effects of the Pill, however, lay in the future. What is striking about the undoubted liberalization of sexual attitudes in the 1950s is how slowly some things seemed to change. Many institutions tried hard to hold a line: all but a few universities maintained restrictive parietal rules until the late 1960s. Their efforts suggested that parents still expected their children to conform to older norms of sexual behavior.

Other statistics suggested the enduring desire of people to find meaning in long-term, monogamous family life. Following the disruptions of wartime, divorce rates dropped sharply after 1947. Despite the passage of more liberal divorce laws in the 1950s, these rates remained lower throughout the 1950s (and early 1960s) than they had been since 1942. Illegitimacy rates also remained stable.
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Marriage rates fell off a bit from the record peaks of the early postwar years but stayed very high. Despite world-record participation in higher education, Americans in the 1950s still married young (an average of around 22 for men and 20 for women) and were more likely to be married (90 percent or more at some point in their lives) than people anywhere else on the planet.
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The baby boom did not slow until 1958, after which it declined only gradually through 1964.

Playboys (or girls) were surely not the norm. Public opinion polls revealed that young people in the 1950s unquestioningly expected to marry and raise families—what else was possible? These feelings were especially strong among women. "It is not a matter of'want' or 'like to' or 'choice,'" one young women said about marrying. "Why talk about things that are as natural and as routine as breathing?" Another woman, asked why she hoped to marry and have children, responded, "Why do you put your pants on in the morning? Why do you walk on two feet instead of one?"
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Sexual liberation, driven in part by the wider liberalization of attitudes that came with the Biggest Boom Yet, and in part by the buoyant commercialization of the consumer culture, was gathering great power in the 1950s. Not until the 1960s, however, did its power really become obvious.