Make talk, not love

David Allyn talks about his history of the sexual revolution, in which he says talking about sex is sexier than sex.

By David Bowman

Apr 22, 2000 | If you were born in the United States before, say, 1974, "Make Love Not War" is one of the most intimate histories you can read. All of us were either adult participants or child/adult observers of the so-called sexual revolution, an era that began with the legalization of birth control in the early 1960s and proceeded with the invention of the Pill, the miniskirt, the R-rated movie, the practice of wife swapping, non-sexist sexual cohabitation, gay liberation, American bestiality and -- what have you.

David Allyn didn't interview me and he probably didn't interview you, but our experience is as valid as anyone else's. The fun of reading "Make Love Not War" is bouncing our personal histories against Allyn's "official" one to see what he got right.

Or wrong.

And mostly Allyn gets it wrong. Not factually, but in spirit. Right off the bat Allyn assigns too much cultural importance to the topless bathing suit, as if this slight cultural gift from France were somehow equal in importance to or even responsible for the invention of the Pill. But this slip is just a judgment call -- after all, the kid wasn't born back then.

But as you read on you realize that Allyn has an edge to most everything he's chronicling, be it urban swinging or suburban orgies or the whole concept of "worry-free" sex. Allyn doesn't appear to be a prude. Something else is going on. By the time this historian has reached Alex Comfort's '70s American bible, "The Joy of Sex," it hits you:

Allyn is just really pissed off.

His latent anger at the sexual revolution is not because he was too young to be a sexually active participant. Allyn writes from the view of a neglected child. But this doesn't invalidate his history. Instead, it makes the book more fascinating. "Make Love, Not War" is the first salvo from a children's crusade opposed to any era that prefers adult pleasures to those of its children.

In your book, you say most of the pleasure of sex comes from talking about having had it -- shall you and I have some fun?

Excellent.

When did you begin writing this cultural chronicle?

It was my history dissertation at Harvard. I started graduate school in the fall of '91. I began it the summer of my second year. I'll let you do the math.

So for most of the 1990s you've been a sex historian?

Kind of weird, huh?

What's that like?

It's driven everyone else crazy. A friend recently told me that for years he avoided going to lunch with me because he didn't want to have to answer personal questions about his sex life.

So, as a historian, why are you so pissed off about the sexual revolution?

Oh. [Pause.] See, I really didn't want it to come across that way.

Have people been saying this?

[Pause.] Only you. Some reviewers thought I was extraordinarily liberal. It's funny, the reviewers have spanned the spectrum. The Washington Post reviewer said I was a champion for sexual revolution. And the New York Times said I was not an erotic partisan. It's been interesting that way. I just wanted to present a nuanced view because people have different experiences.

But you end the book with an experience of your angry peers -- children whose parents went through the sexual revolution. Like the girl whose mother missed the kid's school play because of an appointment with a sex therapist.

What I was trying to say was the attention of the culture wasn't on kids. The attention of the culture was on adults. And one's own pleasure as an adult. And one's own needs. There's nothing wrong with that, but what was missing was a certain amount of attention on kids as well. Kids have different needs and different expectations.

I'm eternally grateful for the transformation of our society. In 1965 birth control was illegal in the state of Connecticut. I hope to God we don't go back to that.

What did you observe your parents doing? I assume they weren't wife swapping.

My parents got divorced when I was about 4. My father moved to a singles colony down near Atlanta and then moved to L.A. He dated lots of flight attendants. And my mom went to Club Med and met a man and fell in love and got married.

As your generation's first historian of your parents' sex lives, what was the relationship between the sexual revolution and divorce?

You started to see your parents as sexual beings at a much earlier age -- when they're dating other people. I used to go on my father's dates. It was impossible not to see him in a sexual light. He had a water bed and the whole thing. That definitely had an impact.

I used to hang out at my aunt and uncle's apartment on Central Park West. And there were a lot of erotic photographs around that had been taken in the 1960s. And "The Joy of Sex" was always there. I loved that. That was always fun. So I definitely felt the whole swirl of the sexual revolution in my life. I remember when I was a teenager my stepmother said to me, "Every time you call I'm hoping you're calling to tell me that you've lost your virginity." [Pause.] I didn't need to know that.

So your generation didn't have to sneak around when you were kids?

The only thing I kept secret was gay pornography. I wasn't gay, but gay porn seemed so forbidden.

Next Page: The real sexual revolution was the end of monogamy

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