Pop quiz.
Who did more to influence sex in the 20th Century, Sigmund Freud or Henry Ford?
Every red-blooded American should know the answer to that one. The automobile, made widely accessible by Ford’s assembly line, allowed young men and women to go on dates beyond the front porch, greatly improving opportunities for clandestine amorous activity.
Clearly the car did more to liberate the libido than any psychological theory.
“The automobile allowed you to leave town” for romantic picnics or roadhouse assignations, says James R. Petersen in his intriguing book, “The Century of Sex, Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900-1999” (Grove Press, $35).
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who wrote the book’s foreword, says the sexual revolution in the United States began long before the first edition of Playboy was published in November 1953.
“Many of the issues we debate today — sexual expression, sex education, birth control, abortion, disease, law — were first framed at the turn of the century,” Hefner writes.
Not surprising, Hefner and Petersen firmly believe that sex has been the primary motivating factor of the 20th Century. Certainly, they make a strong case for their view.
The century began and ended with the United States embroiled in public battles over sex. In the early 1900s, there was Anthony Comstock, the powerful postal censor, pushing through the Comstock Act, which banned obscene materials from the mails. Then there was Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated the affair between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which ended in the president’s impeachment and his acquittal by the Senate in February.
In between, the country seemed to come of age sexually with all the hormonal turbulence of a teenager going through puberty. There were explosions of sexual energy, such as during the Jazz Age of the 1920s or the free-love era of the ’60s. And there were moral convulsions, from the white-slave hysteria of 1910 to the communist and homosexual witch hunts of the 1950s.
The history of sex in the 20th Century is more than just a story about what has gone on behind bedroom doors. Sexuality in America has been dramatically influenced by urbanization, technological change and the mass media. Rapid change, however, also has resulted in attempts to control sexual behavior by regulating what could be seen, read or even discussed by the public regarding sex.
A senior editor at Playboy and former Playboy Advisor, Petersen discovered that writing the book offered a rare chance to “time-travel to parts of the century you didn’t get to in high school and college. Every decade I had a major moment of discovery. I fell in love with someone in every decade,” he says from his office in Chicago.
He populates his history with clearly defined heroes, who are pro-sex, and villains, who censor and repress and who are mostly painted as hypocrites who do not practice what they preach.
For every Anthony Comstock, there is an Ida Craddock, one of the country’s earliest sex advisers. Craddock wrote explicit sex manuals for women at the turn of the century, including the popular “Wedding Night,” which provided step-by-step instructions for couples seeking mutual satisfaction in bed.
In 1902, Comstock had Craddock arrested for sending “Wedding Night” through the mail. After a jury found her guilty and before her sentencing, Craddock put her head in an oven and committed suicide, but not before writing a note asking the American people to investigate Comstock’s trampling on her “right to freedom of religion and to freedom of the press.”
Comstock also battled with another sex pioneer, Margaret Sanger, over pamphlets she wrote offering advice to women about sex and birth control. Eventually, Sanger opened America’s first birth-control clinic in 1916. It was closed 10 days later when the vice squad arrived and arrested her. Found guilty, she got a 30-day sentence in the workhouse.
Petersen says he was amazed by the amount of sexual activity in the country during the first three decades of the 20th Century. “Basically everyone born before 1900 was virgin at marriage. And everyone after was not.”
The Jazz Age, along with the country’s prosperity, ended with the crash of the stock market on Oct. 24, 1929. With it came the bleak times of the 1930s, when sex — like prohibition booze — became something of an illicit commodity. “I hated the 1930s,” Petersen says. “Poverty strangled sex.”
With the 1940s came World War II and another loosening of sexual restraints. Premarital and extramarital sex became rampant. Just in time, penicillin was discovered to combat venereal disease. By mid-1944, there were a million and a half Americans on British soil, a fact that contributed to the third of a million illegitimate babies born in Britain during the war, according to Petersen.
Then in 1948, the curtain was officially lifted on sex in America with the first volume of Alfred Kinsey’s report on American sexual practices. The authoritative 800-page “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” based on thousands of interviews, shocked Americans but also became an instant best seller.
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Among Kinsey’s conclusions: 90 percent of the males interviewed masturbated, 85 percent engaged in premarital sex, 50 percent had extramarital affairs. (In a study released five years later, Kinsey found that half of the 6,000 women interviewed said they had not been virgins when they married.)
If the 1950s were the days of family togetherness as depicted on the popular TV show “Father Knows Best,” they were also a time of rampant paranoia about communists, UFOs — and homosexuals. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told Congress that federal agents had identified over 400 “sex deviates in government service.” Hoover got permission to launch a special Sex Deviates Program, which compiled more than 300,000 pages of material on the private lives of Americans.
At the same time, rock ‘n’ roll fused with the rebellious tendencies of adolescence to create a sexual energy that would sweep over the country and shape its culture well into the next decade.
The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 was the appropriate launch to this decade of flower children and free love. But the next three decades would also see continued legal and cultural battles over sex education, homosexuality, abortion and pornography.
Meanwhile, the battle between the sexes heated up. Attention to sexual harassment was heightened by the contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings pitting Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill and by revelations of President Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This was “trial by scandal,” Petersen says, and the beginning of “victim-sexism.”
The AIDS epidemic prompted headlines pronouncing the “End of Sex” and the phrase “safe sex” slipped easily into the national vocabulary. Telephone sex even found its way into the White House. In the last years of the century, sex exploded on the Internet, but also induced a new moral panic over the impact of cybersex on the nation’s morals.
In the end, Petersen believes that the century ended on a positive note.
He points to two signs: Viagra, embraced by Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, helped people view sex as a “quality of life” issue rather than strictly a moral or legal one. And the presidential impeachment hearings helped to force a national debate over sex that ultimately was good for the country.
“When I started this book, I didn’t know how it was going to end,” Petersen says. “But we put it to a vote, and Bill Clinton is still in office.
“Sex triumphs.”