Labor of Love (17 page)

It is also easy to forget that the 1960s marked its second coming. The term “sexual revolution” was first used to describe the antics of the Flappers and Fussers of the Roaring Twenties. Two young and then unknown
New Yorker
writers, James Thurber and E. B. White, coined it in 1929, in a book that they wrote together and Thurber illustrated.
Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do
parodied the kinds of advice manuals that had become popular over the previous decade, which used Freudian vocabulary to explain to readers their own sex lives and psychological “adjustment.”

In the chapter titled “The Sexual Revolution,” the authors described the changes taking place in the language of rights. Specifically, they said that the revolution began when young women discovered that they had “the right to be sexual.” When the archetypal New Woman went to college, and then took a paying job, they said, she began to discover that she could do many things that only men had done before. The New Woman rented her own apartment. She smoked and drank and bobbed her hair. Sometimes she even
wanted
sex.

On January 24, 1964,
Time
magazine announced that “The Second Sexual Revolution” had arrived. The cover story observed that “champagne parties for teenagers, padded brassières for twelve-year-olds, and ‘going steady' at ever younger ages” had resulted in an “orgy of open-mindedness.”

There have always been rebels and libertines. Plenty of statistics show that turn-of-the-century shopgirls and dykes, Greeks and fairies, could be just as promiscuous as the hippies who succeeded them. The difference was that the first group had often described their own activities as unnatural, or at least exceptional. Their sex was sexy because it felt illicit.

By contrast, the soldiers of the second sexual revolution declared that no desire could be unnatural. If prior generations had winked that rules were made to be broken, more and more young people seemed to believe that no rules should exist. They agreed with the Flappers that everyone had a “right to be sexual.” However, they did not stress the equality that this right gave them. Instead, they argued that having sex was a way to express another inalienable right: freedom.

*   *   *

The 1960s' most important philosopher of freedom was a Jewish Marxist named Herbert Marcuse. Often hailed as the “father of the New Left,” he fled Nazi Germany and eventually took a position as a professor at Berkeley, where his teaching and writing made him a hero to the student radicals.

Marcuse's 1955 book
Eros and Civilization
anticipated the second sexual revolution, saying that technological progress would soon make sexual repression obsolete. Following Marx, Marcuse argued that increasing automation would eliminate the need for work and expand the opportunities for leisure. Freed from labor, people would soon escape what Marx called the “realm of necessity” and enter the “realm of freedom.” This meant that everyone would have more time to do what he or she wanted—including experimenting with sex.

To make the most of this new freedom, Marcuse wanted people to unlearn the Freudian psychology that had become so popular in the preceding decades. For Freud, sexual repression was an essential ingredient of human civilization. If we all had as much sex as we wanted all the time, Freud said, our species would never have discovered fire or made the wheel or figured out how to grow food or build houses or develop medicines.

Although this may have been true at an earlier stage of human history, Marcuse argued that sexual repression was no longer necessary. The new leisure would liberate sexuality, and transform society in the process. Laws governing sexual behavior would be repealed. Traditional institutions like marriage and monogamy would be overthrown.

Marcuse's message resonated with the partisans of the second sexual revolution. In his 1965 book
The Erotic Revolution
, the Beat poet Lawrence Lipton hailed the emancipation of sexual pleasure that technology and prosperity would soon make possible. “‘The New Leisure' is already presenting new opportunities for orgiastic recharging of the life-force,” he wrote.

Like other figures of the counterculture, Lipton demanded an end to all legal restraints on sexual behavior: “Repeal all the laws and statutes regulating premarital sex. Repeal all laws making homosexuality, male or female, illegal … Repeal all laws making any sexual act, the so-called ‘unnatural acts,' illegal.”

These laws had tried to contain sexuality within the conventions of marriage. They said that individuals should be allowed to invest their sexual energy only in particular kinds of relationships—the ones that would create new nuclear families and produce children. Lipton disagreed. He said that private relationships were like private property. Individuals should be able to spend their own sexual desires, and whatever desire they attracted from others, however they saw fit.

The ways that sexual revolutionaries spoke about sex often echoed the ways that free-market advocates were beginning to speak about the economy. Both wanted to maximize individual liberty. Both agreed that a laissez-faire approach was best.

While Marcuse was in Berkeley demanding sexual liberation, the economist Milton Friedman was in Chicago arguing for market liberalization. Friedman wanted to make markets as “free” as possible, by shrinking the state and slashing social protections. He believed that removing all barriers to economic activity was the fastest way to create a wealthy society.

The sexual revolutionaries said the same things about sexuality. Even though Friedman and Marcuse came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, each wanted to liberate individuals from all external restraints. The second sexual revolution is often cited as the moment when dating died. Dating did not die; it was simply deregulated. “Free love” turned the meet market of dating into a free market.

*   *   *

Laissez-Faire Love took many different guises. Before Marcuse and Lipton wrote about eros and the orgiastic life force, Hugh Hefner launched
Playboy
magazine. The first issue hit the newsstands in 1953. The centerfold showed a stark-naked Marilyn Monroe, sitting on folded knees and tilting back with one arm crossed behind her head. A wall of scarlet fabric is unfurled behind her. Her eyes are closed but her ruby lips are parted. They match the fabric.

Alongside nudes,
Playboy
brimmed with photos of “bachelor pads,” well appointed with barware and stereo equipment. The magazine allowed readers to enjoy a fantasy life of pure leisure, where having sex would be just like drinking a cocktail or listening to a record. Afterward, a man could smoke a cigarette and forget about the whole thing as quickly as he would the details of a James Bond paperback.

The life of ease that
Playboy
promised not only freed men from the constraints of marriage or monogamy. By turning female bodies into consumer objects, it also freed men from the burden of having to have feelings about the women they slept with. The editors promised readers that in the new age of abundance, they could “enjoy the pleasures that the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.” The architectural spreads promised men that they, too, could have rooms of their own.

Playboy
said that sex was ideally a form of recreation. The vision clearly appealed to people. At least, some people. The first issue sold out in two weeks, and
Playboy
quickly became a cultural fixture. By the early 1970s, each issue sold millions of copies and one in four male college students in the United States subscribed. By then, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the oral contraceptive pill for use. The availability of reliable birth control seemed to make it possible for women as well as men to at least daydream about treating sex as harmless fun.

When
Cosmopolitan
hired Helen Gurley Brown to rebrand it in 1965, after a decade of falling circulation, they created a national spokeswoman for the
Playboy
point of view. With Brown as editor,
Cosmopolitan
became a
Playboy
for girls—sort of. Like
Playboy
, the magazine was all about consumer pleasures, of which sex was the most important. Like
Playboy
, the covers featured scantily clad, conventionally beautiful white women. But while
Playboy
presented its readers with images of women they could enjoy and then dispose of,
Cosmo
told women how to make themselves enjoyable and disposable—the kinds of girls playboys desired.

The magazine called the ideal reader it imagined the Fun Fearless Female. Fun Fearless Feminism promised young women that they could have the same freedoms that their brothers and boyfriends did when it came to enjoying sex. It said that all these pleasures would come to them along with the other formerly masculine privilege they were suddenly claiming: the right to work outside their homes.

*   *   *

When a census taker arrived at the front door of the Friedan household in 1960, Betty was having a coffee with her friend and neighbor Gertie. Gertie overheard the man asking Betty what her occupation was, and Betty answering “housewife.”

Gertie interrupted. “You should take yourself more seriously.”

Betty corrected herself. “Actually, I'm a writer.”

It took her two more years to finish the book she was then struggling to finish,
The Feminine Mystique
. By the time it came out in 1963, Friedan was already used to giving interviews and appearing on television; the excerpts she had been publishing were garnering widespread attention. Over the next few years, she would be widely hailed for having helped launch the second-wave feminist movement in the United States.

The Feminine Mystique
opened with a chapter describing the sense of entrapment and discontentment that Friedan herself experienced as a full-time housewife during the 1940s and '50s, despite leading a life that closely resembled the ideals she saw on television, in movies, and in women's magazines. Friedan attested that her peers were suffering, too. She called what afflicted them “the problem that has no name.” By the end of the first chapter, she had diagnosed it. The housewives suffering from anxiety and depression and the alcohol they used to self-medicate were all struggling to come to terms with a voice in their head that said: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

For hundreds of pages,
The Feminine Mystique
investigates the forces that conspired to convince American women that they should want this life—and that if they were unhappy in it, there was something wrong with them. In the final chapter, Friedan laid out the necessary steps women could take to emancipate themselves.

The first thing they needed was work. Women, Friedan said, must make a “lifetime commitment … to a field of thought, to work of serious importance to society. Call it a ‘life plan,' a ‘vocation,' a ‘life purpose' if that dirty word
career
has too many celibate connotations,” she joked.

Friedan devoted many pages to the importance of systematic reforms in order to help women meet these goals. She called for a national program similar to the GI Bill for women who wanted to continue their education, which would cover tuition fees, books, travel expenses, and even household help, while they pursued higher degrees that might enable them to reenter the workforce.

She was optimistic that the first lucky women who broke through into male professions would help their sisters. “When enough women make life plans geared toward their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals … they will [not] have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution any more than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood.”

Yet in the popular version of the call to women to develop life plans, the serious and systematic elements of Friedan's argument faded out. The popular feminism Helen Gurley Brown pioneered at
Cosmo
sold well because it turned the life plan of the Career Girl into another glossy product.

*   *   *

Before she took over
Cosmo
, Brown had become a national celebrity for her advice book
Sex and the Single Girl
. It was hugely successful. One point of comparison: To date,
The Feminine Mystique
has sold three million copies.
Sex and the Single Girl
sold two million within the first three weeks.
Sex and the Single Girl
told female readers that they should feel just as free as the men they worked with to date around. They should ignore all the concerned friends and relatives urging them to get married and enjoy casual sex while focusing on their careers.

Like
Playboy
, Helen Gurley Brown constantly described sex as a form of “play” and “fun.” In her bestselling follow-up book
Sex and the Office
, Brown even refers to her male coworkers as “playmates.” Yet if a Single Girl could collect lovers, just as a playboy would, a big difference remained between them. Hugh Hefner constantly appeared in photographs in his bathrobe. He presented a vision of the life of
Playboy
as a life of leisure. Helen Gurley Brown, always pictured in neatly tailored skirt suits, knew that the women she wrote for could expect no such luck.

“There is a catch to achieving single bliss,” she warned. “You have to work like a son of a bitch.”

Despite her breezy prose, Brown's descriptions of the life of the Single Girl make it sound exhausting. “Why else is the single woman attractive?” she asked. “She has more time and often more money to spend on herself. She has the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make her face up for their date.”

At the dawn of dating, Charity Girls had turned to men to treat them because the pittances they earned hardly allowed them to support themselves otherwise, much less afford any leisure. But Helen Gurley Brown's Single Girl does not aspire to rest.