Straight (21 page)

The experience that worried Royden was, of course, sexual experience. Although it had been the Victorians, not their children, who had been responsible for what Ellen Rothman has characterized as “the invention of petting,”[
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] it seems that these Victorian parents, like
many since, were terrified at the thought that their children might experiment sexually in the same ways they had themselves. On cursory examination it seems that the older generation might not have had too much to worry about: the few surveys of sexual behavior that exist from the early decades of the twentieth century indicate that actual sexual intercourse before marriage remained a rarity. But on the other hand, the dating system had considerably changed the picture of premarital sexuality. Young people had many more opportunities for the kinds of noncoital sexual play commonly included under the heading of “necking and petting,” and with more partners. Possibilities for casual, noncoital promiscuity were thick on the ground.

These sexual opportunities had a distinctive economic side. Because of the nature of the date and the need to “go out,” companionship had a price tag. It was not entirely unlike the dynamics of prostitution, and men who paid for dates felt justified in expecting “thrills” in return for their investment. They frequently got them. As Beth Bailey puts it, “What men were buying in the dating system was not just female companionship, not just entertainment—but power. Money purchased obligation; money purchased inequality; money purchased control.”[
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]

If dating seemed more perilous than earlier modes of courtship, it was because in many ways it was. There was more privacy, more autonomy, and more danger. Many more women of a much wider range of socioeconomic classes were subject to sexual commoditization and exploitation on the a la carte basis of the date than had previously been the case. But there was more to the picture for women than just danger and exploitation. Sex could be a source of power, pleasure, and profit for them, too. So-called “charity girls” were likened to prostitutes who provided charity service because they gave sexual favors (possibly but not necessarily including intercourse) in exchange for the various things that a date might buy, including meals, entertainment, and gifts. And of course such “irregular relations” might be based in mutual respect and affection as well. Women's greater sexual latitude could even be viewed as a feminist victory. “Ethically it is better than prostitution,” Alison Neilans wrote in 1936, “because such relations, though they may be temporary, are not necessarily promiscuous on either side, and are often based on some friendship and liking and on
mutual interests. To some intelligent feminists this new approach to a single standard of morals represents the final triumph of the equality movement; to them this is, at last, freedom.”[
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]

TEENAGERS IN LOVE

At about the speed of the automobile, which swiftly became an all-but-indispensible accessory to a date, dating spread out of the cities and into the suburbs and countryside. At first a primarily American phenomenon, it also began to spread elsewhere in the West. Wherever it went, it took with it a new universal: teenagers in love.

Dating had become much more than just a path to marriage. By the time of the Second World War, dating had become a phase of life, a period between childhood and settled, married adulthood. One could speak of a young person who was “old enough to be dating” but still “too young to get married.” This phase of life coincided, more or less, with a period commonly called “youth” but also increasingly “adolescence,” a term popularized by American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall.

Adolescence was a realm of emotion. To an extent that was not, Hall claimed, true either for children or adults, adolescents were the subjects of “storm and stress,” an intense and reactive emotionality all its own.[
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] One of adolescence's hallmarks was the awakening of a conscious interest in sex and love. Adolescents, Hall believed, were “psychologically in the condition of Adam and Eve when they first knew they were naked.”[
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] This vulnerable stage had to be managed carefully, lest “premature or excessive experience in Venusberg” forever bar them from being able to achieve ideal adult relationships.[
33
] Hall and others like him strongly encouraged parents and educators to keep their hand on the rudder of the dating habits of the young and to actively educate them about love, so that love could be “less haphazard and less purely sentimental” and they would not fall prey to sexual promiscuity.[
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]

Dating, in this context, could be a form of education, a way of wading experimentally along the shores of the great sea of adult, married sexuality. Part of what made it acceptable was that before World War II, dating was not generally expected to involve exclusivity or emotional depth. “Playing the field,” at least in theory, was safer for
the young and offered the opportunity to meet and get to know a variety of potential mates.

Then things changed. In what could be characterized as a desperate end-run around the harsh prewar world of dating-and-rating competition, couples began to take a different approach. Serial monogamy, in the form of “going steady,” became the norm for dating.[
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] At the same time, the age of marriage plummeted, due to a combination of factors that included relief at the end of a long and brutal war plus enormous postwar economic activity. People were marrying earlier, and their marriages came as the culmination of a very different type of dating, one whose expectations of monogamy, exclusivity, and emotional intensity could much more accurately be described as “playing marriage.”

Prior to World War II, “going steady” had been the stage at which dating became courtship, where the popularity-oriented antics of dating and rating turned to a more serious dynamic that at least implied eventual marriage. By the early 1950s, playing the field had virtually vanished, and couples went steady from the outset. Dating couples were “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” to one another rather than just “dates,” complete with all the accompanying connotations of romantic love and monogamy.

As the age of marriage dropped, so did the age at which both adolescence and dating were slated to begin. In 1961, a professor of family relations at Pennsylvania State University, Carlfred B. Broderick, studied children in a nearby school district and found that about 40 percent of the fifth graders were already dating.[
36
] This lengthy education in male-female coupledom did not necessarily have much to do with finding a mate. Dates didn't merely focus on
attending
entertainments like movies; dating
was
an entertainment. It was a hobby, a challenge, and something to do on a Saturday night. One went out on dates not only because one hoped eventually to marry or because not dating was a social faux pas. One did it because it was—at least in theory—fun. The ups and downs, but particularly the neurochemical highs of infatuation and the swoons of romancing, became the obsessive subject of literally thousands of pop songs, teen-focused movies, and a dizzying array of periodicals.

Emotional pleasure for its own sake was becoming part of the
ethos of heterosexuality. As critic Margaret Kornitzer wrote in 1932, “The fluffy-headed are persuaded that having a good time is not merely risky amusement, but is, in fact, the way to get the most out of life. . . . The serious are intellectually assured that self-gratification is a kind of sacred mission connected with their rights.”[
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] This “fun morality,” as Stephanie Coontz characterizes it, made it permissible to judge dates not on how well suited they were as potential mates but simply on the basis of whether or not they were a good time.

But not all pleasure was the same. Which kinds of pleasure were permissible or important, and whose pleasures should set the priorities of dating, were difficult questions. Whether or not the unmarried would engage in sexual activity became a more fraught and intense decision as dating turned into “going steady,” in large part because it centered around a stylized version of romantic love. “Making out” was a fairly standard part of dating. But declarations of romantic love might up the ante. Each symbolic move in the direction of marriage—whether or not it was sincere, and whether or not the relationship ever got there—was more likely than the last to open the gates to actual intercourse.[
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]

It had been some time since love was expected to emerge post-maritally out of a diligently conducted and prudently chosen partnership. Now it was also coming to seem quaint to expect love to be the result of the heaven-sent meeting and intertwining of selfless, kindred adult souls. As a drama of pleasure and power, romance was coming to be seen as an inherent part of the adolescent Sturm und Drang. But it was also, and simultaneously, a form of emotional entertainment reflected in thousands of song lyrics and movie plots, a goal to be obsessively striven for, and an experience that meant emotional authenticity and social success. The 1959 plaint of Dion and the Belmonts, “Why must I be a teenager in love?” was purely a rhetorical question. What else, indeed, could any midcentury American adolescent have aspired to be?

LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

“The only position for women in the movement is prone,” civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael said, faced with Ruby Doris Smith Robinson's 1964 critique of the sexism faced by women in the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Throughout the West and especially in North America, the 1960s were bringing in a culture-rattling tide of political and social criticism, struggle, and change. Activists and rabble-rousers were smashing idols and questioning almost every realm of society except, it seemed, for relations between men and women.

The men of the 1960s Left, born and raised in the strictly gendered culture of post–World War II America, tended to view women as support staff and sexual outlets, just as their Atomic Age upbringings taught them to do. This view was compounded by emerging attitudes toward women's sexuality that centered around progressive politics and the Pill. “Free love” was fast becoming synonymous with throwing off Establishment shackles and getting rid of “hang-ups.” The Pill made pregnancy worries a thing of the past. All known sexually transmitted diseases were curable with antibiotics. Much of the reason that the “sexual revolution” happened when it did was that medical science had rendered two of the main barriers to unfettered sexual activity fairly easy to overcome. But women had not had enough social and economic autonomy for a long enough time to have developed many effective ways of refusing to be shunted into the role of staff to men. They also had few workable ways of saying no to sex with them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few men, even on the far Left, evinced much problem with this.

Women, on the other hand, got fed up with being saddled with the day-to-day “shitwork” of political action and the emotional care and sexual servicing of politically active men. Large numbers of women abandoned the male-dominated New Left to concentrate on feminism. Like the “first wave” feminists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this “second wave” of feminists banded together because, although it was a time of generally greater social and political sensitivity and struggle for change, women's specific concerns about sex, gender, and the power imbalance often still went unheard. First-wave women had dominated campaigns for property- and marriage-law reform and women's right to the vote. Second-wave women wanted something even more sweeping: an end to discrimination and unequal treatment based on sex in all realms of public and private life.
It was a tall order. But there was an oddly sticky obstacle: love.

The desire for love spurred women to conform to cultural expectations that they would shape themselves socially, behaviorally, and physically in order to attract men. Once they did find love with men, they looked to marriage, wifedom, and motherhood as the ways to make love last. Romantic heterosexual love, it was claimed, shaped women's entire lives in one way or another. It was seen as the force that opened the door to a woman's participation in a whole system of male power and female subservience.

Not unreasonably, feminists questioned this. They had done so before. Many second-wave feminists, indeed, echoed Cicely Hamilton's 1909 plaint: “[U]nder present conditions, it is not easy for [a] self-respecting woman to find a mate with whom she can live on the terms demanded by her self-respect.”[
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] Radical feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson described love as the “psychological pivot” of women's oppression and complained that “perhaps the most damning characteristic of women is that, in the face of horrifying evidence of their situation, they stubbornly claim that, in spite of everything, they ‘love' their Oppressor.”[
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]

Some feminists insisted that the solution was to refuse love with men. Martha Shelley, a member of the feminist group the Radicalesbians, wrote that “[i]n order to throw off the oppression of the male caste, women must unite—we must learn to love ourselves and each other, we must grow strong and independent of men so that we can deal with them from a position of strength.” She went on, protesting that women are “told to be weak, dependent, and loving. That kind of love is masochism. Love can only exist between equals, not between the oppressed and the oppressor.”[
41
] Shulamith Firestone likewise recommended that because women were so often defined by love relationships with men, the best course of action was to do without them. Such scathing indictments and harsh demands were far from popular. Even other feminists found them hard to swallow.[
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] But at the same time, such uncompromising critiques did pierce the extremely durable armor of the doxa of romantic love.

Second-wave feminism, particularly its radical wing, helped expose a central problem with the conceit that heterosexuality and all its trappings were all of a natural, seamless, perhaps even God-given
piece. Before the Victorians, little thought was given to the nature of attractions and emotions between women and men. It was simply the way things were, God's or Nature's way of taking care of business. Victorian culture had looked a bit closer and parsed out more individual bits, yet still the argument that the status quo was “natural” or “Godgiven” underlay most understandings of the relations between men and women. Women's erotic desire was often conflated with the desire for motherhood, women's love of men with the love of being mastered by them. Freud and Havelock Ellis dwelt at length on innate female masochism and the role it played in creating a gender-normative, male-dominant hierarchy in love, marriage, and society. Certainly the coining of “heterosexual” did not help to tease out fine distinctions, putting a falsely unifying stamp on a vast, complex topography of male/female interaction. The feminists of the second wave dismantled and denied such essentialist “biology is destiny” messages, replacing them with “the personal is political.”