You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (33 page)

In the book, Portnoy goes on to describe how he continues to masturbate obsessively even though a penis freckle leads him to think his masturbation has given him cancer, and how he used his sister’s cotton panties and images of a physically developed classmate, Lenore Lapidus, to masturbate. He also relates the masturbatory challenges of lost ejaculate and privacy in a household of meddling parents.
⁶⁷

Portnoy’s Complaint
was an instant best-seller and is now regarded as one of the literary gems of the twentieth century.
⁶⁸
Adolescent boys across America finally had someone with whom they could relate. Whereas Portnoy was fictional, women had their own real-life counterpart in Betty Dodson.

Dodson was born in 1929 and began masturbating at the age of five. Later as a girl she used a mirror to look at her genitals and was horrified. Her inner lips (labia minora) hung out from her outer lips. Although this was completely normal, she believed that she had stretched them out from masturbating. Later in life she was taught that she should not pleasure herself with her clitoris, only with a man and his penis. Even her sexually liberal friends put down masturbation.

Dodson was sexually frustrated in her first marriage. Her husband orgasmed too quickly and she never orgasmed. Sex was followed by embarrassed silence and became more and more infrequent. After he would fall asleep she would masturbate under the covers, “without moving or breathing, feeling sick with frustration and guilt the whole time.”
⁶⁹

Dodson eventually divorced and in the 1950s moved to New York City to study illustration. Unlike her fellow artists who drew solitary nudes, Dodson drew nudes having sex. In 1968 her life-size images of figures having intercourse were displayed at the Wickersham Gallery next to the Whitney Museum. Eight thousand people came to see her work, and because they were displayed in the gallery’s windows, they were also viewed by the general public.

Although labeled “shocking” by the press, it was not until her second show, when she wanted to include four images of women masturbating, that “all hell broke loose.”
⁷⁰
The director finally allowed two images that included one six-foot drawing of her friend, legs spread and clitoris erect, using a vibrator.

Dodson went on to become an advocate for masturbation and female sexual awareness. As a writer she has stressed that women learn to celebrate the diversity of female body types and be “cunt positive.” Women have written to Dodson thanking her for introducing them to self-induced orgasm. Those who were already masturbating have written to express their relief, “Ever since I saw your drawing I’ve felt better about myself—not so guilty, not so alone, not so weird after all.”
⁷¹

Although the popular media was simply revealing diverse sexual practices that had been around forever, it still had profound effects. People who were not aware of these activities learned of their existence, and people who were already practicing these activities learned they were not alone. The media attention spread the practice of countless sexual activities and reduced their stigma.

One institution at the forefront of this publicity was
Playboy
magazine, started by Hugh Hefner in 1953. As the first magazine to include photographs of nude women, Hefner took precautionary measures to fend off censors.
Playboy
began by not showing the pubic region, with the first shot of pubic hair not occurring until 1969.
⁷²
Hefner also presented sex and nudity in a sophisticated and mature manner. The magazine’s logo was an innocent bow-tied bunny and it ran non-sexual material by respected writers. There were no references to masturbation, despite its obvious masturbatory potential.
Playboy’s
cautious entry into pornography cleared the way for later, more brazen magazines, such as Bob Guccione’s
Penthouse
in 1965 and Larry Flynt’s
Hustler
in 1974.

Playboy
also cleared the way for more than magazines. An article on arguably the first American topless bar, San Francisco’s Condor Club, made it and its star dancer, Carol Doda, sensations, and launched a topless bar craze in the mid-’60s.
⁷³
Doda was one of the first celebrities to use silicone injections to augment the size of her breasts. Her new breasts “set the city on fire.”
^74
,
75

By repeatedly reminding people that sex could be used solely for pleasure,
Playboy
indirectly legitimized homosexuality in liberal portions of society.
⁷⁶
Playboy’s
rise coincided with the blossoming of a gay cultural underground.

Although homosexuals had gathered in American cities for at least a hundred years, it was not until after World War II that a gay subculture became identifiable.
⁷⁷
World War II provided a nationwide “coming out” experience.
⁷⁸
Psychiatrists seeking to prevent the “mentally unstable” from entering the military would thoroughly question inductees about homosexual behavior.
⁷⁹
After propagating the concept of homosexuality to every recruit, the war then provided unsupervised sex-segregated isolation to large populations of men and women who otherwise would have been married.

Bob Ruffing, a chief petty officer in the Navy, related how “eye contact” would tip him off to other gay servicemen. “Pretty soon you’d get to know one or two people and kept [sic] branching out. All of a sudden you had a vast network of friends.”
⁸⁰

Returning soldiers, who had accepted their sexual identities and developed homosexual social networks during the war, chose to congregate in port city neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Castro and New York City’s Greenwich Village. In 1964
Life
magazine wrote an article about the gay subculture of San Francisco, saying “this social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself into the public eye because it does present a problem—and parents especially are concerned.”
⁸¹

Life
declared San Francisco America’s “gay capital.”
⁸²
If San Francisco was not yet in that position, the
Life
article helped, as gays all over the country read it and moved there. Following suit, smaller cities ran newspaper articles about their own neighborhoods infested with the “pernicious sickness.”
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These articles unintentionally promoted the growth of the neighborhoods by directing isolated gay youth from surrounding areas.

In these urban neighborhoods, certain bars became associated with gay patrons and the institution of the gay bar developed. Although it did not replace the covert public courtship, or “cruising,” that occurred at certain city streets, parks, bus, and train stops, gay bars helped to alleviate the social isolation of homosexuality. In fact, it was a violent revolt by patrons against a police raid on a “seedy” Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, that grew into a weekend of rioting on the evening of Friday, June 27, 1969.
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This revolt started the gay liberation movement.
⁸⁵

The 1920s returned America to the pre-Victorian attitudes in which middle-and upper-class women had sex drives. The 1920s returned American women to the Puritan practice of having premarital sex with men they intended to marry. The 1960s and 1970s rolled back some of the Puritan restraint as well.

From the mid-1960s onward the premarital sex rates of white females surged upwards and closed the gap between them and their male peers.
⁸⁶
Not only were they having premarital sex but it was increasingly occurring in relationships where there
was not a definite expectation of marriage. Cohabitation became a visible trend in the 1970s.

The age of first sexual intercourse for white women decreased from roughly eighteen and three-quarters to just below seventeen and three-quarters.
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Young women were also increasingly engaging in masturbation, although not at the levels of their male counterparts. Oral sex was also becoming commonplace, and anal sex was more pervasive.
⁸⁸
Among married couples, a good sex life was being seen as central to a good overall relationship.
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These changes were occurring behind closed doors and were largely hidden from public view. More alarming to moralists was the openness with which society was publicly accepting sex. In the conservative American political climate at the start of the third millennium, it is difficult to remember how open the late 1960s and 1970s were.

Starting with the commercial success of
Deep Throat
in 1972,
⁹⁰
hard-core films (showing sexual penetration) were screened in mainstream movie theaters and a few television broadcasters even began reviewing pornographic films.
⁹¹
Surprisingly, juries in conservative towns across America ruled
Deep Throat
deserving of First Amendment protection. In one 1973 survey, a quarter of the respondents said they had watched an X-rated film in the previous twelve months.
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(This was five years before the VCR would allow private home viewing.) Even the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis went and saw one.
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In 1969 the sexual musical romp
Oh! Calcutta
! opened off Broadway.
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Its opening was attended by celebrities such as Shirley MacLaine, Joe Namath, Julie Newmar, and Hedy Lamarr. A comical series of sexual vignettes intended to provoke and titillate, it included naked actors and actresses simulating acts such as sex and date rape.

The creator, Kenneth Tynan, insisted that the show be choreographed by “a non-queer,” and that it include “no crap about art or redeeming literary merit.”
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At the end of the show, the entire naked cast spoke out loud conjectured thoughts of the audience, “I mean what is the point, I mean what does it prove? . . . Nudity is passé . . . . That’s my daughter up there . . . If they’re having fun, why don’t they have erections?” The show was a hit with tourists and moved to Broadway, where it broke the record for the longest-running show in Broadway’s history.

Another sample of the times was the Manhattan sex club the Continental Baths, which was a nationally known hotspot in the 1970s. Located in the basement of the exclusive Upper West Side’s architectural marvel the Ansonia Hotel, it began as a gay bathhouse that featured cabaret-style entertainment. Singers Bette Midler and Barry Manilow both began their careers there,
⁹⁶
and Midler made the Continental Baths a sensation when she mentioned it on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
in 1970.

Soon the club was catering to heterosexuals as well, and straight sex joined the gay sex in the Continental’s back rooms. The club was so accepted that Mayor Abraham Beame and Congresswoman Bella Abzug made campaign speeches there and Bloomingdale’s stores sold Continental Baths towels.

A taste of its atmosphere is found in Manilow’s description of the public-address system’s interruptions of a singer’s performance:

With the influx of suburban heterosexual patrons, the Baths became unpopular with gays. In 1977 new owners changed the name to Plato’s Retreat and began catering exclusively to heterosexuals. Plato’s Retreat received a positive review from the mainstream magazine
New York
in 1977,
⁹⁸
and was reportedly frequented by celebrities such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Madonna, Paul Newman, and conservative movie icon John Wayne.
⁹⁹
Time
magazine estimated that in 1977 over 6,500 men and women visited each month.
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Plato’s Retreat did not tame down the sex. One New Yorker recalled:

Those were the days that are never brought up by sexual conservatives and the media. Instead they chose to label 2007 as an
unprecedented
time of sexual openness that may be turning America’s children into “prosti-tots,” largely because one female celebrity was caught sans panties in a paparazzo’s photograph of her exiting a car.
¹⁰²
The days when female celebrities went to swingers’ sex clubs sans panties has largely been erased from the collective memory.