Sex as a Spectator Sport
Mark the following propositions True or False:
The American people have at last been liberated from the long night of Victorian prudery. The sociosexual revolution is wholesome and overdue. The mature individual is now free to decide for himself what he wants to read or see or do. America is on the way to becoming honest.
The American people face moral and social breakdown. The standards that have guided us to greatness over the past two centuries are being systematically subverted by permissive courts and smut peddlers. In the name of freedom, we are being engulfed by filth. The Kick Society is a sick society.
If you feel that neither of the above views is T. or F., submit your own statement. Whatever you believe, your response will indicate whether you are right, half-right, righteous, left or left out.
THE issue is as old as the fig leaf, as new as tomorrow's nude-theater opening. An erotic renaissance (or rot, as some would have it) is upon the land. Owing to a growing climate of permissiveness--and the Pill--Americans today have more sexual freedom than any previous generation, Whatever changes have occurred in sex as behavior, the most spectacular are evident in sex as a spectator sport. What seems truly startling is not so much what Americans do but what they may see, hear and read. In those respects, the U.S. is now by far the freest country in the Western world. Moreover, it happened in a few short years. Until 1933, James Joyce's Ulysses was not purchasable in the U.S.; today, the corner drugstore sells Fanny Hill along with Fannie Farmer. In 1959, the Ballets Af-ricains were not allowed to perform in Manhattan until the female dancers donned bras. When they returned in 1968, no one even raised the issue.
From stage and screen, printed page and folk-rock jukeboxes, society is bombarded with coital themes. Writers bandy four-letter words as if they had just completed a deep-immersion Berlitz course in Anglo-Saxon. In urban America, at least, the total taboos of yesteryear have become not only acceptable but, in many circles, fashionable musts as well. As Dr. William Masters (Human Sexual Response) has suggested, "The '60s will be called the decade of orgasmic preoccupation."
Between the extreme partisans--those who hail the phenomenon as liberation and those who condemn it as decadence--there is room for some serious con cern about what it means in American life. In a sense, the creative arts and even their sleazy offshoots--blue movies, smut books, peepshows, prurient tabloids --hold a public mirror to a society's private fantasies. A nation gets the kind of art and entertainment it wants and will pay for. Thus to many serious critics, and they are by no means all bluenoses or comstockians, the explosion of salacity in cinema, theater and book rack is disturbing. Esthetically, pop sex may well reflect a stunting of the imagination, a dilution of artistic values, and a cultish attempt to substitute sensation for thought. Morally and psychologically, it may signal a deeper unease connected with a crisis of values. It also has its political aspects. Sex and politics have always been linked, but the connection can be carried too far --as was demonstrated for all time by the Marquis de Sade, who was more of a revolutionary than a sensualist, and pushed both roles to madness. Today, many of the young (or would-be young) use sexual display or obscene language quite deliberately as shock weapons of protest against "the Establishment." At the same time, those who are affronted by the new license may produce a backlash that could lead to a general mood of repression, social as well as political.
Part of the widespread resentment against the liberal Warren Court is based on its decision striking down various forms of censorship. The Citizens for Decent Literature, biggest of a number of antismut organizations that have sprung up around the country, has pledged itself to appear on the prosecution side in every pornography case that comes before the Supreme Court. At present, no fewer than 135 anti-pornography bills are under study by the House Judiciary Committee. Last year Lyndon Johnson appointed leading educators, sociologists, psychologists and lawyers to a presidential commission on obscenity and pornography. Its interim report, to be released this month, will recommend, among other measures, that all erotic wares in the marketplace be stamped Adult Material.
No Longer Underground
If that proposal were adopted, the stamp should, by rights, appear on an astonishing variety of products. Already, under a new, voluntary rating system, certain films are branded "M" and "suggested for mature audiences." American moviegoers have been peeking at bodies ever since Theda Bara bared her royal nipples in 1917 in Cleopatra. Still, inhibited by production codes and the restriction imposed by such influential bodies as the National Legion of Decency, American moviemakers generally avoided total nudity and explicitly erotic situations until the late 1950s, when successful films like Room at the Top and Never on Sunday showed that seals of approval had become an anachronism. Today, assured of virtual immunity against seizure and prosecution, movie exhibitors and importers have no qualms about films that would have been cut or confiscated a few years ago. Far-out films now on show include The Libertine, in which a widow acts out a manual on errant sex; I, A Woman, II, which portrays fetishism, voyeurism and varied adultery; and Therese and Isabelle, a "love story" that treats of lesbianism and autoeroticism.
The most explicit and protracted depiction of fellatio ever filmed for commercial distribution occurs in an as yet unreleased movie called Coming Apart, starring Rip Torn as a troubled psychiatrist. For all its howling commercial success, I Am Curious (Yellow) by comparison is about as erotic as Das Kapitol. Andy Warhol's latest film, a 90-minute sexorama appropriately titled Blue Movie, contains 45 minutes of realistically simulated copulation (heterosexual for a change).
Warhol's movies used to be "underground," but most of them are now shown in theaters and seriously reviewed. The distinction between "underground" cinema, straight commercial films and "sexploitation" movies is no longer easily made. The screen's crassest byproduct, variations of the old stag film or skin flick, draw more customers in some cities than the hard-ticket Hollywood product. Ranging from 20 minutes of nudie shorts to the sophisticated voyeurism of Directors Russ Meyer (Vixen) and Radley Metzger (The Dirty Girls), sex films are now a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry. Exhibited in well-appointed cinemas that charge $3 and up for admission, they have moved from the tenderloin to midtown.
For a long time, the theater lagged far behind the cinema in the realistic presentation of sex. Until recently, actors came on as fully clothed as if they were lunching at the Plaza. Then, all of a sudden, playwrights and directors decided that nudity was significant, artistic and serious. In 1965, Jean-Paul Marat briefly flashed his gluteus maximus in Marat/Sade. As the marquis warned in the same play, "The revolution of the flesh will make all your other revolutions seem like prison mutinies." And so it almost has.
The more extreme stage examples are still mainly confined to off-Broadway, but they are spreading. In Fortune in Men's Eyes, a play about homosexuality in prison that is now playing in Los Angeles, theatergoers are confronted with a scene of forcible sodomy between unclad actors. The lively and ubiquitous Hair, which is booked or playing in five U.S. cities and six abroad, nearly went under when it opened--before word of its celebrated and now relatively unremarkable nude scene brought a stampede of ticket buyers. In Christmas Turkey, Actress Marti
Whitehead knelt front-center and nude throughout the play. During most of the one-acter Sweet Eros, Sally Kirkland, the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism, was tied naked to a chair. Paradise Now, performed by Julian and Judith Beck's Living Theater, was the first play in which a nude cast invited audience "participation" and then, in at least one city, marched seminaked from the theater onto the street.
Che!, which opened off-off-Broadway last March only to be shuttered by the police after its second performance (it has since reopened in a relatively sanitized form), was another landmark of erotic realism. The play consists of one hour and forty minutes of elaborate fake copulation. It led English Critic Alan Brien to the bemused conclusion: "I can only report that it made me feel intercourse was a feat rather more difficult than a triple somersault on a trapeze while balancing a tray of drinks at the end of a cane on the tip of your nose." The nudity invasion in the theater reached yet another apogee last month with the opening of Oh! Calcutta!,*a revue billed as "elegant erotica" by Impresario-Critic Kenneth Tynan, who "devised" it. Housed in an old burlesque theater wistfully renamed Eden, the show is performed almost entirely in the nude. Though various sketches involve mass masturbation, rape, wife swapping and other forms of sexuality, Oh! Calcutta! is not only inelegant but also antierotic. The sheer expanse of skin in time becomes a bore. Still, the customers keep appearing, and in a ploy for the benefit of the astigmatic, the management plans to raise ticket prices for the two front rows to $25--highest on or off Broadway.
Ars Gratia Amoris
The plastic arts have also turned anew to "genital commotion," as Jesuit Priest Harold Gardiner puts it. A gifted, Paris-trained Manhattan artist, Betty Dodson, uses as many as six models at a time for her large-scale canvases of multiple coupling. U.S. Psychologists Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen arranged a vast exhibition of erotic art in Sweden (TIME, May 17, 1968) that broke attendance records in two days. (Children were admitted and, the sponsors reported, showed no sign of shock.) At Los Angeles' David Stuart Galleries, a series of eight massive plastic phalli by Sculptor Bruce Beasley were immediate sellouts at $200 each. There is a new gallery in Manhattan, grandiloquently styled The United States of Erotica, Inc. --and it has lived up to the name.
One litmus test of the new permissiveness is the degree of outrage it provokes. Though Oh! Calcutta! and other current offerings contain countless scenes, words and inferences that would have stirred a tempest a few years ago, New York City's high-minded cops have acted against only one play (Che!) and one nudie movie (Muthers) since 1964.
Scores of bookstores in every major city deal in the hard-core pornography that Dad had to smuggle in from Paris (where it is now hard to find). Many, for 250 a viewing, also feature two-minute peepshows of naked couples. Nudist magazines, which until recently airbrushed their models in strategic areas, now show them in toto. So do a proliferation of homosexual magazines. So do a new wave of lecherous tabloids, with titles like The New York Review of Sex, whose erogenetic aim is mostly emetic in effect. Despite the blatant offensiveness of books, magazines and wall posters in smut-shop windows, local authorities are reluctant to take action for fear of prolonged and probably fruitless appeals through the courts.
Within this erotic panorama, there are obviously immense differences. Surface appearances are deceptive. A play in the politest language can be more obscene in essence than a four-letter-word tirade. A sexual embrace depicted with art can be more innocent than a Botticelli Venus. A fully clad model in a TV commercial can exude more sexuality than a nude onstage.
The naked body can bring a visceral vitality to the theater--as several American ballet companies have demonstrated. The bedroom scene in Franco Zeffirelli's film Romeo and Juliet took on a new dimension when the couple were portrayed in the nude. So might many other dramatic interludes.
Actor Nicol Williamson rejects the notion of Hamlet in the buff, for example, but conceded in a recent New York Times interview that he would be in favor of disrobing for the title role in a planned London production of Prometheus Bound. After all, he argued, it is hardly rational for a fallen god, chained to a rock until the end of time, to wear a tigerskin loincloth for eternity. A more immediate concern for many actors and actresses is that few have the physical endowments to withstand public scrutiny. Shelley Winters, now 46, observed of onstage nudity: "I think it is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive, religious experience."
Audience of Voyeurs
Miss Winters' second sentence is, of course, a parody of all the clothes-lessness-is-next-to-Godliness homilies of hippies, nudists, protesters and naked theater advocates, who have somehow managed to equate the altogether with the unattainable: total honesty, innocence, understanding, peace and, in the same breath, revolution. Protesters who stop traffic or disrupt the work of a draft board by taking off their clothes use nudity as a kind of nonviolent Luddism. But artistically undressing is too easy. If a dramatist can substitute a mute nude for the interplay of character and situation, he will be tempted to do so and in all likelihood be handsomely rewarded for succumbing. Nonetheless, nakedness is not a statement but a condition.
Moreover, some critics contend, the artist's license to show and do all creates an audience of voyeurs passively feeding on their fantasies. In the visual arts, as in literature, "the cult of utterness," in one critic's phrase, tends to devalue and depersonalize human sexuality. In an essay in the book Language and Silence, an eloquent condemnation of pornography, Literary Critic George Steiner objected: "Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the nightplace where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order and repose." The totally explicit love scene, he suggests, is an intrusion upon the imagination and a synthetic substitute for reality.
Words also tend to be devalued by the new erotica. Three centuries or so ago, William Shakespeare or John Donne could convey passion, poetry, disgust and concupiscence in words with artful undermeanings that shocked none. Nowadays, a few greatly gifted writers can effectively employ the familiar quad-riliterals for dramatic or comic effect, but they tend to lose their value through overuse. As George Orwell observed 22 years ago, "If only our half-dozen 'bad' words could be got off the lavatory wall and onto the printed page, they would soon lose their magical quality." That process is well under way. The four-letter pudendicities are now dropped casually into cocktail conversation. But not everyone applauds the fading of the magic.
Many readers miss the florid circumlocutions of such erotic classics as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Today's pornographer handles a love scene as if he were dictating an engine-repair manual for high school dropouts. Not so the oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair lad and a group of fair ladies (all of whom become pregnant). Even the title of the poem, Narcissus, Come Kiss Us! (And Love Us Beside), would assure a rock recording of the lyrics a top ten rating in Billboard.
Such classic examples illustrate the classic dilemma: What is pornography and what is outspoken art? Innumerable erotic works, from Ovid's Ars amatoria to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, in time assumed the stature of classics. Innumerable others were denounced as wicked when they first appeared. Yet almost everyone agrees that there is such a thing as pornography and that it is bad. No less an authority than Henry Miller recently denounced pornography as "a leering or lecherous disguise" that has helped make sexuality joyless. On any level of creative intent, it is hard to defend the bulk of salacious literature being churned out today. Most of it is perverse, narcissistic, brutal, irrational. And boring. As George Steiner observed: "The number of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse, are fundamentally finite . . . Once all possible positions of the body have been tried--the law of gravity does interfere --once the maximum number of erogenous zones of the maximum number of participants have been brought into contact, abrasive, frictional, or intrusive, there is not much left to do or imagine."
Beholder's Groin
Even D. H. Lawrence favored rigorous censorship of smut. "You can recognize it," he wrote, "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit . . . The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship!" On that point, both the author of Lady Chatterley and Evangelist Billy Graham would be in wholehearted agreement.
Where they would disagree would be on the question of just what constitutes pornography. For years the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled with the issue, as writers and publishers, pressing home the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and expression, spearheaded the battle for freedom in the arts. After a series of test cases, the Supreme Court formulated a somewhat vague but consistent philosophy that no material could be banned by local authorities unless it was "utterly without redeeming social value." Charles Rembar, the Manhattan attorney who successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill before the Supreme Court, has offered what may be a classic definition: "Pornography is in the groin of the beholder." Though, as Rembar notes, there is virtually no such thing as obscenity in the literary legal lexicon today, the courts have insisted that minors should be protected from exposure to prurient material. And by federal law an individual may take action to prevent receipt of unsolicited pornography through the mail.
In the view of a great many people, of course, that protection is not enough. Critic Pierce Hannah complained in the London Times: "We, no less than the Victorians, have our current cant. Ours is to protest that books and plays with only the most tenuous claims to be taken seriously must be fought for because they contain once-taboo words and situations. We make martyrs out of third-rate writers in no danger of going to the stake." A compelling answer to this argument is that third-rate or even tenth-rate writers must be protected if first-rate writers are to be free. Banning books and prosecuting theater owners can actually be self-defeating, since they lend false glamour to the forbidden and the illicit. I Am Curious (Yellow) would in all likelihood not have become a vastly profitable movie if it had not first been the subject of a well-publicized prosecution by the U.S. Court of Appeals. In Sweden, where movies are almost never censored for eroticism, I Am Curious (Blue), Yellow's sexier successor, has fared dismally at the box office. Booksellers in San Francisco, one of the nation's most permissive cities, report that sales of pornography have dipped 70% in the past six months.
The Impact on Society
Such evidence is scarcely conclusive. Erotica has flourished in every society and under every kind of regime from the Pharaohs to the Maos. "Legalizing pornography," reasons Author Wilfrid Sheed, "will not destroy its appeal any more than ending Prohibition stopped people from drinking. Liberal cliche to the contrary, lust was not invented by the censors." But lust can indeed be helped along by the censor. The outwardly prudish Victorian era produced pornographic literature of unsurpassed richness and ingenuity. In the first five decades of this century, U.S. art and entertainment either were censored or practiced self-censorship. Yet those were decades of titillating sexuality, heavily reinforced by advertising; technically the decencies were observed, but the atmosphere was charged with eroticism from every screen and billboard. It was those teasing decades that prepared the way for the erotic explosion. The current situation in the arts is at least more honest.
Fundamental disagreement occurs on the issue of what erotica does to the consumer. Critics of the new permissiveness assume as obvious that it is damaging to people, particularly the young, and that it leads to sexual license. But in the age of the in-depth survey and the microscopic sexual study, there is a remarkable dearth of information about the psychological impact of erotica on the normal--or more significant, ab normal--individual. A possible clue was offered by a commission of the Danish government appointed to study the incidence of sexual crimes; the commission found that such crimes had declined by 25% in the year in which antiobscenity laws on books had been abolished. After an intensive investigation of the relationship between eroticism on the screen and individual behavior, Sweden's censorship office reported unequivocally that no normal adult is harmed by seeing intercourse and nude bodies in a motion picture. Psychologists and sociologists in the U.S. have no concrete evidence that erotic material directly stimulates sexual activity. They maintain that the young in particular --and movie audiences today consist mostly of people under 25--are more sophisticated about sex than the previous generation, and in consequence may tend to be less excited or shocked by nudity or scenes that show copulation. The strongest evidence suggests that total permissiveness in the arts is a result, not a cause, of relaxed standards of conduct. The majority of psychologists and behaviorists in effect reassert the familiar dictum that no girl was ever ruined by reading a book--and no boy was ever seduced by a girl appearing onstage without her clothes on.
That is not the only issue, however. A number of experts are agreed on one point: erotic art often unduly celebrates sexual prowess to the exclusion of such qualities as tenderness, patience, courage, humor or honesty. If sex is universally regarded as the ultimate status symbol, as Playboy and the pornocrats suggest, many responsible adults will wind up feeling cheated, and alienated; at the same time, and ironically, the aim of sex will become mental rather than sensory.
Hardly anyone can quarrel with the ideal of a healthy sexuality, free of false shame and guilt. Yet to judge from the nation's mood, a great number of Americans feel that the surfeit of sex must somehow be contained. Unless some restraints are imposed--or self-imposed--history suggests that the reaction to permissiveness may be strong. The ribald, rollicking Elizabethan age was succeeded by the severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal anthill of Nazism. Constitutionally and temperamentally, the U.S. is probably immune to such violent reversals of law and mood. Nonetheless, as in any other democracy, change in the U.S. tends to be uneven: two steps forward, one step back. Whatever the disposition of the new Supreme Court, there is real danger of repressive action at the local level--in all likelihood by policemen and prosecutors not intellectually equipped to judge the artistic or social merits of a book or film.
In an odd way society is locked in an ancient dialectic. Western civilization would not have had the energy to develop as it did, wrote Denis de Rougemont, "without the sexual discipline which the so-called puritanical tendencies have imposed upon us since Europe first existed. On the other hand, without eroticism and the freedom it supposes, would our culture be worth more than that which a Stalin, a Mao have attempted to impose by decree?"
Western eroticism, unlike the Oriental variety, has not been a relatively uncomplicated, simply hedonistic matter; it began in defiance of Christian law and has remained strangely and often unconsciously tied to what it sought to oppose. The real Western myth of rebellion against God and society is probably not Prometheus but Don Juan. Thus sex as revolution is not so novel as some of its practitioners think--nor is it necessarily so anarchic as some of its opponents fear. Even in their eroticism, many of the young rebels are peculiarly puritanical and earnest. They are not unlike Hugh Hefner, who feels compelled to sanctify his hedonism in thousands of words of "philosophy."
Perhaps the best hope in dealing with the erotic explosion is that the crassest, most commercial panderers will be curbed by law; beyond this, in legitimate arts and entertainment, a public sense of taste--and humor--will act as the best censor and restore some balance. Gresham's law does not necessarily apply to literature, theater or cinema. The bad drives out the good only temporarily. The point has been made briefly: anything can be shown. Now perhaps the time has come to remember that not everything has to be shown.
*The couple shown on TIME'S cover this week are members of the show's cast.
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