You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (31 page)

61.
      D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, p. 203.

62.
      George Kneeland,
Commercialized Prostitution in New York City
(1917), pp. 104–105.

63.
      Lawrence Friedman,
Crime and Punishment in American History
(1993), p. 326.

64.
      As for police harassment, arrested prostitutes were often paraded through the streets to be jeered by righteous onlookers. Mayor Brand Whitlock of Toledo commented, “We found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive the girls off the streets. Of course, after a while the poor things . . . would come back. Then the police would have to practice their brutalities all over again.” Morone,
Hellfire Nation
, p. 272.

65.
      Brand Whitlock as quoted in Ruth Rosen,
Lost Sisterhood
(1982), p. 18.

S
EX
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E
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T
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R
EVOLUTIONS

Just as the Industrial Revolution fostered the sexuality of the Victorian Era, another round of societal changes would change sex in the 1920s.

As before, increased independence of young adults played a large part. Family control was lessened by the growing number of kids attending high school.
¹
High schools allowed young men and women to socialize outside the family’s purview. The car, a “house of prostitution on wheels,” would also increase freedom.
²
With cars youth could take advantage of the growing forms of commercial recreation, such as movie theaters, dance halls, and amusement parks. Supervised courtship that occurred in parlor rooms and porches was being replaced by the dating system, with stages such as “going out” and “going steady.”
³

New attitudes were also coming into prominence. Some had been spread by feminist reformers like Victoria Woodhull, who believed in free love.
⁴
Free love was the idea that love, not marital status, should legitimate sexual relations.
⁵
Other attitudes came from the new scientific field of psychology. Sigmund Freud’s ideas were gradually introduced into American society during the 1910s, and the general concept that reached the masses was that an omnipresent sexual instinct drove society forward, and that its repression could cause psychological suffering.
⁶

The youthful independence and new attitudes were flaunted by the fashionable young women of the 1920s, known as flappers. Whereas a newspaper in 1872 could slyly portray Woodhull as disreputable by illustrating her with an exposed ankle (still covered by stocking),
⁷
the flappers wore skirts just below the knee and bared their arms. They wore makeup, previously the fancy of only prostitutes and actresses. Flappers also smoked and drank like men, used ’20s slang like “big cheese,” “baloney,” and “the cat’s meow,” and enjoyed the nightlife enlivened by the innovations of electric lighting, air conditioning, and jazz.

The flappers may have been the ones displaying their released sexuality, but covert behavioral changes were widespread. Prostitution declined significantly in the twentieth century. Males who came of age after the first World War (1914–1918) went to prostitutes half as often as the prewar generation.
⁸
Although the Mann Act’s defenders took credit, reports pointed to another cause.

A typical entry was made in Newark where investigators wrote that they found:

Perplexed vice crusaders classified this new female breed “clandestine prostitutes” or “charity girls.”
¹⁰
Prostitution was declining not because of the FBI but because women were now having non-marital sexual intercourse for free. Whereas the typical Victorian man had his first sexual intercourse with a prostitute, the typical twentieth-century man now had his first intercourse with a girlfriend.
¹¹

The new sexuality was changing not only when it was done but how it was done. Women began disrobing for sex and experiencing orgasm.
^12
,
13
Sexual variation,
including oral sex, mutual masturbation, and non-missionary coital positions, increased as well.
¹⁴

Although it appeared to be a historic revolution for those in the midst of it,
¹⁵
the 1920s were merely returning to sexual normalcy after the frigid Victorian Era. While women explored their sexuality more than their Victorian mothers, they were not promiscuous. Petting parties were a common phenomenon for teens and young adults. As the name implies, kissing and fondling were enjoyed, but “bamey-mugging” was not.
¹⁶
As with the Puritans, premarital sex was usually reserved to one partner with the expectation of marriage.

As always, the youthful independence was contingent upon location and wealth. In the middle of the twentieth century, one young man still groused, “I’ll tell you, it’s really tough getting it in a small town. Everyone has their eyes on you and especially on the girl. You can hardly get away with anything.”
¹⁷

The Roaring Twenties abruptly ended in 1929, when the stock market crash launched the Great Depression. For the next twenty years America would be preoccupied with crushing poverty and the Second World War.

During this time consumerism became America’s driving force. A capitalist economy flourishes when people are kept in a permanent state of discontent and spend their lives seeking satisfaction through buying material goods. This discontent is maintained with advertising, and advertisers learned that in a sexually repressed society sex was (1) a source of discontent and (2) drew attention.

Entire industries, such as cosmetics, sprang up to help people feel sexually attractive. Even in advertisements for products that had nothing to do with sex, attractive models and seductive poses were used to grab attention. The omnipresence of sexual advertising in society gradually accustomed people to seeing sex, even if only through the allusions that slipped past the censors.
¹⁸

In the 1930s, the hungry, unemployed populace had more important things to think about than the vices of others and their views changed accordingly.
¹⁹
In religious circles, Jesus’ message of sharing and helping others took precedence over prudery,
²⁰
but by the late 1940s postwar prosperity allowed charity to be once again pushed aside.

In addition, the commencement of the Cold War created an “other” to stoke a new round of moral crusades.
²¹
Communism’s atheism made Communists the ideal enemy to rally around. Communism was not simply a different ideology. Communism was evil.
Life
magazine wrote in 1955 “It seems pretty clear that Communism is a form of Satan in action, to be resisted by all means at all times.”
²²

In the 1950s, religion and patriotism blurred into one.
²³
In a symbolic act of the times, the Pledge of Allegiance was amended in 1954 to include “under God.” So popular was the bill that after the Senate unanimously passed it, the House of Representatives’ Democratic sponsor and the Senate’s Republican sponsor fought over who would get credit. They compromised by standing side by side proudly reciting the new pledge in unison as President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill into law.

This new religious spirit was harnessed and turned against sex. Congressional committees in the ’50s repeatedly made absurd connections between left-wing politics and the exposure of obscenity to minors.
^24
,
25
However, America’s gullibility to sexual paranoia was waning due in large part to the work of Alfred Kinsey, a zoology professor at Indiana University. In 1948 and 1953, the world’s foremost expert on gall wasps published groundbreaking sex studies. These best-sellers reduced sexual ignorance.

The Kinsey reports revealed that “deviant” sex such as masturbation, homosexual sex, extramarital sex, oral sex, and even bestiality were not as rare as people thought. Kinsey estimated that nineteen out of every twenty American males had broken a law having sex.
²⁶
Either some of these things were not perverted, or the majority of Americans were perverts.
²⁷
No matter how that question was answered, millions of sexually “abnormal” Americans were relieved to learn they were not alone.

Although polls showed that a large majority of the public approved of scientific sexual research,
²⁸
Kinsey was intensely attacked. An Indiana Roman Catholic newspaper wrote that Kinsey’s studies “pave the way for people to believe in
communism.”
²⁹
J. Edgar Hoover, as head of the FBI, wrote in
Reader’s Digest
that Kinsey’s work threatened “our civilization” and “our way of life,” and had the FBI open a file on him.
³⁰

Although a popular concept, the idea of the 1960s Sexual Revolution is misleading. The “revolution” actually began in the 1950s with the Beat artists and their prosecution, and extended into the late 1970s. The change in sexual activity was predominantly an acceptance among middle- to upper-class white women of premarital sex with a male in a committed relationship (although no longer with the expectation of marriage). This is not the population-wide transformation from purity to promiscuity portrayed by conservatives like former President George W. Bush.

By mid-century the sexual censorship of celebrated literary figures, which began with the crusading zealot Anthony Comstock in the 1880s, was embarrassing not only to literary highbrows but mainstream Americans as well.
³¹
The religious/patriotic moral zeal of the 1950s brought continuous prosecution, however, the culture had changed. Whereas Victorian censors had operated with the middle class behind them, the new crusaders now found themselves to the right of most Americans.
³²

Courageous publishers openly “broke” the obscenity laws, suffering imprisonment and financial devastation so that the constitutionality of the obscenity laws could be challenged in court.
³³
One of these was Barney Rosset, who published Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
in 1961. Now considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,
³⁴
at the time Rosset was required to defend himself in sixty separate obscenity cases, costing him over $1.9 million in legal fees.
³⁵

Tropic of Cancer
passages like the following attracted the government’s prosecutorial wrath: