Synopsis
Make Love, Not War is the first full-scale history of how the Sexual Revolution changed life in America forever. A fascinating and frank portrait of private lives and public discourse, it traces changes from the deceptively repressive Fifties, to the first tremors of rebellion in the early Sixties and the sexual rights movement of the mid Sixties, to the heady heyday of the Revolution (1969-73), and the counterrevolution in the early Seventies.
Reviews
A report of the changing values that came about when the amoral adolescent culture of the 60s brought the so-called sexual revolution to America. Allyn (History/Princeton) has interviewed many leading lights of the time (Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Gloria Steinem) and consulted radical writings of the era that often vilified monogamy in the name of a drug culture that sought to shock the middle classes. The movement attacked the double standard of sexual behavior that separated men and women and reaped a whirlwind. Backed by the notorous Kinsey Report, much of the sexual revolution was media-driven and not followed by the majority (more than 70 percent of college students cited by a survey in the book were against coed dorms because they invaded privacy). Television, radio, newspapers, and magazines gave space to the demonstrations, sit-ins, and parades. Draft dodging, considered a cowardly disgrace during WWII, became a badge of honor; the Vietnam era, a time for cosseted students to make love, not war. Millions of teenagers, according to Allyn, rejected the moral standards of their parents to indulge in promiscuity and group sex. Penicillin, condoms, and the pill insulated their users from many of the consequences of free sexual activity. Meantime, the success of the civil-rights movement gave birth to unending rights demonstrations aided by the ACLU in broad interpretations of the First Amendment: workers rights, womens liberation, rights for Chicanos, homosexuals, and abortion seekers. Allyn draws few moral conclusions from these developmentsexcept to remark that the religious right, in its attempt to maintain ethical standards, was opposing progress. Allyn displays no such squeamishness, however, in detailing clinical accounts of liberated sex. Readers should have a strong stomach, or a barf bag. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Successfully treading the fine line between a serious chronicle and sensationalism in his account of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s in the U.S., Princeton historian Allyn mixes a smooth narrative of events (e.g., the legalization of birth control, abortion and interracial marriage), the famous (Hugh Hefner, Masters and Johnson) and not so famous (Jeff Poland of the Sexual Freedom League), with occasional analytic excursions into dramatic changes in society and individual lives. The book ranges widely, from Helen Gurley Brown's packaging of sexual liberalism in Sex and the Single Girl to novels promoting sexual utopias (i.e., The Harrad Experiment), the decline of the college policy of in loco parentis, the uses of sexual liberation by suburban swingers and political radicals like the Weathermen, and the commercialization of sex. Based on interviews with participants in these activities (including such figures as Barney Rosset, Rita Mae Brown and Andrea Dworkin, as well as ordinary people), and materials from the period, Allyn ascribes full credit to feminism and gay liberation for social changes that touched almost all Americans. Readers who lived through these heady events will appreciate his fresh perspective, while those of his generation (he was born in 1969) may be amazed to learn, for example, that birth control was illegal in many states as late as 1965. Allyn's broad sweep occasionally gives short shrift to historical background in areas like birth control or obscenity in literature. And he falters badly in his final chapter, virtually ignoring the feminist defense of sexual freedom and putting too much emphasis on the coalition of antipornography feminists and the religious right in his recounting of the decline of sexual liberation. Overall, though, Allyn's work is as exuberant and expansive as the movement he observes. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Allyn, a writer and Harvard-trained historian, presents here a detailed analysis of the 20th-century sexual revolution, beginning with the publication of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Drawing from documents and interviews with diverse individuals such as Andrea Dworkin, Larry Flynt, Camille Paglia, and Gloria Steinem, Allyn examines acceptance of birth control, greater sexual freedom for women and men, experimentation in nontraditional relationships, the decriminalization of homosexuality and interracial relationships, the beginnings of the gay rights movement, and the relaxation of restrictions on pornography. Even intellectuals, judges, and religious leaders who had rejected previous attempts to regulate personal behavior, Allyn argues, encouraged these changes. But the sexual revolution was cut short by the economic downturn of the early 1970s and the rise of the Religious Right. In the end, although it opened new doors on behavior, it was incomplete in changing American attitudes to sex. Particularly interesting are the stories Allyn collects of ordinary people who participated in mate swapping and swinging. Detailed and well written, this is highly recommended for all libraries.
-Stephen L. Hupp, Urbana Univ. Libs. OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This once-over of the fabled sexual revolution isn't bad, considering that Allyn is a mere baby-boomer's brat, "born in 1969." Unlike many of his subject's college-student participants, he did his homework, as 60-plus pages of notes, bibliography, and resources attest. He devotes 20 fact-and-testimony-crammed chapters to 20 aspects of libidinal liberation. He starts with the acknowledgment of female sexuality sparked by Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962); proceeds through such topics as the pill, the overthrow of miscegenation laws, gay liberation, the sexualized ideologies of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, and group sex; and, in the twentieth chapter, reviews 1973, the year of Pat and Bill Loud's televised trip to divorce court, the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and Erica Jong's right-to-orgasm novel-cum-tract Fear of Flying. A last chapter sketches the '80s counterrevolution of antipornography crusades, sexual abuse hysteria, and AIDS. Allyn eschews analysis and omits fine points but still produces a first-rate primer on its subject. Ray Olson
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