Sexing the Millennium. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 4, 1994 | by Suzanne Fields

When Linda Grant said she was writing about the sexual revolution, women asked her bitterly, "What sexual revolution?" Such questions provide her with a book of rebuttal as she catalogues sexual changes over the last 30 years, precipitated by legalized abortion, the pill, easy divorce, open homosexuality, spinsterhood without stigma and the mix and match of motherhood and career. She interprets the shifts in public perception and acceptance positively but also shows how the revolution opened a Pandora's box out of which flew violent reactions of rape, wife abuse, incest, pornography, the trivialization of intimacy and assorted personal pathological relations between men and women.

Sexing the Millennium (Grove Atlantic, 282 pp), a terrible title that muddles a vague thesis about the significance of sexual revolutions past and future, sets out to interpret the personal in the political ramifications of psycho-social-sexual changes that have been sometimes good, often bad and mostly misleading. "As we approach the end of the millennium, millenarians are, of course, irredeemably unhip," she writes. "In the new world order, we wander a broken landscape of failed visions, both social and economic. But there was a great moral adventure once, hopes that returned again and again to lighten our dreams."

Whether you regard that "great adventure" - especially the sexual revolution of the last 30 years - as moral, immoral or amoral may determine how much you enjoy this book. If you place moral judgment on hold and read the book for its sexy, sometimes raw, personal anecdotes, as well as historical surveys of sexual experiments from the 17th-century Ranters to the "swinging '60s" and Madonna, there's plenty of grist for the mill of the millennium.

But Sexing the Millennium is not for the prudish or even serious observers of sexual mores. An English journalist, Grant is better at description than analysis, more at home researching the past and interviewing those who have lived to wag their tales than she is at providing a deep understanding of the tragic dimensions of her subject. In the end, the book is profoundly and irredeemably sad, offering voyeurs of social change an insight into the historical hills and valleys of perversity, leaving behind a landscape strewn with bodies sacrificed in the orgies of pleasure.

The book began as a social study of the pill, which promised women that they could be the sexual equals of men. But its serious side effects - pain, bloating, hair loss, urinary infections, depression, irritability and suspected links to cancer and heart disease - caused many women to see themselves more as scientific guinea pigs than liberated sexpots. "It was not AIDS that ended the sexual revolution - it was what had started it, the pill," writes Grant. In detaching sex from intimacy, the pill created an illusion not only of physical safety that it could not provide, but also of psychological safety that ultimately devastated many women and children.

The failure of the "fun revolution" is crystallized in a survey of Cosmopolitan readers in 1980, acolytes of Helen Gurley Brown who believed they could romanticize the Playboy philosophy for women without getting hurt, never wholly realizing that the airbrushed centerfold was bound by a staple in her navel. The Cosmo women talk of numerous lovers and group sex and denigrate marriage. Writes one: "Why should I put up with the inconvenience of men, their sloppy habits, their snoring, their stinginess, when I can have the best thing of all: sex whenever I want it, and no strings attached."

But juxtaposed with such comments are descriptions of one-night stands where a woman is left frightened and lonely, wondering whether the man with whom she has just spent an ecstatic moment would even remember her name if he saw it listed in the obituaries a day later.

The author blames the failure of the modern sexual revolution on the determination of its devotees to self-destruct. Instead of seeking a freer, more humane world, of which sexual liberation was merely a part of a larger vision, a world purged of misery and inequality, sexual liberation sank into selfish explorations of personal desire. Women, limited to imitating the phallocentric philosophy of promiscuity, were left holding both the bag and the babies whose diapers came in it. Consequently, liberation slipped into a soppy catchall rationalization glibly summed up by Woody Allen as he groped to explain his sexual relationship with his almost-stepdaughter: "The heart wants what the heart wants."

Sexing the Millennium is an ambivalent book, desperately seeking to project passion without a passionate point of view to project. The author tries to slip her facts into a procrustean bed: Pleasure without responsibility is a dream that quickly turns into a nightmare. Grant stops well short of recommending the disciplined moral life to which much of her anecdotal data points.