The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      The tipping point in changing sexual behavior from an abstinence/double standard came in 1968 (some would say 1969). By 1972 our entering freshmen were considerably more likely to have had sexual intercourse than the freshmen of 1968.

      A multitude of factors had led up to this marked change in behavior, particularly among the female students, and it was interesting to see it happening right before my eyes. Of course, it wasn’t only sex behavior that was changing. It was women’s attitudes about what fields should be open to them as careers. Medicine, law and psychology witnessed an increase in applications, and by 1974 the numbers of women in post graduate fields were significantly increased.

      Initially, I found myself on the side of the conservatives, who were resisting women becoming professionals. After all, a female psychologist would be taking a job away from a man who was the support of the family. I needed to come to grips with the idea that women were now calling for full participation in the marketplace and that the dual income family was the coming norm.

      Earlier I had had no problem accepting a divorced woman with children as a doctoral candidate, but later one of my best undergraduate women wanted to enter graduate school. Taking a single woman as a candidate who might get married and have children and drop out of the job market—was that fair? I did take her, and she ended up not only raising two children, but as a professor and an administrator at a university.

      Women’s need to find meaning

      On the other hand, there were some other more positive influences on my thinking about women as professionals. In the early ’60s as a Veteran Administration hospital psychologist, I had done some consulting with the personnel division on women volunteers, and had interviewed many of the applicants and published several articles about them in mental health journals.

      The volunteers were women who were typically in their forties or early fifties, married with children who had left home. These volunteers were complaining of the boredom and the lack of meaning in their lives. Their husbands were busy with their careers and had a significant life role; these women had lost their most important role, “mother,” and were seeking to find a replacement.

      They reported to me that the opportunity to volunteer at the hospital was putting some meaning back into their lives. The talk I gave in 1963 when I applied for the position as a professor at the University of Missouri was on this struggle some women were having in finding meaning in their lives after child rearing.

      In 1963 I found that Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique captured the problems I had been hearing about, and her conclusions made sense to me based on what the women volunteers had told me.

      As Friedan stated, “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”

      Her book, of course, was the start of the women’s liberation movement. It was obvious that women needed meaningful work after their children left home and probably earlier. You had to have been a member of my generation to understand why this was such a significant change in attitude and why it was so difficult to sell the idea that women could want a career outside of her family.

      Another factor in my growing awareness was my own family. I had four daughters who assumed they would have careers in something other than teaching and nursing, and a wife with a master’s degree in English who was considering going back to get a Ph.D. in psychology.

      In the mid ’70s I began to accept women doctoral candidates and eventually 14 of the 37 doctoral committees I chaired were for women. If I were still supervising doctoral candidates at this point in history, the number of women would be considerably larger.

      Besides women’s dissatisfaction with their roles, what other factors built up to the tipping point that changed our sexual behavior? Many! I will review what I see as some of the major influences on creating the tipping point in regards to premarital sexual intercourse.

      Sex research

      For years, masturbation was seen as a practice that would lead to mental illness,physical disabilities and the wasting of precious body fluids.Our coach in the seventh grade had given us what turned out to be the standard lecture on the dangers of this horrible practice, including the message that adultery was a rare occurrence and no decent woman had sex before marriage. Laws still treated both premarital sex and adultery as criminal acts for which you could be arrested.It was some time before these were removed from the law books.

      Then came Alfred Kinsey’s books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. That put a whole new face on what people really did behind closed doors. Although some of his data was debatable because of whom he chose or had available to interview, the general nature of his results changed attitudes as to what reality was when it came to what people were doing sexually.

      Right on the cusp of the change in sexual behavior in 1966 came the Masters and Johnson report on Human Sexual Response. While almost too dull to read, it demonstrated the capacity of women to enjoy sex and opened the door to experimentation on how women could achieve orgasm. This was followed by their 1970 book on Human Sexual Inadequacy that was soon a standard on the desks of all therapists working with sexual problems of their clients.

      Scientific breakthroughs

      The birth control pill became available in the early ’60s giving women much more control over pregnancy. Previously one of the arguments women used against having sex before marriage was the danger of becoming pregnant. With the pill this argument became weaker. This was despite the fact that most physicians would not give a prescription for the pill to unmarried women.

      Some of my older readers will remember that when a couple was discussing whether or not to have sex, it was often like a small debate with him giving arguments for and she giving arguments against. Besides her need to be a virgin when she married, the woman’s two big arguments against having premarital intercourse were the fear of pregnancy and the fear of sexually transmitted diseases.

      The sexually transmitted disease argument became weaker after the discovery of penicillin during World War II. It was effective against two big STD’s at the time, syphilis and gonorrhea. The evolution of gonorrhea resistance was not a known factor at the time, and of course with the sexual revolution we discovered many new STD’s.The possibility of an STD is no longer a strong argument not to have sex, but instead an argument to have safe sex.

      Wars

      World War II introduced American troops to the sexual behavior of women around the world. They discovered women could enjoy sex and would actively take part in the process.Some of their experiences had been that American women were passive participants in sex and didn’t really enjoy it all that much. This seemed to be related to the Victorian attitude that good women didn’t enjoy sex and did it only to please the uncontrollable sex urges of men.

      In 1947 and 1948 I had worked the grain fields of North Dakota with World War II veterans who at times seemed preoccupied with sharing their sexual experiences in France, Germany and Japan.Their changed expectations about women’s sexual responses would have had an influence upon the behavior of the women they had sex with.

СКАЧАТЬ