The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was the ongoing conflict in Viet Nam. Students who came into our Counseling Center for counseling were trying to find ways to avoid the draft. Resistance to war was high, and with it a questioning of the wisdom of the government in going to war that opened the possibility that other rules of behavior that had previously been accepted as absolute might also be questionable.

      The hippie movement appeared to be a direct outgrowth of the resistance to the war. The hippies were against most established institutions, opposed the Viet Nam War, favored the use of drugs and promoted sexual liberation. They got a great deal of media coverage for their Summer of Love in 1967.

      Questioning the rules

      At that time, the University of Missouri had rules governing student behavior, especially women’s. Dorms had hours at which the women had to be in their rooms with the doors to the dorm locked. Men were not allowed above the first floor, and a man found in a woman’s room would be banished from the university.Women in my classes had to wear skirts to class unless the temperature dropped below freezing.

      A counterculture began to develop. Drug use went up; women went for the braless look and began to push for changes in the rules. At one point, the President’s Office at our university was taken over by students protesting the Viet Nam war, and the National Guard was called in to remove them.

      At this time, I helped start Everyday People, a center outside the university regulations, to help students with problems concerning drug use, birth control and other sensitive topics because a considerable number of students no longer trusted the administration. I discuss Everyday People more fully in another chapter.

      Nationally and on our campus in ’68 and ’69, we began to feel the power of the woman’s movement, gay organizations and Black Power. It was a society in ferment and the world changed.

      Role models were different.

      I think music is a major influence on behavior, both the words and the dances that go with it. Here, an earthquake in behavior change occurred. First came Elvis Presley whom the public had to be protected from on the Ed Sullivan show by filming him only from the waist up. Then the Beatles were followed by groups whose lyrics became ever more explicit.

      In 1953 Playboy was born under the leadership of Hugh Heffner, who had the explicit goal of changing America’s sexual behavior. Between 1962 and 1965 he published a series of editorials he called the Playboy Philosophy, which he saw as a revolt against “narrow, prudish Puritanism.”

      In it he predicted the sexual revolution that was just about to take place. Some of the philosophy was an attack on the religious attitudes that regarded women as objects or possessions and refused to recognize her sexual rights. In some ways I saw him as being in league with women’s liberation.

      In one of my lectures I still cover the “battle of pubic hair.” The censors evidently watched the Playboy centerfold to prevent Heffner from showing too much, especially pubic hair. He went on a campaign to gradually show more and more. First by showing a black woman dancing across a stage in multiple shots, was there or wasn’t there? Then a woman on a bed with the shadow of a bedpost across her pubic area—again—was there or wasn’t there?

      I remember getting copies of the philosophy that had been reprinted as separate documents and using them as stimulus materials in my graduate sex classes. They were not great literature or even particularly deep as thought pieces, but they were in tune with the changes that were taking place in society.

      Other men’s magazines more explicit than Playboy entered the market. Bob Guccione began selling Penthouse in the U.S. in 1969. Penthouse was more explicit about sex and its pictures more detailed sexually. The magazine had a section that it claimed were letters from readers, but which appeared to me to have been written by someone with a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis on his desk next to his typewriter. The letters introduced readers to many aberrations.

      The rules about what it is acceptable to publish in a magazine were thrown out the window in 1974 by Larry Flynt in his Hustler magazine, which just a few years before would have been seen as hardcore porn. Interestingly I was not aware of my students, graduate or undergraduate, reading the magazine.

      Movies, books and censorship

      The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (MPAA) in 1930 adopted the Hays rules of censorship that are quite long and forbid practically anything that has to do with sex.The rules or code had to be obeyed if a picture was to receive the office’s “seal of approval.”No showing of bare breasts, the inside of a woman’s thigh or a couple in bed together—one of them had to have two feet on the floor. Even words like “damn” or “hell” could not be used.

      Previous to the 1950s censors had had considerable oversight as to what the public read and viewed, but in the ’50s censorship began to break down, introducing many people to models of behavior they would never have imagined under the old rules.

      In Roth vs. United States in 1957 the Supreme Court ruled that sexually explicit content is protected by the First Amendment unless it lacks “redeeming social importance.” The ruling indicated that anything could be printed or sold unless it was utterly without redeeming social value, and in 1959 books previously considered obscene such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Naked Lunch became available to the public.

      A best selling notable book of 1962 was Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, a book of advice for women on becoming sexually experienced before marriage. The book sold two million copies in its first three weeks, an indication that there was an audience for this kind of advice.

      Finally in 1968, MPAA in a reaction to court rulings, introduced a voluntary system of rating based on the viewer’s age. The original ratings were G for General Audiences, M for Mature Audiences, R for 16 and above and X for under 16 not admitted.

      Music

      Music is both a reflection of sexual attitudes and a molder of those attitudes. I have not followed personally the changes in music over the years since early on it all became just so much noise to me.When I first became a professor at the University of Missouri in the early ’60s, my wife and I were occasionally asked to supervise dances. It was all too noisy and wild for us and we soon gave up the duty.

      What my daughters listened to in the ’70s and ’80s sounded all the same to me, and I seldom could make out the lyrics. I have depended on feedback and research studies from my classes to let me know what was happening in the world of music.

      My generation had crooners like Crosby and Sinatra. The music was highly romantic and anything sexual was only suggested. Love was the thing. In the ’50s the change toward more direct sex began with Elvis Presley whose on-stage gyrations led the way into the sexual revolution. He also became noted for the number of his fans he had sex with, a reputation that was to follow many of the rock and roll stars who followed him.

      Pop music has become even more of a factor in today’s everyday life with iPods, portable radios and the Internet. Behavior and sex roles are being influenced by celebrities who portray standards with their lyrics, their performance and their social status. My most recent class was into a pop artist called Lil’ Wayne with lyrics such as “shawty wanna l-l-lick me like a lollipop, she said I’m like a lollipop, saying he’s so sweet, maker her wanna lick the rapper, so I let her lick the rapper” (Lil’ Wayne, “Lollipop”). My students’ research shows that the majority of pop songs reference sex, violence or drugs. Sexual СКАЧАТЬ