The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [149]
I found evidence of these phenomena everywhere. There is, as I have said, an air of exaggerated unreality about sex today, whether it is pictured in the frankly lascivious pages of a popular novel or in the curious, almost asexual bodies of the women who pose for fashion photographs. According to Kinsey, there has been no increase in sexual “outlet” in recent decades. But in the past decade there has been an enormous increase in the American preoccupation with sex and sexual phantasy.1
In January, 1950, and again in January, 1960, a psychologist studied every reference to sex in American newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs, plays, popular songs, best-selling novels and nonfiction books. He found an enormous increase in explicit references to sexual desires and expressions (including “nudity, sex organs, scatology, ‘obscenity,’ lasciviousness and sexual intercourse”). These constituted over fifty per cent of the observed references to human sexuality, with “extramarital coitus” (including “fornication, adultery, sexual promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease”) in second place. In American media there were more than 2 1/2 times as many references to sex in 1960 as in 1950, an increase from 509 to 1,341 “permissive” sex references in the 200 media studied. The so-called “men’s magazines” not only reached new excesses in their preoccupation with specific female sex organs, but a rash of magazines blossomed frankly geared to homosexuality. The most striking new sexual phenomenon, however, was the increased and evidently “insatiable” lasciviousness of best-selling novels and periodical fiction, whose audience is primarily women.
Despite his professional approval of the “permissive” attitude to sex compared to its previous hypocritical denial, the psychologist was moved to speculate:
Descriptions of sex organs…are so frequent in modern novels that one wonders whether they have become requisite for sending a work of fiction into the best-selling lists. Since the old, mild depictions of intercourse have seemingly lost their ability to excite, and even sex deviations have now become commonplace in modern fiction, the current logical step seems to be detailed descriptions of the sex organs themselves. It is difficult to imagine what the next step in salaciousness will be.2
From 1950 to 1960 the interest of men in the details of intercourse paled before the avidity of women—both as depicted in these media, and as its audience. Already by 1950 the salacious details of the sex act to be found in men’s magazines were outnumbered by those in fiction best-sellers sold mainly to women.
During this same period, the women’s magazines displayed an increased preoccupation with sex in a rather sickly disguise.3 Such “health” features as “Making Marriage Work,” “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” “Tell Me, Doctor,” described the most intimate sexual details in moralistic guise as “problems,” and women read about them in much the same spirit as they had read the case histories in their psychology texts. Movies and the theater betrayed a growing preoccupation with diseased or perverted sex, each new film and each new play a little more sensational than the last in its attempt to shock or titillate.
At the same time one could see, almost in parallel step, human sexuality reduced to its narrowest physiological limits in the numberless sociological studies of sex in the suburbs and in the Kinsey investigations. The two Kinsey reports, in 1948 and 1953, treated human sexuality as a status-seeking game in which the goal was the greatest number of “outlets,” orgasms achieved equally by masturbation, nocturnal emissions during dreams, intercourse with animals, and in various postures with the other sex, pre-extra-or post-marital. What the Kinsey investigators reported and the way they reported it, no less than the sex-glutted novels, magazines, plays and novels, were all symptoms of the increasing depersonalization, immaturity, joylessness and spurious senselessness of our