The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (3 page)

When a female baboon is ovulating, the skin around her vagina swells and turns bright red so male baboons can see it from a distance. In case the males are not looking her way, she also gives off a distinct smell. And if the bright red skin and strong smell don’t work, the female will squat in front of the male and present her hindquarters. She knows when the time is right for sex, and she knows how to make it happen.

Such behavior is the norm among mammals. Humans are the strange ones. We’re the ones who ovulate with almost no discernible clues. We’re the ones who have sex at random times rather than waiting for the time around ovulation (also referred to as
estrus
) when pregnancy is most likely. When a female Barbary macaque is fertile, she’ll have sex every seventeen minutes, getting it on at least once with every adult male in her troop. Gibbons go several years at a time without sex while waiting for the female to wean an infant and come into estrus. After a month of abstinence, female baboons will copulate up to one hundred times when they’re fertile.

Most animals have sex because they want—or, rather, need—to procreate. Anything else would be a waste of time, and possibly dangerous, because they become vulnerable to attacks by predators when distracted by their mates.

So why do men and women have sex all the time, even when (make that
especially
when) we know fertilization is impossible? Anthropologists have long trumpeted one theory: that the human female has a difficult time raising her offspring alone (and had an even more difficult time in prehistoric days), so she keeps her man around by offering him sex whenever he wants it, even after she reaches an age when she can no longer reproduce. But not everyone buys that argument, and there are a lot more questions that still have scientists scratching their heads. For example, why do humans copulate in private when all other mammals do it in the open? And why do men have bigger penises, in proportion to their bodies, than their ape cousins?

For centuries, the beginning of life was a mystery. Everyone knew that a man had to ejaculate into a woman’s body to achieve conception, but beyond that the process involved a lot of guesswork. Most anatomists up to the time of the Renaissance believed people came not from eggs but from seeds (
semen
is Latin for “seed”). Hippocrates believed that conception required two seeds, a male and a female. Aristotle maintained a century later that human life began when the man’s seed mixed with the woman’s menstrual blood. The debate went on for almost two thousand years. Throughout that time, most people believed that an orgasm was required to generate the heat that a seed or seeds needed to spring to life. The woman had to have an orgasm too, this theory went, given that the conception occurred within her body. It was not until the seventeenth century that the Englishman William Harvey suggested that people come from eggs, and it took yet another two hundred years before scientists figured out that women ovulated monthly.

The science of reproduction might have advanced more swiftly if a few of the researchers involved had been women, but bias was not solely a feature of scientific research. Throughout most of human history, men and women have seldom been treated as equals where sex comes into play. In the Old Testament, when Sarah could not bear children for Abraham, Abraham took a maidservant for a mistress. King Solomon not only had hundreds of wives but had hundreds of concubines, too. In imperial Rome, a woman guilty of adultery was exiled from her home and banned from marrying again. Roman Catholic doctrine declared that sexual intercourse was only for procreation and that thinking or acting otherwise was a sin. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, promiscuous women were burned at the stake. In Victorian England, women were told they were not supposed to enjoy sex, and men were encouraged to visit prostitutes rather than defile their own wives. To discourage promiscuity, birth control and abortion were outlawed in many countries, including the United States, and women were often forced to rely on illegal abortions to control family size. Not until the early twentieth century did anyone dare suggest that sex should be accepted and even embraced as healthy or something to be enjoyed by both men and women.

American attitudes toward sex took a big turn in 1909, when Sigmund Freud gave a series of lectures at the school that would briefly and halfheartedly take in the exiled biologist Gregory Pincus some thirty years later: Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Born in 1856 in the Austrian town of Freiberg, in what is now the Czech Republic, Freud studied medicine and specialized in nervous and brain disorders. He was influenced by the work of a Viennese colleague, Josef Breuer, who found that he could help deeply troubled patients by getting them to speak openly about the earliest occurrence of their symptoms. Freud theorized that many neuroses were rooted in trauma that had often been forgotten and hidden from consciousness. If patients could be helped to recall their experiences, he suggested, they could rid themselves of their neurotic symptoms.

In 1900, Freud published
The Interpretation of Dreams
. The unconscious mind was a powerful force, he proclaimed, and sexual drive was the most powerful of all determinants of a person’s psychology. Sexual urges required gratification, Freud wrote; abstinence was both unnatural and potentially harmful. In Europe, critics complained that Freud was making too much of sexuality, and the good doctor came to be despised. But upon arriving in America he found a welcome and influential audience. “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?” Freud asked his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung as the two men stood on the deck of their ship, staring down at the cheering throngs awaiting their arrival.

Most Americans never bothered to read Freud, but they came to understand, correctly or not, that he had endorsed sex as a desire equal in importance to hunger or thirst. His followers argued that sexual satisfaction was essential to happiness and mental health. Young women in particular, recalled the writer Malcolm Cowley, “were reading Freud and
attempting to lose their inhibitions
.” Freudians did not worship Freud; they worshiped intercourse and orgasms. Among the believers, nothing satisfied desire and made the world a better place more than a mind-blowing, spine-shivering orgasm, or “la petite mort” (the little death), as the French called it, suggesting a mystical quality to sex.

Margaret Sanger took up the cause, and so did Wilhelm Reich, another disciple of Freud. In 1923, Reich told the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that he believed orgasm was
the key to curing neuroses
. “Genital stagnation,” he warned, would lead not only to emotional problems but also “
heart ailments . . . excessive perspiration
, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.” Women and adolescents were particularly vulnerable, he said, because they were expected to remain abstinent (at least until marriage, for women) while men were free to satisfy their sexual appetites. Reich believed that everyone needed orgasms—and lots of them—to discharge their sexual energy and remain healthy. What’s more, he said, unless that energy was released, the world would never achieve progressive political or social reform. It would take nothing less than a sexual revolution—a term of Reich’s creation—to create a truly free society. Reich was the prophet of the orgasm. He even devised a special box—the Orgone Energy Accumulator—to help harness orgasmic energy, which he believed circulated in the atmosphere and in the human bloodstream. Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Steig, and many other intellectuals later sat in the box (Albert Einstein considered it but politely declined). Eventually the federal government labeled Reich a fraud, but by then it didn’t matter. He had already inspired a generation of believers who would become central players in the sexual revolution.

After Reich came Alfred Kinsey. At first glance, Kinsey did not look like a radical. He wore a bow tie and crew cut as he lectured students at the University of Indiana, and he liked to invite his colleagues to his home to drink tea and listen to classical music from his impressive record collection. He married the first woman he ever dated and took her camping on their honeymoon so he could collect bugs. Sex interested him because it was a part of nature, but work was his real passion. Kinsey was an entomologist who began his academic career studying gall wasps. Only when his students began asking questions about marriage did he begin reading all he could on human sexuality. Appalled by the scarcity of reliable information, Kinsey began his own studies. A radical empiricist, he viewed everything as quantifiable, whether it was orgasms or sex between humans and barn animals. Armed with nothing more than a notebook and a straight face, he set out to measure and categorize the variety of sexual conduct in America. He started by interviewing his students and soon, with a team of researchers, fanned out across the country.

Kinsey discovered he had a great gift for eliciting elaborate and secret information. By 1947, he was ready to publish his results. Among his findings: sex was good for marriage, masturbation did no harm, homosexuality was more widespread than most people assumed, and men and women cheated on their partners more frequently than most people believed. While others weighed in on whether homosexuals or unmarried sex partners were destined to go to hell, Kinsey reported the facts as science: “Mouth-genital contacts of some sort, with the subject as either the active or the passive member in the relationship, occur at some time in the histories of nearly 60 percent of all males.” But Kinsey’s most important finding was probably this one: Women desired sex, and not just to make babies. They masturbated, they enjoyed orgasms, and they slept around much the same as men did (although, according to Kinsey, they either did so less often or were less willing to admit it). Either way, Kinsey made Americans feel less shame about sex. He assured them their desires—even the kinky ones—were normal. His book,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
—which cost $6.50 (about $63 today), had 804 pages, and was published by W. B. Saunders, an older medical publishing company, in 1948—became a surprise bestseller.

Kinsey inspired young men like Hugh Hefner—who used the furniture in his small Chicago apartment as collateral for a bank loan to launch
Playboy
magazine—to think of sex as something healthy and righteous. Hefner would soon see himself as a kind of Paul Revere in silk pajamas, a messenger of truth and freedom. He urged Americans to treat sex as something they were entitled to enjoy selfishly and ostentatiously, like fast cars, good food, and fine spirits.

Thanks to Freud, Reich, Kinsey, Hefner, and others, humans were more unusual creatures than ever by the middle of the twentieth century. They became fascinated by sex, convinced that it was the ultimate source of rapture. Young men began describing the stations of their sexual achievements in competitive terms such as “first base,” “second base,” and “scoring,” or “going all the way.” Everything seemed sexually charged. Even the cars of the day looked like phallic rocket ships—except for the Edsel, which had a grille that resembled a chrome vagina. Scandal magazines reported on the sex habits of the stars. Girlie magazines like
Flirt
,
Wink
, and
Titter
offered crude jokes and luscious pinups. Hollywood in the 1940s turned Betty Grable and Esther Williams into objects of sexual worship.

On the surface, the 1950s appeared to be a time of conformity and conservatism, but it was also an age of fear. Russia had the atomic bomb, so families built underground shelters stocked with canned goods and water to last for years and the Department of Defense hid Nike missiles underground all over the country in case of nuclear attack, from Michigan Avenue in Chicago to the Santa Monica Mountains in Malibu. U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a ruthless campaign to uncover suspected Communist sympathizers, tarring innocent, law-abiding citizens in the process. For women, it was an especially challenging time. They risked being seen as outcasts if they graduated from college without being married, got married and did not immediately have children, or had children but also wanted to work outside the home. To have a child out of wedlock was the greatest of shames.

Even women’s clothing was restrictive. “
Fifties clothes were like armor
,” wrote Brett Harvey in the introduction to
The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History
. “Our ridiculously starched skirts and hobbling sheaths were a caricature of femininity. Our cinched waists and aggressively pointed breasts advertised our availability at the same time they warned of our impregnability.” Nursing and teaching were the only professions easily accessible to women. A woman’s role in life was to be married and raise children, and to start at an early age. She was supposed to find satisfaction in serving her husband and her children. If she had desires of her own—be they sexual, professional, or personal—she was expected to hold them in check, to wipe them out the same way she wiped germs from the kitchen counter or stains from the collars of her husband’s white dress shirts. To rebel against these restrictions was to invite scorn and humiliation. The unmarried life was seen as empty and joyless, and women living it were to be pitied.

Women in the 1950s tended to marry as soon as they could. The
median age of marriage for a woman in 1950
was 20.3. A decade earlier, the median age had been 21.5 (today it is 26.1). Why were young women of the 1950s in such a hurry to get hitched? With the war over and men returning home, single women had few options. They couldn’t compete with the men for jobs, and college, while potentially enlightening, only postponed the realization that career options for women were limited. “
What’s college
?” asked an ad for Gimbels department store. “That’s where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing.” Another reason to marry: They wanted to have sex, and it was dangerous to do so out of wedlock. Condoms were sold in drug stores, but to get a diaphragm in most states required a doctor’s prescription, and most unmarried women were ashamed to ask.