SEX AND LIBERATION
Steinfels, Peter
SEX AND LIBERATION PETER STEINFELS One day several months ago I was thinking, as usual, about sex, and I resolved to write something about it. I was not prov.oked, at that particular moment, by...
...Cameron's moral seriousness sets him worlds apart from Vidal, and yet it was primarily tone which marked the latter's earlier reviews of books about sex...
...How could they, especially they-my friend was talking about what is frequently termed the "intellectual establishment"-have possibly avoided it...
...One says astonished only because indignant could never be applied to a man of such vehement un-flappability...
...Vidal now writes about fiction, an area in which he seems as anxious to prove traditional notions viable as he was astonished, in regard to sex, that any such notions might linger...
...It is a superb, humane statement...
...Cameron is not fooling about the great questions that are posed, about "how far the revolution has added to human happiness or misery, . . . what the effects on civilization or culture will be...
...The brightest will not be bold...
...There were several who had devoted major attention to what might be termed "sexual- civilizational" questions - Brown Marcuse, Rieff, more recently Bell...
...they will write about the sexual revolution, about sex itself, as though it is something which comes to them in books and newspaper reports...
...It is curious," a friend had said to me, "that almost none of our first-rate minds have written anything directly about sex...
...Yet there is much that is excluded by the detached, play-it-safe attitude...
...Our failure to think well about the "revolution in sexual mores" is normally attributed to an uncritically accepting attitude on the part of the intellectuals...
...Perhaps it is the topic, I thought...
...I think it is still pertinent to popular sociology and works of advocacy...
...in fact his review is a display of moral argument to which I would like to return in a future column (along with the argument of another excellent and somewhat parallel review, that by Dennis O'Brien, which appeared in these pages last June...
...I was not prov.oked, at that particular moment, by the recollection or anticipation of any personal rapture-heaven forbid that a journal which barely grants admittance to the ego should suddenly open the floodgates to the id...
...Of course I didn't think in alphabetical order, and lots of other names came to mind...
...The reason was simple: they, like myself, think of Cameron, once a regular correspondent for Commonweal, as a first-rate thinker...
...The air of being unimpressed ultimately renders the arguments, whatever they may be, something less than persuasive...
...and like Trilling's, or even more than Trilling's, it made clear that the reviewer was much superior to the works reviewed...
...Arendt, Bell, Bellow, Berlin, Chomsky, Dubos, Gay, Glazer, Hardwick, Harrington, Hook, Howe, Kazin, Kempton, Kenniston, Lasch, Lipset...
...Such is the intellectual life...
...My friend's remark was occasioned by the appearance of an extraordinary review, in the May 13 New York Review of Books, by J. M. Cameron, advertised on the cover page with the title, "The Prison of Sexual Liberation...
...Perhaps this is truly the case, making J. M. Cameron a most unusual and unrepresentative man...
...and it discourages the breathless and the credulous, which is what he finds in several books under review...
...yet even here the more flamboyantly it was featured (somehow the cinematic term comes naturally) the less it seemed to pertain to sex itself and the more it became the metaphor or vehicle for some supposedly grander theme...
...I think George Orwell was closer to the truth when he wrote, about the appearance of "obscene" books like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, that "it is not at all easy to approach an unprintable book with detachment"-and yet it is precisely the appearance of detachment that we insist upon...
...There is a myth that intellectuals fall all over any new book promising the explosion of sexual taboos...
...He does write with his usual moral seriousness...
...I began to run down lists of names...
...Of the proliferation and pervasiveness of periodicals like Playboy and Penthouse: "Such periodicals are beginning to achieve a kind of respectability and are not too slowly moving into the picture of the normal American home, along with the Reader's Digest, cola beverages, contraceptive pills, laxatives, instant coffee, and stuff to make the floor shine...
...Hadn't everybody written about sex...
...Could it be...
...That is obviously part of Cameron's rhetorical strategy...
...None of which, we may feel confident, are matters of much concern to the reviewer...
...This is the pattern, the division of labor, I detect...
...I enjoy Vidal...
...The stance has its merits...
...He announces, at the beginning, that "we are in the course of, perhaps at the end of, a revolution in sexual mores," and then he outlines its content...
...The observation that all my friends first made about Cameron's review was that it was a masterpiece of tone...
...Second-rate thinkers research sexuality, give advice, hawk reforms, celebrate liberation...
...books on sexual techniques reinforces the analogy...
...The remark stopped me dead...
...Leslie Farber skewers the Masters and Johnson research...
...The last," wrote Orwell, "is probably the commonest reaction...
...George Steiner writes about pornography...
...Insofar as any of our leading thinkers had addressed themselves to sex, the model appeared to be Lionel Trilling's classic essay on the Kinsey Report, reprinted in The Liberal Imagination...
...Either one is shocked and disgusted, or one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be impressed...
...This may no longer be the case with fiction, as it was when Orwell wrote...
...It has its disadvantages...
...first-rate thinkers then write about the second-rate thinkers...
...But for all his concern with the outcome of this revolution, there is no hint that the revolution itself has meant anything for him, no more than chewing gum and stuff to make the floor shine...
...But it is also a low-risk strategy...
...Individual, personal sexual experience was hardly absent from fiction...
...Indeed it is good to suppose that the New York Review is now giving the sex beat to Cameron (along with other topics like death, where the Review may suspect that its own determinedly secular outlook is under strain) instead of to Gore Vidal...
...Of masturbation, for example, he writes, "There isn't absolute unanimity that masturbation is without bad emotional consequences, but most students of sex think it at least harmless, like chewing gum or backscratching...
...My friends were right...
...At least five friends had mentioned Cameron's review to me before I had the opportunity to read it...
...No, what actually lurked behind my reverie was a book review...
...In particular it encourages the calm and the judicious view, which is what Cameron admires in Trilling...
...This in itself was curious...
...nor, for that matter, to us, the readers...
...Of the appearance of sex stores: "These emporia correspond in their own field to gourmet shops for lovers of rare foods, and it is characteristic of our time that the publication of gourmet (Continued on page 575) Steinfels (Cont...
...The determination not to be impressed is understandable...
...I also think that if the Swedish Academy should ever consider granting a Nobel Prize for Snottiness, he deserves to be the first recipient...
...It is also oblique, not looking at the topic first-hand but through the medium of a work which, we swiftly realize, is the product of a mind far inferior to the author's...
...They will stay at one remove...
...The writers of these books are usually so terribly impressed themselves, the critical intelligence cannot help but want to restore balance...
...There have been exceptions: one thinks of Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman, who risked looking foolish, and perhaps added little to our understanding in the process...
...I wonder whether part of the story might also be the cautious distance, and sometimes superior detachment, that the best among them have often affected to take from the subject...
...It rendered homage, early on, to Trilling's essay...
...Cameron's article was a masterpiece of tone...
...One is determined above all else not to be impressed...
...The strategy works: having announced a "revolution in sexual mores," and a whole series of world-historical questions that hang on this revolution, Cameron now deflates the actual oc-curence by assimilating it to suburban consumerism: to chewing gum, gourmet shops, Reader's Digest, instant coffee, and stuff to make the floor shine...
...what we are now to think of what has been, in the matter of sexual morality, the central tradition of our culture . . . from Deuteronomy...
...Far more likely this is a stance which he has adopted and which he rhetorically invites his readers to adopt with him...
Vol. 103 • August 1976 • No. 18
