Making love

The Google Ngram viewer allows any user to search the database of Google books for single words and phrases. This thing is well nigh irresistible, and I don’t do such a good job resisting temptation to begin with. I decided to run through it some of the terms that are relevant to my research. For those of you who don’t know about my research, just fax me an affidavit that you are at least 18 years old before you read any further. For everyone else, just a reminder that I am investigating the social structure of adolescent sexuality in the 20th century. Some of that structure makes itself known through language, through the terms that people apply to their practices, rituals, norms, and ideas.

Consider item one here, the term “going steady.” No doubt this phrase can appear in places where it would not refer to steady dating, but none of these come readily to mind. I think this will generally be attached to the kind of adolescent courting that we associate with lettermen’s sweaters and fraternity pins in the 1950s, and to songs like “Leader of the Pack.” As we might expect, the term hardly appears at all in the 1920s, when dating anyone twice in a row risked loss of social status. By the mid-1930s the term begins to increase in frequency and rises rapidly through the Pat Boone era until about 1958. The actual practice probably grew in advance of the frequency of use of the term, since the Ngram tracks uses in books, i.e., uses by adults who are observing and writing about and condemning the practice. How much condemnation? Sex educators almost unanimously advised against the practice, and religious leaders condemned it. A friend of mine (a few years older than me) swears that the nuns at his parochial school taught that going steady was a mortal sin. It was certainly the case the some dioceses forbade the practice in parochial schools. Why forbid it? Place your orders now with Amazon for my book.

But here is the second exhibit, and the motivation for this note. I track the term “making love” from 1700 to the present. As you can see, this term gains a clear hold on literary usage about 1740 and continues slowly but steadily to increase in use. What interests me here, though, is the shift in meaning attached to this term. Any reader of Jane Austen knows that 19th century British (and this applies to Americans as well) used the term as an equivalent to a kind of courtship. I’m sure many of you reading this will have read far more Victorian literature than I have, and can refine my definition. But my impression is that in the 19th century this term meant something a bit more serious than flirting, but still referred to talk.

Of course, most people of my generation (the Baby Boom) and after will relate “making love” to having sex. I don’t have a huge load of data about this, but I do have another Ngram chart, this one tracking three terms which are not precise equivalents today but certainly overlap: “making love,” “having sex,” “fucking.” Since use of “fuck” in a book would have had it banned in Boston (and everywhere else) early in the century, we can’t be surprised that the frequency of use remains negligible until about 1960. “Having sex” seemingly appears even less, then at about the same time starts to gain in use. I think a clear and rapid shift in meaning came to “making love” in the 1960s with the phrase “make love not war.” By that time, making love had become associated with the freer (perhaps I should say “freer”) sexual practices of the counter culture. Certainly, beginning in the 1960s many taboos of language were abandoned or else renegotiated, so that sexually explicit terms appeared everywhere. This does not clear up for me why “making love” would have nearly the same meaning as “fuck,” but today, whatever meaning attaches to “making love” includes sexual intercourse.

My other lingering question about the term has to do with an earlier shift in meaning. I think I’m correct in saying that “making love” went through an intermediate phase where it referred to a couple’s mutual caresses, what was usually termed “petting” at the time or (less frequently) “necking.” I even have some vague memory that the phrase was being used that way in the 1960s, but I was too young myself then to have had anything to do with that kind of thing. I’d be grateful for any observations from among my well-read friends as to their impressions of this term.

Grunge prostitution

During the summer of 2011 I spent a week reading through part of a collection of Girl Zines at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. These often contained personal and often explicit reflections on life and sexuality by young people, mainly girls and young women. The following comes from a special supplement to Sassy titled Ben is Dead, from 1994.

“It had to happen…grunge prostitution” by Amlee Jordan.

Bixy is 23, lives outside Seattle. Recalls in college she was in an all-girl band, but then had to start stripping to support her boyfriend who had a bad drug habit. One of her teachers liked to see her perform [she was, after all, a performance major]. She witholds his name but says that he suggested she shift to prostitution. “He really spelled it out to me, told me that time was money, ya know? He really taught me about how the world works. Why would you spend three hours stripping in some over caffeinated espresso bar, he said, when you could be in someone’s hotel room for 30 minutes making the same amount of money and having time left over for your band and your schoolwork?”

Humanitese

This evening I spent an hour or so reading an interesting article on the denial of incest in the middle-class. The topic touches on sociological and psychological work, but in reality it surveys the development of the concept of childhood from the 17th century, something that became particularly important for middle-class families.  Well into the article, however, I stumbled upon the following.

“It would not be appropriate to conclude even a cursory look at the role played by sexual abuse in the history of white middle-class ideology without noting that the otherwise inexplicable crusade against childhood sexuality is a crucial component in the effort to constitute bourgeois subjectivity as the successful suppression of natural animalism and passion by the intellectual and rational powers, in effect creating a hierarchy whereby impulses are restrained by civilized reflections. The fully developed, mature adult middle-class subject must manifest the ability to sublimate sexual energy into productive work or at least defer its expression until the social-sanctioned relationship of marriage. This facet of bourgeois subjectivity, it has been noted, laid the groundwork for middle-class fear and loathing of cultural “others” who are supposed not to insist on (or not to the same degree) this hierarchy of forces within the subject.” [Elizabeth Wilson, “Not in this house: incest, denial, and doubt in the white, middle-class family,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (Spring 1995).

Those of you who lack PhDs in English are excused if you do not understand more than half of this. This paragraph contains important, even compelling ideas. Yet it comes across as a prime example of “humanitese,” a language used by academics in the humanities to make their disciplines as jargon-laden as a social science field report. The very academics who pride themselves on their control of language, who often cherish well-turned phrases and praise stylistic excellence (and whose departments are often given the task of teaching undergraduates to write) turn out these rotund, German-syntaxed monstrosities.

As a check on my own prejudices, I opened up an online readability tool.

[http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php]  This offers scores on both the Fleisch Kincaid grade level (so, what grade level would be necessary to read a text? 3 = 3rd grade etc.—the higher the score, the greater the difficulty) and the reading ease score (the lower the score, the more difficult to read, e.g. comic books come in at about 90). The 143 words in the selected paragraph supposedly required a grade level of 27 and the reading ease score was -14 (that is, about 20 points more difficult than a legal document).

Of course, I cannot simply criticize without trying to make the world a better place. So, I turned my hand to re-writing the paragraph, retaining all the information. Of course, I’m not Elizabeth Wilson, and do not claim to be as smart as she, so my blunt prose may have lost something. Still, here is my version.

[Rewrite 1] Before I conclude this brief review of ideas used by the middle-class to deny children’s sexuality (contrary to ordinary observation of children), I should note that it plays an important role in middle-class concepts of the normal individual. Middle-class intellectuals conceived of the fully developed, mature adult as successfully controlling low or animal-like passions through reason. He or she will channel sexual drives into work, or at least reserve these desires for lawful marriage. This element of the middle-class’ conception of itself laid the groundwork for fear and distrust of other social and cultural groups that supposedly lacked this same level of self-control.

My paragraph comes in at 103 words. I’m still not particularly successful. My grade level score is 17 (at least a PhD in history could get it) and the reading ease comes in at 19. Still kind of obscure, but only for the vast majority of English-reading people.

If at first you don’t succeed…here’s another attempt, this time without the effort to capture every nuance of the author’s argument, but still reflecting the key points of the paragraph.

[Rewrite 2] So why all this effort at denying that children are sexual? The answer lies in the middle-class concept of self. Middle-class people control animal passion through reason, saving those physical drives for work and for marriage. This sense of self also laid the groundwork for middle-class views of other groups (the poor, immigrants, and so on) as lacking the same control over their own passions.

65 words, readable by a grade level of 9. Reading ease, 58.

Could I do better? Yes, with some effort. But, the point here is, all of us in the humanities need to do much, much better.

Saving Western Civilization

During this coming semester (spring 2013) my colleague, art historian Maureen Vissat, and I have set ourselves the task of saving Western Civilization. Of course, the actual civilization that began in the Near East and now straddles both oceans with former colonial possessions—that civilization is on its own. But the core element, western civ (known as Western Cultural Traditions at our university)—that is very much our concern.

Students come to this course prepared to revisit their worst experiences of “history” from high school. They expect a grilling about the meaning of the acropolis or the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Or maybe someone will ask, what caused the French revolution (and what does “cause” mean anyway)? And dates. Dates seem to exercise students more than just about anything else. Which thirty years were handed over to the Thirty Years’ War? Or the Hundred Years’ War?

I’m not even sure where we will begin. Though, I would love to see a course where students ask questions, such as, why did any war take a hundred years? Or, 95 Theses—who cares? That’s the point, isn’t it—why anyone cared enough about a set of debate prompts that they should start a revolution in church dogma?

Good questions, lively discussions, sharp analysis of source material. That’s where we want to end up, and maybe even generate some good, thoughtful writing along the way. I’d be willing to let students leave the course without knowing the year of Hammurabi’s Code (I’d take a millennium, if they could remember it). I would even trade in their ability to distinguish between Charles II and James II if they could really engage the ideas of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution.

We have a huge task before us. We plan to discuss, revise, and create a new curriculum in the coming semester, then team-teach our course during 2013-2014. The class will serve as a kind of Beta version, with observation and evaluation by all the faculty in this core area and also by our students. And, I plan to do all of this “out loud,” i.e., with full disclosure on the web.

Although we have discussed this project many times during the last year or so, we have yet to hold one meeting to pursue our goal of revising the course. January 2^nd, we begin with tabula rasa.

Restoring the Parthenon. Athens, 2005

I can’t say now what our class will look like. But it probably won’t look like Western Civilization.

Twenty years from now…

Mark Twain, a 1907 photo portrait by A.F. Bradley.

Recently I opened the Facebook page of a former student–a student of mine when I taught high school, 30 years ago. So this adolescent is now a middle-aged man. I’m always interested and pleased to see what interesting, complex people these high school seniors have become. But in this case, I found myself fixed on the quotation that he had given as his personal statement.

 Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.  –Mark Twain

This delivered shocks of both familiarity and oddness. I first saw this quotation seven years ago, in a bar in Heredia, Costa Rica, a bar with at least seven posters of Che Guevara stationed around the room. The message of the lines impressed me, and I’ve often brought them to mind when faced with a new challenge, one likely to make life unpleasant, at least in the immediate future.

So I had to congratulate this former student on taking up this robust  approach to life. Admittedly, though I was surprised to see the quotation coming from Mark Twain. I had first seen it in Spanish, and I had recalled the language was far sharper, with “arrepentir” used in place of disappointed, carrying more the weight of regret or “repenting of.” I managed to find a Spanish version of the phrase online, at  and listed as part of “Positive Thought” (Pensamiento Positivo) 295. [The other hits from this quick search turned up 20-year olds either pregnant  else looking for men, and some “porno Mexicano.” So, that seems like another story.] Sergio, who is a “coach, formador, escritor” and “conferenciante,” among other accomplishments, attributed the following thought to…himself:

Dentro de 20 años de lo único que te vas a arrepentir es de aquello que no has hecho.

Well, this is not the same as the Twain quote, so no need to suspect any intellectual malfeasance there. And plenty of other web sources had the quote, completely in English, and tied directly to the author of Letters from the Earth. Goodreads has it, as does a slew of Tumblr pages. I discovered posters with these same words, and individual postings of the quote either with or without other sayings from Twain. No surprise there–I’d found it so irresistible that it remained in my memory, in Spanish, for years. So it made sense that many others would be drawn to the same healthy mindedness.

But, those very same positive sentiments made me doubt any such words came from the pen or the lectures of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Had any of the quoters ever read any other authentic work by Mark Twain? Huckleberry Finn, with its depiction of two miscreant outcasts—an abused orphan and an escaped slave. Pudd’nhead Wilson, with the plot turning on two babies switched at birth, making one a slave and one a slaveowner? Or even the dreary, moralizing novel he considered his masterpiece, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc—French heroine judicially murdered by English invaders? Pudd’nhead Wilson’s “calendar,” a series of pithy sayings meant to skewer Victorian uplifts, would have served as a likely source for the saying. But, instead, it displays Twain’s sardonic wit to full advantage. A couple of samples

There is a Moral Sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

As I made my rounds of the Internet in search of the quote, I also noticed that the words “Mark Twain” never preceded any further indication of provenance. This is not at all a product of the Web—after all, Wikipedia is a model or citation, and even when inadequate, Wikipedia’s sourcing is subject o review and revision. But, credible citations come with sources. Students of the world, are you listening? There is a reason you learn the MLA or Chicago Manual or APA!

Even apart from the power of positive thinking displayed in this quote, it also contained other signals that its author was not Mark Twain. “So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.” Odd metaphors for Twain. In Life on the Mississippi, he went into detail about the long apprenticeship of riverboat pilots, and their responsibility for the safety of their vessels. “Catch the trade winds in your sails.” ?? Did Samuel L Clemens ever go sailing? Ever? If he did, he spent far more time at sea on steamships, on scheduled cruises with established routes.  Even stylistically, the quote just goes on too long. Twain always bore down hard on the need to leave out what is unnecessary. If a point is made well, further discussion only dulls it.

Finally, several pages into my Google search, I found the page of Mark Twain “quotations” that he never authored. Mental Floss  has the saying from the poster, without the seafaring metaphors at the end, and gives as its nearest equivalent:

One cannot have everything the way he would like it. A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.”

That approaches the “Twenty years from now” mindset about as closely as Horatio Alger approaches “The Mysterious Stranger.”

The sexual revolution? Part 1

Be saved by Free Love -- Thomas Nast's caricature of Victoria Woodhull.

When I tell people that I study and write about the history of sexuality, they usually have immediate doubts, primarily about me, but also as to whether “sex” can have a history. Do I study pornography? Do I go around asking people what they do in bed? (No and no.) But when they do have an idea about my research, it usually comes across as it did for a contemporary of mine whom I recently talked to at a tango event. “Oh yeah, the sexual revolution. I remember that.” That I had not mentioned the sexual (or any) revolution is beside the point. Sexual revolution stands as the long pole in a narrative tent, taken for granted by most Americans, that “the 1960s” somehow separates the present from a sexually repressive past.

By sexual revolution, most people have in mind the explosion of youthful libido revealed or imagined by Time beginning in 1962 and referenced throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The loss of in loco parentis rules on college campuses, living together, swingers, hippies (see “A Trip Thru the Sixties”), gay liberation and pride all mix together in the march of sexual liberation (conservatives insert “degeneration” here).  So many trends converge in this period and in this term that we might want to rename it the “sexual mash up.” For a good example of inadequate synthesis in thinking about this topic, look no further than the Wikipedia article on Sexual Revolution. I quote the following three sentences without ellipses: “Advances in chemistry, pharmacology, and knowledge of biology, and human physiology led to the discovery and perfection of the first oral contraceptives also known as “The Pill”. Purchasing an aphrodisiac and various sex toys became “normal”. Sado-masochism (“S&M”) gained popularity, and “no-fault” unilateral divorce became legal and easier to obtain in many countries during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. “*  *(The article on Sexual Revolution in the 1960s makes better sense if only because it takes on a narrower filed of inquiry.)

The pill. No fault divorce. S&M. And much more. No doubt, American and European culture entered a period of attention to the sexual side of life which continues to this day. Explorations of sexual life became commonplace. (An outstanding history of this cultural upheaval comes from David Allyn, Make Love Not War.) But the proclamation of sexual revolution did not begin in 1962. Already in the 1950s some authors saw as revolutionary the new trends toward promiscuity on college campuses and younger marriages. Allyn points out that Wilhelm Reich’s book on the liberation of youthful sexuality (advocating contraception and abortion) was translated into English in 1945 as The Sexual Revolution. Historian Alan Petigny moves the start of the revolution a bit earlier, into the man-scarce World War II era. He notes that demographic data point to the rapid rise of illegitimacy and pre-marital pregnancy beginning in the early 1940s.

Yet another historian, Kevin White, discusses The First Sexual Revolution (NYU, 1993) in the 1920s. By the end of that decade left-wing journalist V.F. Calverton had already dissected the problems of youth and of marriage. As an editor of Sex and Civilization, he pointed toward a new sexual ethic more in line with the bohemianism of New York and the companionate marriage ideals then in vogue. For Calverton and radicals of the time, marriage was the central problem of social life and required a radical reshaping. While many of the cultural avant garde cohabited and otherwise ignored the discipline of marriage, the more mainstream revolution came packaged as a new kind of marriage. Companionate marriage was marriage without children, or, marriage without children as the central motivation. Couples should value one another as companions, including sexual companions.  Birth control (the diaphragm was beginning to gain acceptance by the 1920s) would make childbearing a conscious decision. And, for those marriages where the companionship proved too feeble to hold the couple together, liberalized divorce laws would make ending and re-making marriage easier and more acceptable. Except for S&M, this included everything seen as part of the later stew of sexual revolution.

The long-running debates on marriage in American culture probably provide  better clues to radical change than do curfew rules at college campuses. American-style marriage has always been an unstable mix, with its tendency to abstract men and women from their social environments and remove the cement of property. Richard Godbeer considers the ferment created in colonial America. By the 19^th century, romantic marriage, held together only by the mysteries of love, created even greater tension for the men and women of the period. Victoria Woodhull and her  ghost-writer Stephen Pearl Andrews advanced the notion of a sexual revolution in her speech on “social freedom” in 1877.

Sexual issues have everything to do with love and marriage in American culture and society. When we look to a period of youthful exuberance or even adult escapades as a revolution, we miss an underlying theme in the culture and misunderstand the nature of the social change. If we have to retain the language of sexual revolution in the “1960s,” then we have to understand it isn’t the first and it might not start in the 1960s at all.

Coming soon: Whose revolution?

Turkey Trot — Greensburg, PA — Thanksgiving Day, 2011

Runners and walkers ready for the Turkey Trot