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Fear of herpes obviously prods the trend along but explains the new caution only in part. In 1980, when herpes was just beginning to impinge on the nation's consciousness, a Cosmopolitan survey found that "so many readers wrote negatively about the sexual revolution, expressing longings for vanished intimacy and the now elusive joys of romance and commitment, that we began to sense that there might be a sexual counterrevolution under way in America." Cosmopolitan Editor Helen Gurley Brown, never one to miss a sexual trend, says, "Sex with commitment is absolutely delicious. Sex with your date for the evening is not so marvelous—too casual, too meaningless." The tide of conservative prose, in fact, has become too much for Playboy. An article in the December issue grumpily complains that scribbling erotophobes are out to restore Puritanism in America. Playboy's most recent campus poll found more sex than ever among collegians but also signs of the new traditionalist trend. Most of the sex took place in stable relationships, and a third of the students said that they had to be in love before going to bed with someone.
One problem in gauging the nation's sexual temper is that those in charge of the effort seem to know very little about what is really going on. On the subject of the sexual revolution, the specialists divide into three categories: the experts who think the revolution has ended, those who insist that it is still continuing, and a small group who say it never existed at all. In the last faction is John Gagnon, a sociologist who says the idea of a sexually permissive society was basically a construct of American journalism.
Sex polls do not settle the matter. Sampling is often flawed, questions may be sloppily phrased, and results sometimes vary erratically. More important, all the pollsters have to go on is what people say. New York Psychologist Mildred Newman reports that a close friend was interviewed for the Kinsey report on women. The friend, who led a robust and varied sex life, gave chaste and virginal answers because she was not willing to let anyone know how she really behaved. Nowadays many people may offer up attitudes designed to depict themselves as properly liberated. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, while studying a kibbutz in Israel, noticed that kibbutzniks whose daily conduct was clearly liberal almost always checked off conservative attitudes, and many conservative men and women reported liberal attitudes. This led to Tiger's First Law of Polling: "Attitudes are antidotal to actual behavior."