The Revolution Is Over

In the '80s, caution and commitment are the watchwords

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Another important but unwelcome accelerator of the conservative trend is herpes. Since the late '70s, when it was often misdiagnosed as psoriasis, genital herpes has emerged as a major sexually transmitted ailment. Some 10 million to 20 million Americans have genital herpes, and an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 new cases appear each year. The one-night stand is now so risky that a couple interested in casual sex must get to know each other well enough to pop the herpes question—and believe the answer. Many sexologists think herpes is the chief reason for the new conservatism. Others consider it more of a symbol or the capping of a trend that began before herpes came to full public attention. Says California Sexologist Harvey Caplan: "In a funny sort of way, some people are actually relieved by the threat of herpes. It's a good excuse for them to give up a life-style that had become unsatisfying." Yankelovich thinks the rise of herpes has revived feelings of guilt and the idea of disease as a form of moral punishment for promiscuity. Beneath the veneer of liberation, he says, "we have a residual guilt, and the idea that promiscuity breeds disease falls on prepared ears."

Age is another contributor to revisionism. As many of the baby-boomers begin to hit their middle years, they are following the normal course of settling down, devoting more energy to their work and in general becoming more conservative. Caroline Stewart, 34, a Philadelphia journalist, managed to juggle both the new morality and the old during the '70s. As she grew up in Pittsburgh, her father blinked the message "Stay a virgin at all costs." She headed to Washington and became a grudging conscript in the sexual revolution. After her first romance broke up, she recalls, "I was wild, for me. Many people had a great smorgasbord of relationships. You had them without giving thought to what you needed instead of what you wanted."

Like some other female veterans of the revolution, Stewart thinks she was tricked into playing the male's game of easy sex. "Men compartmentalize their feelings. They can be casual about their sex lives," she says. "For women it's more of a bonding experience. Men use intimacy to get sex. Women use sex to get intimacy." She thinks men are so cavalier that the only sensible female strategy is the one her mother recommended: "Keep mysterious, play hard to get and never give in."

Some analysts think the history of the sexual revolution is the story of the ever ready male gaining access to a larger pool of willing women. "There hasn't been a change in male sexual patterns in the 20th century," says Vern Bullough of the State University of New York at Buffalo, a historian of sexual trends. Though most analysts in the field would not go that far, studies tend to agree that changes in male premarital sexual behavior since the '30s have been rather modest. Premarital sex rates for women more than doubled between the 1930s and 1971, and sharply rose again to a new peak in 1976.

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