The Revolution Is Over

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

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"In sex," says Tiger, "women are the gatekeepers." At least some slowing of the sexual revolution seems traceable to the reassertion of traditional values by women. As always, women have more to lose in casual sex than men: they are left with the unwanted pregnancies, the abortions, the possible damage from contraceptives and the risk of cervical cancer associated with having multiple sex partners. To many women, random sex seems more and more a pointless diversion or a trap.

One female television personality in New York, a veteran of the sexual scene in the early '70s, later joined a loosely structured "celibacy club" of women who went out socially in groups of six or eight to avoid sexual entanglements. Says she: "It's hard enough for a woman to get ahead in this business without waking up in a different bed every morning."

A University of Kansas study of college women over the past decade found a significant increase in sexual activity during the years 1973-78 but almost none in the past five years. Says Meg Gerrard, the psychology professor in charge of the survey: "I think we have reached a ceiling with 50% to 60% of college women active sexually."

Sex is alive and well on campus, but it seems to be subdued by the standards of the early '70s. Says Louis A. Pyle Jr., director of university health services at Princeton: "Although some freshmen boys arrive here asking, 'Where's the party? Where's the orgy?,' students today are more monogamous. There's not a lot of promiscuity. This is substantiated by the fact that we see very little gonorrhea and no syphilis." At Mount Holyoke, Senior Jennifer Shaw observes: "The trend for women is not to sleep with men they meet at parties." The one-night stand is as potentially entangling for men as in prerevolutionary days. "The women who have one-night stands are really looking for further commitment," she says. Nancy Boltz, a nurse at the University of Southern California, says students age 20 and over want long-term relationships. Some younger students sleep around, but in these encounters the trappings of commitment are common. "They may only stay together six months," says Boltz, "but during that time they think they are in love."

Counselors describe today's students as sexually sophisticated but wary. Says Julianne Baffin, a dean of campus life at Atlanta's Emory University: "They have already had their share of heartbreaks in broken relationships. They have already been the dumpee or dumper, and they don't want that any more." Instead of floating into relationships, she says, students are more likely to go out socially in groups. "It isn't that sex as recreation has gone back into the closet," she says. "It's just that it's not considered a primary pursuit any more."

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