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In general, it is clear that the traditional moral system has widespread support. But whether this is a yearning for more conservative moral times or simply the persistence of attitudes that were widely thought to have faded is less apparent. The Yankelovich survey asked people whether their own views about morality had become more liberal or more conservative in the past few years. In response, 42% said there had been no change, 41% said they had become more liberal and 15% said they had become more conservative. It is difficult to measure such changes exactly, but even after ie process of liberalization, the majority seems to remain quite conservative. For example, 76% of the Yankelovich respondents supported the view that "permissiveness has led to a lot of things that are wrong with the country these days."
Surveys of sexual manners and mores are contradictory and tend to reflect the views of the pollsters. Perhaps the most significant such survey, however, is one taken in 1970 by the Kinsey Institute (officially the Institute for Sex Research), which is being used as the basis of a book entitled American Sexual Standards, to be published next year. Like the Yankelovich survey, the Kinsey study of 3,000 people showed a substantial majority (72% to 87%) disapproving of adultery, homosexuality, prostitution and casual sex among adolescents. "What really surprised us," Colin J. Williams, coauthor of the study, told TIME, "was that there existed such a hard-core bunch of conservatives in the country." In numerous places in the study, there are 20% to 40% that term "everything absolutely wrong. We call this moral absolutism, and there's a tremendous amount of it. What change there has been has occurred mainly in white, middle-class urban areas which are the areas that the media are constantly examining. But they do not reflect the country at large."
Although nobody expects America to return to the days of the hoop skirt, a number of experts do see signs that the wildest expressions of sexual "liberation" may be ending. "I think there's a shift back not toward conservatism but toward an end of sexuality for sexuality's sake," says Jack S. Boozer, professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta. "What you had in the '60s was like being thrown into a forest and told there was no infallible reference point, everything was equal. The person in that forest is just as culturally deprived as the victim of malnutrition or child abuse."
Psychologist Joyce Brothers agrees. "We're not as swinging a people as we think we are," she says. "People found that instant sex was about as satisfying as a sneeze. It takes a lot of time and trouble to have sex with a lot of people, and they found it wasn't even worth the scheduling."
Barbara Seaman, author of Free and Female, goes further: "The backlash is against casual sex because a lot of people were hurt. It was as if there was a train gradually carrying us away from Victorian morality, but then suddenly in the '60s and '70s the train became a runaway, and a lot of passengers were injured. Now the brakes are starting to be repaired."