Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Author(s): Anna E. Ward

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3/4, THE 1970s (FALL/WINTER 2015), pp.
120-136
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
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Sex and the Me Decade:

Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Anna E. Ward

In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journal-

ist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the "Me Decade/ arguing, "The old
alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold, lhe new alchemical
dream is: changing ones personality - remaking, remodeling, elevating,
and polishing one s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on
it" (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of
this "new alchemical dream," and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of
self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-ex-
ploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly
noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of
the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts
helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex
guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity
formation and a critical element of self-awareness.

Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the "sexual revolu-

tion* of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as mere-
ly an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate
reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity
of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of
profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., in-
cluding the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird ( 1972)
and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia
Johnsons Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hites The Hite Report:
A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comforts The Joy
of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women's Health Book Collectives Women

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 43: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 201 ©

5) 2015 by Anna E. Ward. All rights reserved.

120

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 Sex and the Me Decade 121

and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); and the release oí Deep Throat (1972).
The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights
Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both
issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful
force in U.S. politics - the religious right and its insistent invocation of
sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political land-
scape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically
feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which
both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popu-
lar sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought
in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist
and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for con-
temporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may
help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and
queer implications.
If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating
and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined
within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention
than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales fig-
ures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people s
sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comforts The Joy
of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The
purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort s is, in and of itself, a be-
havior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts
had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides
such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual
knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and
gender norms.
In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the
U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone,
audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine
sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-mar-
ket literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade
in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely
examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature, this article sheds light on
the historical development of a key arena of sexual knowledge production
and the neglected overlap between mainstream and feminist discourses of
sexual fulfillment as a key component of identity formation. Within this

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122 Anna E. Ward

literature of the 1970s, I argue, there emerged a discourse of sexual ful-

fillment as self-revelation connected to a distinctly modern consumerist
logic of identity formation, one that held much in common with feminist
discourses of sexuality during the period.

Toward a More Perfect Union

The notion that the sexual self is one that requires knowledge, scrutiny,
practice, and mastery began to emerge in the early twentieth century in
the U.S. The early twentieth century saw a boom in marital advice manuals
circulating within the U.S., reflecting a growing concern over a perceived
"crisis in marriage" attributed to a range of causes including women's
changing roles in society, modernization and urbanization, the liberaliza-
tion of divorce laws and rising divorce rates, growing acceptance of pre-
marital sex, changing courtship norms, and declining birthrates amongst
white, middle-class families. The marital union became a metaphor for the
cultural and national union; for many, "saving" marriage meant saving the
nation (Stopes 1931), and within eugenicist-inflected discourses, saving
the "more civilized people" (Stone and Stone 1939). Marital advice lit-
erature of this era emphasized sexual satisfaction as a product of learned
and practiced technique, facilitated by the accumulation of knowledge im-
parted by experts and acquired through training. The need for information
regarding "normal" sexual relations was often buttressed by the argument
that sex cannot proceed from instinct alone - it must be learned, cultivat-
ed, and practiced. As Margaret Sanger put it in her 1926 text Happiness in
Marriage, "No man or woman should leave to chance or the play of blind
instinct the most complex of all human ties" (19). Throughout the mar-
riage manuals of this time period, women are depicted as the complex par-
ticipants of the heterosexual sexual exchange. Key to facilitating women's
pleasure and "mutual orgasm," according to early twentieth-century mar-
riage manuals, was foreplay and rescripting sex "not as a single event but as
a series of acts whose satisfying consummation required careful activity at
every step" (Laipson 1996, 509).
The mid-twentieth century can be viewed as a transitional period in ad-
vice manuals - a period where old ideas and new ideas coexisted on book-
shelves, competing for the public's attention and vying for dominance over
the domain of sexual expertise. In their examination of popular marital ad-

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 Sex and the Me Decade 123

vice manuals of the time, Lionel S. Lewis and Dennis Brisset argue that "a
cult of efficiency" pervaded this literature ( 1967, 17), concluding that "the
public is advised to prepare for sex just as they are advised to prepare for
a job" (10). While most early twentieth-century marital advice manuals
were targeted at physicians and other professionals, or to husbands whose
responsibility it was to implement the suggestions offered, the intended
audience for midcentury manuals was overwhelmingly women. The bur-
den of achieving sexual satisfaction in marriage shifted from husbands to
wives in midcentury marital advice (Neuhaus 2000). This literature sought
to diminish the importance of women's sexual satisfaction in marital sex-
ual union and redirect the blame for its lack on women themselves, often
drawing on Freudian-based theories of sexuality. The importance of fore-
play and the role of the clitoris in female sexual pleasure was significantly
downplayed in 1950s and into the 1960s. Midcentury manuals often de-
picted men as the ones in need of sensitivity from their partners, paying
considerable attention to male sexual dysfunction and placing responsibil-
ity on wives to ensure that husbands were sexually satisfied. Thus, "the cult
of efficiency" that pervaded mid-twentieth-century marital advice litera-
ture was distinctly gendered in that it was women, specifically, who were
advised to treat the sexual satisfaction of their husbands as a duty requiring
preparation, experimentation, and the cultivation of technique.
In the 1960s, however, we also begin to see the emergence of a "how-to"
or "self-help" style of marital advice manual that argued for equal attention
to women and men. Steven Seidman notes that advice manuals, beginning
in the 1960s, were often "addressed to a couple' whose relational status -
married, cohabitating, long-term, short-term, etc. - is unknown and pre-
sumably irrelevant" (1989, 308). Some manuals do not presume a couple
as their target at all, instead targeting the single man or woman. No book
was more reflective of these shifts than Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the
Single Girl ( 1962). Brown targeted single women as her primary audience
and encouraged them to pursue robust sexual lives outside the confines of
marriage. Brown also challenged notions of expertise in the advice man-
ual market: "Her claim to fame was neither a degree nor a pedigree; she
simply spoke from experience" (Scanlon 2009, 86). The 1970s ushered in
a new era in sex advice literature that shifted away from the promotion of
healthy marriages toward a focus on personal satisfaction, reframing sex
and sexual relationships as critical domains of self-exploration and identi-

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124 Anna E. Ward

ty formation. Feminist and lesbian and gay inquiries into sex and sexuality
heavily influenced this shift in focus within advice literature and played an
important role in shaping larger discourses of sex in the 1970s. Unlike the
literature of previous decades, sex and relationship advice literature of the
1970s revealed sex to be thoroughly political.

Help Yourself

In the 1970s, women's pleasure and sexual politics became a significant

focus of a diverse array of feminist writing and activism. Feminist sexu-
ality debates often involved an emphasis on women's self-determination
and self-exploration - a réévaluation of female embodiment and sexual
pleasure, particularly in terms of the source of orgasm - and a reframing
of sexual differences between women and men as products of power dif-
ferentials and socialization, rather than essential physical or psychological
differences. Critical to these debates was the recognition that women's sex-
ual lives cannot be understood outside the realities of a pervasive culture
of sexual objectification, harassment, and violence; many feminists argued
that women's sexual pleasure could not be accounted, let alone pursued,
until women's physical and emotional well-being were taken seriously. De-
spite deep divisions over issues of sex and sexuality, feminist discourse of
this era regularly cited sex as a key lynchpin in the oppression of women
and a potentially potent site of liberation, and this framing of sex and sexu-
ality as fundamentally political made a tremendous impact on U.S. culture.
The impact of feminist debates regarding women's sexuality and pleasure,
as well as power relations between the sexes, is evident in the sex and re-
lationship advice literature of the 1970s and the growing market for ad-
vice literature targeted specifically at women. No longer was it possible to
ignore feminist challenges to normative prescriptions regarding sex and
sexuality; even when resistant or downright hostile to feminist critiques,
authors had to address feminist interventions and demonstrate a degree of
familiarity with what was at issue in these debates. While these guides are
not always easily redeemable for what they have to say regarding these is-
sues, their explicit engagement of gender and sexual politics is noteworthy
and, in some instances, these guides contain surprising overlaps with key
themes in feminist and lesbian and gay interventions into sexual discourse.
The most overt example of the influence of feminism on 1970s sex and
dating advice literature is the explicit acknowledgment of feminist activism

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 Sex and the Me Decade 125

and its impact. Indicative of feminisms growing influence on the sphere

of sexual discourse and sexual relations, "M" devotes an entire chapter of
The Sensuous Man to "The Womens Liberation Movement - And You"

(1971). This section makes clear that feminist critiques of sexual relations
have permeated men s consciousness. The beginning of the chapter begins,
"I have a recurring nightmare in which the woman to whom I am making
passionate love suddenly cries out, 'Male chauvinist pig!' and kicks me
out of bed. It could be worse, of course. The more militant members of
the contemporary Women's Liberation movement would settle for noth-
ing short of castration with can openers, scissors, and rusty razor blades"
(209). He admonishes men, however, to forget about the ultraradical fem-
inists, the dykes, and the "crazies" and "confront the real issues." He argues,
"Women claim that most men perpetuate a 'double standard' of sexual
morality. They are right Women claim that most men view women solely
as sexual objects to be used.' They are right Women claim that most men
are totally selfish in bed, exploiting their partners to reach orgasm and then
ignoring the woman's need for sexual satisfaction. They are righť (210).
Despite its hyperbolic statements, The Sensuous Man is one of the earli-
est advice manuals to directly address feminism; other manuals tended to
make oblique reference to changing gender relations and typically did so
in a manner suggesting that these changes have already occurred, rather
than acknowledging that they continue to be a matter of contemporary
contestation, debate, and political organizing. The devotion of a chapter
to "Women's Liberation" recognizes the importance of feminist political
and cultural debates and their ongoing impact on sexual relations between
men and women, even if the author explicitly rejects some feminist claims.
Alex Comfort's wildly successful The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to
Love Making also includes passages specifically addressing feminism. In
the section "Women (by her for him)," presumably written by a female
contributor to the book, the author states, "As to the Women's Lib bit, no-
body can possibly be a good lover - or a whole man - if he doesn't regard
women as (a) people and (b) equals. That is really all there is to be said"
(1972, 97). In the "Men (by him for her)" section, the writer responds to
feminist critiques of sexual objectification, "The Women's Lib bit about
sex objects misses the point - sure the woman and the various parts of her
are sex objects, but most men ideally would wish to be treated piecemeal
in the same way" (72). Despite the rather dismissive tone, referring to one
of the most influential political movements of the twentieth century as a

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126 Anna E. Ward

"bit" for example, and the objectionable arguments made, The Joy of Sex
acknowledges that discussions of sex cannot proceed without contending
with feminist critiques. Regardless of the specificity of the authors' argu-
ments, these texts demonstrate feminisms successful framing of sex and
sexual relations as thoroughly political. Whereas early twentieth-century
marriage manuals presented the "problem" of sex as stemming almost en-
tirely from physiological differences between men and women, the man-
uals of the 1970s were far more likely to present sexual issues as having
political roots, namely the unequal distribution of power between men
and women and gender socialization.
The question of women's orgasms, how and where women experience
orgasm, became a central focus during the 1970s, particularly among fem-
inists. The critique of the primacy of vaginal orgasm, or even the existence
of vaginal orgasm, also appears in dating and sex guides of the 1970s.
Again, The Sensuous Man is quite direct in this regard:

One of the most harmful myths that have been perpetrated on the fe-
male in the last few years is that there is only one kind of orgasm that
counts - the vaginal orgasm. In point of fact, there is no such thing. All
female orgasms are clitoral in origin. (1971, 103)

The Sensuous Man offers detailed instructions on specific sexual techniques

aimed at stimulating the clitoris, particularly techniques for oral sex, in-
cluding "The Alternating Flame," "The Strawberry Suckle," and the "The
Velvet Buzz Saw" (113-15). Whereas marriage manuals of the early and
mid-twentieth century primarily focused on modifying coital technique
and controlling timing to achieve "mutual orgasm," 1970s manuals fo-
cused heavily on variety of technique and experimentation. The Joy of Sex,
in particular, heavily invests in an ethic of variety and experimentation.
The books title playfully riffs off The Joy of Cooking, a beloved cookbook,
and utilizes a food and cooking thematic throughout. Comfort explains in
the preface, "A cookery book is a sophisticated and unanxious account of
available dishes - culinary fantasies as well as staple diets - with the prac-
tical details provided. This book is an equally unanxious account of the
full repertoire of human heterosexuality" (1972, 6). Thus, sex is likened
to food; just as one tries out a variety of different foods, developing and
cultivating tastes for certain foods and dishes, so The Joy of Sex readers are
encouraged to playfully experiment with this "full repertoire." The Joy of
Sex is "advanced lovemaking," intended for those that wish to enhance and

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 Sex and the Me Decade 127

expand upon skills they already possess (8). While Comfort widens the
repertoire of sexual practices, and does not purport to offer one universal
sexual practice as many earlier manuals do, he does put forth the notion
that sex is a skill, or even an art - one that needs to be practiced. The pro-
motion of sexual experimentation and variety meant that 1970s advice
manuals often presented varying interests and behaviors as not necessarily
indicative of a type of person but rather a matter of individual taste.
Just as sex and relationship guides focused on cultivating knowledge
and technique, feminist literature often encouraged women to focus on
understanding their bodies through knowledge and physical self-explo-
ration. Refuting Freudian-inspired understandings of women's pleasure,
Anne Koedt s "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," first circulated in 1970,
contends that men have convinced women of the existence of vaginal or-
gasm, "an orgasm which in fact does not exist" and that women who claim
to have experienced vaginal orgasm "lack knowledge of their own anato-
my" and have afail[ed] to locate the center of the orgasm" (2003, 105).
Koedt argues, "New techniques must be used or devised which transform
this particular aspect of our current sexual exploitation" (101). The 1971
Workshop Resolutions of the First National Chicana Conference devotes
a section to "Sex and the Chicana," suggesting, "Lets cast off all our sexual
complexes to have a better and happier life" and highlighting the impor-
tance of sex education, "Women should go back to the communities and
form discussion and action groups concerning sex education" (2000, 166).
Alix Kates Shulman highlights the political potency of women s conscious-
ness-raising (CR) sessions and its implications for male-female sexual re-
lations, "With women getting together, the day may soon be approaching
when they will exert enough counterpressure to define female sexuality in
their own way" (2003, 121). Women and Their Bodies: A Course, published
in 1970 and later renamed Our Bodies , Ourselves , grew out of CR sessions.
In addition to the "Anatomy and Physiology" section that discusses wom-
en's reproductive and sexual anatomy, the text devotes an entire section to
sexuality. As was common at many feminist CR sessions, the text encour-
ages women to examine their bodies, particularly their genitalia, "We em-
phasize that you take a mirror and examine yourself. Touch yourself, smell
yourself, even taste your own secretions. After all, you are your body and
you are not obscene" (1970, 14). As Nancy Tuana explains, "Members
of the Boston Women's Health Collective did not simply consult medi-
cal textbooks to understand the sexual organs or sexuality, but turned to

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128 Anna E. Ward

their bodies. Genital self-exam was an epistemic practice that the women's
health movement used to undermine ignorance" (2006, 8). These self-ex-
ams would become feminism s own version of sexual science, one that was
focused on positioning women as the true experts on their own bodies
and envisioned as a springboard for women's sexual emancipation, lhe
importance of education was a recurring theme among groups focused on
women's empowerment. Knowledge and exploration were key to chang-
ing women's perceptions of their bodies and the source of their pleasure.
While many sex and relationship advice guides of the 1970s situated
the clitoris as the primary source of women's pleasure, few rejected pen-
etration as irrelevant to women's pleasure or "a male trip" as some fem-
inists did. The focus on variety in these guides meant that the body as a
whole was situated as a potential source of pleasure, with certain zones of
the body producing pleasure in some, indifference or disgust in others. In
this respect, mainstream sex and relationship guides may have had more
in common with certain strains of lesbian and gay discourse of the decade.
Jill Johnston's "lhe Myth of the Myth of Vaginal Orgasm," originally pub-
lished in 1973, is a case in point. While Johnston was a staunch advocate of
lesbianism as the proper sexual mode of feminism, she is mocking of some
feminists for calling into question the sexual possibilities of the vagina:

It seems actually amazing that what they [feminists] were asserting was
a stubborn refusal to submit to conventional intercourse on grounds
of an insensitive vagina. Equating intercourse with vaginal orgasm as it
were. (No mention of hands or bananas or dildoes.) Really as though
one was unthinkable without the other. As though the case for an insen-
sitive vagina provided women with their first legal brief for the indict-
ment of phallic imperialism. (2003, 508)

Johnstons interrogation of the assumption that vaginal pleasure was a

fictitious ploy on the part of patriarchy demonstrates the complexity of
meanings attached to sexual acts within feminist communities, and reflect-
ed what was perceived to be a growing feminist orthodoxy around sex that
situated penetration, as well as a range of other sexual acts, as inherently
problematic.
The emphasis on sexual experimentation and variety within advice
literature functioned in tandem with the idea that sexuality is a key com-
ponent of self-expression, particularly for women. As David Reuben pro-
claims in his popular Any Woman Can! Love and Sexual Fulfillment for the

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 Sex and the Me Decade 129

Single, Widowed, Divorced . . . and Married, "Sexual liberation entails ac-

ceptance of your own unique sexual responses and sexuality in general,
not because it conforms to external standards or solely because it provides
pleasure for a partner, but because it is an intimate expression of your-
self " (1972, 197). In advice literature of this era, sexual experimentation
becomes the cornerstone of discovering ones truest, most intimate self.
Steven Seidman argues that manuals of this era represent a "libertarian
sex ethic," an ethic that views sex "not only as an act of love but as one of
pleasure and self-expression" (1989, 310). This is most obvious in Alex
Comfort s statement regarding normality:

If you must talk about "normality" any sex behavior is normal which
(l) you both enjoy, (2) hurts nobody, (3) isn't associated with anxiety,
(4) doesn't cut down your scope. Insisting on having intercourse only
in the dark, in one position, and with as little pleasure as possible, which
used to be the moralists' stereotype of normality, is a very anxious and
limiting routine. Good, unworried lovers use all five fingers of all four
hands. (1972, 78)

Comforts directive to "take off your shell along with your clothes" can
be read as both an argument for not only sharing oneself completely with
a partner but also unearthing a more authentic, genuine sexual self (81).
Connected to this focus on self-awareness, a substantial market devel-
oped in the 1970s around psychology-based manuals, particularly those
premised on the growing field of sex therapy; these manuals reflected and
encouraged the emphasis on cultivating an authentic self through sexual
discovery and experimentation. Psychology as a field grew substantially
in a short period of time in the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. As
James Capshaw explains, "As the professional domain of psychology ex-
panded, it spilled over into the popular realm and gave rise to an almost
indescribable cornucopia of theories, techniques, and therapies offered
for public consumption" (1999, 243), or what Wendy Simonds refers to
as "psycho-media" (1992, 133). Lonnie Garfield Barbachs influential For
Yourself: The Fulfillment of Female Sexuality is a notable example of sex ther-
apy's influence on the popular advice literature market. Barbach, trained
as a psychologist and sex therapist, bases the book on a group treatment
program she developed, shifting Masters and Johnsons treatment modal-
ity from heterosexual couples to a group setting with women only (1975,
xi). Barbach popularized the term "pre-orgasmic," a critical reframing away

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130 Anna E. Ward

from "non-orgasmic" or "anorgasmic" that is emblematic of the 1970s ap-

proach to sexuality and the expectation that all women should be able to
have orgasms and can do so with the right guidance. "All you need is prac-
tice and determination" Barbach explains, "You have to begin feeling that
you have a right to an orgasm" (97-98). Beyond the potential to improve
sex and intimacy with a partner, Barbach emphasizes that sexual fulfill-
ment has effects far beyond the bedroom, "Taking control of your life, at
the most intimate, personal, and fundamental level - the level of your sex-
uality - seems to lead to extending control over other areas of life' (197).
Patricia E. Raley s Making Love: How to Be Your Own Sex Therapist is
another example of the influence of the sex-therapy paradigm on advice
manuals of the 1970s, direcdy translating therapeutic techniques for a
mass market. "Your self-knowledge, common sense, and willingness to
explore/ Raley contends, "can make you your own best therapist" (1976,
4). The book incorporates extensive images, featuring a photograph on
almost every page of the text and is designed like a how-to manual, with
worksheets to be completed, quizzes, and extensive exercises for both
individuals and couples to complete. Billing itself as the "most thorough
and explicit guide to sexual fulfillment ever published," Making Love dis-
tinguishes itself through its detail but also through its all-inclusive aim; the
book is one of the few sex advice manuals during this era, for example, that
markets itself directly to both straight and gay readers in the text and the
images. As the author makes clear, "Who needs this book? Anyone who is
interested in sex" (4).
While psychology-based, "expert"-driven advice guides were plentiful,
there was also a noticeable increase in guides written by self-proclaimed
nonexperts. The Sensuous Man draws from the author s own experiences,
"I will show you, step by step, how I became a better - some women say
ťthe besť - sexual partner for a number of very exciting and sexually en-
lightened women. By the ends of this book you should be a believer - and
a sensational lover" (1971, 14). Comforts The Joy of Sex mobilizes both
an expert and a nonexpert mode of address. The author s credentials, MD
and DSc, are prominently displayed on the book jacket, despite the fact
that very little of his training and research were in the area of sex or sexu-
ality. Despite this gesture toward expertise, however, Comfort positions
the book as written by an anonymous couple and inspired by their sexual
practices, positioning himself as more of an editor or contributing author

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 Sex and the Me Decade 131

to their original manuscript. This was, of course, a ruse - the book was al-
most entirely written by Comfort and was based, in part, on his own sexual
exploits. Nevertheless, through a simultaneous mobilization of both sanc-
tioned expertise and unsanctioned, yet highly valued, practical expertise,
Comfort was able to achieve the best of both worlds, producing a sex man-
ual that was both legitimated by a veneer of expert discourse and grounded
in personal experience.
While guides aimed at both women and men continued to enjoy prom-
inence in the 1970s, guides focused on exclusively on women boomed
during the 1970s. These publications included Free and Female : The Sex
Life of the Contemporary Woman (1972), Sexual Honesty : By Women, For
Women (1974), Woman s Orgasm: A Guide to Sexual Satisfaction (1975),
Becoming Orgasmic : A Sexual and Personal Growth Program for Women
( 1976 ), Sex for Women Who Want to Have Fun and Loving Relationships
with Equals (1977), Getting in Touch : Self Sexuality for Women (1977), and
Sexual Enhancement for Women (1978). If feminists were keen to encour-
age women to reenvision sex on their own terms, sex and relationship ad-
vice literature of the 1970s offered a roadmap on how to put that vision
into everyday practice. In addition, a significant number of the guides pub-
lished during the 1970s were authored by women, for women - a stark
contrast to previous decades in which male authors dominated the genre.
If earlier marital advice literature focused on the newly married, ide-
alized couple - young , white, middle-class, heterosexual - advice man-
uals in the 1970s began to increasingly recognize a broader segment of
the population and diversity in sexual desires and needs. The 1970s saw
the emergence of a sex advice market for gay men and lesbians, includ-
ing the publication of Emily Sisley and Bertha Harris s The Joy of Lesbian
Sex : A Tender and Liberated Guide to the Pleasures and Problems of a Lesbian
Lifestyle (1977) and Charles Silverstein and Edmund Whites The Joy of
Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle
(1977). There was also growing recognition of sex and disability, includ-
ing the publication of Toward Intimacy: Family Planning and Sexuality Con-
cerns of Physically Disabled Women (Venables 1978). Advice literature also
increasingly recognized that sex and sexuality do not remain stable over
the course of a lifetime but rather vary with life changes and aging. Guides
often included sections on sex during illness or after surgery, sex during
pregnancy, menopause, and the effects of aging on sex. Another striking

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132 Anna E. Ward

element of 1970s sex and dating manuals is the attention paid to sexual
problems or problems in other domains that can negatively impact sex.
For example, Silverstein and Whites The Joy of Gay Sex includes sections
on rape, depression, body image, and venereal disease.
Despite the greater variety of sex and relationship guides available in
the 1970s, the genre is noticeably white and middle-class in both partici-
pation and focus. The authors are overwhelmingly white and the manuals
rarely, if ever, make mention of racial and ethnic identity or situate them-
selves with respect to issues of class, race, or ethnicity The Joy of Gay Sex
includes a few images of men of color in the text, but no mention is made
of issues of racism confronting gay and bisexual men of color nor is any
attempt made to interrogate how race and sexuality might intersect. Com-
forts The Joy of Sex similarly fails to position itself. As was popular in the
1970s, however, Comfort liberally and haphazardly sprinkles tidbits from
a range of non-Western cultures and religions, particularly Tantra. In addi-
tion, all nine colorplates included in the book are taken from eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century South Asian and East Asian texts, included with
no comment or context. Comfort also continues the troubling practice
of using slang for sexual positions and acts based on racial, ethnic, and
national identities, including "South Slav Style" (215), "Chinese Style"
(162), and "Négresse" (132). Such inclusions suggest that for Comfort,
racial, ethnic, and cultural difference is merely another form of variety in
sexual exploration. Given Comforts culinary thematic, bell hooks s argu-
ment that "within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning
that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture" is particu-
larly apt ( 1992, 21). While sex and dating advice guides of this era do not
specifically situate their audience in terms of racial and ethnic identity, it
is clear that much like the marriage manuals of earlier decades, the target
audience was white, middle-class men and women.
As demonstrated throughout this section, the 1970s was marked by
a proliferation of sex and relationship guides in which the focus shifted
away from the promotion of healthy marriages toward a focus on person-
al satisfaction, reframing sex and sexual relationships as critical domains
of self-exploration and identity formation. Feminist and lesbian and gay
activism heavily influenced this shift in focus within advice literature and
played an important role in shaping larger discourses of sex in the 1970s,
particularly in reframing sex and sexuality as thoroughly imbued with gen-

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 Sex and the Me Decade 133

der politics. While none of these guides should be positioned as shining

examples of feminist-inflected analysis, they do demonstrate the consid-
erable impact of feminist discourse, including mirroring some of the ten-
sions and debates within feminist communities.

Afterglow

Within sex manuals and other writings of the 1970s we see the material-
ization of Tom Wolfe s notion of the "new alchemical dream" as applied to
sexual life ( 1988, 143). These texts formed what would quickly become a
saturated market for individually oriented relationship and sex manuals
that would encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity
formation, a critical element of self-awareness. These texts emerged in the
same era that feminist discourses increasingly situated sex and sexuality as
fundamentally political, encouraging women to challenge sexual and gen-
der norms and interrogate their own sexual selves through feminist inqui-
ry and techniques of self-exploration.
Several contemporary authors have linked the rise of modes of
self-transformation in the U.S. to the economic and social changes
wrought by advanced capitalism and modernity. Micki McGee, for exam-
ple, argues "Work on the self - the quest for a path, the invention of a life,
or the search for authenticity - is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-pro-
ducing uncertainties of a new economic and social order* (2005, 43-44).
"Within cultures of self-improvement,3 " according to McGee, "values from
the competitive world of the marketplace have been transplanted to the
personal world of intimate life, and vice versa," creating a "hybridization
of personal and commercial values" (176-77). Eva Illouz coined the term
"emotional capitalism," or "the intertwining and intensification of emo-
tional and economic cultural models to address social relations," to de-
scribe this transplantation of economic models and values into personal
life, primarily through therapy and psychologically based narratives of the
self (2008, 150). These authors situate the rise of self-help and therapeutic
culture within an era of profound economic, political, social, and cultur-
al change, arguing that these cultures of self-improvement provide a per-
ceived antidote to the anxieties of the modern era.

Quite a few scholars have linked feminism directly to the emergence of

therapeutic culture, with Wendy Simonds ( 1992) marking Betty Friedans

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134 Anna E. Ward

landmark feminist text The Feminine Mystique (1963) as a critical turning

point in the proliferation of self-help literature aimed at women. Illouz
contends that while many feminists have decried "the therapeutic mode
of self-understanding as a form of false consciousness that translates polit-
ical collective problems into psychological individual predicaments, thus
inhibiting the possibility of genuine structural change/ the "alliance of
psychology and feminism proved to be one of the strongest of the twenti-
eth century" (2008, 1 14). Whereas Illouz views the relationship between
feminism and therapeutic and self-help culture as mutually reinforcing,
Arlie Hochschild sees it more as a relationship of abduction, with femi-
nism being used "to buttress a commercial spirit of intimate life" (1994,
12), citing "cool modern advice books" as central to this abduction in the
service of creating a "postmodern cowgirl" ( 10-1 1).
While the self-help market has only grown in the decades since the
1970s, particularly with the proliferation of advice columns in newspapers
and magazines, online Hogging, and the rise of the "sexpert" in pop culture,
this mode of intervention functions alongside rampant medicalization in
contemporary discourse. Increasing attention to sexual dysfunction has
shifted the emphasis from psychology and education to physiology and its
limitations, creating a proliferation of biomedical approaches to sex and a
decreasing emphasis on therapeutic interventions. Sexual functioning has
become thoroughly medicalized, particularly for men, not just by sexu-
al medicine itself but also in the public imagination thanks to aggressive
direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceutical companies. Nonethe-
less, the entrenched medicalization of sexual dysfunction must be under-
stood as an extension of the ethic of transformation that crystallized in the
1970s, rather than as a challenge or alternative to it. Sprout Pharmaceuti-
cals recent attempt to get FDA approval for Flibanserin to treat hypoactive
sexual desire disorder in women has renewed debates over women's sexual

desire and pleasure and what we seek when we seek improvements in our
sexual lives through the marketplace (Associated Press 2015). Whether
through self-help guides or advice columns, therapy, or pharmaceutical
intervention, sexual satisfaction remains a critical facet of identity forma-
tion, one often positioned as requiring management, cultivation, and max-
imization. Returning to the 1970s as feminist scholars and taking the sex
and relationship advice literature of this decade seriously may help us to
reinvigorate feminist and queer sex studies and intervene in contemporary
debates.

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 Sex and the Me Decade 135

Anna E. Ward is a lecturer in the program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith
College. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura , Social Psychology Quarterly, The
Scholar and the Feminist , and American Quarterly, and she is currently working on a
book project, "The Queer Life of Orgasm."

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