Transcript Sex and Sexuality in the 1950s: Alfred Kinsey, Christine Jorgensen

Sex and Sexuality in the
1950s: Alfred Kinsey,
Christine Jorgensen, the
Beats, and Playboy
I. Sex in the 1950s
A. Classic Image:
• Everybody waited
until married
• Married people
slept in twin beds
• No one talked
about pregnancy
(not even allowed
to say it on TV) and
certainly not
abortion
B. Alfred Kinsey
• How did Kinsey’s reports
counter the traditional view of
sex in the 1950s?
• What were Kinsey’s larger
social goals?
C. Christine Jorgensen
• Why was Jorgensen’s sex
change such a sensation at the
time? What larger anxieties did
it reveal?
• Dec 2, 1952
• http://www.npr.org/features/feat
ure.php?wfId=863811
II. Flight from
Commitment
A. The Breadwinner
Role
• Women: wives,
mothers; June
Cleaver
• Men: heterosexual
and breadwinner;
Ward Cleaver
• Female deviation: “narcissistic
pursuit of career ambitions”
• Male deviation: immature,
irresponsible, possibly
homosexual: “adaptive failure”
B. Male Revolt
1. Criticisms of “Momism”: men
being forced to give up their
desires to serve mothers (first
their own and then a surrogatemother, their wives: “the old
lady”)
2. The Beats: went “On
the Road” (Kerouac) to
escape traditional male
lifestyle/norm
• Poets, writers, criminals,
etc.
• Were open to ideas of
racial mixing and equality
(esp. music)
• Were very conservative in
their opinions about
women: largely sexual
objects to fulfill men’s
desires
• Some homosexuality
(Ginsburg)
3. Playboy and the
Apartment
• Playboy ethic (1953)
allowed men to not
marry and still claim to
be heterosexual:
• Living it up in their
“Apartment” with the
latest stereos,
gadgets, and cars;
attuned to fashion and
cultural trends
• Men really were
reading it for the
articles
• Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy
4. Medical Advice
• Men had increased risks of
heart disease must relax
wives must be extra nice and
lower pressure for money and
materialism, must not ask men
to take on “extra”
responsibilities (childcare,
house work)
Effect of Male Revolt?
• Relationships are temporary and pleasureoriented “serial-monogamy”
• (marrydivorcemarryrepeat)
• Women left to care for the children
• All the harder because society refuses to accept
anything but the nuclear family with male
breadwinner as normal, despite the fact that this
never was the dominant form and is unrealistic
today
• Susan Faludi, Backlash: women’s
movement/sexual revolution blamed for collapse
of family + society for changes begun by men
C. Female Revolt?
• Largely
internalized
throughout the
1950s: “The
Feminine Mystique”
(fulfillment through
domestic ideal)
• Women knew they
were unhappy, but
didn’t know why
and didn’t know
what to do about it
• Mommy’s Little
Helper