Free Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences by Laura Carpenter

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    women behaved in very similar ways. 149
    The tension between ideals and conduct around virginity was one of several postwar sexual paradoxes that set the stage for the sexual “revo- lution” of the late 1960s. 150 This tension had existed in the 1920s and 1930s, of course; but the American public had largely been able to ignore it until the publication of Alfred Kinsey and colleagues’ Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Collectively known as the Kinsey Reports, these hefty com- pendiums of sexual habits became surprise best-sellers. 151 Many readers were shocked to learn, from an ostensibly scientific authority, that over half of the women interviewed for the study—and many more of the men
    —had lost their virginity before they married. 152 The Kinsey studies also shook the widespread assumption that homosexual desire and activity were rare, with the claim that as many as one in three men and one in ten women had experienced an orgasm with a same-sex partner. 153 These rev- elations helped facilitate the evolution of urban gay communities, which had already received a boost from the sex-segregated employment and relative freedom of the war years. 154 Still, virginity loss remained equated with vaginal sex and “homosexually inclined” youth often felt isolated and found their desires difficult to name. It is likely that most gay and les- bian adults who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s began their sexual careers with other-sex partners. 155
    The commercial success of the Kinsey Reports points to another post- war paradox: the growing sexualization of commodities and commodifi- cation of sexuality during an era of sexual conservatism. 156 The Moon Is Blue is a case in point. Although the film seems remarkably traditional

    from today’s perspective, depicting virginity as women’s ticket to wedded bliss, in 1953, Hollywood Production Code officials refused to certify it on the grounds of its “unacceptably light attitude toward seduction, illicit sex, chastity, and virginity.” 157 When director Otto Preminger decided to release Moon without official approval, it became one of the year’s top- grossing films. As with the best-selling Kinsey books, the public’s favor- able response to Moon hints at a permissive undercurrent running just be- neath the era’s conservatism. Not coincidentally, 1953 also marked the premiere of the remarkably successful, sexually explicit men’s magazine, Playboy, which from its inception unequivocally celebrated bachelors’ sexual escapades and tended to portray male virgins as effeminate losers. 158
    Thanks to corporations’ realization that sex sells, plus the first stirrings of second-wave feminism (Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was pub- lished in 1963), it wasn’t long before women could purchase their own fantasy of a sexy singles lifestyle. The indisputable queen of this new regime was Helen Gurley Brown, whose irreverent 1962 advice guide, Sex and the Single Girl, and revamped version of Cosmopolitan magazine (from 1965) explicitly refuted the prevailing view that sex outside of mar- riage brought women nothing but despair. Brown didn’t seek to devalue women’s virginity per se, but she denounced the good girl/bad girl di- chotomy, asserting that it was perfectly acceptable for an unmarried “girl” to say “yes” “when a man ‘insists.’” 159 She also expressed pro- found distress at the effects of traditional sexual socialization on Ameri- can women: “One fine day—maybe on her wedding night but probably before—she will want to unlock her chastity belt and she won’t be able to find the key.” 160

    The Revolution Begins, 1965 and Onward
    The permissive undercurrents reflected in the sexual paradoxes of the Cold War years, along with major demographic changes, ultimately helped produce the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The baby boomers—the