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Woven throughout James R. Petersen's The Century of Sex is a story of 100 years of Americans trying to wriggle out of the sexual restraints of the Victorian era, and the many powerful forces that tried to stop them. The two opposing sides of sexual exploration and sexual repression battle throughout, with the forces of censorship and sexual repression slowly, ever so slowly, losing their grip over the intimate lives of American citizens.

In interesting contrast are two men granted almost unlimited powers by the government, one at the beginning of the century, and one at the end. Both used attacks on sexuality as tools to destroy their opponents.  Anthony Comstock was special agent to the U.S. Post Office, with few checks on his ability to go after sexual content and suppress it. He took great pride in the suicide of a women he had attempted to send to prison for distributing a pamphlet on birth control.  He was a media darling for his relentless pursuit of vice, destroying hundreds of thousands of obscene materials and arresting thousands. Birth control devices, books for young married couples, and even classics such as Henry Fielding' s Tom Jones were seized and destroyed and their distributors arrested. Individual rights, free speech, and the 1st and 14th amendments were not his friends, and those he attacked were virtually powerless to stop him.

Fast forward to the end of the century, and Kenneth Starr is given unchecked powers in some cases greater than Comstock's, and an unlimited budget. Almost as obsessed with sex as Comstock, he did equal damage to the constitution, privacy, and individual rights. To Starr, personal privacy was merely an impediment to be moved out of the way. His case was founded on illegal recordings, he seized bookstore records of purchases, and ignored lawyer-client and even mother-daughter privilege. Unlike Comstock, though, Starr had little support in the country, and ultimately failed in his attempt to use sex to bring down a popular president and personal enemy.

Between these two powerful men are hundreds of similarly sexually disturbed individuals whose power has limited the sexual options of Americans and kept us still, one of the most prudish of the developed nations. The heroes of The Century of Sex are those who stood up to these often cruel forces of repression, often at considerable personal risk.

The tide did not begin to turn until the 1950's, which was, ironically, a time of stunning conformity, fear, paranoia and repression. Even so, this decade gave birth to an amazing number of things that would dramatically change our views of sexuality: the introduction of Playboy, the landmark publication of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the development of the birth control pill, the first stirrings of the women's movement, and the first Supreme Court ruling recognizing 1st and 14th Amendment protection of films.

The battle is not won yet, with a scary recent Federal Court ruling that found that laws outlawing vibrators for "moral" reasons are constitutional. There have been recent arrests in Massachusetts for possession of a vibrator and in Florida for attending a swing party. Our obscenity laws are still an obscenity, allowing prosecutors to go after anyone and destroy them financially if not legally for distributing something that no one can define.

Even so, Americans have more access to sexual information and entertainment than ever before in history.  The Internet has made possible easy and private access to sexual content, and while there will be many powerful forces working in the coming years to censor the Internet and restrict our freedoms, it will be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

One of the subtexts of the book is how the media and popular press often work hand in hand with the anti-sex forces. They want to sell papers and get ratings by using sex, but in order to not offend their more conservative audience members, they often do it with a condescending and negative attitude that frequently distorts the facts. Ironically, this is exactly what happened with the Playboy sponsored press bus tour that reporters were invited on in Los Angeles, where Petersen gave a talk about several L.A. sex-related historical spots. The article about it that appeared in the Los Angeles Times distorted what Petersen said, had a smarmy attitude, and was more fiction than journalism. We know because we were there on the bus, and you can read about it in our article: Sex, Lies, and the Los Angeles Times.
 

-JB
 

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