The sexual revolution operated on two basic premises: first, that sex was good and there should be more of it, and second, that sex wasn’t very important; it was just sex. Vidal Sassoon famously said that, in the ’60s, “having sex was the same as having dinner.” The pursuit of sex without responsibility or emotional involvement was an ideal. The sexual counterrevolution has now gone to the opposite extreme: Sex is not just to be feared but is also hugely important, the locus of life’s most defining traumas and a primary venue for justice. No wonder people are having less and less of it. “Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women,” Scientific American recently reported. The discourse around sex has become stricter, more stringent, less tolerant of any diversity of opinion, while the act itself has become more brutal—choking doesn’t even qualify as a kink anymore. The sex recession has coincided, almost exactly, with the rise of depression, which 29 percent of U.S. adults now report struggling with, as opposed to 19.6 percent in 2015.
Dr. Ruth understood the social power of sexuality perhaps better than any other figure. A society in which sex is not joyful is a failed society. If you can’t find joy in sex, where will you find it? She represents a moment in history that has passed, an approach to sexuality that has been replaced. But that doesn’t make her irrelevant. The opposite: She was right. The moment that has passed her by is wrong.
What underlay Dr. Ruth’s infectious joy was frankness. She knew what screwing was like, and she said so. Her job was to see and to explain the messy realities of human sexuality with neither fear nor shame. The radical sexual freethinking of the mid-century German intellectuals she followed based itself on taking human sexuality out of the shadowy realms of morality. Most of all, she listened. She was nonjudgmental. That’s why those New Jersey aunts were so grateful.
The current state of discourse around sexuality and gender is maximum judgment. Ours is a culture of intolerant tolerance: Be who you want to be. But don’t dare say the wrong thing. The urge to punish is the first instinct, drowning out not just compassion, but understanding.