Boomer sex fizz
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three …
We know what he meant. Human beings were making the beast with two backs long before 1963, as Larkin — born in 1922, vigorously heterosexual, never married — surely knew, but the place of sex in our lives — in our society, in our imaginations — underwent some kind of radical shift in the early 1960s.
In relation to political power, for example. The pre-1960s U.S. Presidency may not have been an unbroken continuum of marital fidelity, but it was surprisingly close to one. The first thirty-four Presidents of the United States were, sexually speaking, a sober lot: the earlier ones quite strikingly so by comparison with their contemporaries in charge of the big old despotic empires.
(You can include female despots in that latter group. Was it Catherine of Russia or the Dowager Empress Cixi of China — pronunciation here — whose favorite retainer was said to be able, while standing upright, to spin a wagon wheel on his erect member? I forget.)
Then along came JFK.
Shirley MacLaine says Marilyn Monroe went to bed with both John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert on the same night.
The Oscar-winner, 90, makes the scandalous claim in her new coffee book, The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories from this Marvellous Lifetime, which features a photograph from May 19, 1962 — the night Monroe breathlessly sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK.
MacLaine was present at the event and says she attended an afterparty where she saw President Kennedy leave a bedroom with Monroe inside. [New York Post, November 2nd.]
Today, sixty years on, the scenery has of course all changed. There is no 2024 equivalent of Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. We are not as reserved as our great-grandparents, but the fizz of Boomer sexuality has calmed down to occasional bubbles.
(As an aside: I’ve always thought the late Martin Gardner was on to something when he remarked the coincidence that the only two letters of the alphabet shaped approximately like the female bosom are “M” and “B,” while the best-known sex symbols of the middle twentieth century had initials “MM” and “BB.” Although Gardner did not mention it, we Brits had a sex symbol of our own in those years: Diana Dors. DD? Hmm …)
In idle moments I sometimes channel-surf through to reruns of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, which aired through the aughts. (From 2003 to 2011 in the Charlie Sheen version, which I much prefer.) The show relies heavily on sexual humor. That makes it a Boomer relic, as I am reminded any time one of my Millennial kids happens to cross the room as I am watching and laughing. My Millenial stops, watches a minute or two stone-faced, then exits with eyes rolling.
Have social scientists come up with general theories about how these shifting currents of sexual attention affect the fate of societies? Of course they have; but I wasn’t acquainted with any of them until late November. Then, scrolling through X, I came across a post by M.A. Franklin, proprietor of the Foundation Father website, which gives advice on fatherhood. Franklin had posted a good long thread on the anthropologist J.D. Unwin, whose dates are 1895-1936.
I had never heard of Unwin. Now I have his 1934 book Sex and Culture on my reading list.
America’s Newspaper of Record Legs
In all the shifting currents of sex-in-society, some things stay fixed.
Opening my New York Post this morning, what should I see occupying most of page three but a leggy young blonde of no very significant news value — brandishing a cigar! Nothing new about that: here are illustrations from the Post for four consecutive days prior.
And here was George Orwell, writing a long lifetime ago:
There is an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in on women’s legs, but there is no popular literature specializing in the “vulgar,” farcical aspect of sex. [“The Art of Donald McGill” in Horizon, September 1941.]
How I love my New York Post! — the still center in a changing world.
(Legs apart … Sorry! I meant to say, legs aside: I don’t know how things go at the Post in 2024, but in the old Fleet Street tabloids forty years ago, the corner of the newsroom that housed the subeditor responsible for those features was known as the Ts and Bs desk, for “tits and bums.”)
A man of honor
Speaking of Presidential sexuality: Following Donald Trump’s election this month I thought I should flesh out (yeah, yeah) my understanding of the other person to win two non-consecutive terms as President, so I took Henry Graff’s short biography of Grover Cleveland out of my local library.
Before reading Graff my knowledge of Cleveland was rudimentary. I knew the story about the child that he sired before he was married; I knew the ditty it inspired when, a dozen years later, Cleveland was elected President:
Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?
Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!
I knew that, and I knew that Cleveland had behaved honorably towards the child, financing his education. (The boy became a physician.)