THE MISALLIANCE
Anita Brookner
New York: Pantheon, 1986
191 pp., $14.95
LOVE UNKNOWN
A.N. Wilson
New York: Viking, 1987
202 pp., $ 16.95
"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." Those words, written by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract, have haunted the modern mind for over two hundred years. And like so many powerful and appealing ideas, Rousseau's dream of freedom has become part of the cultural air we breathe. Though we have long since forgotten Rousseau's notion of the "state of nature," where primitive men lived in a presocial condition of perfect harmony, we are willing to believe that somehow morality and social institutions have imposed artificial constrictions on our behavior. If only the outmoded, prudish Victorian morality could be jettisoned, so the argument runs, we could express and satisfy our desires naturally and spontaneously. By adding a dash of Freud to these Rousseauistic ideas, it can be claimed that only those individuals who are "repressed" fear the freedom and robust healthiness of natural man.
From Noble Savage to Yuppie
Nowhere is this line of reasoning more clearly evident than in our opinions about sexual behavior. In the 1960s, when the phenomenon we call the Sexual Revolution began, the hippies took Rosseau at his word and attempted to live as noble savages in communes. There was, of course, something noble about the sincerity and commitment of the hippies in their search for the good life. But sincerity often covers a multitude of darker and less virtuous motives. If drugs, venereal disease, possessiveness, and jealously brought the back-to-nature movement to an end, nonetheless, the rationale behind the Sexual Revolution remains the same--albeit in a more sophisticated and urbanized form. The difference between a hippie and a yuppie is more sartorial than ethical. Both want an environment in which they are free to satisfy their "natural" desires. When it became clear that the sentimental optimism of the communistic model had failed, the selfish individualism of the marketplace had the advantage of appearing realistic and devoid of illusion. A yuppie is in one sense nothing more than a cynical hippie.
There are signs, however, that the Sexual Revolution has reached its Thermidorean point. The voices of dissent now include not only members of the Moral Majority, but several of the avatars of the original drive toward sexual emancipation. Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique helped to launch feminism as a social movement, recently wrote The Second Stage, which claims that the family is crucial to feminine identity. Germain Greer, whose The Female Eunuch played a similar role to The Feminine Mystique, has now written Sex and Destiny, which claims that birth control, far from liberating women from domesticity, has enslaved them to the casualness and violence of untempered male sexuality. (My old paperback copy of The Female Eunuch, incidentally, has on the front cover the slogan: "The Word on Sexual Freedom!") Whether or not the AIDS epidemic will bring about greater honesty or an almost nihilistic evasiveness about the
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