THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407210073
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSEMARY ARMAO, SPECIAL TO HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
BRITISH JOURNALIST Linda Grant set out to write ``a social history'' of the birth control pill - its effects on religion, politics and male-female relations - but her book turned into more. ``Sexing the Millennium'' (Grove/Atlantic Press, $22) reads, as she describes it, as ``a personal quest to find out what had happened to myself and a generation.''
Grant and I and a lot of baby boomer women who came of age in the '60s have turned out to be members of a unique generation of women, the only generation in history for whom sex could be engaged in without the threat of either pregnancy or disease. Our lives are profoundly different from those of our mothers or our daughters because of that. And yet. . .
And yet, Grant mourns, the world has not changed that much with the new freedom found by women in easy contraception. Sexuality in the popular culture still focuses on male pleasure and male fantasies in everything from television to books to music videos.
Just look at Madonna, which Grant does for pages. The singer's real message, as Grant discerns it, is that anyone as rich as she can make a fortune from her fantasies. Madonna's fantasies are nothing but the same old male cliches: bondage, group sex, lesbians, the young female body as the object of desire.
The one ``perversion'' at which Madonna draws the line is contact with a fat person, Grant notes in a powerful ending plea for a new, kinder view of sex.
``We need to defeat the male gaze,'' she writes. ``We live in a society in which single, divorced and separated women over the age of 40 are doomed to sexlessness because our phallic culture has turned the young girl into the cult object of desire. So many people are sexually off-limits - the old, the disabled, the ugly.''
This is the stirring message at the core of Grant's work, which is at once profound, kinky and original. Merely explaining her moral, however, doesn't relay the fun of the book. Through it, Grant assesses how the pill rocked the Catholic Church, prompted women to look for the first time at their own bodies, including the private parts, and called the authority of the male medical establishment into question. This is heavy fare, but her style propels us through.
For example, she writes of women's lack of knowledge about themselves before the '60s by recounting how Terry Garrity - the author, known as ``J,'' of the shocking ``The Sensuous Woman'' - lost her virginity at age 21. Her lover asked her if she had come.
``I'm here aren't I?'' Garrity replied, puzzled.
Regarding the end of the ``Sexual Revolution'' in the '80s, Grant quotes a ``witness,'' a writer for the Berkeley Barb, a frankly sexual underground newspaper of the '60s: ``I have this almost cosmic sense that there is a conspiracy against sex at work in the world. Every time it seems you can actually do this thing, something comes along that says, no, you can't. I don't know whether it's a divine plot or a CIA plot or a right-wing Christian plot, but something keeps poisoning the well.''
And in a sassily titled chapter, ``The Country Run by Men in Dresses,'' Grant writes pungently of the effect of the pill on the Vatican. ``. . . In 1968 it collided with a large obstacle the invention of which it had never anticipated. It reacted toward it much as it had received Galileo's assertion that the earth revolved around the sun. After its smash-up against the pill, the Church survived but so battered, dented and unroadworthy that large numbers of its riders would abandon it. Sex effectively derailed Catholicism, the religion so troubled by desire that its founder had even proscribed his own mother's sexual pleasure.''
Grant's tone, as befits the narrative of a personal quest, is never detached or objective. It's hot. She's angry at priests and doctors and pornographers. She's proud of women like Alice Wolfson who led protests during the 1970s demanding that some women be brought in to testify at Senate committee hearings on the safety of the pill. Those efforts led to the now routine procedure of including patient information leaflets in all medications.
``Sexing the Millennium'' is filled with such history, lessons not recounted in more conventional treatises.
Oral contraceptives never solved the Third World population explosion as they were supposed to do. Horribly, though, they did unleash a sexual revolution from which arose the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). That virus, Grant writes, is on its way to slashing the population far more efficiently than anything since the Black Death. MEMO: Rosemary Armao, a former VP/LS staff writer and editor, is executive
director of the Investigative Reporters & Editors bureau in Columbia,
Mo. by CNB