To me, the expression “revolution” is most felicitously applied to the revolutionary conception, the revolutionary act, the publication and defense of the transforming ideas, and their acceptance by the intellectual elite, rather than to the later derivative phenomenon, sociological changes brought about by the percolating downward of these sexual theses and commitments. Today’s young did not invent their sexual revolution. They are buying it. It was manufactured long ago. The drug revolution, I gather, is their’s. They are welcome to it. We hope, however, for more from them.

It is now time, incidentally, for a new sexual revolution, not in the sociological sense of mass acceptances of an idea, but in the intellectual sense of the creating of new conceptions of and modes of sex. In the intellectual sense of “revolution” it is now time for a new sexual revolution. The sociological sense will have to take its turn. The major sexual revolution, the honest understanding of sex as a biological phenomenon, and not as a legal, moral or theological problem, is now accomplished. Old stains linger, but each generation begins anew, less disfigured than the last.

The essence of the new sexual revolution, whatever its human implications, is as simple as that of the old. The essence of the old revolution was that sex was a natural biological phenomenon. The essence of the new sexual revolution, that which I propose, is as simple. It builds on the old. It accepts the thesis that sex is a natural biological phenomenon. It then builds on this thesis by taking note of the fact that this natural biological phenomenon takes place in a human being. This, in itself, makes human sex considerably different from animal sex.

Biology in an animal with an upper brain is not biology in an animal without an upper brain. In one sense the codfish is much better at sex than we are; in another sense he is an amateur. Sex, once the constrictions of obsolete conditioning processes are severed, is a dimension of human experience as open to, and as inviting of, human imagination as any other.

Why should human thought not be used to enhance sex?

Why should sex not become fun, mentally as well as physically?

Why should not elemental sexual pleasure become transformed into psychosexual pleasure, the sexual pleasure of a creature with a complex brain and imagination?

We are now, still, in the hydraulic stage of sex, in which the potentialities of this glorious human capacity are seen largely in terms of manipulations and pushes and pulls.