We have come a long way sexually in the last hundred years. Already we have discovered that a woman has a clitoris. There were many husbands a hundred years ago who were unaware of this. Already there is an open admission of the desirability of caressing a woman before penetrating her. One. even hears, in the more daringly avant circles, of fellatio-cunnilingus now recognized by even eminent psychiatrists, who have found out about it somewhere, as kind of nice. The fact that the very thought of this simple, pleasurable act still fills many people, men and women alike, with thrills of sexual horror, attractive and repulsive simultaneously, is an excellent indication that we are still in the bronze age of sex. It is probably still the case that most lovers, statistically, cannot bring themselves to practice fellatio-cunnilingus. Perhaps the bronze age is too advanced for us. Perhaps we are still wandering around looking at stones, wondering what they are for. At any rate, this book proposes a sexual revolution.

The expression “sexual revolution” is used already, but not too usefully. It seems generally to refer simply to the fact that young people are more public about what they are doing than we were. We bragged less. On the other hand, it may be that they are getting more sex than we did, and younger. That is quite possible, but it would be difficult to get reliable statistics on the matter.

Let us suppose that more people are getting more sex than used to be the case. Even so, that scarcely counts as a revolution. It counts rather as an increase in a certain form of activity. The agricultural revolution differs from the hunting phase of mankind in the sense that people started growing their food rather than chasing it. It was something different. The agricultural revolution is not constituted by the fact that there was an increase in the number of farms. If, on the other hand, “sexual revolution” means that the intellectuals began viewing sex as a natural, pleasurable function rather than a depravity or a disease, then that revolution took place in the generation before mine. On the other hand, I suppose “sexual revolution” might be applied to the phenomenon of large numbers of people catching on to what had been discovered in the generation before mine. In other words, sociologically, the modern sexual “revolution” would simply be the more widespread acceptance of the genuine intellectual revolution of two generations ago.