A couple of my friends read this book and enjoyed it and, after reading Sex at Dawn recently, which provides an evolutionary psychology based argument against monogamy, I became interested in reading this book chronicling American adventures in sexual nonconformity during the so-called sexual revolution. Talese has that new journalism style which will be very familiar for those who have read some of his contemporaries, such as Studs Terkel and Joan Didion. His writing style kind of floats from one person to the next in the book and it has an interesting rhythm; one moment it focuses in on the tiny details of emotion and setting of a particular event in one small moment of a person's life and in another it will widen its lens to take in the larger historical and legal context everyone is inside of. This changing focus kind of lulls you as the reader into a strange, observatory mode. It is deeply intimate while still feeling somewhat remote and alienated from its subject matter and reads more like a novel than non-fiction in many chapters since there can be such a wealth of details provided about people's inner lives while still being very much in the third person. Even when Talese brings himself into the book at the very end, he continues to write in the third person and in an odd way, he tells you the fewest details about his own interior life as a witness to all that goes on in the book compared with the depth he goes into telling the life stories of the other major players in the book.I liked reading the book and it did provoke me to meditate about the issues at play because of its style and the variety in the central figures that Talese dwells on. There are definitely some flaws and limitations to it also though. It is very clear by the time you finish the book that Talese is really primarily interested in the sexual revolution only as it applies to the perspective and lifestyle of the average, white, middle class American male. Although there are some moments here and there where Talese digresses into the point of view of women in the book, women are clearly far from central to the overall movement of the book as we get comparatively brief glimpses into their worlds and lives and what descriptions he does give us, feel abrupt and not quite sincere. I guess the irony there, is how much women's perspective and pleasure was largely ignored by the sexual revolution itself, much less in journalistic coverage of it. Similarly there are pretty much no people of color represented at all, male or female.The feminist movement, gay liberation movement, and civil rights movement, which were experiencing simultaneous revolutions and which obviously had a fairly large and direct relationship with the sexual revolution, are all almost totally ignored except for a few, brief asides. I found myself wondering often what kind of commentary could have been found from people involved in those movements. The absence of homosexuality in the book is especially glaring, considering that it was obviously something that Talese was encountering quite a bit along the way and he even makes certain meandering hints about it several times, but he never fully engages with the issue. I think Talese was focused on trying to write to a very mainstream audience and I would suspect he felt like including homosexuality into these accounts would be so off-putting to readers that they would no longer be open to any of the other ideas in the book. But reading the book now, within a modern context, the total blinders to what was happening with gays and lesbians at the time is baffling. With that said, there were long passages of the book that I found kind of fascinating, in a similar way to how I have felt attending Vagina Monologues/Memoirs over the years. While heterosexual male sexuality is all around us all the time and often incredibly in your face, what you don't hear often is men's honest, de-machoed self-reflections about what they like about the porn they watch, what attachments they do or do not feel to it, how they experience lust and desire and jealousy, and the kinds of the things they're looking for out of sex. These are the real goods that straight women are looking for paging through the Cosmo sex advice columns. Much of the book reads like the kind of unflinching conversations about sex that men might have with each other in a world more open to talking honestly about it and I was interested in getting to see behind the curtain in a way that doesn't happen very often. I also appreciated the way in which the book maintained a certain amount of ambivalence in tone. It doesn't read as an endorsement of the sexual revolution per se and the leaders and radicals he describes are portrayed as real people, with flaws and strengths and three dimensional personalities. The book doesn't leave you with any easy conclusions or a pat thesis to take away. It is particularly interesting reading this book now, in light of the internet-generated explosion in porn consumption, the increasing mainstreaming of porn, the escalating fight for gay marriage, the growing prominence of polyamory and alternative relationship and family structures, and the declining state of heterosexual marriage. Its hard to know how related these developments are to some of the questions that emerged during the 70's, especially considering how many of these questions greatly pre-date the 70's and how much technology has changed our lives in such a short amount of time, but I feel like reading this book gave me some interesting context to reflect on. It also made me wonder about where my own history and attitudes would fit, if I tried to write it out into a similar style of narrative.Dan Savage wrote this thing on the Stranger just the other day:"Whether you believe that female sexual reserve/reluctance/caution is about socialization or biology or both, or that it's a reaction to sad fact the many unpleasant consequences of sex fall disproportionately on women (greater risk of pregnancy (um, duh), much likelier to be the victims of sexual and intimate-partner violence, easier for STIs to be transmitted from male-to-female than female-to-male), female sexual reserve/reluctance/caution exists."Talese makes some related comments toward the end of the book (which I can't directly quote because it was overdue at the library and I took it back already) about how in his research he discovered that there pretty much is zero market for erotic massage and pornography amongst straight women. He chalks this up to a lot of broad generalizations about women not being sexually aroused by the nude male bodies of strangers and only being willing to be penetrated by the comfortable known penises of men they have relationships with. Surely the fact that porn doesn't try very hard to appeal to women's tastes and the increased risk of violence and STIs that women cope with during anonymous straight sex that Dan lists in the quote above, must factor in too. Its weird that Talese would fall back on that kind of rhetoric at the end of the book though, considering how many women he encountered along the course of the book who did enjoy and seek out anonymous sex, who were aggressive, who broke out of those stereotypes when they had a safe space in which to do so. It makes me think about how, part of the reason the sexual revolution was so much more of a success for men than for women ultimately, is that women have so much more negative shit in their way before they can even think about their desires and attaining total sexual freedom. No wonder reproductive rights and anti-domestic violence and sexual assault work were so important to feminism at the time, and still today. White middle-class men may have faced religious moral codes and obscenity laws trying to police their thoughts and fantasies, but that's nothing compared to the patriarchal complex of society that attempts to control and regulate the actual bodies of women, working class folks, people of color, and of course GLBTQ people. In a corresponding way, we have a lot of great infrastructure now supporting the mitigation of the negative things restricting sexual freedom for women- Planned Parenthood, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault advocacy organizations, etc. There is so much more of a flood of positive-side sexual freedom promoters geared toward men though. Porn is absolutely everywhere, turning a 13 billion dollar profit in America, with a majority of men watching it regularly and being more open about that now than maybe ever before. There is also the continuing boom that the sex work industry has experienced. The only corrolary I can really think of for women, is the growing sex toy industry which has helped women reclaim their bodies and their sexuality for themselves, but which is still pretty small by comparison at least in terms of money spent.My partner has said before that he thinks that as women gain equality and as the culture becomes more sex positive, more women will be an increasing consumer base for porn and maybe other types of sex work. It does seem true that more women watch porn now than they did in the past and it's certainly more accessible to women than it used to be. But in some ways, I can't help feeling like there is always going to be something extremely male about those things. Which makes me question, what would embody and encourage real sexual freedom for women? What kind of media and organizations would cater mostly to women? What would that look like? Is women's supposed "sexual reluctance," really reluctance or is it something else? How would you set non-sexist standards and terms for even building a framework for these things? These are all questions I've thought about for a long time, but something that I find myself wondering more and more these days.
E' lungo.E' grosso.E' durato molto.E mi ha pienamente soddisfatta...Cosa avete capito?! Parlo del reportage di Talese sulla Rivoluzione sessuale degli anni Sessanta e Settanta!Un'inchiesta durata 9 anni, diretta in modo magistrale, nella quale il giornalista si è immerso personalmente mettendo a rischio il suo matrimonio.Con la sua "osservazione partecipata", mette in luce aspetti, persone e luoghi senza mai generare un giudizio soggettivo: anche la descrizione delle sue esperienze è impersonale e viene esposta in terza persona.Pur essendo l'erotismo e il sesso i temi principali, non c'è nulla di scandaloso o morboso, grazie ad uno stile sobrio e senza interferenze soggettive. Il percorso dell'indagine è circolare ed è incredibile come l'autore sia stato in grado di trovare una connessione fra i tanti protagonisti, apparentemente slegati l'uno all'altro. Un aspetto che balza agli occhi di chi legge è l'inafferrabile definizione di "oscenità", su cui si sono basati gran parte di processi contro chi divulgava materiale di "dubbia moralità":"...Tra i paladini legali del Primo Emendamento è diffusa l'opinione che sia osceno tutto ciò che procura un'erezione al giudice..."Credo che la libertà con cui oggi è possibile reperire e leggere testi come "L'amante di Lady Chatterley ", "Ulisse", "Fanny Hill", sia dovuta per la maggior parte alle lotte che gli editori di riviste erotiche dovettero affrontare, continuamente messi sotto controllo da polizia e da "Leghe per la Moralità"."La donna d'altri" è un testo che consiglio, sia per come è scritto che per i temi trattati: offre un punto di vista che solitamente non si coglie, quando si parla di pornografia..."...Il libro diventò un best seller internazionale, aggiudicandosi un anticipo di QUATTRO MILIONI DI DOLLARI PRIMA ANCORA DI VENDERE UNA SOLA COPIA..." esticazzi!!!Barbara78ehttp://www.pescepirata.ithttp://www.pescepirata.it/aspiranti_s...
Do You like book Thy Neighbor's Wife (1995)?
Eye-opening and fascinating, this is written in a narrative, reporting style, using indepth personal profiles of famous and ordinary pioneers in the sexual revolution of the 50s and 60s. I was often amazed at the level of repression in our "free and democratic" society as recently as just before and during my early childhood. Literature being banned, court cases involving jail time and heavy fines for simply using the US mail to send magazines or sell books to private citizens wanting to purchase them for their own use, politicians, police raids, the catholic church's reach into private lives and public policy. Scary stuff. Talese really brings home how difficult it was to break through the efforts to any public expression of sexuality, and the price that some people paid in money and actual prison time. Not everything he writes about is necessarily my cup of tea, but the efforts to destroy, ban or punish those with different views, tastes or desires is a terrible thing to read about. I'm so so grateful to have been born after the 50s, but also more aware of how very recently it really was that we lived in a very different world.Coincidentally, I had started watching the MadMen TV series on Netflix at the same time I started this book, which has been a kick. About as close to reliving a period of time as you can get I think. I have the benefit of seeing both two sides of society during this period- corporate mainstream-(MadMen) and the countercultural revolutionaries (Talese's subjects-many of whom from the outside did look just like the corporate mainstream types).I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about a significant period in our cultural history, the people and events, and just anyone interested in sex.
—Mary
First off, the name Gay Talese has got to be one of the most perfect names for a New York literati type like Talese. "Thy Neighbor's Wife" took the better part of 10 years to write, made Talese millions and pioneered getting rub and tugs and going to swinger's retreats as high journalism. All hat being said this was a pretty interesting read. The really interesting stuff is the character sketches of guys like Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein of "Screw" magazine fame. Talese's description of both the history of porn and porn censorship in US history is eye opening--it takes a unique individual to sell dirty books and advocate free love in 1870s America. The Hefner bio is interesting. I got a new found admiration for Hef turning a leveraged set of furniture worth $600 and a small grub stakes of capital from his family into a $100 million+ enterprise. Better yet, he spent more than 1/2 of that first capital to buy some old Marilyn Monroe prints for his first issue. By 1970 Hef was worth $100 million (1970s$$), but his penchant for being what Talese describes as an adolescent tycoon and horrible business sense beyond magazines saw it all crumble. Lastly Talese lays out the string of Supreme Court cases from 1950-1970 that overturned a century's worth of US govt efforts to stamp out the "smut business". Of particular note is the small roster of civil libertarian lawyers and highly litigious porn peddlers. I am a big lover of the "New Journalism" that Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe bought about in the 1960s and after reading this Talese work I will track down the rest.
—Andrew Tollemache
Gay Talese really wrote a fascinating book detailing some interesting historical facts and tribulations of what was considered obscene according to figures such as Anthony Comstock, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating; he gives us the history of figures such as Hugh Hefner, Al Goldstein, the owner of the Sandstone Retreat, and John Humphrey Noyes who founded Oneida and the Oneida Community in New York. There's a lot of detail in this book regarding police raids, landlord disputes with people considered to be pandering obscenity, and personal stories of important figures in history related to obscenity or lifestyle choices that were considered taboo. While it's an excellent read, you do have to wonder about the purpose of the Sandstone Retreat given it sounds like a creepy sex cult at times, along with some of the stuff they preached, along with a case of how one member wasn't allowed to talk to her husband on the phone. At the same time, you learn that some of the figures such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein were really champions of free speech.
—Brian
