Chapter 12 Between Coitus and Commodification: Young West German Women and the Impact of the Pill Dagmar Herzog The mass availability of birth control pills in the late 1960s coincided with at least three omerdramatic developments in the history of sexuality: a thorough saturation of the visual landscape with nude and semi-nude'Tmages of women's bodies and the unabashed marketing of a multitude of objects via these images; a liberalization of sexual mores and of the terms of debate surrounding sexuality so profound that it acquired the name "sexual revolution"; and the emergence and rise to cultural prominence of both a New Left movement'and an incipient feminist movement, both of whichf albeit iňllifFerěntways, sought deliberately to politicize questions of sexuality. All three of these phenomena were evident throughout WestenTEurope and the United States, and in many ways West German developments mirrored those in other nations. In the wider context of the Cold War, across the Western world, the initial fifteen or so postwar years had seen a strong emphasis on family values, political quiescence, and conformity to conservative Render norms. And in all these nations in the 1960s and 1970s, counterculture! and youth rebellions coincided with and spurred further broader liberalizing trends. Similarly, in all these nations feminist women's organizations, often emerging out of anti-war and student activist groups, not only fought for reproductive control and abortion rights and greater social, economic, and political equality for women, but also made heterosexual sex T 262 Between Coitus and Commodification Dagmar Herzog 263 Yet there were also specificities to the cultural climate of post-Nazi Germany that shaped how all these transformations, and the relationships between them, were experienced and interpreted by contemporaries. Because of-the intense salience of issues of sexuality and reproduction to Nazism itself, and because of the ways sexual politics functioned as a main site for coming to terms with, and attempting to master, the Nazi past—in both the conservative 1950s and the liberal and radical 1960s-1970s—conflicts over sex in Germany were unusually freighted and vehement. This essay will, first, reconstruct key elements of thej3terPill_cdture of sexjind bjrth control in the F«derd Republic. Next, it will examine how that culture was liberalized, initiaLyTn^tne realm of advertising and subsequendy also in official mores.jand then explore the ways the distribution of the Pill both contributedj»>aná. benefited jrogi.p.tfaei, dynamics_of Mberalization. Finally, the essay will address the radical politicization of sex by New. Left men and by_the_ women's movement. Before the Pill Postwar West German culture was peculiarly hostile to open discussion of birth control products or practices. In comparison with the United States in the 1950s, for insrance, there were in West Germany far fewer family planning clinics, and sales of such objects as diaphragms or spermicidal jellies were proportionally much lower; there was also far less medical literature discussing the subject available to specialists and of what literature there was, much expressed strong criticism of birth control.1 There were a number of reasons for this. One was that in several of the Federal Republic's states, the Himmler orde£ofJ^4j_b^mn^jhe_ sale and advertisement of all birth control products besides^condoms, remained in effect. (Condoms had been exempted from the order during the Third Reich because of their usefulness in preventing the spread of venereal disease.) Yet another was that many of the doctors practicing in postwar Germany had been trained under Nazism and had received no effective education about birth control issues in their medical school years. In addition, there were also more subde—but no less tenacious— inherited forms of misogyny, and of unreflected anxieties about the declining German birthrate, that affected physicians' willingness to educate themselves or their patients about effective strategies. The hesitation to defend fertility control vigorously as a basic human right was not only a direct inheritance of Nazism, however. There was also an indirect, but no less powerful, legacy. The effort of Christian con- -t - r^n •i~—! -r—h1 n i i Democratic government under chancellor Konrad Adenauer—to enforce conservative sexual values in the postwar period needs to be understood not only as an extension of the values promoted during the Third Reich, but rather, and far more, as a deliberate backlash against Nazism. For while this has been largely forgotten now, Nazism brought with it many incitements and inducements to heterosexual activity— marital, premarital, and extramarital—not only for the sake of reproduction, but also for the sake of pleasure (or, as it was usually put, "drive-satisfactibn," Triebbefriedigung). For the duration of the Third Reich, Catholics in particular fought furiously against Nazi assaults on the sanctity of Christian marriage. And in the immediate aftermath of the war, Catholics were the most vocal in criticizing what they saw as Nazi-encouraged licentiousness and libertinage. There was far more concern with protecting youth from supposedly corrupting sexual influences—pornography or birth control products—in the postwar period than there had been under Nazism. Symptomatically, for instance, while condom vending machines had been fairly familiar aspects of the streetscape, or the backs of bars or barbershops, in many German towns throughout the Third Reich and in many places also for seven or eight years thereafter, the years from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s saw heated discussion among jurists and journalists over the desirability of these machines and their potential for morally corrupting youth. Even the neutral display of condoms in vending machines could be interpreted—as some courts did—as an offense to "morals and decency" (Sitte undAnstand), a particularly vague but for that reason all the more effective traditional legal category employed by conservative jurists in their efforts to constrict youth—and inevitably also adult—access to fertility control.2 Again, Catholic activists set the tone. In 1951—52_ conservative Catholic youth organizations had demonstratively burned down kiosks which marketed pom, and in 1953 they initiated "actions" against condom vending machines. In both instahces^these campaigns, far from being legally censured, themselves directly inspired conservative jurisdiction.3 Yet it is crucial also to note that the major opposition party of Social Democrats did not provide much of an alternative to the Christian Democrats on sex-related issues. Clearly very fearful of being associated with the sex radicalism of Weimar-era socialism, postwar Social Democrats displayed a singular lack of imagination and conviction.They might vote against a repressive measure—for example the censoring of pornography in the name of youth protection—but neither in the press nor in the Bundestag debates did they offer any truly energetic defenses of individual sexual freedom i—' i—! . i—1 m and self-derprminanr-p ii- Iľ r i—r t—jt w_i i_r t_r i_r t_r i_t u_r 2(ri Between Coitus and C&mmodification The preoccupation with cleaning up sexual mores in postwar Germany had multiple functions. Stressing rhe importance of premarital chastity allowed postwar Christian commentators to delineate their difference from Nazism in especially stark terms, since Nazis had been so particularly eager to celebrate premaritd sex ar^^a^gjage-die^hurches ^foTtheir "prudery" on this marrerTTrlis postwar emphasis on sexual propriety was not only politically expedient. For many serious Christians, it was the result of a deeply held—and under the circumstances, not unperceptive—belief that sexual licentiousness and genocide had been, quite concretely, linked. Yet at rhe same time, and disturbingly, the manifest postwar departure from Nazi values wirh respect to premarital heterosexual sex was often accompanied^ bx.unapoit^e^ic connnuity with^ Nazism in regard to the_ongoing crirrn^nahzation ofjiomosex^lit^as well as continuity in adherence to eugenic T3eas,_as homophobia and ^ eugenics both were refurbished and given renewed legitimacy under Christian auspices. Moreover, the emphasis on postwar Christian sexual morality also deflected attention from the Christian churches' complicity with Nazism during the Third Reich—and nor only with irs anti-Bolshevism but also with its anti-semitism. In general, rhe postwar churches worked to redirect moral debare away from mass murder and toward sexual matters. Both Protestant and Catholic church leaders presented sexual propriety as thtTWnrc^brtheTiatio^ thereby implied, in a striking—and telling—displacement, that sexual immorality, not complicity in genocide, was the source of that crisis. 'Precisely this complicated combination of tupture and continuity between Nazism and postwar Christian politics, together with the sense that the hyper-preoccupation with sexual morality only thinly veiled some deeper enranglement in narional guilt—as well as ongoing anger and resentment at the fact of that guilt—was unnervingly palpable to more critical young people growing up in this climate. And yet at the same time the connections were difficult to decipher. What many young proplejwereJbJ^Jd^^ so£ie.ty3asjnarked J~ Moreover, popular mores were not the same as official mores. This was true both with respect to Christian values more generally and with respect to sexual morality per se. Germany was a more secularized society than either the United States or Great Brirain, and Nazism had done its part to further that secularization. Only about one-quarter of West Germans attended church regularly in the lare 1940s, and rhe numbers dropped over the course of the 1950s. Meanwhile, even believers and church-goers had their own opinions about sexual mattets that diverged from both the churches' official stances and from those advanced by TL-j: i_r uj: i_e i_£ i_r i_t. i—c !—? Dagmar Heratg 265 ducted in 1949, also among the regular church-goers, fully 44 percent were of the opinion that premarital sex was acceptable. And the numbers were far higher for those who did not attend church regularly. In this same survey, it was found that 89 percent of the men and 69 percent of the women interviewed admitted to having had premarital sex. Among young men under the age of 30, 97.8 percent thought premarital coitus was either permissible or simply necessary.4 Although the numbers admitting to and endorsing premarital coitus had dropped by approxi-i mately ten percentage points by the time rhe survey was repeated in 1963—and this was no doubt due precisely to the conservative rhetoric and cultural vigilance of the 1950s—numerous more informal estimates offered in the course of the 1950s and early 1960s suggested that anywhere between 80 and 90 percent of young people were practicing pre-mariral coitus.5 These numbers are much higher than rhe comparable figures for the United States or Britain. In short, in spite of all of the official rhetoric adamantly insisting on female virginity before marriage, and pleading also for boys to desist from premarital experimentation, actual practices in Germany diverged sharply from the formal norms. In no area of sex-related discussion was there so wide a gap between prescription and actual behavior—even as the prescriptions had profound consequences for how rhe sex people did have was experienced. , Two national, peculiarities, then, came together: a low level of information about and access to birth control and a high rate of premarital coitus. Yet another national peculiatity was crucial as well. While American youth were internationally notorious for the practice of petting-manual mutual sexual play often leading to orgasm, a practice developed for the purpose of combining sexual intimacy and pleasure with pregnancy prevention (and the maintenance of technical virginity)—the conservative publicists who dominated rhe sex advice market in West Germany were tireless in their insistence that this form of sexuality, while seemingly offering "pleasure without regret" {Genuss ohne Reue), would ruin the capacity for future sexual happiness in marriage. They were certain that girls who engaged in perting would prove to be frigid in their marriages.6 Also more liberal German commentators found American petting practices bizarre. As one postwar journalist disapprovingly summarized the general attitude, "this petting' cannot possibly offer any sort of deeper satisfaction."7 And, strikingly, although interviews with individuals who were adolescents in West Germany in the 1950s reveal quire a lot of activity that could be defined as petting, it was almost always seen—by the participants themselves—as a brief transitional phase before the onset of coital activity and/or as a paltry, even pathologically perverse, substitute for "real" sex, something unnatural.8 IT. . I 11 I 2G6 Between Coitus and Commodification Dagmar Herzog 267 The discomfort with petting was undoubtedly exacerbated by the massive postwar campaign against youth masturbation. Although a range of experts in the Weimar and Nazi and early postwar years had emphasized not only the harmlessness of youth masturbation, but even its value as a preparatory experience for later sexual relationships, the majority of 1950s experts, with astonishing forcefulness and unanimity, insisted that masturbation was dangerous and deleterious to one's psychological health. Although most, if not all, experts rushed to assure readers that masturbation did not have the frightening physiological consequences it had once been rumored to have—deterioration of the bone marrow, a wasting-away of energy and health, impotence or insanity—sex-advice authors nonetheless emphasized that masturbation disturbed an individual s capacity for proper relationality. Having become dependent on self-stimulation and on fantasies, experts warned, young men would have trouble making the transition to having sex with an actual woman. Young women, if they became accustomed to clitoral self-stimulation, would in turn have trouble gaining any satisfaction in coitus. Any problems couples subsequently had with each other could be traced back to these early missteps. As one man who had been subjected to these exhortations in the 1950s remembered in 2001, "Of course we all masturbated. But we were terrified."'* In sum, the ultimate messages conveyed were contradictory. Coitus was treated as the only natural sexual activity. For example, with the exception of one sex advice magazine—which was shut down in 1951— no publication in West Germany in the 1950s ever mentioned oral or anal sex as possible alternatives to coitus. The contrast to Weimar-era sex advice—when for instance the well-known physician Max Marcuse not only endorsed both oral and anal sex as pleasurable ways of avoiding pregnancy, but also noted that their use was widespread—could not be more striking.10 Yet at the same time, almost all advice writers treated female orgasm during coitus as an important desideratum, and advice literature stoked women's fantasies of being overwhelmed by male strength and tenderness, while it also held out the dream of lifelong passion in bed. Indeed, some of the most sophisticated arguments put forward by medical doctors against birth control practices and products had to do with the idea that these practices or products would inhibit female pleasure. Simultaneously, however, the literature, whether Christian or secular, continually elaborated normative notions about gender that either placed the blame for any problems or sexual unhappiness women might feel on the women themselves, or—if it acknowledged that coitus, especially with a selfish man, might not always be a wonderful experience for a woman—did not suggest alternative or even supplementary i r i-1 Aside from condoms, birth control products were almost impossible for unmarried people to procure. But birth control was not easily available for married people either. Access depended not only on the laws of the state in which one lived, but also on whether one lived in a big city or a little town, had (or did not have) a sympathetic and well-informed family physician, had (or did not have) a local pharmacist from whom one could purchase spermicidal powders or jellies without embarrassment, and/or had (or did not have) the wherewithal to order birth control products and information from mail-order catalogues. A general atmosphere of shame and secrecy surrounding sex also made conversations with friends or relatives over potentially awkward personal matters much less likely. The rhythm method, invented and refined in the 1930s with the discovery of how women's cycles actually worked, was the only method in 1950s West Germany that was ever energetically endorsed in the medical literature. And although many doctors fiercely attacked the method as (variously) ineffective or unhealthy for a relationship, it was the only form of birth control officially permitted to believing Catholics. A general familiarity with which days were likely to be "safe" and which were not was also fairly common knowledge among all strata of the population. But so too was the knowledge that the method was not exactly fully reliable, especially if one tried to "stretch" the days when coitus might be ail right beyond a supersafe minimum, or if any untoward event—stress, illness—threw the cycle off. Widely held beliefs that coitus during a woman's menstrual period was not normal or acceptable shortened the number of available days even more. And again, the hostility to, or ignorance and utter lack of imagination about, possible alternatives to coitus on the "unsafe" days was manifest throughout both the professional medical and the popular advice literature. Thus, for instance, a prominent physician analyzing the value of the rhythm method in 1953 could only recommend the method as a means of family planning "to that group of advice-seekers who have at their disposal a considerable amount of conscientiousness and self-discipline," for—in his opinion—the period of "abstinence" required by the method could prove to be an "unbearable burden" on marriages.11 The single most widely used method of birth control in the pre-Pill era, both before and within marriage, was withdrawal during intercourse (i.e. coitus interruptus). "My husband is careful [Mein Mann nimmt sich in achi\," was the standard way women phrased it when prodded by a curious doctor about how they managed to space the births of their children.12 And as a young man who grew up in 1950s West Germany remembered_in_200L_^^aking_Q£,him«f-lf and h'= ";rlfrie"d^ "We 268 F 1 L i ! x i_r i_r Between Coitus and Commodifimtion \ 1 1 talked about it. We decided to use withdrawal." (And then when the girlfriend did get pregnant, this teenage couple married.)13 This story was part of a much larger phenomenon of premarital heterosexual activity among teens which led to "early marriages" (Friibeben), also colloquially called "must marriages" (Musseben). Marriages among minors—a phenomenon which had reached "outrageous" levels by the late 1950s—were almost always entered into solely because a child was "on the way." Among the approximate average of 500,000 marriages entered into annually in the eady 1960s, 88,000 spouses per year were between the ages of 16 and 20; 20,000 brides annually were 17 years old or less. Unsurprisingly, statistics showed that these marriages were also uniquely vulnerable to divorce.14 But also among young couples who were no longer minors, unplanned pregnancy often led to a marriage that would otherwise have been delayed or not entered into at all. Numerous memoirs and oral history testimonies describe the social pressures within local communities that made rushed marriages the norm. At the end of the 1950s, it was found that approximately one-third of West German brides were pregnant on their wedding day. By the eatly 1960s, studies variously found that anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of firstborn children were conceived out of wedlock; mote than 50 percent of all marriages and fully 90 percent of early marriages (with spouses between the ages of 18 and 21) were enteted into solely because the bride was pregnant.15 Early marriages—or, if married, another (sometimes only half-wanted) child—--were, however, not the only consequences of a climate in which birth control products and information were not easily accessible to everyone. Professional physicians' discomfort with or hostility to dispensing birth control information and products contributed not only to the popularity of coitus interruptus, but also resulted in an environment in which abortion, despite its illegal status under Paragraph 218, was nevertheless widespread. In the 1950s and early 1960s, abortion was */w> German method for keeping family size small—in stark contrast, as observers noted, to both France and Britain where there was much stronger official support for family planning.16 As one doctor put it bluntly in 1953, Germany was in the midst of an "abortion epidemic."17 Another in 1963 matter-of-facdy referred to "the abortion plague."18 Over the course of the 1950s, estimates of abortion rates fluctuated and also varied by region, but there was general agreement among medical professionals that the tates remained extraordinarily high, or were even climbing. Midwives, quacks, and pregnant women themselves performed most of the abortions (sometimes using knitting needles or injections of soapy water or 1_^ 1 DagMT Herzog |___f |_E 1 ,,F i_i) 269 doctors who were willing to break the law for a price.19 As some patients confided, when prodded gendy by a trusted physician about what they had done in those instances when withdrawal had not worked: "Well yes, a few times I did let myself get scraped out [naja, em paarmal habe icb mich ausschaben lassen]"20 A frequendy used technique was to go to a physician for a routine brief walk-in office visit, have him or her induce a miscarriage mechanically, and then be rushed to either a public hospital or a private clinic with "sudden" bleeding.21 In 1959 alone, 5,400 individuals were each sentenced to several years in prison for performing abortions.22 Experts assumed that for every case that came to the attention of authorities, either the police or a hospital (where women sometimes ended up not just because of induced miscatriages but also after botched operations or in instances of life-threatening complications), there were at least 100 abortions that went unrecorded. Indeed, in a case that made national news in 1963, a doctor who had served time in prison a year earlier for the first time a woman in his care had died and was now committed to an insane asylum in the wake of his second fatality, admitted to having performed approximately 2,000 abortions over the previous decade.23 Other ways of obtaining estimates involved asking women about their prior reproductive history, in confidential intake exams during visits to their gynecologists, and then extrapolating from this sample. Based on a total of between ten and eleven million women of reproductive age in the Federal Republic between 1950 and 1957, estimates found that in any given year between 5 and 10 percent of all German women had an abortion. Experts repeatedly spoke of an average, for the duration of the 1950s, of anywhere between 500,000 to one million abortions in the Fedetal Republic each year. Some studies found that there was a yearly ratio of one abortion to every birth; an oft-quoted 1953 study undertaken by a Hamburg gynecologist identified in his region an annual ratio of three abortions to every birth.24 By the early 1960s, the mainstream press and medical journals repeatedly referred to an annual avetage of anywhere between 750,000 to more than one million abortions, with some physicians even estimating two million per year, and it had also become routine for mainstream periodicals to note as common sense that there was one illegal abortion for every birth in the Federal Republic.25 Contemporaries variously speculated that one of every two German women faced the decision of whether or not to abort at some point in her life, or indeed that every year one in four women was affected.26 One prominent gynecologist interviewed in 1964 noted that abortions were available not only in every major city, but also in the smallest villages, and that the methods used, also by nonprofessionals, had become so sophisticated {geschicki) 270 Between Coitus and Commodification Dagmar Herzog 271 While doctors had pointed out already in the 1950s that death rates from abortion were much lower than they had been in previous decades because of the widespread use of antibiotics, numerous observers in the 1960s still noted that health complications from illegal abortions were nonetheless widespread. This was so not least because the illegality made proper follow-up care unlikely, and there is no question that the furtive and not always clean conditions under which abortions were performed exacerbated the likelihood of both physical and psychological damage. Insurance records from the 1950s also reveal that, every year, an average of 10,000 West German women died from complications due to their abortions.28 Only the invention and widespread dissemination of the Pill brought an end to this scandalous state of affairs. Commodification and Liberalization The Pill did not cause the sexual revolution, however. Mass availability of the Pill brought West German abortion rates down dramatically from the end of the 1960s on. But the medical-technological invention^the Pill alone did not in itsdTEruig about a liberalization of sexual mores. That liberalization depended upon two other crucial dynamics. One was the ever-intensifying use of sexual stimuli in advertising and jour- • nalism, irTolrtieTwofds ä'ci^nämic "S^^m^^m^SffmO&JSSa^^. The~secöhd dynamic—in extraordinarily complex interaction with the first—was a process of political mobilization against the official culture of sexual conservatism. This political mobilization, beginning at the turn from the 1950s to the 1960s and escalating in ardor and strategic effec-tivity in the first three to four years of the 1960s, involved both prominent liberal public intellectuals and younger, often left-leaning student activists. But there is no question that liberals and leftists, while on the one hand often critical of the commodification of sex and its role in consumer capitalism, were, on the other, able to use the space opened up by the manifest contradictions between conservative norms and sexualized marketing to press their own claims. The sexualization of the public sphere preceded the 1960s. Despite strict constraints on naked images in the media for much of the 1950s— nudity was jigwously censored under, the auspices of the"Law about the ^Circulation of Youth-Endangering Literature" {Gesetz über den Vertrieb jugendgefährdender Schriften), which took effect in 1953—it was clear to observers of all ideological persuasions that sex was being used to sell products. Moreover, the West German film industry, engaging in avid self-censorship throujhjhe umbrella organization forfilm studios, "Vol-. eschewed nudity and overt representations of sex—and yet simultane-ouslyTnHkedthe "sex appeal" of starlets for all they were worths In addiction, international "bombshells'' like Marilyn Monroe arid Bngitte Bardot were as iconic and obsessively idealized in West Germany as they were in the United States or in France. For many conservative critics, this purported "hypersexualization" was yet another sign of what they feared was the decline of Western civilization. Across the ideological spectrum, however, there were also a range of more trenchant interpretations of the effect of sexualized marketing appeals. The respected conservative sociologist Helmut Schelsky, for instance, astutely observed in 1955 that the sexualization of the visual environment so often hysterically criticized especially by conservative religious activists could actually have a rather anti-sexual impact. In Schelskys opinion, the constant inundation with external srimuli had the tendency not only to encourage conformity rather than individualized fantasies, but also to inhibit an individual's internal desires and dri-vies from developing at all. Forcing sexual images into everyone's field of vision, he thought, ultimately had a de-eroticizing impact.29 The left-leaning Frankfurt-based student newspaper Diskus in 1962 made a no less important observation. Although religious conservatives argued that youth were being "overenlightened" in dangerous ways by the wealth of sexually suggestive images in the media, Diskus was convinced that the success of sexualized advertising rested precisely on the fact that sex was still subject to many taboos and that society was only partially enlightened. It was specifically because enlightenment was incomplete that "one can still capitalize on sex," and that politicians, opinion-makers, and advertising specialists alike could successfully appeal to "the sexual arous-ability of the human being." Diskus' big insight was that sex profoundly attracted the uitraconservative "plulistines" too. "We are~floating in an ocean of sexual stimuli of all nuances, from the direct reference to the private parts to more subde appeals to the unconscious. ... The restora-tionist forces themselves address the unconscious when they polemicize against 'smut and trash' and appeal to the cleanliness complexes of the anal phase of our childhoods."30 A year later, in 1963, the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Theodor W^Adorno argued that the never-ending stimulation brought by mass media and advertising—which permitted sex to be turned on and off, steered tfWexploited—meant that while sex appeared to have become more tolerated, it had also been tamed. In the process "^^fetf4i«d-^ecome\l»^^lized. But rather than just being nostalgic—as Schelsky had overtly been—for a time when sex held more .reci^^ri thi';-l=-?xual*j-","tam{4i,~ !er- ; drama—^dorno,aw da"j>o^p 272 Between Coitus and Commodification Ui Dagmar Herzog 273 of naturalness" (ein Ideal des Natürlichen) had been accompanied by a relentlessiv^derogatory attitude upward jlPjenfersion" (Perversität) or usö^^cationJ(fUißnemmt). A single-minded emphasis on "pure gen-itality" (pure Genitalias) made sex a pitifully shriveled and dull thing. This single-mindedness was itself a form of profound repression and it had frightening consequences (e.g. it fueled hostility to sexual minorities like homosexuals and prostitutes). Just as bizarre but revealing was the fact that even though taboos against sexuality outside of marriage were becoming so manifestly outdated, the taboos were still mobilizable at any moment. Sexually conservative, even aggressively punitive, messages still reached a wide audience. All the more reason to be suspicious that the one kind of non-genital sexuality that was not just permitted but actively cultivated by the society was voyeurism.31 These diverse apercus from the pre-sexual revolution moment highlight for just how long the changes that would from 1966 on be grouped under the heading of "sex-wave" had already been underway. But more importandy, they foreground the ambiguities that from the start accompanied the sexual revolution as it took shape from the mid-1960s on. For from the beginning the manic explosions of nudity and sex-talk that had erupted over "West Germany by 1966 and gathered force for the remainder of the 1960s were accompanied by indeterminate but nonetheless strong feelings that all this hype was not as sexually exciting or personally and socially transformative as people might have hoped. What ultimately dissolved the former culture of censorship was above all markerföTCörBy 1966, censorship of nudity or sex-related themes in the "media had"irrmany ways simply stopped working, for there was no doubt to anyone that %fet"Ge~frTranyhad-become homei to a "sex-wave" of "pühöcent^fläHkr,tH^rybuTtöns-,'and ubiquitous breasts—usually with all but the nipples uncovered—blanketing billboards and magazine covers, and of ever more frank descriptions of sexual matters in periodicals and mass-market books alike. The society was "obsessed with sex." Not only was West Germany fuil of representations of sex, but magazines also showed photos which proved that some young women were starting to go topless at swimming pools, and published articles which announced that nude dancing, or the "American" fashion for partner-swapping, were becoming popular at West German parties as well. "A flood of demonic forces is overwhelming our people. Countless individuals are being lured into unrestrained pleasure and the living-out of their drives," warned the Protestant campaign "Action Concern about Germany" (Aktion Sorge um Deutschland), and the archconservative Catholic campaign "Action Clean Screen" (Aktion Saubere Leinwand), under the direction of politician Adolf Süsterhenn, sharply denounced the atmos- Yet media and advertising just kept pushing the boundaries of what it was possible to show. Indeed, the print media—from popular illustrated magazines to serious newspapers—took advantage precisely of the intensifying conflict between liberal and conservative forces over sexual matters in order themselves to profit from the national preoccupation. Articles selfVeflexiveiy rhematizing the culture of voyeurism—or "sex as spectator sport," as one magazine sardonically phrased it—were inevitably part of the same circuit they criticized.33 An ever-greater percentage of text space in popular magazines was devoted to sex-related themes. As recently as 1963, the ideal of marriage, and also young and not just older peoples devotion to the value of marital fidelity, had been celebrated in the media as the West German cultural common sense. Indeed, fidelity had been at the top of the list of qualities most valued in a marriage partner, also among female and male youth.34 But starting in 1965 and within a few years spreading relendessly also into the most mainstream of venues, infidelity and its possible benefits became an especially popular media theme. From the left-wing youth magazine Konkrét to the right-wing tabloid Bild, infidelity in general and threesomes in particular (always two women with one man, a familiar constellation in heterosexual porn), were discussed in elaborate detail. Meanwhile, sexual representations in film that two or three years earlier had been considered absolutely shocking, had come to seem utterly routine. By the late 1960s, the bourgeois sex apostle Oswalt Kolle's pseudo-sciennfTcT^ex enlightenment" movies for the masses—which featured naked "couples talking through their sexual problems, framed by expert voice-overs assuring people that marriages could be mended through opeří communication—functioned for many people more as amusing soft-core pornography than as genuinely educational materials.35 Yet for all the new heightened visibility of and volubility around sex, enlightenment continued to remain only partial, and simultaneously generated many new anxieties. The yearning for sex to be easier, and more fun, coincided with a powerful awareness that the selling of sex and the sex-ing of sales involved manipulation and impossible-to-meet expectations. Liberalization and Politicization Although it was introduced to European markets in 1961, the Pill had only been taken by about 2,000 West German women by 1964. Initially, many doctors would only prescribe the Pill to married women. Outraged, student radicals publicized the existence and benefits of the Pill, auctioned pills as a form of guerrilla theater, circulated addresses of doc- 274 Between Coitus and Commodification DagmarHerzog 275 vide Pill access. "We're not talking about 'the Pill,' we're taking it," announced the sign in a typical student counseling clinic.36 In addition, the increasing attention to sex in the news made it impossible to cover over any longer the truth of massive youthful sexual activity. Scholarly surveys and journalistic reports on sexual attitudes and practices confirmed what everyone knew. Sex simply was a major part of youth culture. The age at first coitus was dropping. In response to this new/old news, a remarkable range of professionals concerned with youth, among them leading pedagogues, psychologists, sociologists and even—and significantly—theologians, went on line to defend premarital coitus as a normal developmental phenomenon.37 From the mid-1960s on, these more liberal authorities would set the terms of debate about sex, and conservatives were the ones on the defensive. The publicity surrounding two major scandals involving doctors who provided (in one case) abortions and (in another) sterilizations contributed significandy to turning Pill access into a moral cause dtehre^ The market-driven sex wave and the cultural ascendance of more liberal experts and the critical youth insurgency each did its part to legitimate what people were already doing—and to push even further the liberalization of popular mores and behavior. Under the combined force of all these developments, barriers to Pill use by singles soon crumbled. By 1968, the number of West German women using the Pill had jumped to 1.4 million, and then jumped again to 3.8 million by 1977. By 1975, while 33 percent of fertile women relied on the Pill in West Germany, 47 percent relied on other birth control methods. But among young women, the rates of Pill use were very' high. In 1977, fully 80 percent of girls under the age of 20 were on the Pill. Unsurprisingly, abortion rates declined precipitously. Yet the birthrate declined the most. Already by 1974 West Germany had the lowest birth rate in the world, with the GDR close behind. Everyone spoke of a "Pill-induced decline," a "PiUenknkk" Within the course of one decade, the birthrate in West Germany had dropped 50 percent. "Are the Germans dying out?," became a national discussion.39 And yet, the very space opened by the Pill—since this was a birth control method that women controlled themselves—and the feet that the Pills availability coincided with freer talk about sex in general, also created the circumstances which made it possible for women both to share with each other and to go public with their dissatisfactions about heterosexual relations. The very thing that made heterosexual sex less anxious and potentially far more pleasurable for women, also created the conditions for new conflicts. This was in part due to the way that the Pill's forced skepticism not only about alternative but also even supplemental practices. It was also due to the feet that the Pill arrived into a culture that was not exacdy egalitarian in gender terms, and in which men brought to sexual encounters their own, often not fully reflected, anger, condescension, neediness, and insecurities. And it was not least due to the fact that, having banished the constant dread of unwanted pregnancy, and also— in the context of the general liberalization—having banished at least some of the anxiety about reputation, women's economic and emotional dependence on men was dramatically diminished. Women had gained the chance to have sex become more enjoyable and meaningful for them, and to start to set more of the terms in sexual encounters. Already in 1966, the influential liberal news magazine Der Spiegel, in a major cover story on the sex-wave, was recording massive male ambivalence about the very female orgasms that were now more possible than ever before. "The new pleasure-demands of women," it reported, were leading to a high incidence of "psychological impotence in men." The faddish "overvaluation of the orgasm," as one expert put it patronizingly, was leading women to complain that their men did not know how to satisfy them, and men were responding with inhibition, anxiety, and heightened self-consciousness. Unable to take any female criticism of heterosexual relations seriously, Der Spiegel in this instance insisted on seeing women's difficulty in achieving pleasure as an unfortunate but inevitable outgrowth of the monotony of monogamy (thereby rerouting a complaint about male behavior into a challenge to the value of marital fidelity).40 Yet as research on sex multiplied, mainstream venues like the parenting magazine Ekern, and the illustrated news magazine Stern, and Der Spiegel as well, ended up—though usually only tentatively and in passing—reporting that coitus per se was not fully exciting for many women.41 Also among the most educated and politically active youth—precisely the ones who saw themselves as the avantgarde of both the anti-capitaiist political revolution antf^ac sexual revolution—there was 1 considerable heterosexual conflict. Transforming sexual relations was one of the most important tasks the New Left in West Germany set itself. Indeed, the cultural critic Klaus Theweleit, himself a member of the , West German New Left "generation of 1968," once retrospectively remarked that in West Germany, "the interest in the political was manifest among many young people as an interest in the sexual. The bodies of young people in the early sixties were sexually charged in a wholly unusual way."42 Or as the journalist Sabine Weissler summarily noted, after reading numerous New Left materials, the desire to change sexual relations was often the spark that led to political activism. "The flood of -.---airide^lecu,-|s^iscus'^ iof- LJ uJ J Between Coitus and Commodification In school and student newspapers, ahead of Vietnam, emergency laws, university reform, etc. sex was "topic number one."43 Yet almost from the start, gender conflict was evidenr. Complaining about the "laborious manipulations" demanded by other birth control methods, for instance, male students writing in the Berlin newspaper FUSpiegel'm 1968 could not figure out why many female students were hesitant to take the Pill. Did not these young women also want a "de-problematization of sexuality"? The only conclusion the authors could reach wasjhat^oung Ger-^ man women must still have considerable prejudices about and hostility to sex.44 In the fall of 1968, when young activist women in Frankfurt published the first broadside of the incipient women's movement, they complained specifically about "socialist screw-pressure" {sozialistischer Bufnszwang), and the ways in which women who did not cooperate got labeled "lesbian," or "frigid," or as suffering from "penis envy."45 Those we call" GSer? faced a double challenge. On the one hand, the student movement was definitively strongly motivated by sexual rebellion against the conformist postwar culture, fueled by a fervent desire for personal liberation and self-transformation. Äsa group of young activists in Frankfurt, speaking also about themselves, complained in 1970, "none of the adults in our fundamentally anti-sexual and pleasure-hostile society was able to develop an untroubled relationship to sexuality."46 But on the other hand, the mainstream sex-wave booming all around them quickly repulsed them as well. As Theweleit remarked, "with repugnance we took cognizance of the partner-swapping tales of bourgeois couples," as "the sex-wave spread in the so-called populace."47 And yet many members of the New Left engaged in plenty of partner-swapping experiments of their own, perpetually confused about whether fidelity was a bourgeois trap or—now that the bourgeoisie had given up on it also—actually an acceptable leftist value. The discomfort with the mainstream sexual revolution was acutely evident in some of the major New Left texts on sexuality, from former SDS leader Reimut Reiches 1968 study, Sexualität und Klassenkampf '(Sexuality and Class Struggle) to the writings of the anti-authoritarian child-rearing movement at the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s. A classic sample of the typical tone— snatches of "materialist" analysis pasted together with inexpressible Utopian longings—is provided in a 1970 book from Berlin: "As long as the nuclear family survives—ultimately, for economic reasons—sexual freedom serves as a sad little palliative for daily surfeit and disgust." And: "Even if people humped around ten times more than before, it would not add up to real sexual liberation. For merely to amass orgasms, even if man and woman arrive at them simultaneously, can not yet be seen as a satisfying form of sexuality."48 What made activist students' perspective 1 } i_I Dagmar Herzog I_C I_C 1_f I_f I_l 277 se, but rather their insistence on connecting liberated sex with progressive politics. No coincidence then that sex rights activists inline New" L^Twithina'few years would turn awayfrom the eartyfahdoften quite ^elwIfamatTerWulietm cails forl»mpleTe sexual' libera-" ~~rioTras-an-aii«&scist imperative toward more Herbert Marcuse-influ-enced analyses of the mainstream sexual revolution as just another aspect of repressive desublifhatiori',"whlle continuing to demand a form of sexual freedom linked to social criticism and social justice struggles. Yet as grandiose as the New Left theoretical reflections often were, both early feminist writings and also New Left men's retrospective memory-writings record quite a bit of more mundane tensions about sexual behaviors. There was fierce rivalry between men within New Left groups not only over who could make the smartest Marxist statements, but also over who got to sleep with the prettiest women. Women were hardly the passive victims of this process. Within the feminist consciousness-raising groups, women too acknowledged that they had measured their own self-worth and expressed rivalry with each other by competing to "catch" the most impressive New Left leaders. Other women acknowledged that women could also have considerable power in erotic relationships with men, and that often it was the man, as much as if not more than the woman, who was the emotionally dependent one. Yet there was clearly often ambivalence on both sides. One woman put the problem poignandy: "I think the fear of being touched and the incapacity to touch others and to do so tenderly, passionately, is a general social phenomenon. It is hard, simply to approach people and hug them; the walls become higher all the time. But the worst thing is-—-I think—the way in which one tries to master this incapacity. After all, the need has not disappeared. So one does it aggressively, humiliates one another, separates emotionality and sexuality and 'bangs' on forcefully (like machines)."49 Yet other women struggled to put into words the baggage that both men and women brought to sexual encounters, often inherited from their own parents.50 As one woman put it in an early reflection, "Until recendy I was involved with a man who had horrible fears about his potency and wanted to sleep with me very often, because he believed that otherwise it wouldn't work when he was older. I was rarely asked about my feelings and needs in this, and was at that time also not really capable of expressing these often enough or of refusing him. I have after all also learned 'that a man just needs that' and 'that a woman should subordinate herself in this way' (quote from my mother)."51 Many young women were obviously extremely happy with heterosexual sex, especially now that the Pill had simplified it. "We were not a group of sexually frustrated women," one woman affiliated with the 278 Between Coitus and Commodification Dagmar Herzog 279 among New Leftists ultimately broke up more because the couples had simply grown apart, or even because the women had outgrown their male partners.52 And although, as another formerly New Left woman put it, "New Left men were so hung-up and lousy in bed, just dreadful as lovers," she solved the problem at least for herself. "That's when I turned to the working class. That went much better. [Da hab ich mich an die Arbeiterklasse gewandt, da ging's viel besser.]"5i Yet reading the texts of the time—polemical flyers and mimeographed statements produced in the context of university seminars, study groups on sexual politics and. in the first consciousness-raising groups, as well as newspapers, calendars, and handbooks—reveals an astonishing amount of anger, despite or sometimes even because of the Pill, expressed over the terms of heterosexual sex. As one woman in a Frankfurt consciousness-raising group described the benefits of a women's group in contradistinction to her experiences of New Left coed groups: in the New Left groups, there was a feeling of being unable to be real, there was only the ability to "put on a show, to produce myself (clothes, make-up)." In the women's group, by contrast, there was finally "the feeling no longer to be treated like an object as in the mixed groups (suitable for fucking, nothing else)."54 Others pointed out that women still were so economically dependent on men—because they did not have as saleable skills, they needed ultimately to find a man who would support them—that really sex was not a free exchange: "The market value of the woman, like that of a breeding pig, is determined by age, weight and the firmness of the flesh .... Since usually she has not learned much .... she must therefore behave such that the man wants to fuck her."55 In 1972, when the Berlin feminist group Bread and Roses published its thoughts on the Pill, it not only listed "leg cramps, blue hands, more pounds, dried-out skin, hair loss or beard growth" as side effects that some women who took the Pill experienced, but also noted: "Many women would love best to throw every Pill one by one into the garbage, but most young men are so incredibly convinced of the Pill s wonders, that one does not even dare to communicate ones worries, out of fear of being considered bitchy, hysterical, or old-fashioned."56 And as a group of young feminists put it in a contribution to the Frauen Zeitung'm 1973, under the subhead, "What does the Pill have to do with the Revolution?," men were so egotistical and irresponsible in sexual matters that even if a male pill were to be developed, most men could not be trusted to take it. Men just presumed that the women they slept with were on the Pill, but "it's so shitty, those guys can't be depended on at all, one would have to monitor perpetually to make sure they swallowed it." Moreover, even (or especially) "com-r3iJ£S"—' 1i Nsj"7 LeftjBen—-wfiie^p hostilcJo woroenls^emasjfinarlon Vf- someday a complete "revolutionizing of the relationships between I women and men" might even be possible.57 Problems between New Left-affiliated men and women were clearly reflective of broader conflicts within the society as a whole. Not until the j mid-1970s did strategies for achieving better female orgasms—albeit i orgasms produced by female masturbation rather than male solicitude— become a national obsession also in the West German mainstream, as the Bertelsmann and Ullstein publishing companies offered German translations of the works of American female sex specialists Shere Hite t and Lonnie Barbach. Reluctantly, and while taking side slaps at Hite's research method, Der Spiegel did mention Hite's findings that only 30 percent of women achieved climax through penetration alone, and announced that "never before have so many women" freed themselves from the fatalistic and suffering-inducing Freudian belief in vaginal orgasms.58 Stern took a more profeminist line, enthusiastically endorsing the advice of female masturbation guru Barbach, and informed its readers in no uncertain terms that men needed to read her book as much as women, for after all it was "all too often the clumsiness or brutality of sexist men" that was responsible for the "lack of orgasm" in women.59 And again, even this kind of diversification of sex advice was immediately corralled into the culture of quasipornographic voyeurism. Typical here was the Munich-based sexologist Günter Hunolds study, Intimre-port der deutschen Frau (Intimate Report on the German Woman, 1978), which shared with readers housewives' detailed descriptions of masturbating with the help of such aids as Eierlikör, or vegetables ("I always purchase a bit more asparagus than I'll need for our evening meals").60 Whether this book provided more of a masturbation aid for men or for women was an open question. Moreover, this very moment of graphic information and assertiveness about female orgasm coincided almost exacdy with an untrammeled,. albeit incoherent, backlash against feminism. Already in 1975, Der Spiegelv/as reporting hopefully on what it described as a "return to femininity," while also communicating male rage over having to slave away to bring home money for wives who, because of the Pill, weren't even I making any babies anymore.61 By 1977, Die Zeit, under the alarmist caption "Lysistrata everywhere," fretted that women were turning away from both men and motherhood.62 But when Der Spiegel reported in 1977 that women were rejecting the Pill in droves, the magazine could not imagine any other reason for this than that women must secredy crave motherhood. Any negative side-effects reported by women were dismissed as psychosomatic. Der Spiegel could not comprehend what . -, Q---poff a*1-plea—^iH-ruf* "isrn fiT"* \e. 7»ii.'r iforso1 i vol.n more than a decade of very hostile attacks on it by numerous physicians—see Herbert Lax, "Methodik der Antikonzeption," Deutsches medizinisches Journal If,, no 8 (April 1964): 261-67. 13. Conversation with F. T, 2001. 14. See R. Hobbing, "Zur Frage der Haltbarkeit von Minderjährigenehen," Unsere Jugend 6, no. 8 (1954): 366-68; "Erst die Liebe, dann die Moral?," 46; and "Jung gefreit—Nie gereut," Twen (1960), 29; and "Darüber spricht man nicht," Twen (1960), 30. The divorce rate for teen marriages was twice as high as that for marriages between 24- and 26-year-olds. 15. See Angela Delille and Andrea Grohn, Blick zurück aufs Glück (Berlin, 1985), 124; "Ist der Betrieb ein Heiratsmarkt? Alles über die Deutschen (2)," Stern 16/35 (1963), 25; Harmsen, "Mittel zur Geburtenregelung," 175; Gisela Staupe and Lisa Vieth, "Einführung," in Die Pille: Von der Lust und von der Liebe, ed. Staupe and Vieth (Berlin, 1996), 14; and "Heiraten nur weil ein Kind kommt?," Twen (1960), 26. One feminist text in 1974 stated as self-evident that one out of every two marriages was a "must marriage." Criticizing the block placed by the Federal Constirutional Court in June 1974 on the implementation of a liberalized abortion law that had been preliminarily passed by the Bundestag in 1973, feminists summarized the misery of an unwanted pregnancy. Referring to the eight judges, the women wrote: "None of these men .... know the panic of having a monthly period be even only a few days late, none of them knows the crashing breakdown that happens-when we finally know that we are expecting a child rhat we cannot or do not want to raise. None of them know the sense of alienation from one's own body, when the biological mechanism of a pregnancy is moving along against the will of the woman. None of them seem even to know that in such situations marriages are entered into that develop into a terror for the woman, the man, and the children." See "Kundgebungsbeitrag: Frauen und solidarische Männer" (1974), personal archive Sibylla Flügge, Frankfurt am Main. 16. See Hans Harmsen, "Abtreibung oder Empfängnisverhütung?," Gesundheitsfürsorge 3 (1953/54): 123; and the very informative essay by A V. Knack and W. Pieper, "Der Stand der Empfängnisverhütung in der ärztlichen Praxis," Ärztliche Mitteilungen 41/14 (May 1956): 388. Hermann Doerfler, "Was kann die Bayer. Ärzteschaft und was der einzelne Arzt zur Bekämpfung der Abtreibungsseuche beitragen?," Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift^, no. 17 (24 April 1953): 509-11. Harmsen, "Mittel zur Geburtenregelung," 186. See Michael Luft, "Abtreibung in Deutschland: Hilfe, ich kriege ein Kind! (1)," Konkret (May 1964), 7-11. One study do ne in Kiel in the early 1950s suggested that one out of every twenty abortions was performed by a physician. See Doerfler, "Was kann die Bayer. Ärzteschaft." See also Theodor Bruck, Geburtenregelung (Flensburg, 1964), 129-30. Durand-Wever, "Ärzdiche Indikationen," Luft, "Abtreibung in Deutschland," 9. Delille and Grohn, Blick zurück auft Glück, 123. 23. The case of Dr. Suhr is discussed in Michael Luft, "Paragraph 218 oder Baby-Pille für Alle: Hilfe, ich kriege ein Kind! (2)," Konkret (July-August 1964), 7-9, 16. See Delille and Grohn, Blick zurück aufi Glück, 123; and che comments about Dr. Hanns Dietel's study in the interview with Dr. Heinz Kirchhoff in "Anti-Baby-Pillen nur für Ehefrauen," Der Spiegel1), 26 February 1964, 87. 25. See Carl Nedelmann, "Abtreibung: Geburtenregelung und Straftechtsreform," 17. 20. 21 22 24 'I i 284 t--I i-f t — J . Between Coitus and Corn-modification I_t Dagmar Herzog 285 32. 33. 34 35 37. 38. 39 26. See Heike Rieder, letter to the editor, Konkret, Sel964, 2; and the statistics on West Germany in Kühne, "Australiens Frauen und die Pille: Bremswirkung pseudowissenschaftlich erzeugter Karzinophobie," Berliner Ärztehlatt78, no. 7 (1965): 370-73. 27. Kirchhoff quoted in "Anti-Baby Pillen," 87. 28. See Bruck, Geburtenregelung, 127-28; and Delille and Grohn, Blick zurück aufi Glück, 123. 29. Schelsky, Soziologie der Sexualität, 125-26. 30. Christian Crull and Hans Hagedorn, "Sex und Profit," Diskus 12, no. 7 (1962), 1. 31. Theodor W. Adorno, "Sexualtabus und Recht heute," in Sexualität und Verbrechen, ed. Fritz Bauer et al„ especially 299-308. See "Die gefallene Natur," 50,53-54. Ibid., 58. See "Umfrage in die Intimsphäre: Alles über die Deutschen (13)," Stern 16/46 (1963), 56; "Erst die Liebe, dann die Moral?," 52; see also the comments about yearning for twosomeness and for founding a family in Dieter Binder, "Anmerkungen zum ThemaSex on the Campus," Diskusno.7, (July/August 1960), 1; and Anton van der Vet, "Generation ohne Hider," Ämjb«(1962}. Conversation with C. K., 2001. 36. The poster can be seen in Sabine Weissler, "Sexy Sixties," in CheScbahSkit Die sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Mohtov (Berlin, 1984). E.g. see the authorities quoted in "Erst die Liebe, dann die Moral?," 50; and "Zur Jugendliebe gehört die Empfängnisverhütung," Der Spiegel35 (1966), 55. See Luft, "Paragraph 218," 7-9, 16; and Moritz Pfeil, "Eine gewisse Presse, eine gewisse Justiz: Der LehrM Dohm," Der Spiegeln147, 20 November 1963. See Gerhard Döring, "Das erste Mal," Eltern, June 1969, 56; "Anti-Baby Pillen," 81; "Last und Lust," Der Spiegel 22/32, 5 August 1968, 85; "Ins rechte Mass," Der Spiegel 24/12, 16 March 1970, 190, 195; "Die Kinderwollen keine Kinder mehr," Der Spiegel 29/13, 24 March 1975, covet page ("Sterben die Deutschen aus?") and 42,44; and "Das Unbehagen ander Pille," Der Spiegel 3116, 31 January 1977, cover page ("Überdruss an der Pille") and 40. 40. "Die gefallene Natur," 68. For a confident summary assertion, as late as 3964, that the vast majority of young girls were not experiencing anything at all in their coital encounters, see Lax, "Methodik der Antikonzeption," 266-67. 41. For example, see Gisela Schmeer, "Die Aufklärung und wir Frauen (VII)," Eltern, July 1969, 119; "Jeder sechste will mit jeder," DerSpiegell3 (1971), 180; and Ingrid Kolb, "Das Warren der Frauen auf den Orgasmus," Stern 22 (1980), 132-45. 42. Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts; Drei leicht inkorrekte Verträge (Frankfun am Main, 1998), 106-7. Or, asTheweleit had put it several years earlier, a "special sort of sexual tension was the 'driving force' of 1968" in West Germany. Klaus Theweleit, ... ein Aspirin von der Grösse der Sonne (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1990), 49. 43. Weissler, "Sexy Sixties," 99. 44. H. Abhob, H.W. Drager, and B. Witt, "Lautloses Platzen," FU Spiegel February 1968. 45. The Weiberrat quoted in Dagmar Herzog, "'Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong j^etfi^Post- Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany," in i Intimacy, «k Lauren Berlant (Chicago, 2000), 139. 46. "^i^nd^rsenule Frankfurt," in Erziehung zum Ungehorsam, ed. Gerhard Bott (Frank- furt am Main, 1970), 51, 54. 47. Theweleit, Ghosts, 129. 48. Berliner Kinderläden: Annautoritäre Erziehung und sozialistischer Kampf (Cologne, 51 52 53 54 55 56 57. 58. 49. "Psychische Verelendung und Emanzipätorische Selbsttätigkeit" (collective Statement produced by a women's group circa 1974), 6. Personal archive, Sibylla Flügge, Frank-flirt am Main. 50. See Sibylla Flügge, "1968 und die Frauen—Ein Blick in die Beztehungskiste," in Gender und soziale Praxis, ed. Margit Göttert and Karin Walser (Könjgstein/Taunus, 2002), especially 266-86. "Psychische Verelendung," 6-7. Conversation withT. S., 2002. Conversation with G. T, 2000. "Psychische Verelendung," 5. Elisabeth Skerutsch, "Was soll der Abtreibungsparagraf?," mimeograph fiyer, circa 1974, personal archive Sibylla Flügge, Frankfurt am Main. Brot und Rosen Statement from 1972, quoted in Volkmar Sigusch, "Sexualwissenschaftliche Aspekte der hormonalen Kontrazeption bei jungen Mädchen," in Sexualität und Medizin, ed. Sigusch (Cologne, 1979), 91. "Was denn nun: Pille, Spirale oder Gummi? (Beitrag vom Frauenzentrum Berlin)," Frauen Zeitung, no. 1, Ort. 1973, 7, 15- "Hite-Repon: Abnabeln von Doktor Freud," Der Spiegel 5 (1977), 185- Hite also reported that 87 percent of het respondents did sail continue to seek penetration, but largely for "the sake of a bodily contact and the feeling of togetherness." In a rare moment of reflectiveness, Der Spiegel suggested that this idea of using the penis as "a method of communication, not only an instrumenr," could perhaps lead the way out of the "genital labyrinth": "But this would mean, as the U.S. psychiatrist Herb Goldberg formulated it, to move men to feel. Goldberg is pessimistic: 'that's as though one would tell a cripple to run.'" 59. Otto Köhler, "Ober die liebe an und für sich," Stern 19, 28 April 1977,74. 60. Günter Hunold, Intimreport der deutschen Frau: Die sexuelle Befreiung vom Mann (Munich, 1978), 190-93- 61. "Frau '75: 'Grosse erotische Mutter,'" Der Spiegel (1975). The cover displayed a naked woman with a child and announced "Woman '75: Return to Femininity." 62. Viola Roggenkamp, "Lysistrata geht um: Kein Pillenknick, sondern die Emanzipation der Frau lehrt die Gesellschaft das Fürchten," Die Zeit 18,22 April 1977, 57. 63. "Das Unbehagen an der Pille," 40. 64. See Robert J. Levin and Amy Levin, "Sexual Pleasure: The Surprising Preferences of 100,000 Women," Redbook (1975), 55; and Robert J. Levin, "The Redbook Report on Premarital and Extramarital Sex," Redbook, October 1975, 190. 65. "Bis 25: Täglich Liebe. Ab 30: Ich bin so müde," Bild 24 January 1969. 66. Stern cartoon reprinted in "Jüngstes Gerücht," Der Spiegel, 28 February 1977, 190. 67. "Jüngstes Gerücht," 191. "Mild bis wild," DerSpiegel 7 March 1977,207. "Stunde der Wahrheit," DerSpiegei, ISApril 1977,231: Ingrid Kolb, "Zwischen Lust und Frust," SternH (1980), 132. E.g. see Pfiasterstrand, no. 23 (late January-early February 1978), 3. Conrad Zander, "Die Manner werden keusch; Schluss mit dem Sex," Stern 51, 16 December 1982,48-50; "Die verteufelte Lust," Stern 47,17 Novembet 1983,78. Conversation with R. G., 2002. Conversation with C. H., 1996. Quoted in Kolb, "Zwischen Lust und Frust," 172. For example, see the analysis in "Zum Wandel der Sexualmoral," a paper written by an anonymous woman in a seminar at the University of Frankfurt, probably in the 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 286 Between Coitus and Commodification 77. she pointed out, was not just about satisfying sexual drives; it was very much also about ego-confirmation fbf men who had so few other sources for that confirmation. Since in late capitalism sexuality was meant to function as a compensation for all existential insecurities induced in men by the experiences of daily life, especially at work, the fetishization of female bodies in the media and the recent rhetoric affirming female sexuality—and the presentation of that affitmation as a victory for women's emancipation—really meant nothing but a coercion for women, a constant compulsion "always and above all to be sexy ... always and above all to be available fot sex," and "the pressure voluntarily to identify with her role as sex-object for men." The Pill was constandy presented as the ticket to women's emancipation, but it came together with insistent duress, and frequent declarations that women were "neurotic, frustrated, or even repressive, if they do not want to sleep with someone." See also the devastating interviews about women's bad experiences of heterosexual sex in Alice Schwarzer's Der "kleine" Unterschied (1975), discussed in Leona Siebenschön, "Noch genauso frigide," DieZeit30, 18 July 1975, 37. Gernot Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau zieht sich aus, " Ästhetik und Kommunikation 40-41 (September 1980): 91. Chapter 13 Boy Trouble: French Pedophiliac Discourse of the 1970s Julian Bourg On 28 January 2001, the British newspaper, the Observer, broke a story about a former 1960s radical turned Green Party delegate to the European Parliament.1 Daniel Cohn-Bendit had first achieved prominence as a vocal figure in the French student/worker strikes of May 1968. Thirty-one years later he was elected to the Parliament in Sttasbourg, representing France as a dedicated Europeanist. The Observer article publicized remarks Cohn-Bendit had made in a 1975 book he wrote on education, The Big Madness, and then in a German counterculture! magazine in August 1976. Working in an experimental children's school set up by New Leftists, part of the 1970s Kinderladen movement, he said that his interactions with students occasionally became sensual or sexual. Sexually curious overtures were made by the children, and in the open, anti-authoritarian ambience of the time, he sometimes indulged them. As he wrote in 1976, "It has happened to me several times that a few children opened the fly of my pants and started to stroke me. I reacted differendy each time according to the circumstances, but their desire confronted me with problems. I asked them: 'Why don't you play with each other, why have you chosen me and not other children?' But when they insisted on it, I then stroked them. For that reason I was accused of perverted behavior." When asked by the Observer to assess his earlier admission, Cohn-Bendit replied that, although it was correct for public figures to account for their pasts, his remarks should be viewed in the context of their times. As an educator in 1970s Germany, his published rerf==l~hadr1r—^inte^r1—^o prfl—u* tea Is-'had T-~ppIer—"\he