Customer Reviews

Thy Neighbor's Wife

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Gay Talese spent the 1970s studying the Sexual Revolution in the USA. He was no detached scientific observer in a white lab coat like Masters and Johnson. He threw himself into his work with enthusiasm. He lived the life he studied and the results of his work are in this book. But this is not just one man's report from the sexual frontier. As a disciplined reporter, he conducted countless interviews, but as a participant he was able to obtain trusting relationships. This is not Sociology; he reports on the people making money from the Sexual Revolution and their customers. It is primarily a book about men using women's sexuality to make money from other men.

This is not an exhaustive history but rather a look at selective people and their impact on the times. John and Barbara Williamson's Sandstone Retreat, a sexually open community in the hills near Los Angeles, is one group that Talese focuses on. Through interviews with many of the participants he explores the effects polyamory (openly maintaining multiple sexual relationships) has on the couples who belong to this group.

A large portion of the book examines the publishing pioneers who, after World War II, risked fines and jail to sell erotic books and magazines in the US. The Post Office laws against sending sexual materials through the mail was the core legal restraint in the US and Anthony Comstock was the chief enforcer of this law. Some of Comstock's more famous exploits are recounted. Talese also reports on the Supreme Court, its decisions, the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and the Nixon White House's response to the loosening sexual climate. Hugh Hefner, one of the most famous people in sexual publishing, is also studied in some detail.

Feminism was another revolution developing in the 1970s, but Talese only gives it passing mention. The only feminist mentioned is Betty Dodson, whose drawings of female genitalia and visits to Sandstone are discussed.

Talese also looks into the history of sexual expression and repression in the US. John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community is looked at as a precursor to the open sexuality of the 70s. The community was built on Noyes' concepts of Perfectionism which included communal sharing that extended to sexual relationships.

These are just the major themes. A 20 page alphabetic Index ends the book with entries from Abortion to Emile Zola. I found the history of sexually explicit publishing most interesting. The depth of the personal interviews related to the Sandstone community was excellent. So much has changed in the past 25 years in terms of sexual expression and the sex industry. This book is a wonderful study of this period and the people involved.

Gay Talese does a brilliant job of narrating the evolution of sexuality during the 20th century. By thoroughly including all the movers and shakers in the development of censorship legislation, sex shops, massage parlors, communes and sexual revolutionists in enthralling detail, Talese manages to create a riveting tale of human sexuality. By infiltrating the sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's, Talese offers first-hand accounts. He artfully balances his keen observations as a slightly removed journalist with indulgent, self-purposeful experimentation, then masterfully conveys his findings to his audience. Like "Honor Thy Father", Talese invests a great deal of time and risk in researching his material and the result is a page-turner. While he tends to mention numerous names of people who shaped 20th century sexuality, the result is not overwhelming but instead may inspire you to keep a list of names as you read through the book with the intention of researching these people yourself. Indeed, this masterpiece flows with gripping narrative style, introducing characters that seemingly have no relationship to one another, until you read further and find that their influence is intricately commingled. This book will fascinate you with its exploration and understanding of American sexual identity. A must read!

Talese's history of the sexual revolution in America reads like a Jackie Collins novel or plays like a Robert Altman movie where all of a sudden, the characters stories have crossed paths and their lives after were irrevocably changed. You will read the page turning account of how Hugh Hefner came to create Playboy Magazine--a story which indeed has been often told, but not like this--interspersed with various obscenity cases of Screw Magazine publisher/editor Goldstein, the coming of the age of Larry Flynt and Bob Guccione, and the story of our gal Betty...Talese outdid E! entertainment by two decades. It is a great rendering from one of our most talented writers.

Depending on your outlook, author Gay Talese's rambling social history of sex in America is either X-rated titillation or scholarly and objective reporting of a serious subject that affects virtually everyone. The author takes the reader through a maze of people and events from the triumphs and tribulations of Hugh Hefner to pornography and the courts, from free-love religious sects of the 19th century to 20th century California communes. The reader also visits massage parlors and organized mate swapping clubs. The premise is that everybody behaves sexually, regardless. Pretending otherwise is a myth perpetuated by the oppressive cycle of American Puritanism handed down by a variety of parental, religious, and legal authorities. We should just accept our sexuality and be honest with each other, and especially with ourselves. Although the author refrains from preaching a "if it feels good, do it" sermon, complete sexual freedom is the rather trite theme. This viewpoint is somewhat dated and reflects the so-called sexual revolution of the '60s and early '70s. The book was published in 1980 before the AIDs threat was a common concern. Some hot button issues as abortion and homosexuality are ignored. Nevertheless, it is an interesting book on a controversial subject. ;-)

This is the great smutty book of the baby-boom Seventies, one of the cornerstones of the mythology of the Me Decade and a major work in the canon of the New Journalism -- the exemplar of several things at once and tremendously popular and influential for many years. Coming to it thirty years later, though, the reader is struck by how diffuse it is, lacking a real through-line or conclusion. Perhaps there could never have been a conclusion to a book that was so thoroughly "the way we live now" -- we all did not stop living in 1980, and the way we lived kept changing, as it always does -- but Talese doesn't even make an attempt to sum the book up, just drags himself into the last chapter to explain what he wanted to do, or thought he was going to do, before bowing out quietly.

Thy Neighbor's Wife only explains itself in that last chapter, with Talese taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of all of the books that Thy Neighbor's Wife didn't become -- a consumer guide to massage parlors, Talese's own sexual autobiography, an in-depth look at the Sandstone Retreat, an examination of the intersection of nudism and sex -- before ending suddenly. Before that, it ran through twenty-five chapters, each one on a discrete topic, only slightly connected to the chapters before and after -- though he did circle back to a few topics: Sandstone, Hugh Hefner, and the place of Chicago in America's libido. Talese begins with a photo of Diane Webber (the model immortalized on the cover of the 2009 paperback edition) to tell the story of the late adolescence of a Chicago teen, Harold Rubin, who then disappears for several hundred pages. The narrative jumps from Rubin to Webber, on to Hefner, off to the couples who will later form Sandstone, and then wanders away into describing obscenity cases for a while (with the requisite thumbnail sketches of the then-current Supreme Court justices) before bouncing back to many of those earlier subjects for a while and bounding onward.

It's a scatter-shot approach, dizzying at times, and Talese's workmanlike prose moves it forward ploddingly, less leaping from topic to topic than building isolated foundations for various buildings in the same development. Talese hints at larger structures and plans, but refuses to speculate about them -- he'll only concern himself with the particular. One particular love affair of Hefner's is given in great detail, while a myriad others are left unmentioned or swiftly skimmed over -- probably because the one woman in question agreed to be interviewed by Talese, and the others didn't.

Talese wants to tell a grand sweeping story -- of how all of America changed its view of sex and love over the course of the decades of the '60s and '70s -- but to tell it entirely in particulars, and to tell it while keeping himself out of the story almost entirely (until that last chapter, unveiling his part in the proceedings like the Wizard of Oz). Unfortunately, the story is too big to be told that way -- Talese, from what he tells us here, never even visited most of the country, and didn't do any general or sociological research. He wants to present his subjects as exemplars of changing Americans -- but without saying what they are exemplars of, or how the exemplify anything.

And so Thy Neighbor's Wife comes across -- especially now, thirty years later -- as a collection of primary documents from the period, not a coherent single narrative. We see Hefner as he puts together the first year or so of Playboy, and then again at the height of its success in the early '70s -- but not how he got from one to the other, or what that meant (to him, or to America). We also see very little about what Playboy meant to the young men who read it -- and nothing about its place in the lives of the young women who appeared in it. In fact, if there's one single glaring flaw in Thy Neighbor's Wife, it's women -- they exist here almost entirely as objects, as beings seen from the outside. Talese is a man, and he gets into the heads of the men in this story -- from Hefner and Rubin to Al Goldstein of Screw and John Bullaro of Sandstone -- but not the women. The women here, as in the traditional American male view, control the access to sex, and are capricious and ultimately not understandable -- men can just try to figure out the rules so as to get as much sex as possible. And the problem then with this era was that the rules were changing radically and without warning -- that was good for men, since it generally meant that more sex was available, but it was also bad, since getting that sex required entirely different methods and plans.

I kept wanting Thy Neighbor's Wife to either stay on one subject long enough to cover it in depth, or to zoom out to a big picture once in a while to provide some context. (Sandstone was an outlier even in the sexual revolution -- but how many couples were swapping partners, in one way or another, in those mid-'70s years? How did the loosening of sexual morality affect people in the middle of their lives? How were the teens of the '70s different from those of the '50s, in ways that can be traced back to Playboy and Lady Chatterly and Henry Miller?) But Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book of reportage, not of analysis -- Talese never makes this clear, but his aim was to show what he saw, and not presume to make judgements about anything larger. And so Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book focused primarily on Chicago and Los Angeles, and even there on the Playboy Mansion and Sandstone, because that's where Talese spent the most time on the ground, talking to people. (And, as he coyly hints at in that last chapter, screwing around with at least a couple of those newly liberated young women before going back to his marriage.)

Thy Neighbor's Wife is still an important book, but all of the things that it did have been done since -- and mostly done better -- by many other books, each of them focusing on one aspect of that era and examining it in more depth. It's a decent starting point to the world of the sexual revolution, but it only leads on to other books that make more of an effort to answer the questions that Talese only raises.

I recall reading a chapter of "Thy Neighbor's Wife" in a magazine (Esquire, probably) when it came out in 1980. It was interesting but not so interesting that I went on to read the book. I am pleased that I waited until now. Things have happened in the past 30 years - or at least, things have been revealed - that make Gay Talese's book more piquant than it was.

In the early '70s, Talese set out to document "the quiet rebellion that he (writing in the third person) sensed within the middle class against the censors and the clerics that had been an inhibiting force since the founding of the Puritan republic." There was, then, nothing quiet about the rebellion among wide segments of the public. The endless "Playboy Philosophy" in the biggest selling skin mag was made as loud as Hugh Hefner could make it, to take one example. But Talese had a point.

The work-a-daddy middle class was chary of announcing where the gossips could hear that it endorsed the so-called Sexual Revolution. Today, of course, you can hardly get it to shut up.

That behavior, as opposed to keeping up a front, changed very much is to be doubted. Even before "Thy Neighbor's Wife" came out, the historian Page Smith had published his father's letters ("A Letter from My Father," 1976) detailing the life of a randy Republican in the era of unbridled comstockery. Talese tells, in amusing and massive detail, how pretense was riddled, shot to pieces and fell.

Brave, independent but, as Talese acknowledges, socially not very attractive men did it, and some like William Hamling went to prison for long years before the prudes were squelched. What is so wonderful, now, about "Thy Neighbor's Wife" is that the principal villains, the Catholic church and Charles Keating, have subsequently been exposed for the vicious frauds they always were.

If Talese had any inkling that the church was running a world-wide child-rape ring, he suppressed it. Keating's corruption took a different form and was revealed later, although it is sobering to realize that as recently as last year one of his stooges nearly got elected president of the United States. Few writers have been so lucky in their choice of villains. There were plenty of others he might have picked, and not all have been exposed.

It requires some patience to deal with this tome. In form, he follows the careers of several people who were agents in what was either the sexual awakening or the sexual unwrapping of the American middle class, but with long excursions into the past. These include the career of Anthony Comstock, the utopian communes of the 19th century and other background noise. The individual stories are interrupted for long periods, but over and over, two or three strands are later knitted together in unexpected ways.

Even Talese stops to remark about how many of his principals started out in Chicago. Most famously, Hefner. The only real surprise in the book was learning that it was Mrs. Hefner, not Hefner, who was the first to get a little on the side in that couple. A medievalist, conscious of feminine concupiscence (as Talese and I were taught to think of it in church), would have said, "But of course."

There are many things not in the book. Homosexuals are hardly mentioned, since this is about mostly straight people; nor are Kinsey or Masters and Johnson. It is a question whether it was Hefner or Kinsey, with the mediation of newspapers, which were given cover to talk about sex by Kinsey's supposedly scientific approach, that really did most to move Mr. and Mrs. Average American's attitude toward (some limited) frankness about sexuality.

Talese spends much time on the legal fights, but I have my doubts whether these unread decisions were what changed public opinion. The judges and juries did, for sure, make it easier and easier for sellers of talk and pictures about sexuality to service the theretofore unfulfilled market for middle class porn.

We have come a long, long way in openness. Today, the daily newspaper talks unconcernedly on page one about behaviors that were almost ignored by Kinsey or even the much later and purportedly totally frank "Hite Report."

This book must have been a phenomenon back in the 80s. Gay Talese: conservative gentleman, respected journalists, family man, and...sex researcher. In the last twenty pages, or so, of this book, Talese opens up and recounts for the reader his personal odyssey of visiting massage parlors, sex shows, strip clubs, as well as his philandering experiences shacking up at free love communities in California -- all before the outbreak of AIDS. Talese speaks about himself in the third person, probably as a narrative technique to distance himself from the guilt he might have felt participating in such research as a married man. While the soul searching wasn't quite enough for me, the journalism really hit the mark. Talese describes the history of pornography, from the time it was banned in the U.S., up through the major Supreme Court obsenity cases of the 60's and 70's. Along the way, Talese tells the story of Playboy power-man Hugh Heffner, describing his hedonistic lifestyle in envious detail. (There is a naughty man buried inside Talese. TNW treats the voyeuristic reader to the show Talese puts on as he lets us watch this naughty man struggle to climb out.)

The book also chronicles a number of "regular" folks from the 70's who happened to fall into Talese's circle of aquaintences as he was writing the book. (It did, after all, take Talese nine years to write TNW -- and, as an aside, I never did figure out why Talese chose this title; never, once, does he write about his or any neighbor's wife. He could be refering, however, to the general "free love" culture that emerged in the 60s and 70s.) These "regular" folk are supposed to represent the average 1970s American. Not once was I conviced that the people Talese followed through his narrative were actually average. But this is secondary. The journalism is first-rate.

I bought this book because I am a student of the narrative non-fiction genre. Talese is a Master of the discipline. This book keep the Master's reputation secure. If you're looking to learn about writing non-fiction, and you're looking for a topic a little out of the ordinary, choose this book. Talese's most recent book from a few years ago, A WRITER'S LIFE, is said to briefly follow-up (in a few chapters) with his observations about American sexuality. I have not read this new book, but it will be interesting to see what 25 years have done to this man's perceptions.

A classic to be sure, Talese's 1980 book explores the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s. He shows it didn't really begin in the 1960s: 19th century sexual communes and 20th century censorship battles served as its prelude.

This is a snapshot of the times. Older people will recognize his depiction of teenagers pursuing illicit pornography in the 1930s and 1940s; of Playboy's emergence in the 1950s; of suburban marital restlessness in the 1960s spurring experimentation with open marriage and swing clubs; massage parlor proliferation in the 1970s; and so on.

The generation that wanted to "get rid of all that guilt" gets this book. The generations that grew up in the resulting guiltless world, may not.

The decades since could use his treatment. I'd be real curious whether he'd come to the same conclusions. In a recent afterword he dismisses notions of a return to sexual conservatism. He's probably right; I don't see this society fitting back into Pandora's Box anytime soon. But he might ask some deeper questions.

Is this revolution socially beneficial, or not?

He says in the afterword men have become more tolerant of their wives' past sexual history and current infidelities. Few men today insist their brides be virgins, but few men or women are comfortable with a spouse's infidelity, sexual revolution or not. It's human nature not to be.

So do people need more temptation and opportunity to stray?

He quotes Camille Paglia accusing the free-love generation of causing the AIDS epidemic, which is fundamentally true. (Much of the book takes place in the 1970s, after the Pill and Roe v. Wade but before HIV, when sexual consequences were by most eras' standards few and mild.) So how does having a plethora of sex partners fit with that? "Safe sex" is only as safe as a condom you've got, remember to use, are willing to use and that doesn't break.

He writes about women liberated to take the initiative. But for many women, sexual freedom means little more than giving the men a taste and a trial period before the pressure for commitment. Men given sex without commitment lose a big incentive towards it. Many women thus find themselves stuck in unmarried relationships, in a society no longer having the voice to condemn the unmarried for cohabiting or even reproducing.

And it can work both ways. Friends with privileges? Dude, it means she thinks you aren't marriage material. (And many men find their lessened earnings dim their appeal as spouses to independent women ultimately more interested in their pocketbooks than their penises or personalities. This is not new news. All traditional people in decades past knew it. But more women have the means today to be as shallow and selfish as men ever were.)

I digress. Talese's book may be incomprehensible to younger readers, addressing as it does the sexual revolution as a response to repression they haven't experienced. Younger readers can't conceive of pornography not being a few mouse clicks away, of facing widespread ostracism for open sexuality or of college dorms with curfews and parietal rules. They can't conceive of a world where a girl having "a reputation" faced consequences, or where a guy getting too frisky with a young lady might face her brother's fists or her daddy's shotgun.

A Gen X (or Gen Y) Talese might deal with different questions:

--What are the effects on children of stereotypically-Californian parents (like the Sandstone folks here) focused narcissistically on their own fulfillment and "personal growth"? Their serial divorces inflict much psychic damage on children.

--What is the effect on the growing number of children born out of wedlock? In the new world, sexual freedom means a large number of adults can't settle down.

--Why is marriage declining? This will include assessing the endless attacks on it by gay-marriage advocates eagerly pronouncing heterosexual marriage a failure in arguing to let gays fail at it as well.

--The bizarre turned tables of a world smiling benignly on "wild women" and "cougars" like Talese's Sally Binford, while continuing to expose men who do the same, like Tiger Woods, to personal destruction.

--The weird alliance of anti-male feminists, generally creatures (good word) of the secular left, with the prudish religious forces they otherwise despise. Said religious forces are the perennial foils in Talese's book and its times, frequently conflated with the FBI, the Chicago police, Nixon and the Vietnam war as constituting some vast right-wing conspiracy to keep you from getting laid.

The world that the rebels in this book rebel against is long gone. Someone needs to take a long, hard look at the world they created.

Because how many marriages survive swinging?

While I enjoyed "Unto the Sons", and may read Talese's other works, I only thought so-so of this endless tome on the sex industry in the USA. I like his style of writing non-fiction in an engrossing manner, like reading a novel. His section on Noyes and the Oneidan community was wonderful. Then there is Hugh Hefner, who has sexual relationships with countless women, but was hot and bothered when his wife had an affair. And Talese's nine-year commitment to the work is highly commendable. But the scope of such a work needed more/wider coverage. The selection of scenes were few, and overdone. Not much on Masters & Johnson, or Sheryl Hite (sp.?) or Alfred Kinsey. The material on judicial matters, while important was tedious. Sandstone Retreat was saturated with coverage as well. After "Unto the Sons", a wonderful work on Italo-Catholics, who, like me, have roots in southern Italy, this was a let down. Catholicism becomes a punching bag in this work. He might have set up a thesis - antithesis dialogue about the understanding behind Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae", but didn't do that either. In the end he speaks of his italian Catholic background as a means to help him live in a licenteous, heathenistic manner, one that nearly rips his marriage apart. Very strange.

I LIKE VERY MUCH GAY TALESE , MY ENGLISH IS NOT VERY GOOD BUT TO REED HIS BOOKS IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE.
MARIA EZCURRA