Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent and Insightful Book
Review: Allyn's book made me look at the sixties in a whole new light. He's young, he was born in '69, but I think that gives him the ability to write about the sexual revolution and all that happened in the sixties with an objective persepctive. He argues that the sexual revolution taught people to speak how to speak about sex but not how to listen. He also shows how we're still as ambivalent about sex as we ever were. I think those are important points. And the book is a great read! He doesn't just focus on famous people like Hugh Hefner (though he did interiew him). Allyn writes about "average" people who were challenging middle-class sexual morality in their own ways. He has an interview with one guy who formed a Catholic group sex commune. You don't hear those stories in the typical sixties retrospectives.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent and Insightful Book
Review: Allyn's book made me look at the sixties in a whole new light. He's young, he was born in '69, but I think that gives him the ability to write about the sexual revolution and all that happened in the sixties with an objective persepctive. He argues that the sexual revolution taught people to speak how to speak about sex but not how to listen. He also shows how we're still as ambivalent about sex as we ever were. I think those are important points. And the book is a great read! He doesn't just focus on famous people like Hugh Hefner (though he did interiew him). Allyn writes about "average" people who were challenging middle-class sexual morality in their own ways. He has an interview with one guy who formed a Catholic group sex commune. You don't hear those stories in the typical sixties retrospectives.

Rating:
Summary: Really gripping account
Review: Because the 60's sexual revolution has been analyzed to death, this book may not initally seem like it covers new ground. but it presents the classic topic in a refreshing and balanced perspective.

Irrespective of the reader's own personal judgement, Allyn contends the sexual revolution was not solely one large orgy. but the creative work of many different movers and shakers that allowed us to enter into a dialog on the meaning and worth of sex outside childbearing. His history of the sexual revolution differs from earlier works such as Playboy's own (largely self-indulgent volume) because it readily gives credit where it is due to women and non-heterosexuals.

While the sexual revolution was supposed to be for the benefit of everybody in young America, the continued difficulty of securing contraception, the illegality of abortion, and loco parentis policies in Colleges made the concept an intially hollow promise for many women. Others, working in the new left quickly discovered they were expected to be little more than a Housewife/Sex object with an armband and picket sign to their male counterparts. Sexism was so pervasive the doublestandard was just repackaged in psychedelic garb.

The author points out it was feminists and gay liberationists who challenged narrow defintions of sexuality and brought the sexual revolution closest to accheiving it's utopian vision.

Because most other conventional histories of the 60's ignore or marginalize the contributions of these groups, this book should be required reading as part of a college course on the 1960's. Far from being monolithic, the sexual revolution had many unsung leaders, and we could not have the discussions on safe sex today were it not for these pioneers.

Rating:
Summary: Recall Sex, Not Titillation
Review: For those who lived through the sixties (and can remember it!), this book will trigger a myriad of memories. There is an abundance of names of persons who, at the time, seemed to be on the cutting edge of new ideas and values, but who now seem quaint and illogical. Trivial and significant aspects of popular culture are placed into the mosaic of society's evolutionary events. The reader will likely derive a better understanding of America's search for the meaning and control of sex, but will be left wondering "So why are things the way that they are today?" Perhaps the question defies a sensible answer. Despite a possible negative connotation to my comments, I believe that the book is well worth the time and money, but the reader need not approach it with a yearning for sexual excitation.

Rating:
Summary: Recall Sex, Not Titillation
Review: For those who lived through the sixties (and can remember it!), this book will trigger a myriad of memories. There is an abundance of names of persons who, at the time, seemed to be on the cutting edge of new ideas and values, but who now seem quaint and illogical. Trivial and significant aspects of popular culture are placed into the mosaic of society's evolutionary events. The reader will likely derive a better understanding of America's search for the meaning and control of sex, but will be left wondering "So why are things the way that they are today?" Perhaps the question defies a sensible answer. Despite a possible negative connotation to my comments, I believe that the book is well worth the time and money, but the reader need not approach it with a yearning for sexual excitation.

Rating:
Summary: David Allen's, Make Love Not War
Review: I was in grade school in the 70's and missed the sexual revolution. But I never really knew how much I missed. This book tells it all. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! Read this book.
Review: Make Love, Not War is the first book I've read on sex in America that is both intelligent and titiliating. The chapters on group sex and swinging are too good to put down. Allyn did amazing interviews--he basically interviewed everyone who was involved in the sexual revolution. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in sex or American culture.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! Read this book.
Review: Make Love, Not War is the first book I've read on sex in America that is both intelligent and titiliating. The chapters on group sex and swinging are too good to put down. Allyn did amazing interviews--he basically interviewed everyone who was involved in the sexual revolution. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in sex or American culture.

Rating:
Summary: GOOD CHOICE OF SUBJECT, BUT POOR ANALYSIS, LITTLE INSIGHT
Review: The sexual revolution of the 1960's and 1970's is an important subject about which almost no documentation or analysis remains. David Allyn's Harvard U. Ph.D. dissertation, repackaged in this book, MAKE LOVE NOT WAR: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History (2000), is one of the very few books about that subject currently in print. Mr. Allyn has not done a high quality job in treating his subject, but the fact he chose it at all at least keeps the subject alive and in public view, and may cause some future researcher/writer to pick up David Allyn's dropped baton and continue the race a further distance, hopefully with better results. Allyn's MAKE LOVE NOT WAR book is like Samuel Johnson's famous dog reported walking unassisted on its hind legs....never mind that it was not done skillfully....we should be grateful it was done at all.

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR (2000) is almost completely a compendium of popular, mass press and periodical feature story and news coverage of sexual theme material which appeared during the 1960's and 1970's. The mentality of most material reported is almost all airheaded, intentionally salacious stuff (as indeed is the final phrase of the book's subtitle..."An Unfettered History"). Hugh Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy" reflects this mentality best and exemplifies it importantly, and it is no accident author Allyn zeroes in on the phenomena of Hefner, Playboy Magazine and its imitators, and similar slick stuff of those times which appeared.

Hugh Hefner's opinion of the sexual revolution and its signifigance is not the stuff of which important scholarship and social and philosophical insight should be based, regardless of how profitable his magazine was in the 60's and 70's and still is.

Meanwhile, issues of supreme importance such as the impact sexual behavior and sexually related human needs have on individual health are entirely ignored. The term "health" does not appear in the book's index because, indeed, it is not discussed or investigated as a central topic.

The management and intellectual investigation of sexual needs and behavior is an important but ignored subject, mostly outlawed and forbidden throughout recorded history. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960's and 1970's, clumsy and temporary as it was (and as poorly documented and analyzed as it was), was a landmark exception to this dreary situation, an exception we are not likely to see repeated in the life time of the people who lived through it. Those people are now entering their 60's. They are still with us, still available to be interviewed.

Hopefully, some future writer/researcher will consider this subject in the future carefully and skillfully. When and if that happens (as it did not happen with MAKE LOVE NOT WAR), human society will be the better for it.

Rating:
Summary: GOOD CHOICE OF SUBJECT, BUT POOR ANALYSIS, LITTLE INSIGHT
Review: The sexual revolution of the 1960's and 1970's is an important subject about which almost no documentation or analysis remains. David Allyn's Harvard U. Ph.D. dissertation, repackaged in this book, MAKE LOVE NOT WAR: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History (2000), is one of the very few books about that subject currently in print. Mr. Allyn has not done a high quality job in treating his subject, but the fact he chose it at all at least keeps the subject alive and in public view, and may cause some future researcher/writer to pick up David Allyn's dropped baton and continue the race a further distance, hopefully with better results. Allyn's MAKE LOVE NOT WAR book is like Samuel Johnson's famous dog reported walking unassisted on its hind legs....never mind that it was not done skillfully....we should be grateful it was done at all.

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR (2000) is almost completely a compendium of popular, mass press and periodical feature story and news coverage of sexual theme material which appeared during the 1960's and 1970's. The mentality of most material reported is almost all airheaded, intentionally salacious stuff (as indeed is the final phrase of the book's subtitle..."An Unfettered History"). Hugh Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy" reflects this mentality best and exemplifies it importantly, and it is no accident author Allyn zeroes in on the phenomena of Hefner, Playboy Magazine and its imitators, and similar slick stuff of those times which appeared.

Hugh Hefner's opinion of the sexual revolution and its signifigance is not the stuff of which important scholarship and social and philosophical insight should be based, regardless of how profitable his magazine was in the 60's and 70's and still is.

Meanwhile, issues of supreme importance such as the impact sexual behavior and sexually related human needs have on individual health are entirely ignored. The term "health" does not appear in the book's index because, indeed, it is not discussed or investigated as a central topic.

The management and intellectual investigation of sexual needs and behavior is an important but ignored subject, mostly outlawed and forbidden throughout recorded history. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960's and 1970's, clumsy and temporary as it was (and as poorly documented and analyzed as it was), was a landmark exception to this dreary situation, an exception we are not likely to see repeated in the life time of the people who lived through it. Those people are now entering their 60's. They are still with us, still available to be interviewed.

Hopefully, some future writer/researcher will consider this subject in the future carefully and skillfully. When and if that happens (as it did not happen with MAKE LOVE NOT WAR), human society will be the better for it.