The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America.

The changes that this book describes stop short of the "sexual revolution" that the title promises. Kevin White's study of sexual ethics and masculine ideals i the period 1910-1930 searches for a male counterpart to the twentieth century's "New Woman." Employing an impressive variety of sources, White looks high and low for his man, but concludes in the end that "no model of a New Man arose to complement the New Woman." That discovery, albeit a negative one, is a valuable contribution to the literature on early twentieth-century masculinity.

The gravamen of White's case can be briefly sketched. Basing his argument loosely on the historian Warren Susman's concept of a modern "culture of personality" and on theories of hegemonic control, White maintains that a group of intellectuals, experts, advertisers, and journalists with varying agendas used sex to sell the products of mass production. "With the population placated," he asserts, "ruling elites could maintain their power and hegemony."

White begins building his case with a useful survey of print advertising. He shows that men, not unlike women, were urged to preserve youth and cultivate se appeal. The equation of manliness with muscles in the pages of magazines such a Bernard Macfadden's Physical Culture and True Stories was a far cry from the Victorian system of character, for now superficial physical considerations were substituted for moral ones in the definition of what constituted an attractive man.

White goes on to identify the "male flapper" and "tramp Bohemian" as masculine ideals inscribed in the novels and magazine fiction of the 1920s youth culture. While he shunned commitment during a youthful period of playing around, the mal flapper ultimately conformed to bourgeois values, including a settled and monogamous marriage. Accordingly, he fused elements of Victorian morality with the performance imperatives of the personality culture. The more sinister "tram Bohemian," descending from the Victorian underworld, incited men to primitive forms of masculinity, including violence against women.

The crucible of the sexual revolution, however, was not literary culture but rather the working-class dance hall subculture. Inspired by the scholarship of Kathy Peiss and others, White argues that in movie theaters, amusement parks, and dancing palaces, middle-class male sexuality was redefined "on terms simila to those common in the working class." What White feverishly terms the "lewd, crude, rude, and sordid" ethos of the dance halls was thereby transmitted to th middle class by entrepreneurs of the new leisure culture.

These changing ideals, in turn, provoked high levels of male anxiety. More public and open discussion of sex contributed to this anxiety by pressuring middle-class men into sexual expression. Sexual potency, White asserts, was celebrated now as never before, and impotency came to be associated with homosexuality. Viewed in the past as a sin that anyone could commit, homosexuality now betokened a distinct personality type, against which men were encouraged to measure their "manliness." In this way the fear of effeminacy associated with the "masculinity crisis" of the Progressive era was "diffused into fear of the new category, the homosexual."

To evaluate how these new standards of male heterosexuality were received, Whit focuses on the lives of nine men married to New Women, couples who moved primarily in the elite literary and journalistic circles of the 1920s. At this point, portions of his argument begin to unravel. Rather than finding the hegemony of new primitive masculine ideals, he uncovers contradictory evidence for the persistence of Victorian values, both the "bad" values associated with the sexual double-standard and the "good" ones summed up in the ideal of the Christian Gentleman. Writing of the marriages that failed, White asserts: "The men, in trying to break away from what they imagined were Victorian norms, foun that they remained fundamentally Victorians at core who believed in a structure sexuality where the rules were clear." Of husbands in the successful marriages, he says, "This, then, was the New Man, who was not so very different from the Christian Gentleman." Necessarily, such findings call into question the characterization of what took place as a "sexual revolution."

Having discovered that "Victorianism lived on" in new guises, White is constrained to make the more modest, and more plausible, argument that the key development in this period was not the emergence of a new morality so much as rising confusion, anxiety, and resentment of women by men. Nonetheless, he continues to insist that a revolution in morals resulted in "a field day for th least savory males, who now could indulge their shallow selves all the more easily with women of their own class, and it was confusing for everybody."

White is correct to point to the confusion in men's minds that accompanied the emergence of the New Woman, but all too often his analysis reflects rather than illuminates the muddle. One example must suffice. Discussing masturbation, Whit writes that the "cultural ideal was indeed altering towards making [it] more guilt free, if hardly yet valued" as an alternative form of sexual expression. He then cites the evidence of early sex surveys for the proposition that "masturbation was a worry for a large percentage of men, but many men were not bothered by it. This cannot be interpreted as indicating that a liberalizing of actual attitudes was occurring because comparisons with Victorian attitudes and practices are not available." As if that were not confusing enough, he asserts in the next paragraph that "Masturbation, of course, had always been a choice, but it was becoming more guilt free, a more viable alternative behavior for American men." In sum, attitudes were liberalizing, may not have been, and were again, all in the space of three pages. White's discussion of homosexuality, especially working-class behavior and attitudes, reflects a similar level of confusion.

Given these conundrums, White all too frequently reverts to polemics, scolding his subjects as "despicable" (advertisers of baldness nostrums), or "bizarre" ( favored epithet, applied to: literary primitivists; dance-hall habitues; member of working-class youth gangs; and New Yorker editor Harold Ross, for his ambivalent attitude toward homosexuals).

White's scathing indictment of the "sexualized society" of the twentieth centur and his appreciation of Victorian ideals of character and control finally amoun to a species of nostalgia. In the rush to judgment, the author often substitute condemnation for analysis and thereby misses the opportunity to arrive at more nuanced understandings of the changes he describes.

Some sources of White's difficulties can be identified. Let me suggest three. First, in thinking about Victorian culture, White tends to ascribe more authority to the ideal of the Christian Gentleman than it can sustain. Scholars such as Charles Rosenberg and E. Anthony Rotundo, who initially identified the type, argued that it was enmeshed with competing ideals of manhood, especially concepts of masculine achievement.(1) In White's hands, the Christian Gentleman too often seems to stand alone as the sum total of Victorian attitudes and even behavior. Hence the overwhelming sense of nostalgia in his book.

Second, White's argument is captured by the concept of a turn-of-the-century "crisis of masculinity," although he notes in passing that the "extent of 'crisis' should not be overestimated." The concept of a "masculinity crisis" is still the best paradigm we have to describe early twentieth-century masculinity But until it is tested against the evidence of personal diaries, letters, and reminiscences, its dimensions, at least, are unclear and its existence, perhaps suspect.

Finally, White persists in describing the emergent ideals he identifies as "hegemonic," in the face of much contradictory evidence.

Nevertheless, despite some shortcomings, his provocative style and approach are bound to stimulate future study of this important and still relatively unexplored area. In particular, the questions White raises in his conclusion about the limits of gender as a category of historical analysis should caution scholars to think critically about the complex ways that economics and gender interacted as sexual ethics were renegotiated in this period.

Stephen M. Frank University of Michigan 

ENDNOTE 

1. See Charles E. Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 131-153; E. Anthony Rotundo, "Learning about manhood: gender ideals and the middle-class family in nineteenth-century America," in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (Manchester, England 1987), 35-51.