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Sex, Marriage, and the 21st Century Family
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18175 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
5,749 Words |
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Robert H. Rimmer
Robert H. Rimmer is a novelist. His best-known book, The
Harrad Experiment, was made into a 1972 film starring Don
Johnson and James Whitmore. |
Twenty-five years ago, when Bantam Books published my novel The Harrad Experiment, they subtitled it "The Sex Manifesto of the Free Love Generation." I had seen the artwork before the paperback appeared and protested. I thought that I had made it abundantly clear in the novel that the Harrad concept, which involved caring commitments, most certainly wasn't free love.
In the long run there is no such thing as free love. Most people still believe that love and marriage (monogamous) go together, in the words of the song "like a horse and carriage." The publishers didn't listen to me and they were probably right. In their opinion, the book may have sold millions of copies because of the slogan. If you read the novel, you know that the six characters end up in a happy group marriage. It's my feeling that this kind of marriage, along with menage a trois (two men and a woman, or two women and a man), will be legalized in the next fifty years as the only solution to re-creating family structures. Before I tell you why and how, let's explore free love.
In the mid 1970s, "open marriage" became the new twist on the utopian thinking of the nineteenth century. More than a hundred years earlier, John Humphrey Noyes, a Protestant minister, had founded the highly successful Oneida Community in upstate New York. The several hundred members practiced "complex marriage." Wives and husbands, after giving each other specific approval, could switch bedmates. Birth control was effected by "male continence," an ability to control ejaculation, which Noyes probably discovered in ancient Hindu tantric literature.
Utopian Social Thinking
Historically, attitudes toward human sexuality in industrial and capitalistic societies seem to be conditioned by economics and boom-or-bust time frames. The rich railroad and steel barons were getting richer but the wealth, as in the recent Reagan years, didn't "trickle down." There was a great deal of utopian thinking about the joys of communal living. Brook Farm, Amana, New Harmony, and Oneida, as well as many others, all had their own approaches to enjoying better lives in harmony with God, nature, and one's fellow men and women. Robert Dale Owen at New Harmony proclaimed: "Man up to this time has been a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race … namely, private and individual property, and absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual
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