H ow little the radicalness of the sexual revolution has been appreciated and how much questioning its consequences is deemed bad manners or worse has been amply demonstrated by the smugness with which many of the first wave of reviewers have ridiculed Tom Wolfe’s new novel. To describe it, the generic and unlovely term “relationship” was called into service. But the pill helped make possible and, in alliance with the liberal ambition to make the individual his or her own sovereign authority, helped make respectable a new kind of sexual liaison that did not depend on love. And somewhere down the line most are looking for a life partner and a union sanctified by law and society. Forty years later men and women still seek love. Moreover, the new freedom has certainly not overwhelmed all inhibitions, uprooted all customs and age-old practices, and undermined all venerable desires for the happiness of hearth and home. Since attractive qualities are not evenly distributed, the new sexual freedom sustained some old hierarchies and introduced some new ones.

Which is to say that the new freedom did not promote democratic equality in all ways. It was encumbered by the ability to attract sexual partners, and the limits of one’s scruples and imagination.

This was for the simple reason that those who were becoming parents increasingly found themselves standing with their college age children and youth culture more generally on the same side of the sexual revolution’s great divide. And within a generation, the term “generation gap” vanished from use. Middle class young people could now indulge in sex, maintain their respectability, and keep all their options open. Thanks to the pill, middle class heterosexuals could enjoy what the very rich, and the very poor, and homosexuals had always known: sex free of responsibility for bringing a new human being into the world. Suddenly sex without consequences, or more accurately sex without the production of a baby, the one consequence that on a large scale society could not ignore, was available to young adults. A yawning gap opened because what divided parents on one side of the sexual revolution from their college age sons and daughters on the other was unlike anything middle class parents had ever witnessed, or for that matter unlike anything middle class young people had ever experienced. Parents and students could be found on both sides of both. The 60 s called the term forth, but not in the first place because of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war. Although it is natural for young people to rebel against their parents, the term “generation gap” was coined for only one generation in our nation’s history. Evidence of the revolution, and of our forgetting of its radicalness, is preserved in the layers of our language.

I am charlotte simmons writer