Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

by Gay Talese

"Engrossing and provocative." Library Journal

Bestselling author Gay Talese's exploration into the hidden and changing sex lives of Americans from all walks of life shocked the world when it was first published in 1981. Now considered a classic, this fascinating personal odyssey and revealing public reflection on American sexuality changed the way Americans looked at themselves and one another.


From the Paperback edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Journalism, Sexuality, Cultural, Sociology, Erotica

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism or "new nonfiction reportage", also known as New Journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Reviews

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple of my friends read this book and enjoyed it and, after reading Sex at Dawn recently, which provides an evolutionary psychology based argument against monogamy, I became interested in reading this book chronicling American adventures in sexual nonconformity during the so-called sexual revolution. Talese has that new journalism style which will be very familiar for those who have read some of his contemporaries, such as Studs Terkel and Joan Didion. His writing style kind of floats from one person to the next in the book and it has an interesting rhythm; one moment it focuses in on the
tiny details of emotion and setting of a particular event in one small
moment of a person's life and in another it will widen its lens to take in the larger historical and legal context everyone is inside of.

This changing focus kind of lulls you as the reader into a strange, observatory mode. It is deeply intimate while still feeling somewhat remote and alienated from its subject matter and reads more like a novel than non-fiction in many chapters since there can be such a wealth of details provided about people's inner lives while still being very much in the third person. Even when Talese brings himself into the book at the very end, he continues to write in the third person and in an odd way, he tells you the fewest details about
his own interior life as a witness to all that goes on in the book compared with the depth he goes into telling the life stories of the other major players in the book.

I liked reading the book and it did provoke me to meditate about the issues at play because of its style and the variety in the central figures that Talese dwells on. There are definitely some flaws and limitations to it also though. It is very clear by the time you finish the book that Talese is really primarily interested in the sexual revolution only as it applies to the perspective and lifestyle of the average, white, middle class American male. Although there are some moments here and there where Talese digresses into the point of view of women in the book, women are clearly far from central to the overall movement of the book as we get comparatively brief glimpses into their worlds and lives and what descriptions he does give us, feel abrupt and not quite sincere. I guess the irony there, is how much women's perspective and pleasure was largely ignored by the sexual revolution itself, much less in journalistic coverage of it. Similarly there are pretty much no people of color represented at all, male or female.

The feminist movement, gay liberation movement, and civil rights movement, which were experiencing simultaneous revolutions and which obviously had a fairly large and direct relationship with the sexual revolution, are all almost totally ignored except for a few, brief asides. I found myself wondering often what kind of commentary could have been found from people involved in those movements. The absence of homosexuality in the book is especially glaring, considering that it was obviously something that Talese was encountering quite a bit along the way and he even makes certain meandering hints about it several times, but he never fully engages with the issue. I think Talese was focused on trying to write to a very mainstream audience and I would suspect he felt like including homosexuality into these accounts would be so off-putting to readers that they would no longer be open to any of the other ideas in the book. But reading the book now, within a modern context, the total blinders to what was happening with gays and lesbians at the time is baffling.

With that said, there were long passages of the book that I found kind of fascinating, in a similar way to how I have felt attending Vagina
Monologues/Memoirs over the years. While heterosexual male sexuality is all around us all the time and often incredibly in your face, what you don't hear often is men's honest, de-machoed self-reflections about what they like about the porn they watch, what attachments they do or do not feel to it, how they experience lust and desire and jealousy, and the kinds of the things they're looking for out of sex. These are the real goods that straight women are looking for paging through the Cosmo sex advice columns. Much of the book reads like the kind of unflinching conversations about sex that men might have with each other in a world more open to talking honestly about it and I was interested in getting to see behind the curtain in a way that doesn't happen very often.

I also appreciated the way in which the book maintained a certain amount of ambivalence in tone. It doesn't read as an endorsement of the sexual revolution per se and the leaders and radicals he describes are portrayed as real people, with flaws and strengths and three dimensional personalities. The book doesn't leave you with any easy conclusions or a pat thesis to take away. It is particularly interesting reading this book now, in light of the internet-generated explosion in porn consumption, the increasing mainstreaming of porn, the escalating fight for gay marriage, the growing prominence of polyamory and alternative relationship and family structures, and the declining state of heterosexual marriage. Its hard to know how related these developments are to some of the questions that emerged during the 70's, especially considering how many of these questions greatly pre-date the 70's and how much technology has changed our lives in such a short amount of time, but I feel like reading this book gave me some interesting context to reflect on. It also made me wonder about where my own history and attitudes would fit, if I tried to write it out into a similar style of narrative.

Dan Savage wrote this thing on the Stranger just the other day:

"Whether you believe that female sexual reserve/reluctance/caution is about socialization or biology or both, or that it's a reaction to sad fact the many unpleasant consequences of sex fall disproportionately on women (greater risk of pregnancy (um, duh), much likelier to be the victims of sexual and intimate-partner violence, easier for STIs to be transmitted from male-to-female than female-to-male), female sexual reserve/reluctance/caution exists."

Talese makes some related comments toward the end of the book (which I can't directly quote because it was overdue at the library and I took it back already) about how in his research he discovered that there pretty much is zero market for erotic massage and pornography amongst straight women. He chalks this up to a lot of broad generalizations about women not being sexually aroused by the nude male bodies of strangers and only being willing to be penetrated by the comfortable known penises of men they have relationships with.

Surely the fact that porn doesn't try very hard to appeal to women's tastes and the increased risk of violence and STIs that women cope with during anonymous straight sex that Dan lists in the quote above, must factor in too. Its weird that Talese would fall back on that kind of rhetoric at the end of the book though, considering how many women he encountered along the course of the book who did enjoy and seek out anonymous sex, who were aggressive, who broke out of those stereotypes when they had a safe space in which to do so.

It makes me think about how, part of the reason the sexual revolution was so much more of a success for men than for women ultimately, is that women have so much more negative shit in their way before they can even think about their desires and attaining total sexual freedom. No wonder reproductive rights and anti-domestic violence and sexual assault work were so important to feminism at the time, and still today. White middle-class men may have faced religious moral codes and obscenity laws trying to police their thoughts and fantasies, but that's nothing compared to the patriarchal complex of society that attempts to control and regulate the actual bodies of women, working class folks, people of color, and of course GLBTQ people.

In a corresponding way, we have a lot of great infrastructure now supporting the mitigation of the negative things restricting sexual freedom for women- Planned Parenthood, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault advocacy organizations, etc. There is so much more of a flood of positive-side sexual freedom promoters geared toward men though. Porn is absolutely everywhere, turning a 13 billion dollar profit in America, with a majority of men watching it regularly and being more open about that now than maybe ever before. There is also the continuing boom that the sex work industry has experienced. The only corrolary I can really think of for women, is the growing sex toy industry which has helped women reclaim their bodies and their sexuality for themselves, but which is still pretty small by comparison at least in terms of money spent.

My partner has said before that he thinks that as women gain equality and as the culture becomes more sex positive, more women will be an increasing consumer base for porn and maybe other types of sex work. It does seem true that more women watch porn now than they did in the past and it's certainly more accessible to women than it used to be. But in some ways, I can't help feeling like there is always going to be something extremely male about those things. Which makes me question, what would embody and encourage real sexual freedom for women? What kind of media and organizations would cater mostly to women? What would that look like? Is women's supposed "sexual reluctance," really reluctance or is it something else? How would you set non-sexist standards and terms for even building a framework for these things? These are all questions I've thought about for a long time, but something that I find myself wondering more and more these days.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie at the outset and say I picked up this book because it's a classic. I could, because it is. Gay Talese was one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Thy Neighbor's Wife combines the scope and detail of a Tom Wolfe epic with the vivid scene recreations of a Truman Capote and filters them through the Marquis de Sade.

But that's not why I read it.

In the internet era, porn is cheap and easy. I wanted a challenge. I wanted my smut done up right, by a literary professional.

Unlike many classic-and-controversial books, which seem so quaint now, Thy Neighbor's Wife still manages to be immensely provocative. I also discovered, however, that it is truly a classic of its type: an elegantly structured, beautifully written journalistic piece (of course, whenever you write about sex, there are going to be some groaners, and not even Talese is immune from this inevitability).

If I was going to give this book a tagline, it would've been "the classiest dirty book you'll read this year (or any year since 1979)". However, when I thought about it, I realized how much I've been conditioned. The book isn't "dirty." Unless you find sex - talking about it, thinking about it, doing it - "dirty." In which case, I'm sorry.

Americans are singularly bred as anti-sex and pro-violence. It probably harkens back to our earliest days as Puritans in New England, where we funneled our suppressed sexuality into killing Indians and witches. That mindset has continued unabated to this day, where you can easily buy a first-person shooter videogame at any store, or sit down in front of CBS for two or three primetime hours of gruesome crime procedurals (usually against women, natch), but where the nation does a collective freak-out when Janet Jackson's pasty-covered breast is shown for a fraction of a second on live television. (Oddly, the moral police, from their earliest days viewing peep shows and perusing sex mags, have always gone out of their way to be offended, as attested to the high-DVR playback rates for the "wardrobe malfunction).

Talese noted our country's social history, and also how it seemed to be changing in the late seventies, so he set out to write a book about it.

His first chapter was probably designed to drive the moral police crazy. It is a tour de force set piece in which Talese graphically recreates a masturbatory night of 15 year-old Harold Rubin. Suffice it to say, there are no euphemisms involved. After you get over wondering how Talese could possibly know all these details, you move onto the second chapter, which tells the life story of Diane Webber, the model in the skin magazine that Harold was perusing in the previous chapter. The third chapter begins with a young Hugh Hefner gazing at a picture of Diane, as he fits her into the layout for his fledgling magazine, Playboy.

Here, you are given an idea of the structure that Talese maintains throughout this sprawling, digressionary book. He always ends a chapter with the subject of his next chapter. This seems simple, but it never becomes too neat; to the contrary, his use of a handful of artfully drawn, fully-realized characters is a subtly-sewn thread that knits everything together.

The structure is important, because Talese goes a lot of places and talks about a lot of things: massage parlors, sex shops, magazine and book publishers, swingers, and swing clubs. There are a lot of names, both famous and unknown: Rubin, who's onanism starts the book, later owns an erotic massage parlor; Betty Dodson, who's graphic drawings were meant to allow women to enjoy sex as much as men; John Williamson, who's (in)famous Sandstone retreat operated on the twin pillars of honesty and partner swapping; and Hugh Hefner, who's magazine about living the good life helped pave the way for much harder porn (it's odd now, in a day and age in which Hefner has become the caricature of an old dirty man, to think of Hefner at the leading edge of 1st Amendment freedoms).

By far the most fascinating aspects of the book were its discussions of "obscenity" and the 1st Amendment. Talese starts with Anthony Comstock, who masturbated often during his childhood, felt guilty about it, and then took his guilt out on the US Constitution and thousands of innocent Americans. His "Comstock Law", prohibiting the sending of obscene articles through the mail, was used to ban the sale of such titilating works as Joyce's Ulysses. As though anyone could read that thing anyway. (I had no desire whatsoever to read Joyce until I found out that it was once controversial. Take that Anthony Comstock. By the way, you failed).

Talese makes his way through the "great" cases - Roth, Miller, Jacobellis, etc. - which simultaneously granted more freedoms (the eventual publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover) and muddied the waters (national standards verses community standards). The most amusing parts of these sections was Talese's dead-on thumbnail sketches of the Supreme Court Justices. These all-male, mostly-white, most-likely-sex-deprived bearers of the moral torch, sat on high and called the rest of us perverts. They were quite a bunch: Lewis Powell, who could barely stand to watch the porno films screened at the Supreme Court, while Thurgood Marshall laughed his way through them; pragmatic Potter "I know it when I see it" Stewart; smut-hating Harry Blackmun, who tethered Roe v. Wade to the doctor-patient relationship, probably because his idea of a right to privacy never advanced as far as his other evolving progressive views; and the biggest suprise at all, the great liberal William Brennan, who consistently voted in favor of censorship in his early days.

The Supreme Court-oriented sections of Thy Neighbor's Wife had a much bigger impact on me than the Sandstone-centered orgies. This is probably because Sandstone was a passing phase, while the Supreme Court's obscenity saga tells us a lot about ourselves as a nation. (There is also an extended, and fascinating, section on the Oneida "utopia" that flourished in New York during the mid 19th century).

I am shocked and appalled and shocked again that people have gone to jail in this country for what amount to thought crimes (of course, child pornography doesn't figure into this discussion; as Justice Ginsburg has recently explained, in child porn, the taking of a picture is in itself a species of child abuse). The way this nation dealt with publishers and sellers of erotica is indistinguishable from the censorship+prison equation utilized by Hitler and Stalin. Funnily, I'm guessing the people who most advocated in favor of the Comstock Laws were the same ones that screamed most loudly about Communists in the State Department. Because "liberty" is defined as whatever I am comfortable with. I was disgusted by the numerous stories of men who were sentenced to prison terms of up to fifteen years for selling a book or magazine that 12 hayseeds from Deer Hump, Alabama or Corn Lick, Iowa found objectionable.

Maybe it's reductive, but Justice Black was onto something when he memorably stated: "No law means no law." In contrast to the densely worded, oddly structured language of its neighbor, the notorious (and violent) 2nd Amendment, the 1st Amendment is a model of clarity: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."

There isn't any room for exceptions there, and while I agree that exeptions are necessary in some remote instances, I cannot agree that "obscenity" in any form, can be one of them. There isn't a clause modifying the 1st (preeminent) Amendment saying that Congress shall not abridge free speech as long as the speech is popular and acceptable to either (a) a Judeo-Christian national majority or (b) a Judeo-Christian local majority or (c) a Judeo-Christian minority with loud voices. No law means no law. (Oddly, Talese never touches on Stanley v. Georgia which made the possession of "obscene" items Constitutionally protected).

It's a testament to Talese's work that I'm able to get so excised about this subject in 2009, even though, in reality, the forces of repression have lost. Sure, even today, ESPN broadcaster Steve Philips was fired from his job for having an affair with a consenting adult. The moral arbiters of this nation will always have a disproportionate say, abetted by a (crumbling) media establishment that loves a reason to talk about sex without ever honestly talking about sex. The internet, though, has finally fulfilled the promise of the 1st Amendment.

At the end of his book, Talese memorably injects himself into the story, speaking of himself in the third-person. This is a controversial move, which is highlighted (and derided) in just about every contemporary review I've read. However, this is only a small section, and I didn't really mind, especially because it allows him to hit a towering home run on the last page: an amazing scene where Talese succinctly demonstrates our glaring sexual hypocrisy: the outward priggish morality and our inner desires.

My only disappointment was that this is a purely straight story. There is very little discussion of the treatment of homosexuals during this time period. Perhaps it was because Thy Neighbor's Wife prefigured the gay rights movement? I don't know. At the very least, it was written before the astoundingly insulting Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. Still, for as many intimate revelations as he makes, Talese seems awfully reluctant to even mention homosexuality. It felt like I was only being told about half the battle.

[Justin Tate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing. I never knew non-fiction could be this sweeping in scope, this character-driven in concept, this artfully constructed in narration. It took Talese nine years to research and write, and the work paid off.

The amount of detail is breath-taking. Of course it helps that his subject is the tumultuous history of sex in the United States, with specific interest to the rise of nudity in magazines and erotica in literature. We get up close and personal with the trailblazers who pushed the bounds of "obscenity" laws so that we can now enjoy Lady Chatterley's Lover without fear of being imprisoned.

A large portion of the book also discusses the rising interest in alternative relationships, spouse-swapping communities, and the general discovery of sex by a generation who didn't feel beholden to puritanical beliefs of the past.

All this real-life drama is an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride, but what specially makes it so is Talese's attention to fine details. His extensive interviews with intriguing people prove especially fruitful in his delivery of their thoughts, intimate bedroom experiences, and all other manner of private situations which other journalists could only dream of accessing.

When the book was published in 1980, it received the highest-ever film option purchase for $2.5 million and the plan was to produce a trilogy of movies covering the wide spread of content, possibly even with an "X" rating. Unfortunately, no movie was never made, but the book has endured all these years and is well-deserving of its classic status. I can say easily that it's the best work of non-fiction I've ever read.

[Immigration Art · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for a while, and it grabs you by the collar and yanks you into the non-fiction narrative, along with the author! The author is featured as a participant/ reporter in this non-fiction recitation, along with his wife! And, making a guest appearance are some of the sexually liberated friends of the author and his wife (the friends, btw, are known in the "hip lingo" of the times as "swingers")!

Gay Talese, like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and even John Hershey ("Hiroshima") may very well be placed in the category of Gonzo Journalism.

Gay Talese rocks the house. His works are giant volumes, and he presents the details meticulously. The reading experience he provides is lively, easy to follow, written crisply, and highly recommended! The next book from Talese on my To-Read list, "Honor Thy Father," about the life and mob activity of Mafia Don Joe Bonnano, is a must read next for me (my only worry is that the names of a few of my relatives may appear in there).

If Talese can do for the mob, what he has done (in "Thy Neighbor's Wife"), for infidelity and unrestrained hedonism in the suburbs, then sign me up!

"Thy Neighbor's Wife," in my mind, is to be highly, absolutely, RECOMMENDED with glee (with a disclaimer that if you are not a libertine at heart, the topic of this particular study of infidelity and hedonism by Talese may not be your cup of tea)!

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this as a teenage boy when sex seemed so far away as to exist in another world all together. It made me want to be an adult, if only so I could wifeswap and hit the orgy communes. Always, by the time my manhood dropped, such things were wayyyyy in the past. Ultimately, this book is a time piece documenting the various social experiments that in the seventies were coming to a---um---climax (sorry). The Hugh Hefner material should be reread by anyone who doesn't remember the PLAYBOY founder was more revolutionary than the doddering ole pimpmeister he portrays on that horrible peroxide spill of a reality show would suggest. More fascinating are the portraits of the Silent Generation folks who began rebelling against stodgy mores in the sanctum sanctorum of American suburbia. Among those rebels was Talese himself. The book's most famous and amazing moments are the final pages when the journalist writes of his own erotic adventures in the third person (including jaunts to a nudist colony!). The effect is disarming, if only because the pretense of objectivity makes one realize what perspective Talese had on his "investigations." If the book seems impossibly quaint from the post-STD, post-sex=death culture I grew up in, it remains an important cultural document of a time when it wasn't so farfetched to believe that sex and innocence could be synonymous.

[Song · Rating 5 out of 5]

完全没想到特立斯《邻人之妻》会在国内出版，要知道即使在美国，这也是本惊世骇俗的书。讲述了美国近代以来性产业和性自由发展的“在场历史”，同时也是一部美国争取人性自由，出版自由，反对审查制度的历史。作者文笔流畅，叙事高超，人物和事件全是实名，强有力的非虚构写作典范。对，内容非常色情。

抛开那些色色的噱头，《邻人之妻》在当下这个时代也别具深意。比如 #metoo 这类运动风起云涌，然而女性意识在美国社会的觉醒，女性可以大胆地探索自己的身体和欲望，打破从属地位观念，像男性一样随意挑选性伴侣，却是从性自由开始的。而乌托邦式自由性爱社区的出现，也是对社会建制的蔑视和挑战。

《邻人之妻》更像是一部从性解放角度，来叙述美国当代史。电影《性书大亨》里拍的都是真的吗？美国成年人为什么可以合法公开购买色情杂志？资本主义大本营里都有过哪些连共产乌托邦都想不出来的社会实验？书名出自《圣经》“不可贪恋邻人之妻”，而现代美国自由的诞生，却正是从对邻人之妻的贪恋开始。《邻人之妻》这个标题就是引用自《圣经》经文，却巧妙地用反讽的手法，为“上帝已死”做出了实例论述：今日之美国，从挣脱清教徒的道德束缚而诞生。

《邻人之妻》的确也是美国性史啦，这没错，题中之义。但也是美国的自由史。身体虽然属于自己，但政治权力从来都约束着私人的身体，由此而引发言论、出版、结社的禁锢，最后约束到思想。联系曾经热门的“为国生娃”议题，两相对照，《邻人之妻》的深刻意义更加凸显：束缚与自由的斗争。

《邻人之妻》写的是性，但真正的关切还是自由。这是我推荐这本书的唯一原因。当然八卦写那么好玩，立意又那么高，文字技巧读起来极其流畅，同时兼顾高级趣味和低级趣味，成为非虚构写作的典范也是重要原因就是了。

这本书中译本有删节，经过网友初步对比，中译本删除了原著关于自渎的细节描写，和“砂岩山庄”里群体性行为的场景描绘，虽然不影响其余绝大部分内容阅读，但中国新闻出版审查制度之不自由，倒是衬托了这部讲述现代美国社会争取自由的非虚构作品。

[Shima Masoumi · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is about the sexual revolution in US during 60s and 70s. Talese visits different massage parlors, poly communities and swing clubs and talks about the people he meets. What I find annoying about the book is it’s patriarchal view of sex and sexuality. 25 chapters and all protagonists are men except one Barbara Cramer (who I’m sure wouldn’t have made it to the book if she wasn’t married to Jhon Williamson the creator of one of the poly communities). The other women in the book are all presented as sexual objects of the male protagonists’ desires!
And worst of all in the last chapter, which is all about Talese’s views on sexuality and his experiences, he promotes some freudian ideas about women’s sexuality which I find totally cheap. He doesn’t even consider talking to some women or feminists about it, which he should have as a journalist, and is so sure of his observations that refers to them as “facts”!
He also presents some arguments against antiporn feminists of the 70s which are so loose and make you sure he didn’t even know what those feminists objections were about!
You might say it’s an old book (1980), which was what I told myself, but in 2009 he’s written an afterword and obviously he’s not changed any of his views on women’s sexuality!
He’s also a big Hugh Hefner admirer and you can see it in the way he promotes Hefner’s way of life and “big role in sexual revolution” which I find cheap again, considering he’s a journalist and had to know what’s really happening in Playboy mansions!

[Heather K (dentist in my spare time)]

Buddy read with one of my friends

Paid full price for it too... *grumbles*

[achen · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

之前讀（聼）了“Last Night at the Telegraph Club”後，對5、60年代的美國社會就性小衆/情色歷史發展頗感興趣，便接著選了這本書來讀。雖然讀完後，發現其實跟LNATTC中的時間軸事件沒什麽相關之處（笑），也完全沒有提及當時的性小衆發展，但此書從更主流的大方向切入，帶領讀者去瞭解美國性解放運動的歷史進程。

説是性解放歷史似乎有些嚴肅，事實上這本書寫得很有趣，也不枯燥，有些内容還���八卦的（笑）。書中對奧奈達、砂岩這類提倡性愛自由的社區記述是我覺得最有趣、最大開眼界的部分，其中奧奈達社區早至1848年就已成立。

這麽一想，性解放運動在歷史上的發展，還真是既進又退。每個時代都有人在拼命爭取，也有人在努力打壓。欸，大概也不只是性愛自由這回事。

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first heard about Thy Neighbor’s Wife when watching Netflix’s Voyeur, a documentary about author Gay Talese and a man who’d bought a motel solely so he could peep on the activities of those renting rooms. I found Voyeur fascinating, and so when I came across this on offer, I thought I’d give it a go.

Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a big, fat book, delving into the sexual mores of the American public, and the efforts of lawmakers to govern these, from the mid-twentieth century up until the seventies (before the spectre of AIDS). Talese charts the changing attitudes and some of the people challenging them – whether they were wife swappers, publishers, adulterers, club owners, sex gurus, lawyers, and so on – as American society swung from uptight and puritanical to permissive and free thinking, and back again (and so on, and so on). Talese does a good job of immersing you in his material, opening real windows into the lives and thoughts of his subjects, although at times this did lead to long stretches where it felt like I was reading a biography of Hugh Hefner – one of the people who clearly grabbed more of Talese’s interest, if not mine.

Instead I preferred the parts that dealt with the changing laws, and the arguments for those changes, although I did also find the sections on the gurus like John & Barbara Williamson, at whose houses and establishments people could come together and swap partners, fascinating from another perspective. I was interested to see how they went about recruiting and convincing people who seemed otherwise unsuited to that particular lifestyle to join them, as well as the reactions of the women in those partnerships in particular to these new arrangements (both women who were subjects, Barbara Williamson and recruit Judith Bullaro, spent nights alone sobbing whilst listening to their husbands sleep with other people, before emerging having apparently convinced themselves that they were up for it after all. I may be bringing my own biases to this – this would most likely unleash fury in me rather than a desire to fuck – but particularly in the case of Judith, I couldn’t help but feel that they weren’t perhaps being honest with themselves).

For a book purporting to look over the whole gamut of American sexuality, I did find that Thy Neighbor’s Wife had some rather large, glaring holes. It concentrates solely on the experiences of white, straight Americans, and when looking at sex workers goes no further than models, actresses and masseuses. If you’re going to claim to shine a light on American sex lives, then omitting every person of colour, anyone who enjoys the same sex, and anyone who solicits sex outside of a massage parlour, is a handicap that is too large to be ignored.

So, while Talese got points for his writing (which I really did enjoy), he gets them docked for failing to realise that America is and was so much more than white and straight.

**Also posted at Cannonball Read 10**

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening and fascinating, this is written in a narrative, reporting style, using indepth personal profiles of famous and ordinary pioneers in the sexual revolution of the 50s and 60s. I was often amazed at the level of repression in our "free and democratic" society as recently as just before and during my early childhood. Literature being banned, court cases involving jail time and heavy fines for simply using the US mail to send magazines or sell books to private citizens wanting to purchase them for their own use, politicians, police raids, the catholic church's reach into private lives and public policy. Scary stuff.

Talese really brings home how difficult it was to break through the efforts to any public expression of sexuality, and the price that some people paid in money and actual prison time. Not everything he writes about is necessarily my cup of tea, but the efforts to destroy, ban or punish those with different views, tastes or desires is a terrible thing to read about. I'm so so grateful to have been born after the 50s, but also more aware of how very recently it really was that we lived in a very different world.

Coincidentally, I had started watching the MadMen TV series on Netflix at the same time I started this book, which has been a kick. About as close to reliving a period of time as you can get I think. I have the benefit of seeing both two sides of society during this period- corporate mainstream-(MadMen) and the countercultural revolutionaries (Talese's subjects-many of whom from the outside did look just like the corporate mainstream types).

I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about a significant period in our cultural history, the people and events, and just anyone interested in sex.

[no elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

the intro from katie roiphe rly did not bode well for the subsequent text and yet i powered through close to 600 pages of it!! im very brave. this is *almost* a straightforward history of american sexual politics but also scream and barf every time he describes the quality of a woman's breasts or body??? i just dont think the content justified the length of the book like i get it these sexually repressed middle aged losers learned how to be horny, next! boring!!!!!!!!!

[Henry Le Nav · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the late spring of 1972, while I was in the Air Force stationed in the Mojave Desert, I pulled into a scenic overlook not far from the Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains. I looked down on the twinkling expanse of Pasadena in the deepening twilight and wondered how many people were in love and making love right now below me? I felt a bittersweet feeling of grief for my own loneliness and yet a joy that people love each other and express it with sex. Mostly I felt an envious melancholy, sorry for myself that everyone was getting laid except me. Little did I know that if I had simply gone another 32 miles west, to the Santa Monica Mountains, to one of the overlooks on Topanga Canyon Road, I could have possibly looked down on pure bacchanalia.

The Sandstone Retreat was located about 3 miles west of Topanga Canyon Road, which was one of my favorite scenic routes, although really, I was probably on the road only a half dozen times. Yet there I was living two hours away and I never heard of Sandstone Retreat until I read about it in Talese’s book, Thy Neighbor's Wife three weeks ago. Alas!

Alas? Not really, even if I could have afforded the membership fee, I doubt that the Williams would have wanted the likes of me, a skinny, lonely, callow Air Force buck sergeant mooning over the lack of love in his life. Even if they had taken pity on me and allowed me entry, I doubt I would have found what I was looking for. Oh sure I would have been wowed temporarily by the sex, but I think I would soon have discovered what I suspected then and know about myself now…it is not sex that makes a person like me happy. It is Love. Sex is a Sacrament of that Love, but without Love, sex is just a celebration of lust. If that is your thing, fine, I hold no great moral convictions regarding sex. As long as everyone is 100% informed and 100% on board, an enthusiastic yes, then do what floats your collective boat. Just don’t hurt anyone in the process. But I have come to learn something about myself, I am an oxytocin junky not a dopamine addict, and Love gets the oxytocin squirting for me. Warm, messy, plugged in, loving, fragrant post-coital bliss with my wife and I lying in a pool of oxytocin is Heaven on Earth for us, not the thrill of the novelty of yet another partner.

I feel personally indebted to the sexual revolution (what ever it is), and I enjoyed reading Thy Neighbor’s Wife because I have an almost hobby like interest in sex and sexuality like some people have for model trains or astronomy. I have never quite got over the awe struck dumb founded fascination for the tales I heard as a 9 year old boy about the games that big people play. “He sticks it where???? No way!!!!”

So reading Thy Neighbor’s Wife was sort of a cheap thrill of reading about the games that the really big people play. Ok I read this four decades after it was written so there was no great surprises of what goes on, yet with the quality of Talese’s writing, the level of detail that he went into, and his admission that not only was he an observer but a willing participant sort of got the lust hairs on the back of my neck to stand up and go woo-woo. I thought they had wore out from pure exhaustion over the onslaught of sexual imagery and inenundo of modern life. But when I finished the book, I got the uncomfortable, well actually for me comfortable, feeling that none of this applies to me. It was like a trip into a weird amusement park that is somewhat thrilling while you are there, but you are more than happy to leave and never come back.

I am not quite sure what Talese’s goal was for this book. What was his point? To show how morality changed in America? To celebrate the Supreme Court decisions that now allow me to buy a copy of Fanny Hill on my Kindle for 99 cents, or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for $1.99. Years ago possessing these books would have got me arrested. So yes, I am glad I can purchase sexually suggestive if not downright filth and not worry about the likes of Comstock seizing my Kindle and burning it and tossing my ass into the klink. But I also find that I am a hell of a lot more grateful for the Supreme Court decision known as Griswold Vs Connecticut…from Wikipedia:

The case involved a Connecticut "Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". The court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that "the clear effect of [the Connecticut law ...] is to deny disadvantaged citizens ... access to medical assistance and up-to-date information in respect to proper methods of birth control." By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases view the right to privacy as a right to "protect[ion] from governmental intrusion".

In 1964 it was illegal to use a condom in Connecticut. Amazing! Yes I may enjoy reading Fanny Hill but believe me back in the day prior to menopause, I was far happier to be able to buy a box of condoms hanging out on an open shelf in the grocery store rather than whispering in the local pharmacist’s ear while judgemental old biddies stared and thought about writing their congressman over the lack of morals in our state. I was even happier to whisper in the pharmacist’s ear to get birth control pills which for a time were even covered by my employee hospitalization plan. So yes, I feel indebted to the sexual revolution.


I feel far more indebted to David Reuben than Hugh Hefner. Yes, I looked at my share of Playmates of the Month before I was married. But I never recall seeing a detailed photo or diagram of a vulva in Playboy with an arrow pointing to the clitoris with an explanation of the importance of it to a woman’s sexual satisfaction. Yes, I am sure that somewhere along the line Playboy had an article on how to pleasure a woman, but if you want to find out this afternoon and not wait for several years until Playboy got around to addressing it along with cars or polo clothes that I could never afford to buy, then maybe you needed a book like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask. Was the book perfect? Did it have biases? Were gays ignored or treated poorly? Yes. But still it was far better than the marriage manuals of my parent’s era that spoke of the proper way to engage in sex (penis in vagina, in the missionary position with the goal of mutual orgasm) and warned of dangerous perversions that lurked around any act that went beyond that narrow definition. Here is a favorite:

We have seen how body kisses may play an exaggerated part in sexual relations so that what should be part of the normal effort to induce pleasurable excitement in the partner becomes the whole, such kisses thus comprising the complete act. For those who replace coitus by the form of partial intercourse, cunnilinctus [sic] is often an act of self-abasement. It is the sign of a dog-like devotion. A masochistic male, one with the tendency towards finding pleasure in suffering and humiliation, moves by way of the perfectly normal body kisses to one of the byways which lead him away from normality. Eventually, he cannot enjoy full normal union. The part has replaced the whole. Page 251.

That is an excerpt from a book titled ironically Love Without Fear by Eustace Chesser. Well, call me a dog-like devotee! I don’t know about Eustace, but I tend to feel like the conductor of a massive orchestra and choir playing the final movement of Mahler’s Symphony number 2 during such activities. Masochism and humiliation for rocketing my wife down the yellow brick road off to Oz in paroxysms that shake the house? I have never had an orgasm that came close to the power of hers…I enjoy her orgasms far more than my own little putt putts. Perhaps proof that I am the big sissy the Chesser suggests.

So yes I feel a deep indebtedness to the sexual revolution that allowed my wife and I to have proper information and communication skills so that we were not fumbling around in the dark or in fear or putting ourselves in a poor house with too many mouths to feed, or engaged in some sinful perversion that would anger God. I feel indebted to feminism that give women a voice and the beginnings of equality. So I feel indebted to the likes of Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem (one of Hefner’s favorites), Estelle Griswold, David Reuben, Shere Hite, and yes in more indirect way even Betty Dodson. Most of these people, except Dodson, got little or no mention in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” All of them had their personal foibles, prejudices, and weidicities. People are victims of their times, yet they are the heroes of the sexual revolution to me, not Hugh Hefner or John and Barbara Williams.

To illustrate my point further, before Masters and Johnson the process of vaginal lubrication during arousal was not understood. Even after Masters and Johnson, the true size and shape of the clitoris was, depending on how you want to look at it, either unknown or forgotten. I find it incredible that William Masters, a gynecological surgeon, believed the clitoris to be the small external bud. Indeed when Thy Neighbor’s Wife was published in 1980 more was known about the dark side of the moon than the true topography of the clitoris. Helen O'Connell (another hero in my estimation) revealed the extensive internal structure in the mid 1990s.

So yes I feel an indebtedness to the sexual revolution, but felt very little appreciation for the facets that Talese discussed in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. It dimly occurs to me, that while I have rambled through a garbled description of my feelings of the book, I have stated very little about the book itself. For an excellent review of the book, may I suggest Matt’s review on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The weird thing I have found with Matt, he knows and can write down in a review more about how I feel about a book than I am aware of. I often find myself seeking his reviews after I have read a book, to clear the cobwebs and tell me how I really feel about it.

Edit 2/9/2024: I re-read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask about a year ago. I have no idea why that book holds such an exalted place in my memory. Not much how to and a lot of information that while perhaps interesting reading at the time was more of a sexuality and society type of thing. Reuben's opinion of LGBTQ issues, especially gay males, is horrific. It is actually a pretty crappy book. Books are always prisoners of the attitudes and thinking of their time. But Reuben went over board on gay bashing even considering the time. I also didn't find Reuben's opinions of women to be very enlightened.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this a long time ago in paperback, but found this on the local library's for sale shelf and picked it up. It starts out with a lot of history and bios of pioneers in the sex-in-print business, mostly focusing on the story of Hugh Hefner. Pretty dry stuff so far but enlightening in its portrayal of an American society officially opposed to public dissemination of sexual imagery and literature, but (of course) fascinated by it in private. How could one NOT be??? It's sex, the most important human behavior after the basics of stayin' alive. We're programmed for it. I certainly was ... I had a subscription to Playboy when I was in boarding school, starting in 1960. I still remember how stunned and pleased I was to be able to have it mailed to me. I stayed a big fan of Playboy for many years, though I was no fan of Hefner himself. He was undoubtedly a sex addict(though more decorous than Bob Guccione) and on TV("Playboy's Penthouse") seemed stiff and super serious and self-satisfied. Still, the man deserves a lot of credit. At times the interviews were excellent(Germaine Greer stands out in my memory) and a LOT of great short fiction was published. The women were usually fantasy-worthy despite the airbrushing and the advent of so many who were so obviously enhanced in the bust department. One of those lovelies worked in the same hospital as I did in Boulder. Monique St. Pierre(Playmate of the Year!) left the place before I arrived. Never met her. NOT the only Playmate from Boulder, however. Things change, of course, and in more recent years the robe-slippers-pajamas-and-a-pipe guy seemed like a bit of a fool with his retinue of seemingly brainless boobed-up blonde "girlfriends." Seems to have never grown up in some ways.

- This edition is is an original(1980) hardbound from Doubleday. Some parts were previously published in Esquire.

Moving on into the changing, opening sex lives of these SoCal "squares." Their tales are both interesting and boring. It all seems a bit dated now, I suppose, and the author's style is a bit too clinical and dry. Still worth going into, however. Barely ...

- Geography alert! Pensacola is not "across the bay" from Mobile. It's more complicated than that. There's Mobile Bay AND Pensacola Bay. Physically close, but not the same.

Still slogging along. Al Goldstein's("Screw") story was interesting and I like how the author segued from that back into the SoCal swingers story. That's the one that seems to go on and on. To me the great weakness in the swinging lifestyle came to light in the recent case of the California couple who, in their separate search for sex partners, managed to screw-up their child-care arrangements and leave their young daughter alone and unprotected at home. She was kidnapped and murdered. Sex has every potential to become the object of a person's obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior, an addiction like any other, and addictions tend to take over and twist a person's life into a spiritual/emotional wasteland of self-absorption and narcissism. Not only do the addicts lives suffer, but collateral damage, like the murdered little girl, is bound to take place.

Hanging in there with the liberation-through-free sex-gang in Malibu last night when Mr. Talese segued into a LONG history of the legal tribulations of sex publications and films in the 60's and 70's. This is probably an excellent summary of this stuff, but seemed seriously boring to me 40-50 years on. Some of the names and descriptions of Supreme Court decisions and participants rang old cultural/political bells, but I just couldn't read all of it. So I skimmed. So sue me! The skimming brought me near to the end, but not quite. I wonder if I skimmed that stuff when I read this back in the day? Anyway, my overall impression was of how much our supposedly "free and open" society is plagued by conservative forces of repression. Religion was and still is a problem, as it produces the various righteous bluenoses who loved to(still do) conflate questions of sexual behavior between consenting adults with "morality" and legality. UGH! Too many people in the world are spending too much time trying to control the behavior of other people because they don't like the behavior(for whatever reason). The sex-is-dirty-and-sinful brigade had this culture by the throat for a long time and haven't exactly given up yet.

- BTW, Gay Talese is still alive - about 85 years old now.

The author finishes up by telling his own experiences while researching the thing. He definitely was a participating researcher, if you get my drift. In the "ain't that odd" department, he writes about himself in the third person, which has a strong whiff of the gimmick. In my final analysis, this book has not stood the test of time all that well, and the author is not a particularly interesting writer. Kind of a plodder, in fact. Still, it's worthy of a 3.25*(rounds down to 3*) rating. He put in a LOT of work to get this thing done and deserves credit for that, at least.

- Did I get that right? Hef and Christie(Dad and daughter) had the hots for each other???

- Linda Lovelace came to contradict Talese's assumptions about her attitude about performing in porn flicks.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific primer on America's evolving prudery and promiscuity during the first half of the 20th century. Talese's treatment of the legal aspects of the sexual revolution would be utterly riveting even without the salacious material at hand. He elevates even minor characters--lawyers, ex-spouses, secretaries--to fully developed protagonists, each with a history and story. What emerges is a sprawling landscape of people and beliefs that are textured, subtle and entirely credible.

That said, it is more or less impossible to separate the book's literary merit from its prurience. And Talese's own immersion into the cult of sexual utopianism upends the book's balance. There is uneasiness between his role as a chronicler of the sexual revolution and his role as a libertine participant in it. The structure of the book emulates some of this tension: Talese ricochets off of one profile and into another, each glimpse intense and intimate but fleeting, promiscuous through and through.

[Evo Popoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Thy Neighbor's Wife" is an incredibly well written, engaging piece of journalism that explores the changing sexual values of American culture. From early explorations of free-love communities in 19th century New York State to the growth and acceptance of pornography with the mainstream success of Playboy magazine, the book provides an interesting perspective on a changing landscape and the people (Hefner, Al Goldstein, etc.)who were on the front lines of the legal and social battle. Talese is not just an observer, he was also a participant in many of the practices he wrote about such as the "massage parlors" of new york city and the nudist gatherings in California. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in exploring the ever-changing nature of American society and the sex business in this country.

[Manik Sukoco · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a narrative as absorbing as a novel, Gay Talese intimately describes many of the people and events in the decades before AIDS that have influenced the redefinition of morality in America. We meet the prophets of the new sexuality: Hugh Hefner, Alex Comfort, and others. We meet couples whose buttoned-down lives were transformed by sexual liberation. We are privy to their thoughts, their fantasies, their actions as that transformation is played out against a changing sexual landscape. A landscape that includes the halls of government and the Supreme Court, as well as that remarkable spa, Sandstone; the Playboy mansion; and the living rooms and backyards of suburban ranch houses.
It is as entertaining and controversial as it is important. Such an incredible job of reporting. I love Gay Talese!

[Jeanne Boudreau · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story appeared to be well researched with a great deal of historic content, but, I felt the author used this book for personal experimentation rather than for scientific or social value. The book seems like a way for him to justify his curiosity, step outside the realm of what's considered socially and morally acceptable without the fear of being judged, especially since the last chapter was written about himself but not written as a personal observation, rather that someone else was writing about him, it just didn't add up to me.

[Elizabeth Salas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siempre me siento a gusto leyendo una historia que contenga rigor periodístico y a la vez tenga ritmo narrativo. Talese se ha sumergido por cerca de nueve años en éste relato contado con seriedad, honestidad y total respeto a sus fuentes de información. Los datos aquí presentados pertenecen a su estudio entre los sesentas y setentas en Estados Unidos, pero bien podría tratarse de unos sucesos actuales en cualquier sitio del mundo. Me quedo con éste trabajo, en el que me sentí como una testigo acompañando a Talese, mientras iba reconstruyendo los acontecimientos.

[kylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

BRUH

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting, sprawling kind of book. I like the idea that it's kind of a social history of the sexual revolution, its antecedents and its aftermath, though I don't think that's quite it. Instead, it feels like there are two stories that are less widely regarded, the rise of pornography and the sh0rt-lived heyday of swinging communities. And while both of them are tied to the sexual revolution, they feel a lot more like secondary effects than they do drivers.

This doesn't diminish the interest in Talese's reporting, which is remarkable, and kept me flipping back to the note at the start, that :the names of the people in this book are real, and the scenes and events described on the following pages actually happened." The story of the Bullaros and Sandstone was pretty amazing, as are other elements of this story. I felt a little uncomfortable with the Hefner stuff, because he just rubs me the wrong way and especially the story of his early experiences felt too uncritical, but what do I know. It does pay off, more or less, in later scenes involving Hefner. But the whole is maybe less than its parts, as the stuff Talese writes about felt, in the end, downstream from the drivers of what he was talking about. Talking to second wave feminists and the makers of the Pill would have meant a very different book, and other people have written it; I'm just not sure that the aims of this book quite accord with its contents.

The writing throughout is really impressive-- thoughtful and engaging. The introduction of the writer at the end is masterfully done, and the very last scene of the book is wonderfully lyric.

[Isabella González · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Wilson from How To with John Wilson (HBO) recommended this book on a survey about his favorite things. He describes it as "kind of a history of sexuality in the United States. [Gay Talese] even goes to this swingers resort and documents the dysfunction of communal living while it slowly ruins his own marriage." Because of his summary I thought Talese would be more prominent in the book, gonzo-style, but he doesn't write about his own involvement until the very last chapter and in the third-person.

The book has intertwined profiles on early twentieth century importers of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Supreme Court decisions on obscenity, the beginning of Playboy and Screw magazines, the Oneida Community, and most prominently a members-only nudist resort in Topanga Canyon called the Sandstone Institute.

The most heartbreaking, compelling narrative thread was on John Bullaro and his relationships with his wife Judy and his side-piece Barbara. The Bullaros' story is told in chapters that are interrupted by historical asides on Wilhelm Reich, John Humphrey Noyes, massage parlors in New York City and Al Goldstein, but I would skip those chapters and read the chapters on the Bullaros and Williamsons straight through. Then I went back later and read the non-Bullaros chapters. I think the author could have dropped a lot of the historical asides but Talese did personally invest a lot of time researching massage parlors in New York City.

TL;DR: They have sex on pages 37, 113, 137, 154, 156, 197, 210, 222, 226, 289, 348, 451, 472, 508, 514, 526, and 541.

[Alex Whang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well narrated and interesting, but this felt like a collection of anecdotes without a clear thesis. I would’ve like Talese to dive deeper into the societal, political, historical, etc. drivers behind liberated sexuality in the post war era. Felt a bit more like a biography of Hugh Hefner rather than an analysis or commentary on the times.

[Michella Cumpa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 estrellas, al inicio sentí que me envolvía en la historia, pero llega el momento que nos carga de informacióny muchos nombres. Esto hace que el ritmo sea más lenro. Al final siento que vuelve a tener el ritmo que al inicio. Cuenta con elementos periodisticos.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a highly detailed nonfiction account of the golden years of the sexual revolution in the United States (before AIDS). First published in 1981, it became a huge best seller, but mysteriously I don’t think I ever heard of it until now.

In the last chapter, Talese writes about himself in the third person and confesses that his research extended to personally engaging in the adulterous acts that are the essence of the book. After all, how could he write with any authority about it without personal knowledge? Or so the logic goes. His wife made public appearances with him proving her consent.

Talese also confesses he almost could not find a way to organize the vast quantity of interview notes and other sources in order to bring the material to the printed page. More than once while reading it I wondered if there was any organization to it. He ended up twining two primary stories around each other, one of the founders of the Sandstone Retreat (a Los Angeles free love community), and the other of Hugh Hefner’s creation of Playboy. He couches them in quite a bit of tangentially related matter, including the evolution of the law of obscenity as pronounced by the Supreme Court.

Although I think the work succeeds as a history, in the end I believe the author should have split the material into at least two separate books – they would have been more focused and effective.

[Lucas da Paz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexo, Censura e Liberdade: Uma Resenha de “A Mulher do Próximo”

A Mulher do Próximo, do aclamado jornalista americano Gaetano “Gay” Talese, é uma obra que se destaca pelo estilo “jornalismo literário” e pela abordagem do tema da permissividade americana nas décadas de 1960 e 1970. Publicado pela primeira vez em 1981, o livro apresenta uma crônica jornalística que revela os desdobramentos da sociedade americana no que concerne, principalmente, ao tema da “obscenidade”, transitando desde a era vitoriana até o período pós segunda guerra mundial, focando principalmente nas décadas de 50, 60 e 70.

Um dos pontos fortes da trama é a habilidade de Talese em conectar histórias. O livro nos apresenta personagens que florescem a partir de outros, passando o foco da narrativa entre si como o bastão de uma corrida de revezamento. Figuras pouco conhecidas do submundo sexual americano são entrelaçadas com atrizes e modelos, personalidades de grande influência, como Hugh Hefner, políticos como Richard Nixon e censores que defendiam a “pureza e a decência”, como Anthony Comstock. Também viajamos por várias cidades americanas, estabelecendo vínculos principalmente em Chicago, uma cidade com grande parte da população imigrante e fortemente católica, e Los Angeles, cidade da Califórnia que atraia jovens e adeptos da liberdade individual e sexual.

Apesar do teor sexual do livro, grande parte da narrativa se desenrola nos tribunais, onde mesmo grandes nomes da literatura, como James Joyce com a obra Ulysses, se viram censurados e muitos editores, publicadores, vendedores e defensores da liberdade de expressão e de se produzir, publicar e consumir conteúdo sexual foram multados e presos, inclusive o psiquiatra austríaco Wilhelm Reich, que morreu na prisão em 1957, com 60 anos de idade.

Outro cenário frequente no livro são utopias de liberdade sexual. Duas se destacam, são elas Oneida, uma comunidade fortemente religiosa fundada em 1848 cujo fundador, John Humphrey Noyes, tinha uma interpretação da bíblia na qual acreditava que o amor devia ser dividido entre todos, e o casamento era um egoísmo aos olhos de Deus, e o retiro de Sandstone, fundado por John e Barbara Williamson, mais centrados no hedonismo e na igualdade de gêneros, pregando que um relacionamento saudável era aquele no qual os cônjuges tinham liberdade de se entregar sexualmente para outros parceiros com o conhecimento e apoio de seu par, sem que isso diminuísse seu amor um pelo outro ou prejudicasse seu relacionamento; segundo John e Barbara, isso fortalecia seu laço amoroso e a confiança do casal. É certo que essas utopias estavam longe de atingir a perfeição e a harmonia que desejavam; além disso, muitas delas eram fortemente centradas em algum preceito religioso de um guru espiritual, ou então em uma figura autocrata que servia como líder e mentor do grupo, mas elas foram participantes ativas da revolução sexual americana.

Talese consegue transitar entre todos os lados da história, condensando os sentimentos da época em palavras e mostrando que, na maioria das vezes, a censura e repressão, as leis invasivas, o preconceito, o conservadorismo e puritanismo extremos podem justamente criar pessoas com “perversões” e ideias polarizadas, que podem enveredar tanto para o lado “Hefner” quanto para o lado “Comstock”, dependendo de suas experiências e frustrações no âmbito sexual.



A meu ver, este livro representa uma ode à liberdade individual e uma crítica contundente ao conservadorismo extremo, o falso pudor e a dupla moralidade presentes em parte da sociedade. Talese expõe como o “moralmente perigoso” foi usado como pretexto para proibir vários tipos de conteúdos sobre sexo, até mesmo informativos; mostra também como muitos moralistas e religiosos que condenam certas práticas são, realmente, frutos da repressão e do puritanismo citados acima. Além disso, no âmbito da religião é sempre necessário ressaltar que muito do que é considerado pecado pela igreja em determinados momentos da história já foi aceito quando convinha aos seus líderes fazê-lo.

Além disso, o livro ressalta a importância de conhecer o passado para evitar retrocessos na sociedade atual. Podem ser traçados paralelos com o falso pudor, a dupla moral e a repressão sexual na sociedade atual, como um caso recente onde até mesmo uma magnífica obra de arte como o Davi de Michelangelo foi motivo de controvérsia em uma escola americana. A leitura nos convida a refletir sobre a evolução das questões sexuais e como a história pode se repetir se não aprendermos com o passado.

Gay Talese é, inquestionavelmente, um dos principais expoentes do estilo "jornalismo literário". Embora critique a expressão por dar licença a alguns repórteres para serem muito mais literários do que jornalísticos, Talese possui um estilo característico no qual adquire a confiança dos personagens e apura minuciosamente todas as informações relevantes para história, inserindo-as depois com maestria em sua prosa. Isso ficou evidente em obras anteriores, como "Honra teu Pai", quando o autor se misturou com famílias de mafiosos para escrever uma história. Nada disso, porém, foi tão extremo quanto o método de "observação participante" que Talese empregou durante a escrita do livro, no qual trabalhou como gerente nas casas de massagem que começavam a surgir - entretendo clientes e entrevistando as massagistas durante seu intervalo, inclusive convencendo-as a escrever diários que ele poderia consultar mais tarde -, entrevistou envolvidos na revolução sexual americana e, talvez o mais chocante de tudo, habitou por alguns meses a utopia nudista de Sandstone, participando até mesmo das sessões de sexo grupal que ocorriam no salão de baile". Este método gerou muita repercussão e algumas críticas, mas sem dúvidas demonstra um comprometimento com a apuração dos fatos e a obtenção de perspectivas diversas.

Em suma, A Mulher do Próximo é uma obra jornalística que nos proporciona uma visão detalhada e apurada das transformações e embates de uma sociedade influente. A narrativa ressoa fortemente na contemporaneidade, convidando-nos a refletir sobre o papel do sexo na história e a importância da liberdade individual. É uma leitura que informa, provoca e inspira reflexões sobre a sociedade em que vivemos.

[ania · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. One of his best. Twist at the end, when he talks about himself (in the third person...) and the effect the book had on his marriage. Sections on Hugh Hefner are also good. Who knew Hef was such a fascinating guy...

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WTF: "Also in England at this time were several presumed cures for masturbation, including a sort of chastity belt that parents could lock between their son's legs each night before he went to bed. Some of these gadgets were adorned with spikes on the outside, or came equipped with bells that would ring whenever the youth touched his genitals or had an erection."

milliner: a person who designs, makes, or sells hats for women

fun fact: "Pubic hair made its film debut in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up..."

"...but this agricultural community like so many others that were populated by campus-bred radicals, would flounder financially because its members spent too much time reading quality paperbacks and pontificating around the fireplace, and not enough time in the barn milking the cows."

"There were people, too, who seemed amazingly blase about sex, such as the two middle-aged men who sat with their backs to the wall and, while being fellated by two women, carried on a conversation as casually as cabdrivers on a sunny day chatting through their open windows while waiting for the traffic light to change."

"When he first saw the mansion it reminded him of some of the great houses he had seen in mystery movies, the sort that had hidden tunnels and secret doors; and after he had bought the property and discovered that such features were lacking, he had his own private passageways built, together with walls and bookcases that moved by the press of a button."

"'It takes a lot of courage to be who you are in any life situation...' Betty Dodson said..."

[Muhammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot had happened around the world post WWII, and the US being one of the countries greatly affected by the change, big part of it, i believe was driven by its emerging adults, and how they viewed themselves, how they thought of the world, and how they redefined what it is to be free, or probably, just spoke loudly about it, and took actions to turn their beliefs into reality, to turn the world into how they thought it should be, and one of those things, is their control over their bodies, and the relationship they have with themselves as biological beings, for an example not surrendering their bodies to the woes of war that they cannot make sense of, or, having a guilt-free command over their bodies, in the sexual sense of it, and the later; is what Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife is about, or at least what it claims to be. This very well written, excellently researched non-fiction is taking the readers on a journey into the sexual revolution in the United States mainly in the 60s and the 70s of the 20th century. The book being very well researched, has enough intimate details that makes it alive, at a certain point you feel that you are reading a novel, not a non-fiction. The book is structured to look at the sexual revolution through different lenses, Gay Talese looks, reflects and view the sexual revolution through the backgrounds, upbringing, and motives of the publishers who took the initiative and the accompanying risks of publishing (back then obscene) novels, books, magazines that fueled men's libido with literature about intimate relations between adults, carnal knowledge, and the nudes of women like Dianne Webber, and through this we get to know much about Playboy's Hugh Hefner, Samuel Roth, William Hamling, Larry Flynt, and many more, we get to know about their journey, what they had faced, and how they contributed to this revolution. The book takes us also through a journey back in time to give examples from the 1800s of how people thought of sexual freedom, how closed communities were formed to live in sexually liberated utopias, away and detached from the norms of their society back then, and then the book also talks a good deal about the countless court battles between the state and the publishers of sexual material in its different forms, it also shows how members of society emerged to fight this movement, forming committees that aimed to end what they viewed as obscenity that needs to stop before it corrupts the society, and how relentless some people were (like Anthony Comstock) in fighting this, through lobbying for laws against obscenity and porn, and influence raids on magazines headquarters and publishing firms and go after publishers. The book also send the reader to Sandstone Retreat nudist community, and how the Williamsons came to be, and how they wanted to introduce sexual liberation to the average middle class married couples, and free them from what they called a double standard marriage life, and the book shows as well some byproducts of this movement such as massage parlors, and how this was a relief outlet for the middle aged mostly married American men. I choose not to say more because there is so much details in this book, whatever I will say would not cover it even on a high level.

Gay Talese can write, he actually writes incredibly well, and he has put so much effort and time in this book that one has to admire, yet I have to say, I wish that the book did not make the claim that it is about the sexual revolution in the US (up till 1980) because although the book have discussed this from the male and on many incidents the female point of view, but I still think that this is strictly discussing the Heterosexual white sexual revolution, nothing more, and at parts it indulged much into things that drifts away from the sexual movement, for an example, there is a great deal of talk about Hugh Hefner, and details that looked like you are reading a small biography about the guy, a small book within the book. Also, although the book mentioned scientific work on the sexual life of Americans, and human beings in general, but it did that very briefly, and did not dwell much into the psychological fabric of this matter, it seemed to focus on strict upbringing, and people feeling suppressed from exploring themselves in general as well as sexually, I don't think it discussed the philosophical side of it, and if this is really about sexual freedom, or people indulging in pleasure, nihilism, and individualism, also when the book discussed the opposing side to this movement, it only viewed the acts of oppression, the raids, the law suits, but not much on how the other side was thinking, yet, to be honest, Gay Talese did subtly indicated and put some dim light on the double standards of people who fought double standards, their struggle with their own beliefs, and it seemed that at the end Gay Talese was comfortable with the conclusion that America has been and will always like to have it both ways. One observation, reading this book, I feel that if the US Government did not fight this hard, and oppressed the movement, most of this wouldn't have that much of an affect, specially the literature part of it, which is in most of the cases, was mediocre, and interesting to the common man and woman only because of how unusual it was back then to read about those topics, and contain between their hands how other people thought of intimacy and sex, and talked freely about it. In the last part of the book, Talese wrote about some of his very personal experiences; in nudist communities, massage parlors, and he talked about himself in the third person, which I found brilliant, and as he said, reflecting his mental state back then being a participator but also an observer. Overall, this was a very good read, although to me it wasn't very thought provocative, and did not change my views on the subject matter, but it was an excellent insight into a movement that affected a lot of lives, and impacted almost all forms of art! One final note, the familiar cover of this book is one of Dianne Webber's famous nudes, this along with the title Thy Neighbor's Wife formed a very honest facade for the book, they represented that era, they hinted and spoke of the taboo, the vivid imagination, fantasies, the broken scared boundaries, and the struggle that people face at a very young age and it lingers through the most part of their lives, being something they think about a lot, but speak very little of...

[Graham Podolecki · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a challenging read because while I enjoyed Talese’s writing style, I found the way he treats some of his subjects odd. Obviously this book is a touch dated on its views of the sexual revolution of the 50s, 60s, and 70s considering it was published in 1980. Most interesting to me was how this book while being critical of the Puritan ideals that are most aptly presented in the flawed image of the 1950s nuclear family, it tends to then focus on a very patriarchal sexual freedom. Men are always in charge of this sexual ‘freedom’ and are usually the profiteers of it. Reading in the aftermath of the ‘me too’ movement the description of the ‘freedom’ women got working in massage parlours in the 1960 and 70s is cringeworthy. There is a naïveté to it that maybe back then wasn’t so apparent, but today in the copious amounts of stories of men in power abusing their authority and sexually harassing women (the president is a prime example) it’s so much harder to look at this time with the rose tinted glasses that Talese seems to look at it.
With that said, there were several times I wanted to stop reading this book but Talese’s skill as writer kept me coming back. It remains even with its flaws, a captivating read and if viewed as a sort of time capsule, I think there is much more value to it.

Edit: In the context of Tiger King, the fact that the Williamson’s of 2010 were tiger owners does not surprise me one bit.

[Nik Maack · Rating 5 out of 5]

You think you know sex? You kids today, with your Internet porn and your fifty shades of whatever. No sir, you don't know. Because you haven't read this book. Let a straight man named Gay take you through the history of sexuality in America. From the time they banned Lady Chatterley's Lover, to permanent adolescent Hugh Hefner starting Playboy magazine, to the history of Sandstone (a sexy swinger club), to how men went to jail for years for selling "dirty" books, to the multiple definitions of what is obscenity.

And if you love reading about crazy repressed censorship loving lunatics, this book has them too. Citizens for Decent Literature, Comstock of the crazy Comstock Laws, and more. And yes, a book that offers even more reasons to hate Richard Nixon. (Nixon hated porn.)

Why is this book not mandatory reading for everyone? Why did I stumble across it at random? It is great. Journalism as a story. History as gossip. A book I had to stop reading several times in order to do Google searches. I just had to read the Presidential statement where Nixon discounts a study of pornography and it's effects on society (it has none) and in which he says he will always fight porn because anyone with common sense can see that pornography is terrible.

I now must read everything Gay Talese has written.