Lenina shook her head. “Somehow,” she mused, “I haven’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?”

        Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. “But one’s got to make the effort,” she said sententiously, “one’s got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else.”

        “Yes, every one belongs to every one else,” Lenina repeated slowly and sighing, was silent for a moment: then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze. “you’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.”

        Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Chapter 15

Who writes the scripts that young people follow? Who defines what is “cool?” Who says what is acceptable? In Brave New World Aldous Huxley described a world where “every one belongs to every one else,” promiscuity is compulsory, children are taught sex-play from infancy and it is love, which is forbidden. Similarly, in today’s hook-up world, oral sex with someone who couldn’t care less about you is “no big deal,” while  “having feelings for someone” makes one feel guilty. The question is not “whether I should have had sex with him,” but whether “I should have told him to use a condom,” as if that was the beginning and the end of the issue.

Sadly, for many teens “hook-up world” is the one that makes sense. Siena, a 15-year-old, talks about two of her friends, “neither of them liked the other. That’s so common now. It’s nice for them because they don’t have to worry [about] getting feelings for each other. You’re drunk, or horny, the guy wants some, the girl wants some, and you don’t have to worry about hurt feelings.”

But the world of teenage hook-ups is not the only place where deep-seated feelings are forbidden. In the early 1980s, author/educator George Leonard described his fifteen-hour experience at a course called Human Sexuality #101, given once a month at the National Sex Forum, affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco (hereafter called the Sex Institute) and directed by Kinsey co-author and SIECUS board member, Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, and Hustler magazine contributors, Rev. Ted McIlvena, a Methodist minister and Erwin Haberlae, author of The Sex Atlas. The course was attended “mostly by fledging sex therapists, members of other human services professions, and nonprofessionals who have been sent by their own counselors.”

Leonard explained that the course was based on a process that the Forum called Sexual Attitude Restructuring (SAR), whose main point is to break down stereotypes, using many hours of filmed images of gay couples, straight couples, a lesbian couple, and a bisexual group having sex. The climatic multimedia event, called the “F***orama,” is described by Leonard: