Flashbacks & Flashforwards: Legendary Science Fiction Authors Predicted Sex’s Far Future—In 1971

What they foresaw, didn’t see coming, and what might be yet to come

More than half a century ago, while visiting a San Francisco Bay Area Science Fiction convention, the adult magazine Sexscope [NSFW] asked a panel of highly respected writers to share their thoughts on how social and technological changes might change the face of sex and human intimacy in the years ahead.

Though many of the writers’ forecasts were less-than-optimistic—reflecting the tumult of the 1970s sexual revolution—Sexscope’s editor however points out that, “Surprisingly enough, our panel came to the conclusion that sex, while a perennial source of trouble, has a great future.” 

“A mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation”

Opening with the above quote from the late Alvin Toffler’s, Future Shock on science fiction’s role in society, Sexscope introduces our experts:

• Robert Silverberg, a Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inductee, genre Grandmaster, and winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards.
• Jean Marie Stine whose underground work of “antipornography,” Season of the Witch, was hailed when it appeared as the first mature blending of science fiction and eroticism. 
• Jack Jardine, whose Agent of Terra books, written under the byline Larry Maddock, were the best-selling science fiction series of their time. 
• Jane Gallion, the feminist literary rebel who wrote Biker, Stoned, and Why Get Married, former editor of the Feminine Response, and a contributor to a number of alternative publications over the years. 
• William Rotsler, a legendary cartoonist, filmmaker, and science fiction writer whose work appeared in Adam, Knight, Galaxy, and many other publications has become legendary.
• Paul Turner, a former ordnance engineer for ballistic missiles, photographer, who also contributed to numerous adult magazines.

“Not the old rules at all”

Though many of the  issues the panelists discussed have become commonplace, this was a time when frank talk was on the rise and a lot of “firsts” were happening.”

After discussing how relationships have begun moving away from traditional gender roles of men working while women raise children. The panelists then began speculating about the shift towards the science of sex and its current and future discoveries:

STINE: Masters and Johnson are finally discovering exactly what goes on during the sex act, which no one ever knew before, physiologically speaking. And as a result of this they’ve gone a long way toward defining what healthy sexuality is, and what impairs it or causes sexual dysfunction, as well as how to cure it. Now there is hope for all those frustrated, suffering millions whose marriages have been one long sexual failure. And freedom from guilt, too—something not to be discounted. They can be free to enjoy their sex lives now instead of later on in life when, if they’re lucky, they get their heads straightened out about sex and get over a lot of their conditioned hang-ups. Because until now, the sad truth is, most people have never gotten their heads together about this, and probably less than one in every fifty is really satisfying or pleasurable to them.

JARDINE: The new people are growing up in an entirely different universe. 

TURNER: The rules are all different today. They’re not the old rules at all. So they’re not going to have to overcome all those hang-ups, because they’re not acquiring them. They don’t have to—they have the means, chemical and mechanical, to avoid having to go through all those traumas.

SEXSCOPE: What do you mean: chemical and mechanical?

TURNER: Contraception. Universal contraception.

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SILVERBERG: The sexual revolution now is something qualitatively different from the sexual revolution of the 1920’s or the1930’s. For the first time there is an absolute separation between sex and reproduction, and that is taking the consequences out of sex, turning it into merely a meeting of bodies, which it has never been before. I don’t mean merely a meeting of bodies, but that anybody, at any given time, is free to do as he pleases without fear of the result. This is something brand new and it is having explosive consequences.

“Sex as media”

Pirouetting away from reproduction, birth control, and how they might fuel sexual liberation in the future, the panels pondered what might happen if the social pendulum should swing the other way:

JARDINE: Somebody had a story a few years ago, “Coming of Age Day,’ by Jorgenson, in which there was an appliance, a living tissue that each person was given on his thirteenth birthday and wore on the genitals from then on, The appliance gave each person a satisfying sex life of his own so there was no need for interaction or contact with other people.

GALLION: Sounds downright unnatural to me. Besides, a thing like that would completely eliminate the aspect of sex as media.

STINE: What does sex have to do with media?

GALLION: It’s a communications device. It’s like words.

JARDINE: Sex is much more than playing skillfully with each other’s genitals.

GALLION: That’s why all these studies, like Masters and Johnson, can only go so far. They teach sex just as mechanics.

STINE: Oh, no. There’s much more to it than that. In the first program they used that approach, but only because no one else had ever investigated it thoroughly

enough to have a clear idea of what really went on. After all, without knowing what it is, there’s no way to start making it better. In the second program, the treatment program, their stated goal was to treat it as communication and to improve the communications system. They sat down with people who had a block against sexual communication in their relationship, and tried to help them learn to communicate on that level. They don’t try to cure the people, they try to cure the relationship. That’s what they say the patient is, not the people.

STINE: I think that one of the taboos we can foresee will be against having more than a certain number of children, and this could be one of the big ones. A guy who fathers six or seven kids could become as much of a social outcast as someone who displays his genitals publicly today. Another future taboo could be that it may become very socially unacceptable not to keep your clap shots up. People may become hung up about venereal disease in a whole new way.

SILVERBERG: That’s not really a hang-up; it’s more like brushing your teeth; it’s a matter of common courtesy. Common courtesy is not a hang-up.

STINE: But what starts out as common courtesy often ends up as a taboo. Don’t forget that in ancient Egypt they had signs warning, “Don’t piss in the streets. That’s what animals do, not what men do.” And it’s no longer just common courtesy not to piss in public anymore, it’s a taboo. And it hangs some men up so bad they can’t even piss in a public john unless they are hidden in a booth. There’s even a specific name for the psychological disorder.

“Exclusive anything is generally a bit pathological”

The panelists next offered thoughts on the evolution of gender and sexual attraction:

JARDINE: There seems to be a trend in the counter-culture towards increasing bisexual behavior. And I think one of the keynotes in the future of sex will be a less gender-oriented sex drive.

STINE: Well, once you take it out of the area of reproduction, you open it up wide because it really doesn’t matter any more who or what or how or why, merely whether or not it feels good.

SILVERBERG: As you move toward a concept of sex as body communication, the more bodies of all sorts that you can communicate with the greater will be the amount of information you take in; and arbitrarily to cut off fifty percent of the possible information flow is something that I think is going to die out when our present hang-ups in that direction, which are very powerful, begin to eliminate themselves. It may become unusual to be exclusively heterosexual.

JARDINE: Exclusive anything is generally a bit pathological. Society itself seems to be becoming less goal oriented than I recall it having been fifteen, twenty years ago… and I suspect that this is slopping over onto sex, Sexual participation is probably increasingly less orgasm-oriented, less looking forward to the con- summation and more concerned with what’s actually happening right now, whenever now is. I agree with Jane, it’s a form of communication, a highly important form of communication. If you really want to get to know someone, that’s almost a necessity, to totally know them, because it’s a form of communication that can’t be done in any other way.

STINE: All of these people enjoying sex, not just having it, not just going through the ritual, but enjoying it and communicating and being close to other human beings, is going to have such an effect on their heads. People are gonna walk up to each other and they’re not going to feel as threatened or frightened anymore.

“Well, we’re living in the future”

Even with fifty four years separating us, it’s fascinating to see the importance of trying to stay positive about the human sexuality’s future:

SILVERBERG: Everything we’ve been discussing so far is really just a small part of what’s going on in the future, right?

JARDINE: Mainly; what’s going on now?

STINE: Well, we’re living in the future, as Dave McDaniel or George Clayton Johnson would say.

TURNER: It’s simply a small part of what’s happening, and sex is going to be affected even further by the technological phenomenon that we’re living in now. A sexual experience is communication at a most basic level. I just don’t see any way to really anticipate that completely. Where we’re at now is the beginning of all that. We’re at the beginning of a complete and total change in all aspects of our lives—sex just happens to be one of them—but it’s really impossible to say what’s going to happen in the future. All we’ve been talking about is what’s happening now, at the moment.

STINE: I think inevitably if we’re going to see increasing sexual activity, we’re going to see increasing combinations, you know, the whole concept of group sex.

It’s not gonna be just little swing parties out in the suburbs, it’s gonna be like four or five people are going to be living together, and one afternoon they’re all going to be sitting down and somebody’s gonna say, “Let’s all go have sex.” Then it’s gonna be this whole writhing pile of bodies, all of whom are communicating seriously and deliberately to each other, and all of them feeling good about it when it’s happening, no guilt, no hang-ups, no inhibitions.

SILVERBERG: That’s a hard act to follow.

TURNER: I’ll drink to that, but not with this water.

SILVERBERG: Even the future of water is deteriorating.

JARDINE: The future of everything is deteriorating, except sex, which seems to be looking up. 

Image Sources: Depositphots