Thy Neighbor's Wife

Gay Talese · 1980

Thesis

Between the Second World War and the end of the 1970s, Americans' private sexual lives changed far more than public morality admitted, and the change was driven not only by famous publishers and activists but by ordinary people testing the limits of law, marriage and desire, a revolution the author investigated by taking part in it himself.

The main ideas

The sexual revolution in America began well before the 1960s, in the private lives of ordinary people after the war.
Magazines and entrepreneurs made sex a mass-market product, with Playboy the most influential.
Obscenity law and public morality changed slowly and lagged behind private behavior.
Experiments in open marriage and communal living tested whether sex could be separated from possession and jealousy.
The journalist's method of total immersion can reveal what interviews cannot, but it also compromises the observer.
The revolution the book describes was already fading as it was published.

Nine years of research

Gay Talese made his name in the 1960s as one of the pioneers of the New Journalism, which brought the techniques of fiction, scene, dialogue and interior perspective, to reporting. Thy Neighbor's Wife, published by Doubleday in 1980, was the product of about nine years of research into the sexual life of postwar America.

Its reputation preceded it. In 1979, before publication, United Artists paid $2.5 million for the film rights, then described as a record for a book. No film was made. The book became a bestseller.

Talese's subject is how Americans' sexual lives changed from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, among wife-swappers, publishers, adulterers, club owners, self-styled sex gurus and lawyers. He tells it through individual lives rather than statistics, following his subjects over years.

Implication: large social changes are often visible first in private lives, long before they show up in law or public opinion.

Private lives

Talese's method is to follow particular people. The book opens with a Chicago teenager in the 1950s and his fascination with a nude photograph, and moves through a wide cast of people whose lives changed as attitudes to sex loosened, from suburban couples to entrepreneurs who built businesses on the new openness.

His interest is less in the famous than in how ordinary men and women negotiated desire, marriage and guilt. He describes their experiences without moralizing, which was itself part of his argument: that these people were not deviants but representative of a broad change.

The mechanism is that private behavior changes first, among people who feel isolated in their desires, until they discover that many others share them.

Implication: when a moral standard seems universal, ask how many people privately depart from it.

Hefner and Playboy

The most prominent figure in the book is Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy in 1953. Talese presents the magazine as a central force in the revolution. It aimed at the white, middle-class men of the postwar boom, packaging nude photographs alongside fiction, interviews and consumer advice, and presenting sexual pleasure as part of a sophisticated, prosperous life.

Hefner's success made sex a respectable mass-market product and helped shift what Americans considered acceptable to look at, buy and discuss.

The mechanism is that a commercial product, by making something taboo appear normal and aspirational, can change attitudes faster than argument.

Implication: watch how businesses package behaviors that were once considered shameful, since commerce often changes norms before law or opinion does.

Sex and the law

The revolution Talese describes unfolded against changing law. For much of the century, American law treated obscene material as unprotected by the First Amendment, and publishers of sexual material faced prosecution.

The Supreme Court tried repeatedly to define obscenity. In Roth v. United States in 1957, it held that obscenity was not protected speech but narrowed the definition to material appealing to prurient interest and utterly without redeeming social importance. In Miller v. California in 1973, it set a new test based on contemporary community standards and the absence of serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The mechanism is that each legal test left room for new material, which publishers and entrepreneurs pushed into, so the boundary moved step by step.

Implication: in matters of public morality, watch the courts. Legal tests define what can be sold, and what can be sold shapes what becomes normal.

Sandstone

The book's most famous setting is Sandstone Retreat, a community in Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles, founded by John and Barbara Williamson. Sandstone was a clothing-optional retreat where couples and individuals practiced open sexuality, attempting to free sex from possessiveness and jealousy.

Talese spent several months there. He describes the people who came, their reasons and what happened to their marriages, presenting Sandstone as an experiment in whether sexual freedom could make relationships more honest.

The mechanism is that communities like Sandstone tested, under unusually open conditions, whether jealousy and possessiveness are natural or learned.

Implication: radical experiments in living show both what is possible and what costs people pay for it, and both deserve attention.

The author as participant

Talese did not observe from a distance. He spent time in Manhattan massage parlors and lived at Sandstone, and he acknowledged sexual relationships with women he met during his research. He was married throughout, to the editor Nan Talese, and the book strained their marriage.

His participation became a central part of the story around the book. Critics attacked it, and his conduct overshadowed much of the discussion of the work itself. Reviews were broadly harsh, and the book damaged his reputation.

The mechanism is that immersion lets a reporter see what subjects would never describe in an interview, but it also makes the reporter a participant with interests of their own.

Implication: when a writer reports from inside a world, ask how being part of it shaped what the writer chose to see and tell.

Limits

Its perspective is male. Critics have argued that the book views the sexual revolution mainly through men's experience and gives women's lives a secondary place.
Its author's involvement complicates its reliability. Reviewers questioned both the ethics of his research and how far his participation colored his account.
History overtook it. Published in 1980, it appeared just before the first reports of AIDS in 1981, which transformed American attitudes to sexual freedom in ways the book could not anticipate.

Less Than Zero — the emptiness at the end of the era of excess.
The Art of Seduction — the psychology of desire and pursuit.
The Way of the Superior Man — a contrasting view of how men and women should approach sex and commitment.