Cornell and the myth of pre-Sexual Revolution America

I grew up hearing about how my mother, upon seeing it in the theater, had walked out and immediately vomited. The movie, which follows New York schoolteacher Theresa Dunn through a series of at times humiliating sexual encounters (and the lasciviousness of the 1970s) until one of her sex partners murders her, is an adaptation of a novel, itself inspired by the real-life death of Roseann Quinn. Just two days after her body was found, Quinn was described as having “no regular boyfriend but the type of girl who would have a guy in if he brought her home” in the New York Times.

In the panic-stricken moral universe of Mr. Goodbar, which is set in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, women have begun acting like homosexual men (who themselves receive several unflattering cameos): spending their evenings cruising, doing drugs and, ultimately, being brutalized, physically, emotionally and psychologically.

Along the way, we are reminded of the ways that their lecherous behavior disappoints everyone around them: their children, should they choose to carry a child to term, their parents, their employers, most of all, themselves. In a particularly difficult scene, Dunn arrives to her class several hours late – she teaches first-graders at a school for the deaf – after a Quaalude she took (to take the edge off the cocaine) causes her to oversleep.

In the world of Mr. Goodbar, heterosexual men don’t emerge unscathed from the Sexual Revolution either, though. No longer bound to the dictum that a man owes a woman any post-coital respect, they become prisoners of their worst masculine urges. I found that Mr. Goodbar was not “scary” in the traditional sense, as I had always assumed from my mother’s description of it – after all, it’d made her sick. Rather, it is a deeply anxious picture of post-revolution sexual guilt.

You got what you wanted, ladies, the film seems to say, and look at it what you did, not only to yourselves, but to all of us. “All of us,” it should be noted, includes children, too.

The cinematic landscape of the 1970s is full of films like this – Hardcore, Carnal Knowledge, Lipstick, just to name a few. In giving women freedom to – freedom to work, freedom to be independent, freedom to be a twenty-something in New York City without a husband, living in an apartment alone and bringing home a new man each night – we had also given them freedom from dignity and protection. Had Dunn just gotten married, just been satisfied with settling down, her would-be lover and erstwhile stalker James – a social worker and “good man” her parents approve of – tells her, maybe she wouldn’t live in a roach-infested apartment by herself, kept company by nothing but vulgar tchotchkes, her own filth, and occasionally a man she brings home to have sex with. James is not exactly wholesome himself – he does, after all, follow her, and in a bid to get her to sleep with him, tells her a sob story about how his father beat his mother that we later find out he made up entirely. But, of course, if women weren’t such sluts, we are led to believe, maybe men wouldn’t be forced to be liars and brutes.

It should go without saying that this is a sensationalist vision of post-Sexual Revolution America. It tacitly sidesteps the reality of second-wave feminism, which was in no sense naive to these concerns (one need not look further than the often derided Andrea Dworkin). It is not as though promiscuity wasn’t a problem before the late 1960s either. It’s not that nothing changed, certainly, but it wasn’t the change as portrayed in the film. The Sexual Revolution did not exactly create a deluge of women ravenous for no-holds-barred s-e-x, willing to sacrifice anything – including and especially their dignity – for it. But that cultural imprint – the sense of things – is nonetheless an important piece of the story. What is perhaps more important than what actually happened is what people felt happened, and so the 1970s was as marked by loss as it was by debauchery.

The question is whether what had been lost was genuine “sexual order,” a world where boys and girls waited until marriage and sexual violence was punished and rare, or the illusion that such sexual order ever existed. I am not so certain things were ever so good.

The sense that we are long past a “good old days,” the one that is teased in Mr. Goodbar, is what interests me about the conversation unfolding about the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student who alleges that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by members of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. This story, whatever you may think of what actually occurred, has become an occasion for an argument about what the Sexual Revolution wrought, where the adults in the room, with varying levels of compassion, ask: “Well, what did you expect, running around like that?” That is, that the sexual restraint of a bygone era was a form of protection – that a rape like this one could only happen in a world where women falsely believe they can have sex like men.

If only this were the case, though. If only the bargain that Andrea Dworkin lays out in the opening chapters of Right-wing Women – socially conservative values, particularly conservative sexual mores, are a shelter from harm – were real, and not, as she writes, a routinely broken promise.

Was Theresa Dunn worse off in the wake of the Sexual Revolution? I know that she is portrayed, again and again, as having sex for what feel like bad reasons – male validation, boredom, an exertion of her own independence – or no reason at all. But I also know that her murder at the end is not her fault, nor is it strictly a result of the political climate. Being murdered is not a “tax” that you pay for having casual sex, even a lot of it, even imprudently, nor is being repeatedly raped after being referred to as “free pussy” as though you were nothing more than a used couch being dragged out and left on the side of the street. The horror of the Sexual Revolution, of Mr. Goodbar, of the Cornell Seven, is something much darker than our sexual appetites running amok and disturbing some natural equilibrium.

What made my mother sick is not the realization that the Sexual Revolution brought worse conditions, that burning our bras had destroyed some prelapsarian Eden of sexual relations. Rather, it was the bleak realization that even freedom could not guarantee safety.

“LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR” was a true story, but feminists think it was fake? Wow. That somhow is pertinent to 2026 culture in college? No, it is NOT.
There is no evidence she was drugged and raped repeatedly against her will, but this fake judges the males guilty. There are 7 males accused by her. We know that the purported victim had two consensual 3 somes with 4 different males and liked it, admitted to being a “ slut”, then talked into being a victim when her reputation for group sex got her disinvited to the Halloween frat party. At one point, she was in the middle of a 3some, when a brother walked into a unlocked room & asked if he could make it a 4th. She said “hell, no” only because she thought having sex with 3 males at once meant anal sex….not because she necessary was against it. She was aware enough to call onlookers “ voyeurs”, to text her roommate, etc. Females kept claiming that the “ free p*ssy upstairs” proves rape, as if it means the same as “ unconscious, helpless female victim upstairs”: & newspaper articles argue that no woman would consent to sex with a group of males or a succession of males, aka gang bang. These wimen claim to speak for all women, but they cannot and do not. Nobody should be presumed guilty. The older brothers in the fraternity broke up the happening and told the girl she could not come back. She said she was fond of several of the brothers and enjoyed the 3 some. That is why no charges were brought. Just like Joe Paterno, just like George Zimmerman. Governors do not have power to smear investigators & police chiefs, and appoint special pros3cutors to get political enemies, like what happened with Zimmerman and with the Cornell brothers. In fact, the idea of a “ special counsel” is to protect the innocent from politics but also, because those in power cannot be trusted to hold themselves accountable…eg, Joe Biden investigating Hunter Biden.
I once was approached by a female at a party at the Jersey shore, probably 1982…..she asked me to blank her….which my friend heard, and egged me on to consummate….but I told him that I was not very attracted to a drunk, needy girl. I pushed her away. Then she dropped her pants and did a stinky #2 in front of us on the living room hardwood floor, pulled up her pants, then wandered out of the room. My friend and I cleaned up the mess, because we were the only ones to see what happened and know it was there. We crashed at the party, slept on chairs in the living room until morning, and were awakened the next morning by that same female screaming after she woke up naked under the kitchen table in the arms of some guy she did not know and did not remember consenting or choosing to have sex with. Do I consider her a victim? Hell, no.
I’ve had females confess sins and fantasies to me that are not unlike what this girl did. We’ve read news stories about females trying to set the world record for number of males she had sex with in sucession…one after the other over 8 hours….like hundreds of men. As a man, it bothers me that hundreds of males would volunteer or even take money to get filmed helping this woman set a sex record.
You cannot find the Cornell 7 all guilty and without evidence and against evidence because you believe no female ever would say yes to group sex or a gang bang or two 3 somes and some unwanted attention—- or because you think you know what frat boys mean by “ free sex upstairs” without knowing them or asking them what it means. To females hearing “ free p*ssy upstairs” it means RAPE, but that is not what it meant to the brothers who got the text, then went upstairs to find out what it meant. Can prosecutors read everybody’s mind and put incriminating thoughts in their head. Feminism is about not being a lady, but thinking the law forces men to be gentlemen— or thinking you ARE the law and anybody is acting criminally if he does not act like you think he should. I once heard a guy confess to an incident in a dorm room, when he walked into an open door of the room of a girl he knew, but her roommate was naked at a mirror, putting on make up…..& it got his attention. He said he was undoing his pants as he approached her, but she told him that she would not have sexual intercourse with him because she had a boyfriend, but she told him she would take care of his attention deficit disorder to his pleasure differently. I heard this years ago, and the guy was thinking back to what he did in college, and wondering if in the increasingly anti male environment in the late 1980s, he could be accused of rape now. He seemed a little guilt ridden and a little frightened. I remember hearing college stories about college girls who consented to take on a whole fraternity or whole football team. Wasn’t that the idea behind “ Debbie does Dallas”…a film we’ve all heard of that I think was created to align with male fantasies about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Letitia James is a communist who sued Trump because of her beliefs about capitailsm and Trump’s wealth and power damaging to the People of New York. Capitalism is theft and exploitation, according to communists. They have the same weird ideas about rape, too.

Unless the author is referring to unnatural / criminal urges, readers should recognize this slander for what it is: An underhanded insult to the entire male sex!

If, after a casual sexual encounter, your typical, normal male were to indulge even his worst masculine urges, that would probably involve nothing worse than leaving the toilet seat up and then leaving without giving her a kiss.

Anything more than that - e.g., violent abuse - is not the expression of any "masculine urge," per se. Rather, it is general criminal behavior, and should NOT be characterized as specifically "masculine!"

Regards,

This artilcle reminds me of a conversation I had with my liberal cousin who believed all conservatives were liars and phonies and people were just as sexual in the 1920s-1970s in the USA but they hid it, lied about it, refused to admit it. He did not believe his own mother who told him that women were expected to be virgins when they got married and most were virgins when they got married. I never thought my own parents were prudes, but I know they were serious about their Catholic marriage vows, and still are married at 93 years old and 89 years old. My mother did not judge women who slept around or got divorced as being bad, but thought they were just foolish, ——chasing rainbows and unicorns…..expecting that some great sex life would make them feel happy and fulfilled. I do think Catholics do the surrender and sacrifice better……..now, that is the USA. Europe is different. There is a book by Stephen Marcus called “ the Other Victorians” about what a lot of life in Victorian England was like……but …I am not sure how accurate it is. Liberals love the Howard Sterns and Lenny Bruce characters of society. Everybody else is fake or unreal to them, so— consider the source.

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