History

The giant conifer resists mockery

It’s easy to be snarky or cynical about holiday schmaltz like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, which will be lit in a ceremony on Wednesday night. But, as TIME’s Richard Corliss pointed out in an essay that appeared in the magazine 20 years ago this month, it’s also easy to get swept away.

That’s because the holiday festivities represent a way to pretend the world is a little bit, well, easier:

In its totality, the visit is a time trip to a prettier New York and a sweeter America. ”When I was little, I used to come with my grandmother,” says Nancy Murray of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, of her annual trip to Radio City. ”I loved it; the show always gave me the Christmas spirit. It still does. And when my son is old enough, I hope he will come with his grandmother.”

The big Christmas tree — like window shopping and productions of The Nutcracker — is a symbol of that fantasy.

Read the full essay here, in the TIME Vault: I Like New York in Yule

The actress will be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors gala on Sunday

On Sunday, Lily Tomlin will be celebrated as one of this year’s recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors — and she’ll be, as The Advocate reports, the first out lesbian to be given the prize.

Tomlin wed her long-time partner Jane Wagner last year, but she wasn’t always public about her sexuality. As Tomlin put it, while speaking to the Washington Post for an in-depth profile, she resisted going public about her sexual orientation for a long time though she “never did not come out.” And, she added, TIME offered to put her on the cover in 1975 if she would come out — an offer she rejected. “I wanted to be acknowledged for my work,” she told the Post, “I didn’t want to be that gay person who does comedy.”

As Fishbowl NY has noted, Tomlin did appear on the cover of TIME two years after that — and as it that happened, she got her wish. The cover proclaimed her the New Queen of Comedy, and the story inside focused on her career and its development, not her personal life. There’s a brief aside about her decision to study medicine after high school, when other girls where getting married, but no space is devoted to her romantic life. She is, as she had hoped to be, a comedian — with no qualifiers.

That’s true even though the story does read quite differently in retrospect, in at least one respect. Jane Wagner, now Tomlin’s wife, is quoted as a “friend and collaborator” (Wagner has written and/or produced some of Tomlin’s best-known work); it’s also noted that they live together in Los Angeles.

Though perhaps it would not have been the case in 1975, Tomlin now manages to be both out and a no-qualifiers-needed comedian, one who’ll appear next year in Netflix’s new series Grace and Frankie. And, on the other side of the story, TIME got its wish too: two decades after the Tomlin story ran, Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out made the cover of the magazine.

Read the full story, here in the TIME Vault: Lily Tomlin, New Queen of Comedy

On the anniversary of the first-ever text, the medium deserves our consideration

The world’s very first text message, sent Dec. 3, 1992, was a cheerful, if early, holiday greeting: “Merry Christmas,” it read, short and sweet.

Twenty-two years later, texting has been used to communicate every kind of message there is — but if texts were to send a birthday missive of their own this year, it might be “please save us.”

Text messages, with their character limits and lack of embeddable media, are dying a slow death, getting replaced by more advanced messaging services that can include longer messages photos, videos and, yes, even poop emoji.

Apple’s iMessage service, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and similar services all look and act a lot like traditional texts. But, unrestricted by decades-old technological limitations, they are really the evolution of the now-outdated text message, enabled by innovations like smartphones and mobile broadband. Their benefits over SMS? There’s no character limit, you can use them to send lots of photos and videos, they’re largely free (save the bandwidth cost in using them) and many of them are platform-agnostic — that is, sending a Facebook Message to an iPhone user looks exactly the same as sending one to an Android user.

As any more evolved creature does to its primordial ancestors, these apps are displacing texts. We saw their first victory stateside in 2012, a win that was replicated just this year over in the U.K. A 2013 report from Informa, meanwhile, predicted that year’s messaging app traffic would be double its SMS traffic.

But we shouldn’t start digging text messages’ grave just yet.

SMS messages still have a few advantages over their newfangled brethren: It’s often easier to squeeze out a text message when you don’t have good data service, for instance, and they’re a lifesaver if you’re running the risk of going over your mobile data plan. SMS texts are also widely used in parts of the developing world, where smartphones and mobile broadband haven’t seen widespread adoption yet. And SMS messages have gotten more photo-friendly thanks to Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).

Traditional text messages will stick around for some time; radio didn’t suddenly disappear because TV zapped onto the scene. But as texts start fading into the background on this, their 22nd birthday, it’s worth thinking about how they changed the way we stay in touch: They turned our phones, intended as a means to connect us by voice, into a means to connect us by the written word — Alexander Graham Bell could’ve never seen that one coming. And the more-evolved progeny they inspired, with their photos, videos and emoji, mean we’re now just a few smartphone taps from a more intimate form of instantaneous communication than has ever been possible. So thanks, text messages — we couldn’t have gotten here without you.

Sony's original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, 20 years ago today

Two Supreme Court cases have helped define the struggle

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Peggy Young, a former UPS driver who had to go on unpaid leave — rather than paid leave or adjusted duty — when she got pregnant and a doctor told her to stop lifting heavy packages. Though UPS has since adjusted its leave policy for pregnant workers, the company maintains and a lower court agreed that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act doesn’t make it illegal to give pregnant employees different leave policies than non-pregnant ones. If the act did make such treatment illegal, they say, it would constitute special treatment. Young’s side, on the other hand, argues that making accommodations for pregnant workers is to treat them the same as other workers, not specially.

Unsurprisingly, several women’s rights organizations, like the Women’s Law Project and Legal Momentum, which is associated with the National Organization for Women (NOW), have filed an amicus brief in support of Young.

But, despite all the women’s-rights oomph behind Young’s case, the history of feminism and pregnancy discrimination isn’t so clear cut.

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pointed out, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed in 1978 to specify that discriminating against pregnant people is a kind of sex discrimination (after the Supreme Court case had earlier decided the opposite). It was less than three decades ago — in 1986 — that NOW, as well as the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, came out on the side of the employer in a case that sounds very similar to Young v. United Parcel Service. They aren’t exactly parallel, but many of the deep questions raised by the earlier case remain pertinent today. How much should childbearing be connected to a woman’s identity? Does respecting women require making allowances for that undeniable difference? Or would doing so hold women back by linking their legal identities to their function as mothers? How much inequality can be tolerated in the service of big-picture equality?

At issue was a challenge to a 1978 California law that required businesses to offer unpaid maternity leave. Lillian Garland had been a receptionist at a California bank when she took advantage of the state law and went on unpaid leave to have a baby in 1982; when she was ready to return to work, the position had been filled. Without her income, she was soon evicted and lost custody of her daughter, leading her to bring a suit against her former employer.

As TIME reported during the dispute, NOW and the ACLU ended up taking the bank’s side, preferring that employee benefits not be sex or gender-specific. “The question is, Should a woman with a pregnancy disability get her job back when other employees with disabilities get fired? You undermine your argument unless you say everyone is equally entitled to this benefit,” explained the ACLU’s Joan Bertin. In other words, anything that keeps an employee from working should be treated the same, whether or not it’s pregnancy, and no law should apply only to women. Meanwhile, feminist icon Betty Friedan and her allies saw things differently: in her view, the law treated everyone equally because it made clear that anyone, male or female, should be able to make decisions about having a family without the risk of losing his or her job.

DNA samples suggest he was a blue-eyed blond

DNA tests conducted on the remains of King Richard III suggest that contrary to historical records, the king had blue eyes, blond hair and a less-than-ironclad claim to the throne.

Two years after the king’s remains were discovered beneath a parking lot in the English city of Leicester, geneticists have found a likely divergence between the king’s real life appearance and how he was painted after his death, CNN reports. “The genetic evidence shows he had a 96% probability of having blue eyes, and a 77% probability of having blond hair, though this can darken with age,” said University of Leicester genetic specialist Turi King.

The findings also raised questions about Richard III’s claimed descent from his predecessor, Edward III. Five living descendants from that royal bloodline had intriguing mismatches in their genetic markers, suggesting a mysterious break occurred somewhere along the family tree.

[CNN]

"A few years ago I found some correspondence that I thought might have profoundly altered the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. thereby redirecting the course of American and world history"

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

Can a letter change the world? A few years ago I found some correspondence that I thought might have profoundly altered the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. , thereby redirecting the course of American and world history. And what made it more interesting is that King almost certainly was unaware of what happened. I was doing some research into the life of Howard Thurman, the great mid-20th century African American religious thinker. Thurman has never been as well-known as he should be, and if he is remembered among the general public, it is as an inspiration to Martin Luther King, Jr., which is accurate enough, but somewhat ironic given the contents of the exchange in question.

Here’s the situation. In the fall of 1953 Howard Thurman became a professor and the dean of chapel at Boston University (the first black to become dean of chapel at a mainstream university). Martin Luther King, Jr. was a student at Boston University, and by the fall of 1953 he had finished his course work for his Ph.D., so he was never Thurman’s student, though the two men knew each other (Thurman had known King since his infancy) and had some, though fairly limited contact during their time together during Thurman’s first year in Boston.

So on 1 December, 1954, just about sixty years ago, Thurman receives a letter from an old friend and college chum from Morehouse College, A.W. Dent, president of Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans. Dent was looking for a new dean of chapel at Dillard, and wanted to feel out Thurman about a potential candidate. “The other day I heard some good things about M. L. King, Jr., whose father is at Ebenezer at Atlanta. I understand that King after finishing Morehouse, went to Boston University where he has about completed his work for the doctorate. Do you know anything about his record, and do you think him to be the type of person into whom I should take a good look?”

Thurman replied two weeks later, as honestly as he could: “With reference to M. L. King, Jr., I know him casually. He has made a good record here in the university and I understand that he is a good preacher. I do not know anything about his experience with students. But, of course, a man has to start some time. Sue [Sue Bailey Thurman, Thurman’s wife] has had some conversations with King and is very much impressed with him.” But then Thurman goes on to suggest another candidate, another African American Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, might be a better fit for the dean of chapel position. This man would have a significant career as a preacher, theologian and dean of chapel, but he was not, of course, in subsequent renown, another Martin Luther King, Jr.

So, surely, I concluded, when I first read this exchange of letters, this changed the course of history. Dent’s original letter was sent exactly one year to the day before, on 1 December, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, setting into motion a chain of events that would result in King being selected as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. It was this position that catapulted him within a matter of months to national leadership in the civil rights movement, and from thence on a path that made him, within a few short years, arguably, the most famous American of his generation. By the time he would have turned 60, the annual commemoration of his birthday was a national holiday. But surely all of this required King being in the right place, Montgomery, Alabama, at the right time, early December 1955, for him to discover his true vocation, which was not as an academic theologian, but a civil rights leader. What if Thurman had been effusive in his praise of King, and didn’t recommend an alternative candidate? How would history be different, if Thurman had strongly praised King on 1 December 1955?

The short answer is that the letter didn’t really change much. President Dent had been somewhat misinformed. While King had not yet finished his dissertation, he had left Boston in the fall of 1954, having been hired as the new minister at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. And despite Thurman’s guarded enthusiasm, King, along with Thurman’s other candidate, did interview for the position at Dillard, and neither man was hired. It seems unlikely that King would have been tempted to leave a few months into his prestigious position at Dexter Avenue. In any event, he was not in need of a job.

There are two questions this little episode poses. First, why didn’t Thurman provide a more glowing recommendation? Was Thurman obtuse, or was King simply not that impressive? We don’t know, but Thurman clearly knew the other candidate better than King. He had been his student, and was impressed with his intellect and character. Perhaps he felt, as he implied in his response to Dent, that King, at 25, was a bit too young to become dean of chapel, and needed a deeper resume. King did not, as Thurman points out, have any experience with college students. Thurman’s favored candidate was a decade older. If Thurman did not take the full measure of the young King, perhaps it was because King still had some growing up to do. Reading the biographies of King there was relatively little indication, in December 1954, of the extraordinary career he would soon enjoy. Surely King’s career was a case of having greatness thrust upon him, and thereby realizing his destiny. For Thurman, in December 1954, King was simply one of many promising Ph.D. candidates. The two men would subsequently grow closer.

But the bigger question is whether history have been different if Martin Luther King Jr. had been in New Orleans rather than Montgomery in December 1955? I think it is reasonable to assume that, like most of the great historical accomplishments, it would have unfolded more or less along the same trajectory, with him or without him; India would have achieved its independence without Gandhi, South Africa its freedom without Mandela, and even without Einstein, someone would have discovered the principles of relativity. (Though this doesn’t apply to artistic achievements, obviously; no Shakespeare, no Hamlet.)

For some this is reason enough to argue that King’s role in the history of the civil rights movement has been exaggerated. There have been many books, gently or not so gently debunking the thesis of his centrality, arguing the “real history” of the civil rights movement, its “grass roots” essence lies elsewhere. And at the same time, the scholarship on King and his writings, parsing every word and utterance, is also flourishing. For me, these different approaches to King are ultimately complementary; the question of what the civil rights movement would have been, absent King, is ultimately a question of historical metaphysics, since what happened, happened. King’s role, neither exaggerated or minimized, needs to be studied with as much precision, and without piety, as is possible.

The ultimate significance of the letters between Thurman and Dent is the mystery of the interaction between the workings of broad historical processes and the course of an individual life. Lives can only be read retrospectively, and no one in December, 1954, least of all King himself, could have guessed what the next decade and a half would bring. When Howard Thurman, in 1979, near the end of his life, published his autobiography, he concluded it with the following words: “No one shares the secret of a life, no one enters the heart of its mystery. . . . Always we are on the outside of our story, always we are beggars who seek entrance to the kingdom of our dwelling place.”

And no one shares the secret of how a life interacts with the great social forces that surround it, and how a life is shaped and shapes those social realities. This is the great mystery of the civil rights movement, how ordinary people, from all walks of life, found themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and rose to the occasion. And in this way, perhaps, King was no different from thousands, from millions of others.

Peter Eisenstadt is the senior associate editor at the Howard Thurman Papers Project at Boston University.

Dec. 2, 1982: Doctors implant the first permanent artificial heart in a human, Barney Clark, who lives 112 days with it

Barney Clark’s heart was made of plastic — and instead of beating, it whooshed.

The 61-year-old retired dentist was in an advanced stage of cardiomyopathy, a progressive weakening of the heart muscle, when he became the first recipient of a permanent artificial heart on this day, Dec. 2, in 1982.

Heart transplants were already being done to prolong lives, but in a limited, last-resort way. Surgeons accomplished the first human-to-human transplant in South Africa in 1967, when a man with severe heart damage received the heart of a 25-year-old woman who had died in a car crash. He survived 18 days. In 1977, after new immunosuppressant drugs dramatically increased the odds of survival, the first recipient of a heart transplant at Columbia University’s Medical Center — one of only three institutions in the country performing the surgery at the time — survived 14 months.

But Clark was 11 years too old to be a candidate for a heart transplant, according to the criteria U.S. surgeons had by then agreed on. His only shot at survival was Dr. Robert Jarvik’s pneumatically-powered heart. The Jarvik 7, as it was called, comprised two plastic pumps powered by compressed air, which required the patient to be hooked up at all times to a rolling console the size and weight of a refrigerator. The artificial heart could pump blood through the body at 40 to 120 pulses per minute, but it replaced the telltale heartbeat with a soft clicking sound followed by a whoosh.

Clark knew what he was in for: before agreeing to the operation, he first toured a facility where Jarvik’s hearts were keeping several sheep and calves alive, including a calf named Tennyson who set the survival record of 268 days, according to TIME.

He met the requirements for the surgery by having a fatal heart condition, with no other treatment alternatives, as well as a strong will to live. By the time of the surgery, he was nearly dead already: his heart was pumping a liter of blood per minute, or a fifth the normal rate.

The surgery was considered a success, since Clark went on to live another 112 days. A surgeon told TIME that his color had changed, from blue to pink, after more oxygen infused his blood. There were hitches, however. A week after the surgery, he suffered a series of seizures his doctors blamed on an imbalance of fluids and salts. Following the seizures, he was often disoriented, and sometimes believed he was still a dentist in Seattle.

He never left the hospital after his transplant, and ultimately died of “circulatory collapse and secondary multi-organ system failure” triggered by an infection that was likely the result of a blood transfusion, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

Later recipients fared somewhat better with the Jarvik 7. William Schroeder lived a record 620 days with one, although his quality of life was poor after he suffered serious strokes within the first three weeks. Another recipient, Leif Stenberg, made remarkable progress with his new heart, and lived 229 days before suffering a fatal stroke.

Stenberg’s renewed vigor was a triumph fraught with unexpected philosophical considerations. Long suspected of being a powerful Swedish crime boss, he was never convicted of any crime, partly because his health problems delayed a trial on charges of tax evasion. But the transplant led to a new delay, since Swedish law defined death as the moment when one’s heart stopped beating. Stenberg’s attorneys, therefore, argued that he should not have to stand trial, since he was already dead.

Read the full report on Barney Clark’s operation from 1982, here in the TIME Vault: Living on Borrowed Time

The letter, sent to Kerouac before he wrote the Beat classic, will be put up for auction

In December 1950, Jack Kerouac got a letter from his friend Neal Cassady, which recounted a wild weekend in Denver that included climbing out a window to escape the discovery of his affair with a babysitter. According to Kerouac, it was this letter that inspired him to write On the Road in the energetic, disruptive way he did. Also according to Kerouac, this famed epistle had probably been dropped off the side of a houseboat decades ago, never to be held or read ever again.

It turns out Kerouac was, happily, wrong.

The letter, discovered in Oakland—in a box of forgotten submissions to a publishing house—has been recovered in its entire 18 single-spaced pages. The woman who found the so-called “Joan Anderson letter” is putting it up for auction on Dec. 17, the same day it was dated by Cassady 64 years ago. “I never thought it would be discovered,” says John Tytell, a American literature professor at Queens College. “And it’s a fluke that it was.”

Jean Spinosa, a 41-year-old performance artist based in L.A., lost her father in 2011. Digging through his “hoarder-level” belongings in Oakland the next year, she came across several boxes he had inherited from a now defunct publisher called Golden Goose Press. Her father’s music label had shared a small office with the man who ran Golden Goose, Richard Emerson. One day, she says, Emerson decided to close up shop and announced his intention to throw everything out, including boxes full of unopened poems and letters sent in by hopeful authors.

“He just didn’t care. He was going to throw it in the trash,” Spinosa tells TIME, speaking at the Beat Museum in San Francisco, where the entire letter was displayed on Dec. 1 for the first time since its discovery was made public in November. “And my dad, being a little bit of a hoarder that he was, said ‘Those are poems. Why would you throw out anyone’s poems?’” Emerson told him he was free to keep them, and he did.

The Joan Anderson letter, nicknamed after a girlfriend Cassady writes about in the 16,000-word epistle, was enshrined in history as more than just a letter in 1968. That was the year Kerouac did an interview with the Paris Review and this exchange occurred:

INTERVIEWER

What encouraged you to use the “spontaneous” style of On the Road?

KEROUAC

I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed … The letter, the main letter I mean, was forty thousand words long, mind you, a whole short novel. It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves … Neal and I called it, for convenience, the Joan Anderson Letter.

Kerouac goes on to explain that the letter was so great, he lent it to his friend Allen Ginsberg, who then shopped it around to publishers. The first was a man named Gerd Stern, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, just to the north of San Francisco. Stern rejected it and, Kerouac imagined in the interview, “This fellow lost the letter: overboard I presume.” What really happened, according to research conducted by Spinosa and the auction house selling the letter, is that Stern gave the letter back to Ginsberg, who then gave it to Emerson for his consideration. “Emerson never read it,” Spinosa says, “and Allen forgot about it.” (Kerouac was also clearly off about the word count.)

The sudden appearance of a long-presumed-dead letter is thrilling for Kerouac obsessors and Beat Generation scholars, who see it as a missing link that may detail how On the Road got made. “I’ve always thought that this letter was crucial to establishing the connection between Neal Cassady’s speech pattern, which was rapid and steeped in the vernacular and unbelievably free, and the source of Kerouac’s inspiration,” Tytell says. “He had broken through to discover something very new, and that letter, that lost letter, I knew was tremendously important.”

About a third of the letter had been copied, presumably by Kerouac, and survived. The rest, left to be imagined, became “mythology” long ago, says Nancy Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. “We’ll have to see the letter and see his style in the letter to really be able to tell if it was as influential as the mythology leads us to believe.”

At the Beat Museum in San Francisco, a place where the seats of chairs are ripping and the carpet has some holes, reporters set up their cameras on Monday for a view of the letter arranged in a glass case. Even though they could see the whole pile of pages, the sheets had been arranged to obscure most of the newly rescued words—because, a representative from the auction house explained, while Spinosa owns the letter, the Cassady estate still retains copyright for publishing the work. That will remain true for the buyer who wins the letter later this month.

One hopeful bidder, announced in the midst of the press gathering, is the Beat Museum itself. The largest permanent institution dedicated to the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg—just blocks from their hallowed City Lights bookstore—started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for purchasing the letter. “This has to be out in the world,” says Jerry Cimino, who runs the museum and uses phrases like dig this. “This was their stomping grounds.” In the auction, which will be run by Profiles In History, a house that specializes in Hollywood memorabilia, the lot containing the letter will have a reserve price of $300,000.

Regardless of who wins, at least one man will be happy: Gerd Stern, the fellow who had long been blamed, along with Ginsberg, for losing the letter. As soon as Cimino was allowed to share the news that the letter had been discovered, he called his friend Stern, who now lives in New Jersey. “He goes, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!’ He must have said it 10 times,” Cimino says. “And he laughed the longest laugh I’ve ever heard.”

Think the past was oppressive and the present is debauched? Think again

It was January 1964, and America was on the brink of cultural upheaval. In less than a month, the Beatles would land at JFK for the first time, providing an outlet for the hormonal enthusiasms of teenage girls everywhere. The previous spring, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, giving voice to the languor of middle-class housewives and kick-starting second-wave feminism in the process. In much of the country, the Pill was still only available to married women, but it had nonetheless become a symbol of a new, freewheeling sexuality.

And in the offices of TIME, at least one writer was none too happy about it. The United States was undergoing an ethical revolution, the magazine argued in an un-bylined 5000-word cover essay, which had left young people morally at sea.

The article depicted a nation awash in sex: in its pop music and on the Broadway stage, in the literature of writers like Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, and in the look-but-don’t-touch boudoir of the Playboy Club, which had opened four years earlier. “Greeks who have grown up with the memory of Aphrodite can only gape at the American goddess, silken and seminude, in a million advertisements,” the magazine declared.

But of greatest concern was the “revolution of [social] mores” the article described, which meant that sexual morality, once fixed and overbearing, was now “private and relative” – a matter of individual interpretation. Sex was no longer a source of consternation but a cause for celebration; its presence not what made a person morally suspect, but rather its absence.

The essay may have been published half a century ago, but the concerns it raises continue to loom large in American culture today. TIME’s 1964 fears about the long-term psychological effects of sex in popular culture (“no one can really calculate the effect this exposure is having on individual lives and minds”) mirror today’s concerns about the impacts of internet pornography and Miley Cyrus videos. Its descriptions of “champagne parties for teenagers” and “padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds” could have been lifted from any number of contemporary articles on the sexualization of children.

We can see the early traces of the late-2000s panic about “hook-up culture” in its observations about the rise of premarital sex on college campuses. Even the legal furors it details feel surprisingly contemporary. The 1964 story references the arrest of a Cleveland mother for giving information about birth control to “her delinquent daughter.” In September 2014, a Pennsylvania mother was sentenced to a minimum of 9 months in prison for illegally purchasing her 16-year-old daughter prescription medication to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

But what feels most modern about the essay is its conviction that while the rebellions of the past were necessary and courageous, today’s social changes have gone a bridge too far. The 1964 editorial was titled “The Second Sexual Revolution” — a nod to the social upheavals that had transpired 40 years previously, in the devastating wake of the First World War, “when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and anointed itself as the Jazz Age.” Back then, TIME argued, young people had something truly oppressive to rise up against. The rebels of the 1960s, on the other hand, had only the “tattered remnants” of a moral code to defy. “In the 1920s, to praise sexual freedom was still outrageous,” the magazine opined, “today sex is simply no longer shocking.”

Today, the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s are typically portrayed as brave and daring, and their predecessors in the 1920s forgotten. But the overarching story of an oppressive past and a debauched, out-of-control present has remained consistent. As Australian newspaper The Age warned in 2009: “[m]any teenagers and young adults have turned the free-sex mantra of the 1970s into a lifestyle, and older generations simply don’t have a clue.”

The truth is that the past is neither as neutered, nor the present as sensationalistic, as the stories we tell ourselves about each of them suggest. Contrary to the famous Philip Larkin poem, premarital sex did not begin in 1963. The “revolution” that we now associate with the late 1960s and early 1970s was more an incremental evolution: set in motion as much by the publication of Marie Stopes’s Married Love in 1918, or the discovery that penicillin could be used to treat syphilis in 1943, as it was by the FDA’s approval of the Pill in 1960. The 1950s weren’t as buttoned up as we like to think, and nor was the decade that followed them a “free love” free-for-all.

Similarly, the sex lives of today’s teenagers and twentysomethings are not all that different from those of their Gen Xer and Boomer parents. A study published in The Journal of Sex Research this year found that although young people today are more likely to have sex with a casual date, stranger or friend than their counterparts 30 years ago were, they do not have any more sexual partners — or for that matter, more sex — than their parents did.

This is not to say that the world is still exactly as it was in 1964. If moralists then were troubled by the emergence of what they called “permissiveness with affection” — that is, the belief that love excused premarital sex – such concerns now seem amusingly old-fashioned. Love is no longer a prerequisite for sexual intimacy; and nor, for that matter, is intimacy a prerequisite for sex. For people born after 1980, the most important sexual ethic is not about how or with whom you have sex, but open-mindedness. As one young man amongst the hundreds I interviewed for my forthcoming book on contemporary sexual politics, a 32-year-old call-center worker from London, put it, “Nothing should be seen as alien, or looked down upon as wrong.”

But America hasn’t transformed into the “sex-affirming culture” TIME predicted it would half a century ago, either. Today, just as in 1964, sex is all over our TV screens, in our literature and infused in the rhythms of popular music. A rich sex life is both a necessity and a fashion accessory, promoted as the key to good health, psychological vitality and robust intimate relationships. But sex also continues to be seen as a sinful and corrupting force: a view that is visible in the ongoing ideological battles over abortion and birth control, the discourses of abstinence education, and the treatment of survivors of rape and sexual assault.

If the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s made a mistake, it was in assuming that these two ideas – that sex is the origin of all sin, and that it is the source of human transcendence – were inherently opposed, and that one could be overcome by pursuing the other. The “second sexual revolution” was more than just a change in sexual behavior. It was a shift in ideology: a rejection of a cultural order in which all kinds of sex were had (un-wed pregnancies were on the rise decades before the advent of the Pill), but the only type of sex it was acceptable to have was married, missionary and between a man and a woman. If this was oppression, it followed that doing the reverse — that is to say, having lots of sex, in lots of different ways, with whomever you liked — would be freedom.

But today’s twentysomethings aren’t just distinguished by their ethic of openmindedness. They also have a different take on what constitutes sexual freedom; one that reflects the new social rules and regulations that their parents and grandparents unintentionally helped to shape.

Millennials are mad about slut-shaming, homophobia and rape culture, yes. But they are also critical of the notion that being sexually liberated means having a certain type — and amount — of sex. “There is still this view that having sex is an achievement in some way,” observes Courtney, a 22-year-old digital media strategist living in Washington DC. “But I don’t want to just be sex-positive. I want to be ‘good sex’-positive.” And for Courtney, that means resisting the temptation to have sex she doesn’t want, even it having it would make her seem (and feel) more progressive.

Back in 1964, TIME observed a similar contradiction in the battle for sexual freedom, noting that although the new ethic had alleviated some of pressure to abstain from sex, the “competitive compulsion to prove oneself an acceptable sexual machine” had created a new kind of sexual guilt: the guilt of not being sexual enough.

For all our claims of openmindedness, both forms of anxiety are still alive and well today – and that’s not just a function of either excess or repression. It’s a consequence of a contradiction we are yet to find a way to resolve, and which lies at the heart of sexual regulation in our culture: the sense that sex can be the best thing or the worst thing, but it is always important, always significant, and always central to who we are.

It’s a contradiction we could still stand to challenge today, and doing so might just be key to our ultimate liberation.

Rachel Hills is a New York-based journalist who writes on gender, culture, and the politics of everyday life. Her first book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2015.

Sign Up for and more view example view example

Read next: How I Learned About Sex