"The Real Worth and Dignity of Human Sexuality": Open Marriage, Authenticity, and the Politics of Intimacy in the 1970s

In the 1970s, the Sandstone Retreat in the Santa Monica Mountains was known for nudity and group sex. Famously chronicled in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Sandstone is the most iconic symbol of the “Me Decade” experiments with swinging and open marriages. Yet the retreat itself, and many who advocated various kinds of polyamory at the time, saw open relationships as not simply personal, private matters. Rather than self-indulgence and hedonism, non-monogamy was instead a critique of conventional marital expectations and a solution to social ills like patriarchy, high divorce rates, and alienation. Much like the communal living experiments of the 1960s, open relationships were to embody the possibility of a more egalitarian and authentic society.

This paper uses advice books, reporting, and other published materials on swinging and open relationships, as well as archival materials on Sandstone and other organizations promoting non-monogamy, to consider the politics of polyamory in the 1970s. The widespread interest in (if not necessarily practice of) open marriage reflects, as historian Nancy Cott suggests, the growing sphere of privacy around intimate relationships in the latter decades of the twentieth century. But these “alternative lifestyles” also represented a politicization of that same private sphere, as they were supposed to create social change through extra-marital sexual pleasure, sensuality, and honest communication. Rather than simply being emblematic of 1970s narcissism, swingers instead offer us a window into the subtle ways conceptions of the self, society, intimacy, and authenticity were interconnected during the later phases of the sexual revolution.