I have always been afraid of watching the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
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.
Mr. Goodbar is a deeply anxious picture of post-revolution sexual guilt
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.
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