What Happened to 'The Most Liberated Woman in America'?

June 24, 2016 7:35 AM

Barbara Williamson co-founded one of the most famous radical sex experiments of the 1970s. Then she got wild.
posted by the man of twists and turns (17 comments total)

I don't think this experiment or this woman were very famous at all, except, perhaps, among some elite group the writer accepts as arbiters of notoriety. The writer is too young to have been around at the time and has a tendency to sensationalize and exaggerate.
posted by mareli at 7:56 AM on June 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Gay Talese's "My Neighbor's Wife" was a well-known and quite controversial book in its time, and Ms. Williamson was one of the central figures in it. So she has some claim to fame, I think.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 8:41 AM on June 24, 2016 [12 favorites]

Sandstone Retreat (as everyone called it) was a nudist community that promoted personal freedom through open marriage and group-sex parties.

Now I wonder if that's where John Waters came up with the name "Sandy Sandstone" for the job applicant scene in Pink Flamingos.
posted by treepour at 8:56 AM on June 24, 2016

Sorry - the title was "Thy Neighbor's Wife".
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 8:57 AM on June 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

This was lovely, well worth the read. Thank you.
posted by corb at 9:23 AM on June 24, 2016

Thanks to that lynx, I now have a Buddy Holly song in my head. Luckily, I love Buddy Holly.

As far as Williamson and her center, more power to her, but from what I've seen and heard, the type of stuff that went on and was promoted there was more heard about than actually experienced by most of the population.
posted by jonmc at 9:27 AM on June 24, 2016

So, Proto-Bobo: 'No Homo!'
posted by perhapsolutely at 9:46 AM on June 24, 2016

I can't help thinking about herpes. That probably says something about me.
posted by tuesdayschild at 12:35 PM on June 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

After I read in the FPP that Sandstone was founded by a woman, and in treepour's comment that nudism was a central tenet, I wasn't surprised to find this:

Sandstone was intended as a “therapeutic environment,” promoting (in John’s words) “honesty, sharing, and freedom from bullshit.” They were also promoting open sexuality—“but in a very relaxed, low-key sort of way.” Anyone aggressive, competitive, or sexually pushy was immediately asked to leave.
. . .

If only it were that easy. Martin Zitter, who became the retreat’s press liaison, remembers grappling with “a sense of separation or loss” from his wife Meg as each witnessed the other experimenting in the ballroom. It was challenging to be confronted with your partner having sex with another person—Barbara herself says that the pain of those possessive feelings toward her own husband never completely went away—but it was intended to be difficult. The goal was to separate the idea of sexual exclusivity from love, and tearing off that Band-Aid hurt.

In a surprise to their partners, the women proved more resilient than the men. Jonathan Dana and his then-wife Bunny co-directed a 1975 documentary called Sandstone, living on the grounds, in full participation, in order to do so. (A Dartmouth grad who’d married at 23, Jonathan was taking time off from earning a business PhD when he began his foray into filmmaking.) “The people you thought would have the easy time might have the harder time: guys bringing their wives and then discovering that they can’t handle their wives being there,” he says. “The women were ready to break out—and they had a support network from the other women there. The guys were kind of by themselves; they were still male-competitive—but the women would find themselves in demand and very nurtured.” Or in Barbara’s words: “Most of the women took to Sandstone like a duck to water!”

Whatever other level of nudity is allowed or encouraged, most cultures I've been able to look at, including non-literate tribal cultures, feature size-obscuring coverage of the adult male penis.

Almost as if one project of human culture in general is to make it difficult for a woman in the process of freely (without coercion) choosing a mate, not necessarily as a long-term partner, to see exactly what she's getting. One of the more interesting aspects of the eponymous Utopia (published in 1516 in Latin), by the way, was a custom which required a potential bride and groom to be presented to each other naked, with a right of refusal of marriage by either party.
posted by jamjam at 12:45 PM on June 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I don't think this experiment or this woman were very famous at all, except, perhaps, among some elite group the writer accepts as arbiters of notoriety.

Like people who buy books? Or know who Gay Talese is? Thy Neighbor's Wife was a blockbuster book.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:58 PM on June 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

What a wonderful read. I'd be curious to learn if others who shared the same values at the time kept them throughout the 80s - it seems as though it was a decade fuelled by the opposite.
posted by A hidden well at 7:21 PM on June 24, 2016

it seems as though it was a decade fuelled by the opposite.

In brief, yes: the personal excesses of the 70's begat the social conservative backlash of the 80's. The US economy crashed pretty hard in the late 70's, too, which also had far reaching social effects. Oh yeah, plus all that other late 70's/early 80's baggage: the Iran hostage crisis, OPEC control and rising gas prices, AIDs, failures of many US foreign policy measures, rising Cold War tensions w/the USSR and accompanying fears of nuclear annihilation, etc.

The late 70's/early 80's were like one long walk of shame following the bacchanal of the late 60's and early 70's. There was a lot of regret and second guessing of decisions and lifestyle choices. Fun times :-/
posted by mosk at 7:59 PM on June 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

I wonder if Robert and Ginny Heinlein knew these folks.
posted by gingerest at 11:42 PM on June 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

This was totally fascinating. What a great and wonderful life - so seemingly unrealistic but so full of possibilities. I also didn't expect the ending of the essay would be so dramatic.
posted by gt2 at 12:46 AM on June 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Interesting contrast to the recent post about the Oneida colony. Sandstone and the Williamsons seemed so utopian, though as if they expected their experiment to somehow naturally become self sustaining. What get me is that it sounds like it was exhausting on their part, given the rules of the community, and their independent personalities. I would think such a fundamental lack of privacy would be stressful for people so fiercely independent. Despite how seriously they took Sandstone as a kind of legitimate experiment, it's hard for me to envision how there was not an awful lot of just plain old kink involved. Especially considering what amounts to their "no fat chicks" kinds of rule, and effectively "no homos", either. And for all the openness and honesty and freedom, shedding those feelings of exclusivity and possessiveness looks to have been a hard impulse to ward off.
posted by 2N2222 at 2:06 PM on June 25, 2016

How is "plain old kink" different from a "legitimate experiment"?
posted by gingerest at 4:21 PM on June 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

How is "plain old kink" different from a "legitimate experiment"?

An actual plan? Some documentation? Were it not for Talese, Sandstone would have melded into the lore of other experiments of that specific place and time... drugs, musicians, hippies, Manson... A dream alone doesn't amount to much. It sure seems like the Williamsons had some lofty goals, and they were aware enough to try to mold Sandstone into something more than a simple swinger's pad. But perhaps they never got around to the rest of the project. At best, they could offer personal anecdotes to outsiders. All the serious observations were done by others/outsiders.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:01 PM on June 27, 2016