If you were born in the United States before, say, 1974, "Make Love Not War" is one of the most intimate histories you can read. All of us were either adult participants or child/adult observers of the so-called sexual revolution, an era that began with the legalization of birth control in the early 1960s and proceeded with the invention of the Pill, the miniskirt, the R-rated movie, the practice of wife swapping, non-sexist sexual cohabitation, gay liberation, American bestiality and -- what have you.

David Allyn didn't interview me and he probably didn't interview you, but our experience is as valid as anyone else's. The fun of reading "Make Love Not War" is bouncing our personal histories against Allyn's "official" one to see what he got right.

Or wrong.

And mostly Allyn gets it wrong. Not factually, but in spirit. Right off the bat Allyn assigns too much cultural importance to the topless bathing suit, as if this slight cultural gift from France were somehow equal in importance to or even responsible for the invention of the Pill. But this slip is just a judgment call -- after all, the kid wasn't born back then.

But as you read on you realize that Allyn has an edge to most everything he's chronicling, be it urban swinging or suburban orgies or the whole concept of "worry-free" sex. Allyn doesn't appear to be a prude. Something else is going on. By the time this historian has reached Alex Comfort's '70s American bible, "The Joy of Sex," it hits you:

Allyn is just really pissed off.

His latent anger at the sexual revolution is not because he was too young to be a sexually active participant. Allyn writes from the view of a neglected child. But this doesn't invalidate his history. Instead, it makes the book more fascinating. "Make Love, Not War" is the first salvo from a children's crusade opposed to any era that prefers adult pleasures to those of its children.

In your book, you say most of the pleasure of sex comes from talking about having had it -- shall you and I have some fun?

Excellent.

When did you begin writing this cultural chronicle?

It was my history dissertation at Harvard. I started graduate school in the fall of '91. I began it the summer of my second year. I'll let you do the math.

So for most of the 1990s you've been a sex historian?

Kind of weird, huh?

What's that like?

It's driven everyone else crazy. A friend recently told me that for years he avoided going to lunch with me because he didn't want to have to answer personal questions about his sex life.

So, as a historian, why are you so pissed off about the sexual revolution?

Oh. [Pause.] See, I really didn't want it to come across that way.

Have people been saying this?

[Pause.] Only you. Some reviewers thought I was extraordinarily liberal. It's funny, the reviewers have spanned the spectrum. The Washington Post reviewer said I was a champion for sexual revolution. And the New York Times said I was not an erotic partisan. It's been interesting that way. I just wanted to present a nuanced view because people have different experiences.

But you end the book with an experience of your angry peers -- children whose parents went through the sexual revolution. Like the girl whose mother missed the kid's school play because of an appointment with a sex therapist.

What I was trying to say was the attention of the culture wasn't on kids. The attention of the culture was on adults. And one's own pleasure as an adult. And one's own needs. There's nothing wrong with that, but what was missing was a certain amount of attention on kids as well. Kids have different needs and different expectations.

I'm eternally grateful for the transformation of our society. In 1965 birth control was illegal in the state of Connecticut. I hope to God we don't go back to that.

What did you observe your parents doing? I assume they weren't wife swapping.

My parents got divorced when I was about 4. My father moved to a singles colony down near Atlanta and then moved to L.A. He dated lots of flight attendants. And my mom went to Club Med and met a man and fell in love and got married.

As your generation's first historian of your parents' sex lives, what was the relationship between the sexual revolution and divorce?

You started to see your parents as sexual beings at a much earlier age -- when they're dating other people. I used to go on my father's dates. It was impossible not to see him in a sexual light. He had a water bed and the whole thing. That definitely had an impact.

I used to hang out at my aunt and uncle's apartment on Central Park West. And there were a lot of erotic photographs around that had been taken in the 1960s. And "The Joy of Sex" was always there. I loved that. That was always fun. So I definitely felt the whole swirl of the sexual revolution in my life. I remember when I was a teenager my stepmother said to me, "Every time you call I'm hoping you're calling to tell me that you've lost your virginity." [Pause.] I didn't need to know that.

So your generation didn't have to sneak around when you were kids?

The only thing I kept secret was gay pornography. I wasn't gay, but gay porn seemed so forbidden.

Glam rock was a big deal when I was 13 -- David Bowie, "Take a Walk On the Wild Side." It was so cool that I decided I wanted to be gay even though I still hid Playboy magazine under my mattress. It didn't occur to me that this meant you had sex with men not girls. Since I wasn't having sex with anyone, this concept was beyond me. Homosexuals just seemed the ultimate rebels.

That's a great story. I wish I'd interviewed you. I talk a little about that sense of possibility that people had at the time and the real desire to break down polar opposites, very simplistic notions of sexual identity.

People thought that it was really going to happen -- that you could find a rational approach to sex. That you could abolish jealousy. You could abolish all of our hang-ups and shame and fear. And that was the national conversation at the time. I think that is gone. I think people have found there are two ways to look at it. You could say people have gotten resigned, or you could say people got realistic.

I think there were two sexual revolutions in the 1960s/'70s. There was the practical revolution, which was gay rights and birth control and everything that meant in regard to dating. And the second revolution was all that theoretical "free love" stuff. Is there any historical parallel to this pair of revolutions?

There was a sexual revolution in the 1920s. It wasn't as widespread, deep -- wait, don't use that metaphor! [Laughs.] The 1920s didn't lead to as pronounced a change in behavior or in opportunity as the 1960s. You didn't have group sex clubs for heterosexuals springing up on the Upper East Side of New York. I think every historical moment is unique because it's shaped by different factors of that time that give a particular flavor and texture to it. But it wasn't the first time people advocated various forms of sexual liberation.

Do you think there's validity in the movement heralded by 1990s "modesty girl" Wendy Shalit, who wrote "Return to Modesty"?

In our popular culture there are all of these contradictions that we aren't willing to look at directly. The real revolution of the sexual revolution was the end of monogamy -- the idea that you're only supposed to have one sexual partner for life. Today, popular culture says, "You do that, and you're prudish and kind of weird." We're supposed to have multiple partners -- only one at a time -- but multiple. And not too many -- you're not supposed to have hundreds and hundreds. The culture sends out these messages.

How did the sexual revolution end?

In the late 1970s there was a very clear backlash from both the left and the right. I think that people felt the country was in decline for all sorts of reasons, from the decline of the economy and the decline of the inner city, and sex was an easy target. The right attacked sex-education books and gay rights and the left went after pornography. That's also part of the legacy -- anyone who's under 40 now grew up in a time when the left and right were going after sex. So sex was still very charged in that way.

The neglect you felt as a kid is reflected symbolically at the end of your book. The last gasp of sexual liberation -- "nothing is forbidden, everything is possible" -- was to demand the acceptance of pedophilia. You could almost say, metaphorically, all those sexually "liberated" adults were about to fuck you kids, but then -- just in the nick of time -- their revolution went kaput.

There were several radical feminists in the last of the '60s and early '70s who actually advocated eroticism between children and adults because they were trying to be philosophically consistent. Andrea Dworkin said that we needed to break down all of our taboos. We needed to allow for the natural eroticism between children and adults, and animals and adults, animals and children, and break down the incest taboo. When I read that in Andrea Dworkin, I thought, "Wow."

She backed down quite a bit since then.

She did. What happened was she got a phone call from Mary Daly, the professor at Boston College, who said, "'You don't really want to be saying those things. You have no idea how seriously the damage is that can be caused by this." Dworkin backed down. I'm of the belief if Andrea Dworkin hadn't gotten so famous for her anti-pornography campaign, she would have backed away from that as well.

But taboos have value, don't you think?

That sounds like a loaded question.

Sex wouldn't be as interesting as it is if there weren't taboos.

Maybe. I'm leery of taking that argument too far. Life may be more interesting under a Stalin-like regime -- it might be more exciting; there's the passion of being a true rebel. But I don't happen to want to live under Stalin.

But I don't want to live under anarchy either. In order to have democracy you do have to have some rules. Some taboos.

How old is your kid?

My daughter is 18 months.

So you've got a long time before you need to worry.

About her having sex?

And shepherding her through whatever they will be doing in 2018.

I definitely get confronted by that. I think of myself as easygoing and open-minded. Then I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and go, "Wow." I do believe in stasis. I don't think we should be trying to hide things from kids, but we need basins of innocence. I think that there is time for innocence. Do I sound like a conservative?

No. Believe it or not, I remember once being truly innocent myself. In seventh grade, me and my first girlfriend would play tennis in a handball court and kinda accidentally-on-purpose hit the balls over the wall so we could go back there and smooch a bit. That's all we did. It never occurred to us there was more to do than that.

That's so sweet.

I'm sure eventually we would have figured out the next steps, but my parents found out what was going on and freaked. They couldn't see that I was a true innocent.

Every time I watch a Disney film I feel that way. I love that stuff.

On the other hand, it's probably healthy that there's an opposition between your parents and your sexuality.

What do you mean?

I wouldn't have wanted my father to have been helping me out. You yourself couldn't actually have a girl spend the night, could you?

I never tried to do that. The first time I had sex I thought to myself, Wow! Now I see why parents don't want their kids doing this. It almost seemed so animalistic. Our whole civilization is built around this pretense that we don't go to the bathroom and we don't masturbate and we don't have sex like animals do.

The one thing in your book I think is completely wrong is the next to last paragraph: "Much if not most of the pleasure associated with sex comes not from having sex, but from talking about having sex."

That's what you started with. The Chicago Tribune didn't think I was right about that either.

I think you've truly missed the boat, my friend, if you think yakking about sex is more pleasurable than doing it firsthand.

I think what I wanted to stress there, and what I didn't stress, was talking about it mostly with yourself. I wrote, "Talking about ..." and then I put "even with one's self" in parenthesis. I should have dropped the parenthesis. It's the conversation with yourself where I think a lot of the pleasure lies. And you may not be aware of the conversation. Maybe the conversation has been around in your head for so long it's just part of who you are.

But the "animal nature" you mentioned earlier is beyond civilization, beyond words. Talking about sex is only necessary if you yourself aren't getting any, and your generous and wilder friends let you live vicariously through talking about their adventures.

I didn't mean it quite that literally -- the talking about it. The notion of the conversation. It's a little more metaphorical than that.