Did 'Make Love' mean something different in the '50s?

Factual Questions
1

Me and my wife were watching some film noir involving arsenic poisoning from 1953 this afternoon (I cannot recall the title, however). There’s this woman who poisoned her husband and her stepdaughter but nobody can prove it, she’s probably going to poison her stepson too (to get at some trust that was left as an inheritance) and after the case against her gets thrown out, she goes on a cruise to Europe. The protagonist, who is the brother of the murdered husband, decides to go on the same cruise to try and stop her by poisoning her himself, pretending to have fallen for her as a cover. Well, she finds out later and is chewing him out over it, and says something like ‘Even while you were making love to me, you were conspiring’. I go ‘Ooh! She did the dirty with him! Bad girl!’ and my wife tells me I’m silly, that ‘making love’ didn’t mean the same thing back then. I told her I was pretty sure that it did, and asked her what she thought they meant by it. She said it meant sweet talking and general romancing, not sex.

OK, which one of us is right? I know that films in the '50s and earlier sometimes referred to such things - a few days before I watched a movie from 1956 where a man calls a woman a slut.

BTW, I gave so many details about the movie in case somebody knew which one I was talking about, may be important.

2

“Making love” meant sexual intercourse well before the 1950s.

3

The term “love making” or “making love” used to refer to the entire wooing and courting process. Only in more recent times has it begun to refer exclusively to the physical act of intercourse.

4

Going back to the 1930s, ‘make love’ usually meant the process of courting or seducing. A number of films and novels used the phrase that way.

 In one DOC SAVAGE pulp, Monk asks the morally irreproachable Doc to get a woman off his back by making love to her. The editors at that time would not allow a suggestion that the Man of Bronze  would have casual sex with a woman.

 Many phrases change meaning over time. "Gay' is an example, as in "Don we now our gay apparel". Once the new meaning takes hold, the original is usually lost. There actually was a phrase meaning to loan money that went "I'll blow you for a drink." When you hear this in an old movie, you sort of sit upand blink.
5

Example here… We were watching “I Love Lucy” one night and there was a scene in a diner where Fred and Ethel were arguing. Lucy told them to cut it out and not spoil the night. Ethel said something to the effect of “We’re not arguing, this is how we make love.” Of course, back then they could not even say that Lucy was pregnant, much less make an outright sex reference. Thus, “make love” meant sweet talk, flirting, random acts of romance, etc.

I don’t think Fred and Ethel ever got the groove on, anyway.

SF

6

I saw an episode of the ‘I Love Lucy’ show where either Lucy or Ethel said something about your marriage going downhill when your husband could finish anything in under 10 minutes. I thought this was a pretty sly double-entendre.

7

Well, in the 19th century, “make love” referred to sweet talking, etc. I don’t think it was used as a eupemism for intercourse.

8

Its hard to imagine the studio putting out a film that clearly meant let’s fuck in 1960. It would be interesting to see the lyrics to the title song but a quick search left me empty handed. I suspect it described more innocent courting behavior though perhaps by then it had a more risque meaning to some.

9

“Make love, not war” !

Websters:
–make love 1 : WOO, COURT 2 a : NECK, PET b : to engage in sexual intercourse

“make love” has a few definitions, according to my dictionary, a very handy thing.

10

But it doesn’t tell us when they added the definitions. Got a 1950 copy?

11

“It’s George Bailey, mother. He’s making mad, passionate love to me!”

and

“Everyone should have a hobby. Mine is making love.”

I refuse to belive that Donna Reed and Pepe LePew (respectively) would say such things if the phrase weren’t completely innocent.

:putting hands over ears and ignoring all subsequent responses:

12

The difference can make for very amusing reading of older books. In Jane Austen’s Emma, there’s a line that says something like, “As soon as the carriage began moving, he commenced making violent love to her” (paraphrased, because I don’t have the book with me).

13

Exactly!

I have long maintained that this is the key to the meaning shift in the phrase “make love.”

Signs with this phrase were (at least in the popular imagination – I’m sure at some point in real life, too) carried by protesting hippies beginning in the mid-1960s. “Free love” (in the definite sense of doing the nasty) was also associated with this same group. Thus, “to make love” shifted from its previous meaning of “to romance or woo” to it’s present, unambiguous sense.

Examples from movies have been cited so far…to these I can add examples from popular songs:

  1. “Don’t Worry, Baby” – The Beach Boys, June 1964…

“Oh what she does to me, when she makes love to me”
2) “Under the Boardwalk” – The Drifters, July 1964…

“Under the boardwalk, we’ll be making love”
No way in 1964 did this mean “When she lets me stick my schlong into her pussy” or “We’ll be stripping off our bathing suits and humping in full view of everyone else who’s decided to catch some shade under the boardwalk too.”
Of course, I thought I had this all tied up into a nice, neat, little theory. Unfortunately, a couple of flies got tossed into the ointment.

It turns out that two versions of “Under the Boardwalk” exist: a single (mono) version and an album (stereo) version. One contains the lyrics as quoted above. The other version replaces all instances of “we’ll be making love” with “We’ll be falling in love.”

Now I’m confused myself as to which one is which, and which was actually played on the radio at the time. I THING the “making love” version was the single, but I need to look into this further, but at least we can surmise that there was some sensitivity somewhere along the line to using “we’ll be making love” in this manner.
The second fly: I happened to catch parts of the movie “A Summer Place” on TV a year or so ago (dreadful film, by the way). At one point, Sandra Dee’s character is talking to Troy Donahue’s about her parents, and asks “Do you think they make love?”

In the context of the film (as well as subsequent events between the two frisky youngsters), it’s very apparent what she means when she says this. “A Summer Place” was released in 1959.

So it would appear that the term “making love” may have gone through a time of having both meanings, before settling more permanently on the second one.

Anyway, it’s always been a very interesting linguistic question to me. I look forward to others’ thoughts and contributions.

14

I definitely remember the radio version of “Under the Boardwalk” as having the “falling in love” lyrics. I was taken aback years later when I heard the “making love” version on Oldies stations. It certainly changes the meaning of the song.

It was a relativley common practice in the 50’s & 60’s to have alternate versions of some songs cleaned up for air play. This could be one of those cases. I never owned either the single or album versions of the song and cannot verify if either one was different from the radio version.

15

To clarify, one version has both “falling in love” and “making love,” depending on what verse is being sung. The other version has “falling in love” throughout.

What you say makes more sense, i.e., that they would have issued a “cleaned up” version for AM radio and for the single. (I don’t believe there are three versions; i.e., album, single, and special promo single for radio play only. As far as I know, there were only two.)

Most Oldies stations today play the stereo version of a song, even if it’s an entirely different recording from the one that was actually played on AM radio back when it was a hit. (Examples of this abound, but that’s another thread!)

So it’s more likely that you hear the “making love” version today, whereas the original single didn’t have this phrase. I will look into this further tonight.

16

Sorry Badtz: Your wife is right.

In one of the later Oz books (ca: 1900-1910), one of the girl characters “makes love” to one of the bad-guys. Also, in one of the Narnia books (I think The Silver Chair) Jill “makes love” to their evil giant captors. I find it pretty unlikely that Lewis and or Baum would have meant anything other than “sweet talk”.

(although it does conjur up some amusing mental images)

Fenris

17

Would you settle for a 1948? :slight_smile:

My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Fifth Edition, 1948) does not contain “make love.” It contains zillions of “make x” constructions, but not that one. Sorry.

18

It really is unfortunate that post-modern man can think of no other definition for “make love” than the physical act of intercourse.

::sigh::

19

From The Court Jester, 1956, starring Danny Kaye and a very young and ripe Angela Lansbury:

Griselda the witch puts Hawkins (Kaye) under a spell:

“Go and make love to the princess!” (The princess being said Lansbury)

He proceeds to do so by sneaking into her chamber and plighting his troth: reciting poetry to her, kissing her up and down the arm a la Gomez Addams, pledging his undying love, etc., etc.

(“I am craven and thou art my master!”)

20

Aaaaauuuuugh! Like I needed that mental image. Vivian Vance was cute but after thinking about William Frawley doin’ it to her I think I’m going to have to scrub my brain with Ajax! Where is Hannibal Lecter and his head saw when you really need him?