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The Harrad Experiment
Fictional Novel, General & Adult Fiction
Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
April 22, 2012
The Harrad Experiment is set in the 1960s, and tells of a college established to form new styles of looking at relationships. It is written in diary-style, by four of the fictional students, covering their four years there.
This is an interesting book, which at the time of its publication, was revolutionary. Keep in mind it was written when censorship was considered a good thing, by an author who had to travel to India to get a copy of the Kama Sutra.
I was surprised to learn that during the first twelve years, before it went out of print, The Harrad Experiment sold 3 million copies. It garnered a huge following, and people thought Harrad College was a real place, and clamored to attend. The author received letters from people all over. Had the internet been around, it would have spawned blogs and forums and communities.
As it stands, along with the works of Robert Heinlein, it is considered one of the founding novels that lead to the modern polyamory movement. I am polyamorous, living with two life-partners in a triad relationship, and we are raising three children. I owe my lifestyle to this book, although I didn't read it until many years after becoming poly.
I started reading this book a few years back, but found it a bit boring, perhaps because the co-ed dorms and free-love living arrangements were not so shocking to me, as a practicing poly person in the early 2000s. So the authors hook failed on me. Also I think I was also expecting something a bit more sci-fi. After about 20% in, I set it down. I just returned to it, determined to finish it no matter what.
It does get a little more interesting, and plot points *do* happen, though I still found it a bit dry. The dialog is stiff and at times, not natural, just the author speaking through his characters.
Oddly, due to the setting, culture, and subject matter, it reminded me a bit of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which is also set in a college (in the early 1970s), and I almost wonder if she was slightly influenced by The Harrad Experiment. (Not to imply Tam Lin is a novel about polyamory - it isn't, though her characters do experiment with the new sexual mores than 1973 provided them.)
Rimmer imagines a world in which sex is a product of love, deep abiding connection with other human beings, of learning the inner landscape of multiple lovers to create life-long bonds of family. He extends this idea of family to children, with the idea of creating family units for the purpose of raising happy, healthy human beings.
I found some of his approaches a bit fixated on "the right way" to do things, that all society should follow the authors ways, or perish. The book did cross the lines into being preachy. The author has his idea of what is good and right based on his personal experiences, and rules out experiences and preferences of others.
For example, he is against all forms of what he calls "sick sex", which contextually, he implies BDSM, kink, and other lifestyle variations. Some people do find deep connection and spirituality in power exchange, but he is unable to recognize this.
Likewise, he comes across as a bit homophobic, focusing on heterosexuality, and ignoring the family bonds and importance of the power of love in homosexual unions. Parts also come off a bit sexist.
This book is a product of its time, so I can't blame him too much, given that it is *still* hard to think outside those boxes in today's age.
Rimmer also has, both in the novel and in the essay at the end, a staunch anti-porn stance. This is understandable, since his goal is to rid the world of rutting, physical, mindless sex, in favor of emotional and spiritual connection. That is to be commended. Indeed, those who only understand the physical form are surely missing something, and that is indeed a huge part of sex in America today. But both types of sex have a place within a person's life and relationships.
In spite of itself, Harrad University gave off a culty vibe. It is run by a married couple, and at the end of the four years, the students seem lock-step with what the teachers have given them. The students are off to convert the world to their exact standards, with regimented rules and new laws that will solve all problems and make everyone be happy.
Rimmer has a naive view of what makes people unhappy in life, and what makes people incompatible with each other. His conclusions seem very utopian, i.e. if only the world would follow my plan, there would be no war, no divorce, no addiction, just happy children frolicking about. In fact, we are psychologically complex creatures, difficult to persuade. We clutch our childhood pain, and brandish our defense mechanisms, and all these things lead much more often to human pain than outmoded monogamy. Human beings are not healed so easily, nor are they persuaded to change their morality, no matter how much it makes sense for them to do so.
His essay at the end, and the discussions of the students in their fourth year, present some good ideas that seem really great on the surface, but with deeper thought would prove to have all sorts of unintended consequences.
After finishing this novel, I was surprised to learn two things. One, that there is a movie based on this novel, available on YouTube, which I have added to my To Watch list. And secondly, there is no Wikipedia article for the novel. And their should be, since I'm sure the history of this book, and how it was received by America, is fascinating. Rimmer's biography provided in the back of the book was not enough to sate my curiosity.
This is an interesting book, which at the time of its publication, was revolutionary. Keep in mind it was written when censorship was considered a good thing, by an author who had to travel to India to get a copy of the Kama Sutra.
I was surprised to learn that during the first twelve years, before it went out of print, The Harrad Experiment sold 3 million copies. It garnered a huge following, and people thought Harrad College was a real place, and clamored to attend. The author received letters from people all over. Had the internet been around, it would have spawned blogs and forums and communities.
As it stands, along with the works of Robert Heinlein, it is considered one of the founding novels that lead to the modern polyamory movement. I am polyamorous, living with two life-partners in a triad relationship, and we are raising three children. I owe my lifestyle to this book, although I didn't read it until many years after becoming poly.
I started reading this book a few years back, but found it a bit boring, perhaps because the co-ed dorms and free-love living arrangements were not so shocking to me, as a practicing poly person in the early 2000s. So the authors hook failed on me. Also I think I was also expecting something a bit more sci-fi. After about 20% in, I set it down. I just returned to it, determined to finish it no matter what.
It does get a little more interesting, and plot points *do* happen, though I still found it a bit dry. The dialog is stiff and at times, not natural, just the author speaking through his characters.
Oddly, due to the setting, culture, and subject matter, it reminded me a bit of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which is also set in a college (in the early 1970s), and I almost wonder if she was slightly influenced by The Harrad Experiment. (Not to imply Tam Lin is a novel about polyamory - it isn't, though her characters do experiment with the new sexual mores than 1973 provided them.)
Rimmer imagines a world in which sex is a product of love, deep abiding connection with other human beings, of learning the inner landscape of multiple lovers to create life-long bonds of family. He extends this idea of family to children, with the idea of creating family units for the purpose of raising happy, healthy human beings.
I found some of his approaches a bit fixated on "the right way" to do things, that all society should follow the authors ways, or perish. The book did cross the lines into being preachy. The author has his idea of what is good and right based on his personal experiences, and rules out experiences and preferences of others.
For example, he is against all forms of what he calls "sick sex", which contextually, he implies BDSM, kink, and other lifestyle variations. Some people do find deep connection and spirituality in power exchange, but he is unable to recognize this.
Likewise, he comes across as a bit homophobic, focusing on heterosexuality, and ignoring the family bonds and importance of the power of love in homosexual unions. Parts also come off a bit sexist.
This book is a product of its time, so I can't blame him too much, given that it is *still* hard to think outside those boxes in today's age.
Rimmer also has, both in the novel and in the essay at the end, a staunch anti-porn stance. This is understandable, since his goal is to rid the world of rutting, physical, mindless sex, in favor of emotional and spiritual connection. That is to be commended. Indeed, those who only understand the physical form are surely missing something, and that is indeed a huge part of sex in America today. But both types of sex have a place within a person's life and relationships.
In spite of itself, Harrad University gave off a culty vibe. It is run by a married couple, and at the end of the four years, the students seem lock-step with what the teachers have given them. The students are off to convert the world to their exact standards, with regimented rules and new laws that will solve all problems and make everyone be happy.
Rimmer has a naive view of what makes people unhappy in life, and what makes people incompatible with each other. His conclusions seem very utopian, i.e. if only the world would follow my plan, there would be no war, no divorce, no addiction, just happy children frolicking about. In fact, we are psychologically complex creatures, difficult to persuade. We clutch our childhood pain, and brandish our defense mechanisms, and all these things lead much more often to human pain than outmoded monogamy. Human beings are not healed so easily, nor are they persuaded to change their morality, no matter how much it makes sense for them to do so.
His essay at the end, and the discussions of the students in their fourth year, present some good ideas that seem really great on the surface, but with deeper thought would prove to have all sorts of unintended consequences.
After finishing this novel, I was surprised to learn two things. One, that there is a movie based on this novel, available on YouTube, which I have added to my To Watch list. And secondly, there is no Wikipedia article for the novel. And their should be, since I'm sure the history of this book, and how it was received by America, is fascinating. Rimmer's biography provided in the back of the book was not enough to sate my curiosity.
November 14, 2014
I first read this book back in the 60's when it was first published. At the time, it was a bold, exciting view of life as we wanted it, back in the day. I remember coming home from a date and not being able to find my copy; I asked the parents and was told they had thrown it out (and they let me read ANYTHING) because I had left "that trash out" for my younger (12 yr old) brother to read. (Who already knew all about the subject, since he was an extremely early bloomer.)
I bought another copy with my very scarce pocket money so as to finish.
Now, 40 years later, I found it again at a book sale, with "new exciting material" added. Actually, not so much.
The ideas in the book now seem so idealistic, and at the same time, so dated. At the time, co-ed living was simply not done, and even just plain living together in the "outside" world was really unusual. Now, it seems like every teenager has had many sexual experiences (or so they would have you believe), and living together is not even worthy of comment. And the idea of having to read, as 18 yr olds, various sex manuals to learn how to do it is fairly laughable.
I actually think that this is unfortunate, and life would be a lot better for many many people if some of the more conservative values were still in vogue.
The idealized life espoused in The Harrad Experiment, including reasonably-priced education for everyone, mature attitudes toward family, etc., never came to be. And never will. At the time it was written, an average decent wage for one of the parents was less than $10K a year and when he was given a raise to $40,000 a year as a dirty trick, his life became much less pleasant. And $500,000 constituted "filthy rich." Things have changed. And not necessarily for the better.
The Harrad Experiment was a product of the time in which it was written--sexual freedom, women's lib, racial and religious bias just beginning to be tested, the "age of Aquarius." Not to mention Vietnam, a scar that will never go away.
I grew up during those times, and they were heady indeed. We realized things were changing, and hoped for a bright, different future. For whatever you feel about that, good or bad, it didn't come true.
I bought another copy with my very scarce pocket money so as to finish.
Now, 40 years later, I found it again at a book sale, with "new exciting material" added. Actually, not so much.
The ideas in the book now seem so idealistic, and at the same time, so dated. At the time, co-ed living was simply not done, and even just plain living together in the "outside" world was really unusual. Now, it seems like every teenager has had many sexual experiences (or so they would have you believe), and living together is not even worthy of comment. And the idea of having to read, as 18 yr olds, various sex manuals to learn how to do it is fairly laughable.
I actually think that this is unfortunate, and life would be a lot better for many many people if some of the more conservative values were still in vogue.
The idealized life espoused in The Harrad Experiment, including reasonably-priced education for everyone, mature attitudes toward family, etc., never came to be. And never will. At the time it was written, an average decent wage for one of the parents was less than $10K a year and when he was given a raise to $40,000 a year as a dirty trick, his life became much less pleasant. And $500,000 constituted "filthy rich." Things have changed. And not necessarily for the better.
The Harrad Experiment was a product of the time in which it was written--sexual freedom, women's lib, racial and religious bias just beginning to be tested, the "age of Aquarius." Not to mention Vietnam, a scar that will never go away.
I grew up during those times, and they were heady indeed. We realized things were changing, and hoped for a bright, different future. For whatever you feel about that, good or bad, it didn't come true.
July 19, 2016
Robert H. Rimmer
The Harrad Experiment (1966)
Robert H. Rimmer has been considered, by experts, as a rather mediocre author but he has always insisted on integrating his political and social ideals into his novels in the manner of Upton Sinclair (e.g., The Jungle). When this book was originally published in 1966, the publisher marketed the book as a titillating book about sex. This was highly misleading. Though there are scenes of intimacy in the book, it really concerns the relation of love to sex and living. At the end of this book, and at the end of the 25th Anniversary edition which I recently re-read, you’ll find an annotated bibliography. How many novels have you ever seen that included a reference section at the end, like some academic treatise. The 25th Anniversary edition also includes an autobiographical account written by the author. Regardless of what one thinks of the author’s prowess in writing fiction, the real value of the book is that it makes you think.
The book is set on a millionaire’s estate near Cambridge, Massachusetts with some buildings fitted out as dormitories for college students. The directors are a husband and wife team of sociologists who are supervising a revolutionary experiment for the next stage of civilization. It begins with freshmen students who are paired off such that a boy and girl are roommates to each other in their dorm room in contrast to same sex dormitory arrangements that prevail to this day, fifty years after the book was published.
Though the students are enrolled in regular colleges, universities, and classes in the region in regular degree programs, they return to the dormitory each night where the directors have one required course, a four year seminar in Human Values. The whole point of this seminar and the whole Harrad Experiment is to re-orient values to appreciate the past, present, and future of civilization toward an understanding of sexual sanity and the dignity of man in a fashion that promotes peace, tolerance, and community among peoples.
The book is in the format of excerpts from four students’ daily journals/diaries that they are required to keep of their experiences and to record their emotional growth. In view of the sexual insanity that governed how most of us have been brought up, the first six months for this freshman class demonstrates the ups and downs of sexual relations. We have the transition from friendship to love and intimacy, then the evils of jealousy arise in the context of infidelity. However, the students eventually realize that jealousy is a waste of time and that fidelity is not about sex in the end, that multiple sexual partners are not only not an evil, but can be emotionally rewarding and enriching.
The four students whose journals are used are a part of a three couple grouping whose lives become so intertwined with each other that each man has learned to enjoy the amazing wonder of each woman and each woman has discovered the same in each man.
One of my favorite portions of the book is at the end when the students are required to compose a graduation thesis. Since the six students wanted to work together, the directors required a thesis of at least a hundred fifty pages with supporting statistics. The theme of the thesis was to propose a path for civilization to progress toward peace, tolerance, dignity, and sexual sense, but it must be practical, not utopian, i.e., possible to achieve in current society. The students chose a state in the U.S. that they felt could be transformed into a showcase for progress. Politicians and other supporters would be recruited, state laws would be re-written, the educational system completely re-worked. The eventual society would include continued education and training in the humanities. No one would be allowed into the employment market until at least age twenty and leaving the employment market would occur no later than age fifty five when a state version of social security would kick in, in addition to the federal version. The kind of human to be developed would be along the principles of Abraham Maslow’s “self-actualized” person.
This is a book about sex. It’s about love. It’s about the dignity and excellence of humanity. It’s about achieving a future that’s better than any past or present civilization that the world has seen.
The Harrad Experiment (1966)
Robert H. Rimmer has been considered, by experts, as a rather mediocre author but he has always insisted on integrating his political and social ideals into his novels in the manner of Upton Sinclair (e.g., The Jungle). When this book was originally published in 1966, the publisher marketed the book as a titillating book about sex. This was highly misleading. Though there are scenes of intimacy in the book, it really concerns the relation of love to sex and living. At the end of this book, and at the end of the 25th Anniversary edition which I recently re-read, you’ll find an annotated bibliography. How many novels have you ever seen that included a reference section at the end, like some academic treatise. The 25th Anniversary edition also includes an autobiographical account written by the author. Regardless of what one thinks of the author’s prowess in writing fiction, the real value of the book is that it makes you think.
The book is set on a millionaire’s estate near Cambridge, Massachusetts with some buildings fitted out as dormitories for college students. The directors are a husband and wife team of sociologists who are supervising a revolutionary experiment for the next stage of civilization. It begins with freshmen students who are paired off such that a boy and girl are roommates to each other in their dorm room in contrast to same sex dormitory arrangements that prevail to this day, fifty years after the book was published.
Though the students are enrolled in regular colleges, universities, and classes in the region in regular degree programs, they return to the dormitory each night where the directors have one required course, a four year seminar in Human Values. The whole point of this seminar and the whole Harrad Experiment is to re-orient values to appreciate the past, present, and future of civilization toward an understanding of sexual sanity and the dignity of man in a fashion that promotes peace, tolerance, and community among peoples.
The book is in the format of excerpts from four students’ daily journals/diaries that they are required to keep of their experiences and to record their emotional growth. In view of the sexual insanity that governed how most of us have been brought up, the first six months for this freshman class demonstrates the ups and downs of sexual relations. We have the transition from friendship to love and intimacy, then the evils of jealousy arise in the context of infidelity. However, the students eventually realize that jealousy is a waste of time and that fidelity is not about sex in the end, that multiple sexual partners are not only not an evil, but can be emotionally rewarding and enriching.
The four students whose journals are used are a part of a three couple grouping whose lives become so intertwined with each other that each man has learned to enjoy the amazing wonder of each woman and each woman has discovered the same in each man.
One of my favorite portions of the book is at the end when the students are required to compose a graduation thesis. Since the six students wanted to work together, the directors required a thesis of at least a hundred fifty pages with supporting statistics. The theme of the thesis was to propose a path for civilization to progress toward peace, tolerance, dignity, and sexual sense, but it must be practical, not utopian, i.e., possible to achieve in current society. The students chose a state in the U.S. that they felt could be transformed into a showcase for progress. Politicians and other supporters would be recruited, state laws would be re-written, the educational system completely re-worked. The eventual society would include continued education and training in the humanities. No one would be allowed into the employment market until at least age twenty and leaving the employment market would occur no later than age fifty five when a state version of social security would kick in, in addition to the federal version. The kind of human to be developed would be along the principles of Abraham Maslow’s “self-actualized” person.
This is a book about sex. It’s about love. It’s about the dignity and excellence of humanity. It’s about achieving a future that’s better than any past or present civilization that the world has seen.
January 29, 2022
A very thought-provoking book. I first read it when it came out in the 60's. I was in college and it was passed around among a mixed gender group of friends. It was for us a sexual fantasy. I do not remember anyone openly talking about trying something like it but we all wished we could attend Harrad College. I read it a few years back on a nostalgia trip and just to bring back some memories from my college days. Just re-read it again and did some deep thinking. Rimmer is trying to foresee what the advent of the pill could change in premarital relationships. He certainly realized that a new freedom for premarital sex was possible and a whole new ethic around it was coming. In the 50+ years since the movement toward living together before marriage has certainly happened. Not in the way he thought it should but has happened.
I question his underlying belief in the goodness of humanity. Being a Christian and believing we were created good but that sin has corrupted us and that we will hurt each other, hate, be jealous, envious, greedy and that any education process will not take this out of us, it is hard to believe that sexual freedom will lead to less jealousy and hate in relationships as he advocates.
In this book no space is given for same sex partners. It is like it does not exist which in the 60's the whole idea of same sex relationships was just coming out of the closet and being discussed in public.
A good read for anyone who wants to explore alternative premarital hetero-sexual relationships.
I question his underlying belief in the goodness of humanity. Being a Christian and believing we were created good but that sin has corrupted us and that we will hurt each other, hate, be jealous, envious, greedy and that any education process will not take this out of us, it is hard to believe that sexual freedom will lead to less jealousy and hate in relationships as he advocates.
In this book no space is given for same sex partners. It is like it does not exist which in the 60's the whole idea of same sex relationships was just coming out of the closet and being discussed in public.
A good read for anyone who wants to explore alternative premarital hetero-sexual relationships.
December 20, 2009
I found this book in the 60's in Australia... and it was changing the life of so many people then : getting away from "normal" puritan life into happiness, congenial relationships ! Someone was saying we were right to act as we thaught was wiser : Robert Rimmer !
A lot of people,in the States, beleived the book to be realistic and wanted their kids to join the Experiment !
Later on, I read all of this author's books.
As for the film, I found it a bit awkward; yet, most of my friends who saw it liked it !
I consider this author as the first pioneer in human open relationships : he gave birth to all the alternative gatherings like Rainbow, Burning Man, Confest... without knowing it (he was just a witness of what was going to burst out of a "new" (age ! ) generation !
A lot of people,in the States, beleived the book to be realistic and wanted their kids to join the Experiment !
Later on, I read all of this author's books.
As for the film, I found it a bit awkward; yet, most of my friends who saw it liked it !
I consider this author as the first pioneer in human open relationships : he gave birth to all the alternative gatherings like Rainbow, Burning Man, Confest... without knowing it (he was just a witness of what was going to burst out of a "new" (age ! ) generation !
January 11, 2018
Rimmer goes on a sociological bent about how to create a perfect society, rather than share details of how people truly interested in an open, loving relationship can conquer the issues. This is in contrast to what I tried to do with my book, Fourplay. Similar to Rimmer in writing from 4 people's perspective (2 men, 2 women), the two differ in depicting the emotional hurdles that are part of living in a real world, rather than a false, Utopian one. Additionally, four decades later, I added quite a bit of spicy eroticism because in my experience, that is often what draws the parties to push the boundaries of their relationship. However, Rimmer is to be applauded for being early to the fictional depiction of polyamory.
February 28, 2021
My high school actually assigned this to read in English class, I forget in which grade, so I’m re-reading out of curiosity. My parents pretty much let me read anything (I also found my mother’s copy of The Sensuous Woman, my sister’s copy of The Happy Hooker and the whole neighborhood passed around a battered copy of The Godfather, to read the dirty parts) and somewhat surprisingly I don’t remember any other parents freaking out over it. So far I’m finding it mostly naive and idealistic with some stunted and unintentionally funny dialogue but also with some interesting views of sex, emotion and relationships.
December 29, 2009
A friend of mine recommended me this author, and Harrad Experiment was the first one I've read. I remember how delightfull I felt by discovering such open and conforting ideas, contrasting with the so boring and conventional way of life usually on course !
I have adopted now this philosophy in my life and have recovered joy and taste of life : have wonderful friends ans relationships !
So called "utopias" are not only brilliant theories but realistic and enjoyable ways of living Real Life !
I have adopted now this philosophy in my life and have recovered joy and taste of life : have wonderful friends ans relationships !
So called "utopias" are not only brilliant theories but realistic and enjoyable ways of living Real Life !
July 27, 2011
Good book. Interesting ideas on sex, relationships, personal/psychological development, and Malow's ideas. However it is also a testament to the free love movement as much as it is to psychology.
January 15, 2013
this was so unique when it was written, but now, this is how it is in all colleges (well, not the religious ones)
Read
December 24, 2015I don't remember what I thought of this book. I just remember hiding it under the mattress. Times were different then.
June 7, 2019
so dated, het male wanking fantasy
July 17, 2025
I realise that the idea may seem peculiar, but I decided to watch the film, "The Harrad Experiment", as a treat, alone at home, for Christmas Eve (my sixty-sixth Christmas, back in 2009, in as many consecutive years of life to that date, so why NOT something different?). Now at 82 y.o. (in mid-2025), I go back an longer ways with the book on which the eponymous film is based, that's for sure, even if it has taken me so many decades to get around to viewing the movie!
I read the novel of the same title by the New England author, Robert H. Rimmer, which had become hugely successful in the latter half of 1960s, while I was an undergraduate student. I had gone back to studies after a lull of about three years between sophomore year of junior college in Southern California, at Long Beach City College, and my junior year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The novel, which so caught the feeling and the trends of those exhuberent years of the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s, was first published in 1966. I read the 20th printing of the Bantam Books paperback edition. That was not all so long after 1966 as one might suppose for such a large number of printings! The novel was so hugely popular, controversial with parents, but adored by us college kids, that it galloped through one printing after another in very short time, before I would have read the novel in 1968 or 1969.
I even met, briefly, the author as I was reclining lazily on the grassy slope between Boston University and the Charles River, with my Harvard University brainy and cutely sexy gay boyfriend of the time. One of the mutual friends in our sun-loving party of students recognised him, getting up to go over to greet Rimmer and to introduce the rest of us to him, so we othersof tagged along with him to greet The Great Man, which is how that encounter came to pass. The friend then told us, as the author resumed strolling onwards with his female paramour of the moment, what a sexually ravenous libertine Rimmer was with the much younger females whom he dated (or, at least, picked up) in great numbers and quick succession one after the other, now that the author had attained such celebrity and wealth due to the wide sales of, and the royalties from, his most famous book. Our group knew (or so we thought, from the reports circulating in the Boston-Cambridge rumour-mill) that "Harrad" College stood for Harvard University. Having seen, at last, the film, the ivy-encrusted, antiquely posh campus of Harrad as depicted therein does resemble Harvard in a generic (and smaller-scale) sort of way, but so, too, for that matter, does "Harrad" look rather like that "Harvard of the Southwest", Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, and a lot more unlikely!
A couple of years after those pleasant years at U. Mass. Boston, as a graduate student at Kent State University, I was sitting in a lounge for K.S.U. graduate students sometime in 1971, when a group of us master's degree aspirants began to have a discussion about "top hit" mass-marketed novels which we variously had read. I brought up "The Harrad Experiment" and one of the girls chimed in that she had read the novel too. (This was not a particularly amazing coincidence at all, given the still ongoing popularity of Rimmer's novel.) When I said that I had met Robert H. Rimmer, its author, this young woman became even more enthusiastic. She only recently had "lost her virginity", no doubt helped by the sort of licentious attitudes that this novel could inculcate into our student generation. Anyway, she asked me back to her apartment and we got down to discussing further, and more frankly, some of the sex scenes in the novel (several of which are quite kooky!). She asked me, and I accepted, to try out some of the sexual technics which Rimmer describes in the book, which we did, one after the other, all the time with the paperback book at on her nightstand by the bed to consult between our peaks of carnal experimental fervour. Being young (in my mid-20s) and lustily more than a little multiorgasmic, I stayed locked together inside her, never withdrawing or losing my tumescence between ejaculations, during four or five hours in bed, so I had the time to give her more (shared) climaxes in those few hours than she ever had during her entire relationship with that uncomplicatedly heterosexual prior boyfriend at K.S.U. who had "deflowered" her (and for whom one lone spasm of coitus was his limit on any outing).
Fun! Whoopie! We kept on trying out Harrad sexual turns and stunts with each other, but we went "free-style" in our own way within a week or two of that. "Thank you, Robert Rimmer, wherever you may be" (six-feet under the soil, or ashes in an urn, since 2001)! The two of us lovebirds (and I had boyfriends "on the side" at K.S.U., as well) were parted at graduation -- in case anybody wonders about that, but why would s/he?), and I went on eventually to another female lover the next year, and lots of boyfriends then and later, back in Boston, whither I had returned to assume the duties of my first professional position.
Ah, that magical "sweet bird of youth!" The novel and the film based on it, too, are quite dated now, as so many trendy excuses for fornication and promiscuity, of whatever period, eventually come to seem. However, "The Harrad Experiment" was path-breaking in its own way back in those days of such psychobabbling literature that was so "hip" (and which sold so well) during those times, and, in only moderately culturally-evolved ways, still is (and does), for that matter. It would have been better if my life, sexually speaking, had been other than it was, but Rimmer and his panamoury easily can lead to pansexuality, as social history, and even my own family's past, amply have demonstrated, e.g., a grandfather's truly rampaging polygamy, his son's, my uncle's, very advanced "serial monogamy" being, essentially, manifestations, among other such indicators, of pansexuality. So, I admit, was I seduced into that sort of thing partly by the mindset of Rimmer and ot 1960s folks like he. It was difficult to resist at such a time as that was.
The movie of the same title is as much a relic, but an endearing one, of its era as the novel itself is. Of the actors, the pair who enact the roles of the film's principal leading Harrad student couple, highly convincingly, make for two very good-looking 1970s college kids of late teens or early twenties in age, in such a movie. The boy actor is a still quite young Don Johnson (playing the part of the film's ever-libidinous Stanley Cole), a young male of all of the sensuous (and even rather epicene) winsomeness that one could ask for, ruby-lipped and with long, silkily wavy hair, delectably slender and lithe, more sleek and smooth, really, than muscularly-developed! (With young guys this gorgeous, and there still are some of them around all these decades later, why do any guys ever end up "straight"? Well, surely there just are not enough youths quite in Don Johnson's exquisitely beauteous league to satisfy the demand!) For her part, Laurie Walters (as Sheila Grove) is not what one would call stunningly beautiful, but the doe-like, shy, and delicate charm that Walters projects is very beguiling, as is her demure loveliness, dressed or disrobed. What a pair these two young actors make!
The physical allure of Don Johnson, of Laurie Walters, and of the rest of the cast is all the more reason to regret that in becoming available yet again on DVD, the film still has continued to suffer (judging from what has been reported about domestic video editions of it), the artistic indignity of having so much of the full-frontal bodily exposure (although a lot remains!) edited out or toned down. It was the lush abundance of such physical bareness in the film which largely had made it seem so daring to its original cinema theatre audiences. The other sexually coupled characters, and the actors who play them, are well suited, dressed or "in their birthday suits", to their respective roles. Regarding that irksome matter, of moments of advanced undress having been excised from almost all of the commercial VHS and DVD editions of "The Harrad Experiment", which prevents the home viewer from seeing Don Johnson and the other actors in the most graphic full frontal nudity in the film, the Internet Movie Database (as accessed on 29.XII.2009) states that "[t]he late-1980s Wizard Video version contains the film completely uncut and unedited. This is the only version like this known to exist on video." Just try finding nowadays that elusive videotape (if you would like to undertake an exercise in frustration), on that label which so long ago went out-of-business!
The novel and the film alike are far from being any kind of literary or cinematic masterpieces, but I would venture to state here that the novel probably makes for a "fun read" still today (and even, at that, for today's high school and college youngsters). As for the movie, it is rather sweet, in its own 1970s lavender-scented way, as the novel itself is. The lines which the two married professors and the college kids in the film mouth, not unlike a lot of what Rimmer puts upon their lips in the novel, seem close to straight-out-of-the-book from various and sundry sex manuals and other literature on the subjects of sex therapy and sexual technics, inter-personal relationships, and similar pop self-absorptively muddle-headed stuff of the time, which also has remained essentially the same kind of thing since then, a la S.I.T.S. ("stuck in the 60s") mode.
So, concerning "Harrad Experiment" film lore, now it is time to pass on to the sequel, paired as it is with the orignal film in one of the DVD releases. Of lesser cinematic quality than the 1973 movie version of "The Harrad Experiment", the sequel, variously entitled "Harrad Summer" or "Love All Summer", has mostly, alas, a different cast for the roles which correspond to those in the 1973 film. The acting in the sequel is rather wooden and the cast members themselves are endowed with less memorably good looks compared to what the viewer sees in the original film and which had helped in no small measure to make it so treasurable. The sequel holds interest chiefly for those who remain sentimentally attached to all that which "The Harrad Experiment" embodied and represented, for better and for worse, of the "free love" and polyamoury for which youth of the 1960s and 1970s longed and strove. The results of those yearnings and of yielding to such longings through recklessly fornicating promiscuity, alas, often led to tarnished and barren lives in later adulthood and to loneliness in the subsequent years of advancing age, but the novel, and the two films based on it, retain the glow of the youthful aspirations and of the sensual abandon of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" of those two decades.
To Robert H. Rimmer (again, "wherever your bones or ashes are interred, Bob!"), I guess that I would have to say, "I am much indebted to you, Mr. Rimmer, in more ways than one, for 'The Harrad Experiment' frenzy that you spawned. I had quite a fine and frisky time of my own, thanks in some part to your novel, even if life has seemed all too blighted so many long years now after that!" For all of life's mixed feelings and caveats about this novel, the films, and the experiences of a youth lived during (and in the aftermath of) the "Free Love years", I rather regret that it took me so many decades to get around to seeing the film(s) or, as I intend to do, to read the novel anew in a subsequent edition of it!
I read the novel of the same title by the New England author, Robert H. Rimmer, which had become hugely successful in the latter half of 1960s, while I was an undergraduate student. I had gone back to studies after a lull of about three years between sophomore year of junior college in Southern California, at Long Beach City College, and my junior year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The novel, which so caught the feeling and the trends of those exhuberent years of the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s, was first published in 1966. I read the 20th printing of the Bantam Books paperback edition. That was not all so long after 1966 as one might suppose for such a large number of printings! The novel was so hugely popular, controversial with parents, but adored by us college kids, that it galloped through one printing after another in very short time, before I would have read the novel in 1968 or 1969.
I even met, briefly, the author as I was reclining lazily on the grassy slope between Boston University and the Charles River, with my Harvard University brainy and cutely sexy gay boyfriend of the time. One of the mutual friends in our sun-loving party of students recognised him, getting up to go over to greet Rimmer and to introduce the rest of us to him, so we othersof tagged along with him to greet The Great Man, which is how that encounter came to pass. The friend then told us, as the author resumed strolling onwards with his female paramour of the moment, what a sexually ravenous libertine Rimmer was with the much younger females whom he dated (or, at least, picked up) in great numbers and quick succession one after the other, now that the author had attained such celebrity and wealth due to the wide sales of, and the royalties from, his most famous book. Our group knew (or so we thought, from the reports circulating in the Boston-Cambridge rumour-mill) that "Harrad" College stood for Harvard University. Having seen, at last, the film, the ivy-encrusted, antiquely posh campus of Harrad as depicted therein does resemble Harvard in a generic (and smaller-scale) sort of way, but so, too, for that matter, does "Harrad" look rather like that "Harvard of the Southwest", Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, and a lot more unlikely!
A couple of years after those pleasant years at U. Mass. Boston, as a graduate student at Kent State University, I was sitting in a lounge for K.S.U. graduate students sometime in 1971, when a group of us master's degree aspirants began to have a discussion about "top hit" mass-marketed novels which we variously had read. I brought up "The Harrad Experiment" and one of the girls chimed in that she had read the novel too. (This was not a particularly amazing coincidence at all, given the still ongoing popularity of Rimmer's novel.) When I said that I had met Robert H. Rimmer, its author, this young woman became even more enthusiastic. She only recently had "lost her virginity", no doubt helped by the sort of licentious attitudes that this novel could inculcate into our student generation. Anyway, she asked me back to her apartment and we got down to discussing further, and more frankly, some of the sex scenes in the novel (several of which are quite kooky!). She asked me, and I accepted, to try out some of the sexual technics which Rimmer describes in the book, which we did, one after the other, all the time with the paperback book at on her nightstand by the bed to consult between our peaks of carnal experimental fervour. Being young (in my mid-20s) and lustily more than a little multiorgasmic, I stayed locked together inside her, never withdrawing or losing my tumescence between ejaculations, during four or five hours in bed, so I had the time to give her more (shared) climaxes in those few hours than she ever had during her entire relationship with that uncomplicatedly heterosexual prior boyfriend at K.S.U. who had "deflowered" her (and for whom one lone spasm of coitus was his limit on any outing).
Fun! Whoopie! We kept on trying out Harrad sexual turns and stunts with each other, but we went "free-style" in our own way within a week or two of that. "Thank you, Robert Rimmer, wherever you may be" (six-feet under the soil, or ashes in an urn, since 2001)! The two of us lovebirds (and I had boyfriends "on the side" at K.S.U., as well) were parted at graduation -- in case anybody wonders about that, but why would s/he?), and I went on eventually to another female lover the next year, and lots of boyfriends then and later, back in Boston, whither I had returned to assume the duties of my first professional position.
Ah, that magical "sweet bird of youth!" The novel and the film based on it, too, are quite dated now, as so many trendy excuses for fornication and promiscuity, of whatever period, eventually come to seem. However, "The Harrad Experiment" was path-breaking in its own way back in those days of such psychobabbling literature that was so "hip" (and which sold so well) during those times, and, in only moderately culturally-evolved ways, still is (and does), for that matter. It would have been better if my life, sexually speaking, had been other than it was, but Rimmer and his panamoury easily can lead to pansexuality, as social history, and even my own family's past, amply have demonstrated, e.g., a grandfather's truly rampaging polygamy, his son's, my uncle's, very advanced "serial monogamy" being, essentially, manifestations, among other such indicators, of pansexuality. So, I admit, was I seduced into that sort of thing partly by the mindset of Rimmer and ot 1960s folks like he. It was difficult to resist at such a time as that was.
The movie of the same title is as much a relic, but an endearing one, of its era as the novel itself is. Of the actors, the pair who enact the roles of the film's principal leading Harrad student couple, highly convincingly, make for two very good-looking 1970s college kids of late teens or early twenties in age, in such a movie. The boy actor is a still quite young Don Johnson (playing the part of the film's ever-libidinous Stanley Cole), a young male of all of the sensuous (and even rather epicene) winsomeness that one could ask for, ruby-lipped and with long, silkily wavy hair, delectably slender and lithe, more sleek and smooth, really, than muscularly-developed! (With young guys this gorgeous, and there still are some of them around all these decades later, why do any guys ever end up "straight"? Well, surely there just are not enough youths quite in Don Johnson's exquisitely beauteous league to satisfy the demand!) For her part, Laurie Walters (as Sheila Grove) is not what one would call stunningly beautiful, but the doe-like, shy, and delicate charm that Walters projects is very beguiling, as is her demure loveliness, dressed or disrobed. What a pair these two young actors make!
The physical allure of Don Johnson, of Laurie Walters, and of the rest of the cast is all the more reason to regret that in becoming available yet again on DVD, the film still has continued to suffer (judging from what has been reported about domestic video editions of it), the artistic indignity of having so much of the full-frontal bodily exposure (although a lot remains!) edited out or toned down. It was the lush abundance of such physical bareness in the film which largely had made it seem so daring to its original cinema theatre audiences. The other sexually coupled characters, and the actors who play them, are well suited, dressed or "in their birthday suits", to their respective roles. Regarding that irksome matter, of moments of advanced undress having been excised from almost all of the commercial VHS and DVD editions of "The Harrad Experiment", which prevents the home viewer from seeing Don Johnson and the other actors in the most graphic full frontal nudity in the film, the Internet Movie Database (as accessed on 29.XII.2009) states that "[t]he late-1980s Wizard Video version contains the film completely uncut and unedited. This is the only version like this known to exist on video." Just try finding nowadays that elusive videotape (if you would like to undertake an exercise in frustration), on that label which so long ago went out-of-business!
The novel and the film alike are far from being any kind of literary or cinematic masterpieces, but I would venture to state here that the novel probably makes for a "fun read" still today (and even, at that, for today's high school and college youngsters). As for the movie, it is rather sweet, in its own 1970s lavender-scented way, as the novel itself is. The lines which the two married professors and the college kids in the film mouth, not unlike a lot of what Rimmer puts upon their lips in the novel, seem close to straight-out-of-the-book from various and sundry sex manuals and other literature on the subjects of sex therapy and sexual technics, inter-personal relationships, and similar pop self-absorptively muddle-headed stuff of the time, which also has remained essentially the same kind of thing since then, a la S.I.T.S. ("stuck in the 60s") mode.
So, concerning "Harrad Experiment" film lore, now it is time to pass on to the sequel, paired as it is with the orignal film in one of the DVD releases. Of lesser cinematic quality than the 1973 movie version of "The Harrad Experiment", the sequel, variously entitled "Harrad Summer" or "Love All Summer", has mostly, alas, a different cast for the roles which correspond to those in the 1973 film. The acting in the sequel is rather wooden and the cast members themselves are endowed with less memorably good looks compared to what the viewer sees in the original film and which had helped in no small measure to make it so treasurable. The sequel holds interest chiefly for those who remain sentimentally attached to all that which "The Harrad Experiment" embodied and represented, for better and for worse, of the "free love" and polyamoury for which youth of the 1960s and 1970s longed and strove. The results of those yearnings and of yielding to such longings through recklessly fornicating promiscuity, alas, often led to tarnished and barren lives in later adulthood and to loneliness in the subsequent years of advancing age, but the novel, and the two films based on it, retain the glow of the youthful aspirations and of the sensual abandon of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" of those two decades.
To Robert H. Rimmer (again, "wherever your bones or ashes are interred, Bob!"), I guess that I would have to say, "I am much indebted to you, Mr. Rimmer, in more ways than one, for 'The Harrad Experiment' frenzy that you spawned. I had quite a fine and frisky time of my own, thanks in some part to your novel, even if life has seemed all too blighted so many long years now after that!" For all of life's mixed feelings and caveats about this novel, the films, and the experiences of a youth lived during (and in the aftermath of) the "Free Love years", I rather regret that it took me so many decades to get around to seeing the film(s) or, as I intend to do, to read the novel anew in a subsequent edition of it!
November 8, 2014
Another "book of the Sixties" embodying much of the idealism that that decade signifies. (Having lived through the whole of the Sixties I can assure you that it was only a little like what you've been reading and hearing.) The concept Rimmer wrote about did soon come to fruition but it was not driven by some philanthropist with a mission. The first college I attended had a policy of in loco parentis when I matriculated but less than two years later half the dorms and probably a quarter of the rooms were coed. There was a moral tempest. Harrad College didn't yet have alumni.
The Harrad Experiment is certainly now dated and, unfortunately, was always narrow in focus. That tunnel vision and concomitant isolation of ideas is the book's main deficiency. Bizarrely, I see a parallel with the writing of Ayn Rand: if it doesn't support my premise, I won't fight it, I'll belittle it or simply ignore it. A secondary weakness, not nearly as pronounced, comes from the journal (diary) structure. I'm not a fan of that style, so I project my prejudice here. Harrad is well worth reading to get a sense of some of the "socially progressive" thinking of the early Sixties but if you're not dipping your toe in that pool you won't be shortchanged by giving it a bye.
The Harrad Experiment is certainly now dated and, unfortunately, was always narrow in focus. That tunnel vision and concomitant isolation of ideas is the book's main deficiency. Bizarrely, I see a parallel with the writing of Ayn Rand: if it doesn't support my premise, I won't fight it, I'll belittle it or simply ignore it. A secondary weakness, not nearly as pronounced, comes from the journal (diary) structure. I'm not a fan of that style, so I project my prejudice here. Harrad is well worth reading to get a sense of some of the "socially progressive" thinking of the early Sixties but if you're not dipping your toe in that pool you won't be shortchanged by giving it a bye.
October 9, 2012
Not many people will admit having read this book, but I will join the small cadre of brave souls who are going on record as having done so. A college where there are not only co-ed dorms but co-ed rooms -- and you're expected to sleep with your roommate! It's every college guy's fantasy, and it really doesn't get any better than this. That said, we'll overlook the somewhat lame plot and dialogue . . . I'm sure at the time I read it (in college) I would have given it five stars!
April 4, 2009
Dug this up again recently after realizing I remembered only the subject, but no details. An interesting read, as it's based on the journal entries of a group of students from Harvard and Radcliffe in the 60's living out a social experiment. Pretty trippy even by today's standards. And leaves you wondering what happened to the grads' long-term plans for society.
September 4, 2018
Picked up this used copy when I was in college--primarily for the bibliography when I was taking a psychology class. I found the relationship development parts of the book interesting, some of the crazy, wacko, sixties college antics a little annoying. I thought the ending was very contrived, and some of the Utopian ideas espoused somewhat boring.
February 9, 2024
Until this week, in all my 62 years, I had never read this book nor seen the movie. I knew of the book because I remember seeing it on my older brother's bookshelf way back in 1971 (he was going to Stony Brook University). This edition desperately needs an editor because there are lots of typos (example: for some odd reason, the word 'close' is constantly spelled 'dose') Everybody probably knows the premise of the book: high scoring HS Seniors are invited to Harrad College to participate in a four year experiment of having roommates of the opposite sex in order to explore their sexuality with premarital sex (this was 1966, after all.) The premise, while dated (even badly dated), of having co-ed roommates is interesting, but the execution is fumbled. Robert Rimmer is, at best, a mediocre writer who is very preachy. While the four main characters (Sheila, Stanley, Beth, Harry) are likeable, their dialogue does not sound realistic. No 18-year-old is going to speak like that, not even in 1966. The book is written in journal form with every chapter coming from one of the four students at different times during their four years. They write about their roommates (what they like, what kind of sex they had, what emotions they are feeling, etc.) and what is happening at Harrad and beyond. I do not really have a problem with that, but it gets bogged down and becomes tedious and boring when Rimmer goes on and on and on pontificating on his views of sex in general, human relationships, sexual freedom, and polyamorous relationships. These ruminations should have either have been placed at the end of the book as an appendix or should have been placed in a separate sociology book, which would have made this book more enjoyable. I have to say, however, that some of his ideas are not wrong (young people learning about nudity and sexuality at a young age, using one's whole mind and body and fully loving your partner during the act of sex so both of you are fully satisfied), but he seems to be totally opposed to monogamous marriage (not to mention homosexuality). I personally know people who are in a polyamorous relationship that works, and I am happy for them. However, we are human, and one size does not fit all. There are many people in very satisfactory monogamous marriages, but Rimmer dismisses them. Some of his ideas are just pipe dreams while others are naive and just plain wrong (for example, if a man impregnates a woman, marriage is mandatory. Really??) The book is thought provoking and a curious period piece. One thought I had upon finishing it: in the 58 years since it was written, how has the experiment fared, especially with our main characters? Perhaps a more skilled writer would be willing to take up that challenge.
Read
May 26, 2022I'm pleasantly surprised to see that this has such a low rating. It deserves it.
Every time I go slumming in the paperbacks looking for something light and dumb I end up regretting it. Not because of the subject matter at all. A book on this premise could be good or bad.
But this one is bad. The characters do not have distinctive voices in their various chapters, the dialogues are Ayn Rand-level awful, and there's not an interesting thought in sight.
You might think it's going to be fun to read some trash about a bunch of teens skinny-dipping and sleeping around. It's not fun at all.
Every time I go slumming in the paperbacks looking for something light and dumb I end up regretting it. Not because of the subject matter at all. A book on this premise could be good or bad.
But this one is bad. The characters do not have distinctive voices in their various chapters, the dialogues are Ayn Rand-level awful, and there's not an interesting thought in sight.
You might think it's going to be fun to read some trash about a bunch of teens skinny-dipping and sleeping around. It's not fun at all.
December 5, 2018
Thought provoking and still ahead of its time. I read it in 1967 and again in 2018. Rimmer's vision of more open loving (and intimate) relationships is still an ideal that, I believe, has merit. The last 50 years has only proven that the so-called "traditional" monogamous marriage is a failing concept, leading to more pain than stability.
I wonder if, 50 years from now, we will have moved in this direction or if consumerist and "religious" forces will perpetuate the current failure.
I wonder if, 50 years from now, we will have moved in this direction or if consumerist and "religious" forces will perpetuate the current failure.
January 22, 2019
Basically a polemic in favor of a world part Tinder and part eHarmony, I first read this as a college student in the 60s. Back then, I read it mostly for the sex - a soft porn love story, if you will. Every generation before and since thinks that it invented sex and wants to throw that in the faces of their elders. Sigh. My own mother spoke of telling my dad that she’d slide down the bannister to keep “it” warm for him. In any case, this book has become naively preachy in the ensuing years.
February 28, 2022
While the topic and description make it seem titillating and like it will be full of sex, it actually ha very little explicit sex at all. What I liked, and at the same time was somewhat disappointed in a the time as a 21 year old male, was how it was somewhat realistic in that nudity when normalized is actually not sexual at all. This 40+ years later I remember very little about the novel accept that. I remember that overall it was an okay read.
June 29, 2018
Don't remember much of this one. Pretty innocuous, if a bit sexy. I recalled this one thanks to Halliwell's movie book. And ... this author wrote another book that I read BITD but whose title I couldn't remember. Thanks Leslie!
August 27, 2018
This book was a little boring and very dated. The concepts have since matured and we all are more aware of polyamory in this day and age.
February 2, 2021
This was stupid. I don't suggest it.
May 25, 2021
A steamy book about nude Intellectual Hippies embracing free love, sure I'll read that. Too preachy, a little awkward and unrealistic, perhaps that is just how the experiment would turn out.
Read
November 26, 2022I read this year's ago and I don't remember it very well. It came up in a conversation with friends, so I thought it might be fun to revisit it.
August 16, 2025
“We hold the key to the future. The door is unlocked and open. Those who pass through are going into a new era, a new age. Not a Golden Age. My God… how dull that would be! No… rather an Age of Continuous Wonder… an Age of Creative Insecurity. Love from all of us, Beth.”
this was one of the quickest reads of my life and well worth the time. i loved every part of it. 5 stars, cried when it was over
this was one of the quickest reads of my life and well worth the time. i loved every part of it. 5 stars, cried when it was over
September 8, 2007
What do I think of this book? It is certainly a sign of it's time. There is much I agree with and enjoyed in what he has to say but in the end, I had to disagree with the Utopian world they tried to put forth in the last bit. It sounded too socialistic for my tastes. Give up certain freedoms and we'll give you this wonderful world of happiness. Maybe I'm too much of a cynic but I don't see it working. I do believe in the joy of giving and receiving love (and it doesn't have to include sex) and feel many people could benefit from allowing themselves to accept and give more more. And I agree in the silliness of the taboo on nudity. In some ways I think time has left this book behind and in others it hasn't. Though I feel there is something to offer here, I feel it really pushes a fantasy world for many. It was an enjoyable read and it does get one to think about things so I'd recommend it. Just keep in mind when it was written. Of course I have to follow disclosure rules (hey it works for the stock market) and say that I am a believer in the poly ideals which is the main reason I picked this up to read in the first place.
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