The Decline of the Double Standard
There was certainly a lot more talk about sex, but it’s hard to tell how much of it translated into real-world activity. Women had never shared all that much information about their sexual behavior, even with friends. Maria Monsky, who was living on her own in Manhattan and working her way through night school in the early 1960s, hung out with a fairly sophisticated crowd. But she still doesn’t remember having a frank discussion about sexual experience. “There was a line you never crossed,” she said. “It was a privacy issue.” So it’s possible that what looked like a great deal of sexual freedom was actually just a great deal more sexual frankness.
Also, I suspect, a lot of the no-limit partner-swapping whatever-feels-good “free love” was actually constrained, at least among heterosexuals, by the size of one’s social group. When I was part of an avowedly “global” social subset (sf fandom) in the late 1970s/early 1980s, we considered ourselves extremely sex-positive and hangup-free. The advent of herpes, and then AIDS, demonstrated how much — despite our early alarms — all those “spaghetti-tangle Langdon charts”, daring as they seemed to us at the time, came down to the same relatively small pool of individuals partnering up with each other in multiple configurations. There were genuinely adventurous souls who stepped outside of the network, but sometimes it seems like most people treat sex the way they do food — picking whatever’s accessible, affordable, and familiar. Like all the people who buy lavish cookbooks full of gorgeous shots of exotic global dishes, and live off a combination of fast food and chain restaurant meals. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
The young Americans who took part in the sexual revolution were living at a very particular moment in time, a brief window in which having sex with multiple partners posed very little physical peril. For much of human history, syphillis had been a scourge, and a good deal of the Victorian hysteria about sex — and prostitution in particular — had to do with women’s fear that their husbands would stray and infect them with an incurable disease that could put them in peril of sterility, insanity, and death… the Victorian version of sex education involved lantern shows of pictures of the grisly effects of syphillis. Then penicillin, which became widely available during WWII, provided a cure. By the 1960s sexually transmitted diseases were being treated like a joke by middle-class people who, as the decade went on, began experimenting with group sex, wife-swapping, and other kinds of behavior that would have been regarded as near suicidal by earlier generations.
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And then there was the birth control pill, or — as the media called it in deference to its awesome powers — the Pill.
Not to mention, Roe v. Wade. Which was implemented just as I was going off to college, and the new-fledged women in my dorm were so relieved that even if all other precautions failed, we’d have a reliable backup. We were too young to suspect the future backlash.
In 1969 a small group of women in Boston decided to get together and share their “feelings of frustration and anger toward… doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgemental and noninformative.” As time went on, the group felt it was on to something worth sharing. The members created a course on women and their bodies that in turn became the basis for Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book that talked simply and explicitly about sex, birth control, venereal disease, lesbianism, childbirth, and menopause. Lessons on anatomy and basic biology were interspersed with personal testimony, offering the reader the comforting sense that whatever she was feeling or was worried about had happened to somebody else before. “I will tell you that a book we all had was Our Bodies, Ourselves,” said Kathy Hinderhofer, who went to college in the early 70s. “You had to have that.”
I was proud to be the first woman in my dorm with a copy Our Bodies, Ourselves — everybody (including our male friends) wanted to look through it, even quite a few of the “liberated” folks who still had only a vague idea of what was going on Down There. Those were innocent days.
HyperIon
Yes, as someone who came of age in the sexual revolution, I have to say I would never do now some of the things I did back then.
In the age of AIDS, herpes, HPV, etc, it is most wise to require exchanging STD test results before disrobing.
jnfr
I still have my old copy of Our Bodies around here somewhere.
I took full advantage of the sexual revolution, and since I was living in a commune there was plenty to be had. I’m not sure it did me much good, but it didn’t do me any harm, and the skinny-dipping was awesome. Tripping in the woods in the Missouri Ozarks was pretty nice too.
But I was very aware of how much everything we did was considered transgressive by other people. Even before I sexually active and drug-active, when I was still in high school and it was called Women’s Lib, there was much clucking and disdain and even anger at women who dared to step out.
I liked feeling that I had been set free, but it was terribly scary for my mother.
birthmarker
I graduated HS in ’71 and started college that fall. Certainly many (if not most) at college were screwing like bunnies. I too had the book. Many of us were on the pill.
I also appreciate your relief comment. With all due resect to differing views on abortion, it always seeemed to me at the time that so many young women felt overwhelming relief after the procedure. Now the pro lifers tell women that they will be wracked with guilt.
Linda Featheringill
Hi, guys. I’m late, I’m late.
Groucho48
1970’s Science Fiction Conventions! I was a nerdy guy at the time but my personal hygiene was good, and I could talk about stuff outside S-F, so, I was a comparative stud muffin, considering the typical S-F male fan. Good times, good times.
Linda Featheringill
The double standard may have declined, but it didn’t go away. Some fuddy-duddies wanted women to be sweet and demure little things and some of these characters are still with us.
Another element of the double standard is the fact that many women discovered that there is no such thing as free love. Well, usually not, anyway. And I’m not talking about pregnancy here. Sex is an intimate, emotional act and is associated with emotions that are housed in real people. Some of these women decided to back off a little bit from the free-for-all. I don’t remember seeing any evidence that the men backed off that way.
Anne Laurie
Well, they will if they listen to the ‘pro-lifers’, that’s for sure!
Of course these are the same people who tell women that taking those dreadful, nasty birth control pills will make them infertile… but quite a few of them insist their teenage daughters take them ‘for cramps.’ Not to underestimate the dreadfulness of teenage menstrual cramps (what I was prescribed was darvon, which didn’t help much), but that’s not why Sarah Palin dragged Bristol to the doctor.
birthmarker
My mother once told me, “Morals don’t change.” I still so strongly disagree with this statement!
I am enjoying the book because the author brings up so many things that I had completely forgotten about. I have read ahead, so, spoiler alert. She mentions tampons-my mother thought young unmarried women had no business using such a thing. That didn’t stop either my sister or myself.
SiubhanDuinne
@Linda Featheringill:
“I’m late, I’m late.”
Saw what you did there, LF! But oh my, there is NO. SCARIER. FEELING. IN. THE. WORLD. than being a sexually active young woman who is “late,” if only by a couple of days.
I wouldn’t be in my 20s or 30s again for anything.
Linda Featheringill
birthmarker #8
Chuckle. I had forgotten about the tampons thing.
Linda Featheringill
SiubhanDuinne #9
I went to bed with this dude and we had totally unprotected sex. He went on his way. Anyway, my periods were always very regular, except for this time. And I was late. And I fretted and worried and was a bit anxious.
Then my period came and I burst into tears with an overwhelmingly sad feeling. When I realized that I was both relieved to not be pregnant and mourning not being pregnant, I made an appointment with Planned Parenthood right away.
Ah, ambiguity. I didn’t invent it but I sure have practiced it through the years.
P.S. It would have been a cute kid. :-)
birthmarker
My mother didn’t think you should wash your hair during that time of the month. She thought it would make you feel worse. I have the world’s oiliest hair, so there went that one!
Anne Laurie
Hah — my ‘freethinking’ mother was only too glad to hand me her box of tampons & tell me to ‘just read the instructions’. For all her would-be bravado, she did not want to discuss sex with her mean-mouthed daughter (and I was not that eager to talk about it with her, either).
One thing she did warn me about, some years later, was “I didn’t know you could get pregnant the first time you Did It… I thought, y’know, you’d have to practice for a while, to get good at it.” The ‘rewards’ of ignorance…
jnfr
My mother also had fits when I started using tampons, and told me they were just for married women. I was still a virgin but she marched me to a gynecologist to check my status. And we didn’t have health insurance, so seeing a doctor was a major deal at the time. He assured her of my purity.
I read some books on the Pill and was concerned about the hormones so I went with a diaphragm. Never had a problem with that, fortunately. I really did not want to get pregnant and be stuck in Toledo for the rest of my life (or so I saw it). Girls in the projects where I grew up were getting pregnant by the time we all turned 15, and it was not a happy thing. I started sex way late because I was so determined not to get stuck there.
chmatl
You folks are a bit older than I. I graduated high school, as a virgin, in 1980. I was sexually active but monogamous during undergraduate school, but went a little nuts in grad school at Florida State. Very sexually charged atmosphere, I guess not surprisingly. By that time (1984-1987), it was pure stupidity to have unprotected sex, and yeah, I was stupid. I feel extremely lucky to have survived that experience with my health intact.
PurpleGirl
Groucho48 @ #5:
Ah, science fiction fandom and the conventions of the 1970s and 1980s… I attended a bunch of them around NYC and worked on the Star Trek Conventions in the early 1970s. Sex was open and multifaceted and while I wasn’t the wildest of fem fans, it sure was a time.
In the early 1970s the Catholic Church allowed women who had certain cycle problems to take the pill — so that they could become regular and then use an approved natural method (ahem!). The first doctor I saw about taking the pill was very Catholic and spoke to me very seriously. I found a better, more modern doctor as quickly as possible. (She was a doctor trained in Communist Poland and a lapsed Catholic.)
Anne Laurie
Groucho48: Have we met? (insert emoticon for ‘mischievious grin’ here)
SiubhanDuinne
@LF #11: I honestly don’t ever remember feeling sad when my periods came after a scare. I hated having periods (except that they got me out of gym class a lot) but I hated not having them (when I was supposed to be having them) a lot more.
Now relief — that’s an emotion I completely identify with!
Anyone here old enough to remember the Disney film (girls only, with a signed note from Mother saying it was ok) called “You’re a Young Lady Now”? All the “females” looked like those breasted but otherwise sexless creatures in “Fantasia.” I think production/distribution was a partnership between Disney and Modess.
birthmarker
At one point I got a diaphram and the nurse asked me, “What are you planning to do when you get pregnant?” Emphasis on when. You were lucky.
I clipped this from cckid’s comment at last week’s book chat.
Yeah, we are lucky-as American women, we have choices. We just have to be really careful with them.
chmatl
As for the tampon thing, my mother was pretty bold about them for a conservative southern woman. I started using them pretty much from the very beginning, at her encouragement. In fact, I don’t remember using pads at all until after my daughter was born in ’96.
SiubhanDuinne
Is there any reason beyond coincidence that the anniversary of losing my virginity and getting my divorce are the same day?
(it’s really not fair, I only get half the presents I should.)
Anne Laurie
So I was not alone! Of course, as an uber-nerd in an all-girls Catholic school, it was easy for me to stay ‘pure’. After I escaped to college, I waited for another couple years, because I wanted to catch up on the other facets of social experience that I’d missed in my previous life. There are a few things I regret about that time, but waiting to have sex has never been one of them…
birthmarker
Linda F-
Why do I think there was a waterbed involved??
Anne Laurie
Thanks everybody… same time, same place, next week?
Next chapter: “Women’s Liberation” — yay! Of course the subtitle is making me a little nervous about What Some People Will Think, but I guess that feeling is appropriate for the topic (and the book).
Pococurante
@6 Linda Featheringill
Probably because
*) They quietly backed out because they realized they weren’t really wired that way,
*) Got married,
*) Fathered children,
*) Dealt with culture stereotypes,
*) Went to work and dealt with male stereotyping when they would have preferred something different,
*) Got used to being mocked fathers even though they never stood up for a poll,
*) Never threw a fit asking for attention,
*) And wondered why in the 1980s their newly “liberated” wives drank the kool aid and divorced them anyway, only to watch said wives crash through a series of even more divorces.
Poor oppressed women, only gender to suffer stereotyping.
Nutella
I was VERY well-behaved in high school since I was terrified that pregnancy would ruin my life. When I went off to college in 71, though, the university had an excellent student health service that provided birth control to students for no extra charge and with no nosy questions. So I was able to experiment without fear.
I bought Our Bodies, Ourselves when it came out. I have several editions still. Wikipedia says they’re still publishing. I’ll have to dig out the original book and see how dated it is.
Pococurante
Meanwhile, back in a world that is actually relevant.
Nutella
Does anyone else remember the Burt Reynolds centerfold that was published in Cosmopolitan in spring 72? This is apparently the original, with cigarette, but many of the copies you see now have the cigarette and ashtray removed. We had the magazine in the dorm and showed it to our most straight-laced resident (who spent most of her time in Young Life activities) and I have never seen such a dramatic blush. Somehow I don’t think pics like this would make anyone blush these days.
Nutella
@Pococurante
The men “Never threw a fit asking for attention”.
Heh.
Anne Laurie
Heck, Scotty ‘Cosmo’ Brown used his (early 1980s) centerfold as part of his successful Senate campaign!
Not that I want this to catch on; nobody, regardless of age or sexual orientation, deserves to be exposed to pics of a nekkid Eric Cantor or Mitch McConnell.
CaseyL
I am profoundly grateful to have lived during the Sexual Revolution. It was a tiny little crack in time, like most of the liberationist thought and behavior that flourished in the 60s and 70s.
There was a science fiction short story published in the 60s (I think) that posited an intelligent alien race overseeing humankind’s development, poised to keep us from getting “too” advanced. If humans started getting too smart or too free, this alien race released a kind of virus that halted and reversed our progress. I don’t remember if it outright affected cognition or made people more vulnerable to “anti-intelligence” influences, like religion and political extremism. One of the characters likened the alien manipulation to a ring of penicillin in a petri dish that allows the bacteria to grow only so far and no further.
Can’t for the life of me remember the title, but that concept – humanity controlled by a band of anti-intelligence “penicillin” – has always stayed with me. Particularly seeing how much we’ve reverted, politically, in the last 30 years.
jnfr
I had that Burt Reynolds centerfold on my college dorm door.
Groucho48
Anne Laurie
Groucho48: Have we met?
hehe… I live in Buffalo, NY and that was the center of my Con range. My favorite Con was Confusion. We also put on Cons of our own in Niagara Falls…Anonycon. There was a group of half a dozen or so Buffalo fans that were pretty regular Con goers. You may have heard of Linda M., a well known fan artist of the time.
I spent a lot of time in the Con Suite with my bottle of Bacardi 1873 rum, if that jiggles any memories. I was the one without any slogan buttons.
Have you read the mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb? She was a Sci-Fi fan and set a couple of her books at Cons. Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool. Both are fun reads, especially for Con vets.
David in NY
I think so. And some guys, remember, when a certain kind of woman looks at them she’s thinking — “let’s jump in bed” — and some guys are the kind that other, or the same, women look at and say — “husband material”. And if you’re the latter, the consequences of simple bed jumping more often make somebody unhappy than you would probably like. So you didn’t go there so fast, necessarily.
Tehanu
Oh God, the tampon thing. Yes, my mother was the same, said tampons were “inappropriate.” She was also dead wrong. I suffered through every period until a friend helped me.