The Sexual Revolution in retrospect

“Without the rather clumsy revolution we went through back then, this new and necessary and beautiful higher revolution would not have been able to happen,” writes Madhuri in this essay

I wish we had been able to go directly from the 50’s – a medieval time of repression so acute that even thinking, inside your own mind, the word ‘sex’, made you into a vile beast of shame – to a time where empowered Goddesses roamed, putting up with No Shit at All, and claiming for themselves all the rights of their native subtlety, their glorious individual integrity of spirit. In bed and out! I wish!

Instead, during the so-called Sexual Revolution (approximately 1964-1984), we were our own laboratory, and we blundered about in there, experimenters with no training, no manuals, no protective gear; we cut ourselves on beakers, made things explode, poisoned ourselves, broke things, and, on a certain level, had a lot of fun.

When I look back on my own experience then, I can ask: What did I get out of it? That revolution, and the period that encompassed it?

Adventure. Participating in a heady tidal wave that carried all before it. Diseases. The trauma of rape – though I did not call it that; a kind of murder of self. The chance to dress up in colourful and eccentric finery. Gestalt therapy – the beginning of a long and wondrous inner exploration. Wandering the open road. A sense of wild freedom. Poetry and art. (And, later, after I graduated from the open road: meditation. The beginning of the ability to have a life of my very own.)

What did I miss?

Myself. In that the sexual shenanigans that were de rigueur – you could not avoid them any more than you could have gotten away with a short haircut – completely missed the mark for me.

I can sum it all up in one scene: I’m 17, at a rock concert in the Colorado uplands, where BB King is playing, and haute hippies float by with wiggly puffed-up hair and snooty expressions. I’d been hitch-hiking, and ended up here. A beautiful, golden, passionate man of 42, after some conversation (in which I inform him confidently that I don’t want to have sex, an injunction to which he nods his head agreeingly), takes me off into a tie-dyed teepee and feeds me poppers, and makes love to me with tremendous presence, restraint, and gentleness – and absolutely no understanding of what I was experiencing. I had not consented; and I did not understand what he was doing; and I did not experience pleasure, just embarrassment. But I could not say so.

That’s the whole picture, right there.

So what was this whole shit about?

Looking back, I’d say that the sexual revolution made sense only in relation to the 50’s, 40’s, 30’s. I was born in 1952, so Extreme Victorianism was my primal conditioning. And not without reason: STDS could kill you, childbirth could kill you. My grandmother had nursed on a syphilis ward, and imbued my mother with a nascent horror of reckless sex.

Then: antibiotics! The Pill!

And all hell broke loose.

There was a tremendous pressure built up behind the revolution. Sex energy is a powerful force in the human. And now, it seemed, it could go free!

Revolutions are not usually subtle. They are bloody, and destructive, and casualties litter the streets.

This was no exception. Women and children suffered the most – though if women suffer, men do too; even if they know it not.

So our fun was out on the streets – strutting and waving banners and making eye contact with the groovy guy or chick down the picket line a ways. It was when we got into a private place, or even semi-private, that our true ignorance showed itself.

We did not know what women were. We did not know that teenagers cannot and do not have agency. We did not know that rape was rape. We did not, above all, know what blisses and revelations could have been ours had we known how really to love one another – with our bodies, with our hearts, with expanded and empathic vision; with a respect for differences. We only knew a word: Freedom!

Men led the charge. Of course they did – that’s where the yang is. And yang, by its very nature, is not sensitive. Molecules are streaming off its point – that’s where the whole focus goes. Go go go!

Women had been sat upon for two thousand years at least. It took us time to pick ourselves up off the ground where we’d been stampeded. It took us time to start to reconnoitre, and ask ourselves what rights we might have, as humans, to explore our own natures and find out what was true for us.

I did not find out for myself until I was in my fifties. All the rest of my so-called adult life, I was, quite unknowingly, still crashing around in the laboratory, blind and disappointed. I had ultimately to claim for myself a revolution much more potent and extreme than the outer revolution of my youth. I had to say No, and then find out what truly suited me. And it was so subtle, in fact – like the wispiest spider web on a woodland tree – not even seen at certain angles. It had very little of sex in it at all. But it was me, and it had a voice, and when it got to have its winsome and ephemeral magics, it was even, in its own way, love.

I am impressed by a history book I read about Europe in the 15th century, where the author – a woman – tried to explain what it would have been like for people then, inside their heads. They took refuge in brightly-painted cathedrals in the forest, and they really knew that the whole Christian myth was true. Their thoughts, dreams, ways of seeing their physical world – all came from those myths. And even now, periodically hundreds of faithful believers gather on a hilltop to await the Rapture – they know it is coming – and then skulk home at dawn, still unraised. Belief has its limits, but people go on believing. Our milieu, our peer group, has tremendous force in our lives.

The ubiquity of that creed of Freedom, back then in the 60’s, permeated the landscape utterly. We knew that no-holds-barred was the way to go, even if inappropriate and even harmful couplings were going on everywhere. The grownups and the cops and the old guard were wrong, and we would shut them out of our lives. I remember a young man I hitch-hiked with from Amsterdam to Copenhagen in 1971 – a curly-headed American with a serious face. We weren’t lovers, but one night he raped me. I cussed him out and wrote tart things in my diary; but that was all. And then he told me later that he was sexually attracted to children. I felt annoyed, disgusted; I felt he was leaving women out and they needed lovers; and why have such a strange taste as… kids? I waxed acerbic. He showed me photos that he kept at his desk – schoolgirls, in uniform. I felt jealous and ill-tempered about it. But I didn’t think that he was a criminal; I didn’t think to call the cops (the cops were the enemy) – and I didn’t think of those kids and what awful confusion and shame and trauma might await them (although abuse had happened once to me, when I was eleven, at the hands of my best friend’s dad, when I was asleep on a summer night, and I am sure I still bear the scars of it). People just didn’t think that way. It does not mean that he was not a criminal, at least in the content of his fantasy. It does not mean he did right. It just means that we were blind.

It was all the intelligence we had; and it wasn’t much. Just to break the old moralities, and then thrash around like piranhas in a cup of water.

To go against this creed of permissiveness – in all its clumsy excess, its ignorations and oversights, its damage – would be like somebody insisting now that he will not participate in the tech revolution: will not use a computer, a phone, an iPad; and will burn and topple cellphone towers wherever he finds them. He will meet great resistance; people will stare at him oddly. And then ignore him; he will not be able to get his business done; and when he yells that the EMF generated by the towers is dangerous, people will listen a little, maybe, and then go right on doing what they were doing. He might have a hard time finding a woman to stay with him and forgo phoning.

We were, in those old days of ours, tearing up the rule books, the old beliefs – but we had our own; roughly-assembled, but all of us were heir to them. It was a Collective Tide. We believed in Freedom. I’ve heard Osho speak of Freedom From vs Freedom To. We were in Freedom From; Freedom To had not been assembled yet. People tried – but for any new understanding to arise in the Collective about sex, and what constitutes abuse, and exploitation; and how best a woman might be made love to so that she is also truly included – this was going to take more time. And it was going to take women – fighting for recognized agency, fighting to be heard.

And this in turn gave men of care and sensitivity an opportunity to be supportive, and to themselves learn new opennesses and also joys.

Some all-too-small portion of the world is going in this direction. This is the vanguard. It has been led by female scientists, psychologists, who actually measured the damage done to children by abuse; and by meditators – particularly Tantrikas who really know what Tantra is (meditation, not titillation).

But I’m afraid that without the gross and bloody and inept and reckless and wildly adventurous (though not finely adventurous, much) revolution we all went through back then, this new and necessary and beautiful higher revolution would not have been able to happen.

This is because people are dunderheads.

Photo: the author at JFK airport, 1970