girls should want to be fucked— as close to all the time as was
humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women
got fucked a lot more than men fucked.
Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in
Left ideologies and movements with regularity— in most countries,
in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies. ”
The sixties in the United States, repeated with different tonalities
throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic character. One did not have to read W ilhelm Reich, though some did. It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love
were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making
love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and
beautiful. T hey wanted peace. T hey talked love, love, love, not
romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). T hey grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going
to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No
wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their
special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.
The girls were real idealists. T hey hated the Viet Nam W ar and
their own lives, unlike the boys’, were not at stake. T hey hated the
racial and sexual bigotry visited on blacks, in particular on black
men who were the figures in visible jeopardy. The girls were not
all white, but still the black man was the figure of empathy, the
figure whom they wanted to protect from racist pogroms. Rape
was seen as a racist ploy: not something real in itself used in a
racist context to isolate and destroy black men in specific and strategic w ays, but a fabrication, a figment of the racist imagination.
The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them
had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists
especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that
they even thought it was intended for them too. They knew that
their mothers were not free—they saw the small, constrained,
female lives—and they did not want to be their mothers. They
accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more
than any other idea or practice, made them different from their
mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so
much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their
pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the longhaired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere.
This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which
their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same
time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible
home. In other words, the girls did not leave home in order to find
sexual adventure in a sexual jungle; they left home to find a
warmer, kinder, larger, more embracing home.
Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number
of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group
sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of
gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck
had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred—it
occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed
with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because
heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to
be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream
for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy
that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality
based on what men and women had in common, what the adults
tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a
sexual community more like childhood— before girls were crushed
under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence:
transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the
adults who made w ar not love. It was— for the girls— a dream of
being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling
equality, not the traditional male dominance.
Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make
it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man,
did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the
war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in
what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction. ” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,
they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:
fucking. The men grew more m anly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women— found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his
buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and
hers too)— traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,
turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated
into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose— it turned
out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,
and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was
an intensification of the experience of being sexually female— the
precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for
themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety
of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the
impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. T hey
discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,
ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were
characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex