as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female
fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.
In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and
practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an
issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and
it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not
climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of
and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.
When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored,
often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman
white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was
likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When
a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to
describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist.
When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of
recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and
white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given
time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them.
A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not
jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of
rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against
her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the
counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that
force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women
would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so
that it was repression, not force, that stood in the w ay of freedom.
Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-
intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor
did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of
women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited
that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by
more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No
persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of
women, unless the women themselves were blamed— usually for
not com plying in the first place. These were in the main women
who wanted to com ply—who wanted the promised land of sexual
freedom— and still they had lim its, preferences, tastes, desires for
intim acy with some men and not others, moods not necessarily
related to menstruation or the phases of the moon, days on which
they would rather work or read; and they were punished for all
these puritanical repressions, these petit bourgeois lapses, these
tiny exercises of tinier wills not in conformity with the w ills of
their brother-lovers: force was frequently used against them, or
they were threatened or humiliated or thrown out. No diminution
of flower power, peace, freedom, political correctness, or justice
was seen to be im plicit in the use of coercion in any form to get
sexual compliance.
In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture, pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male
demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross,
preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties,
the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was
sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access
to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion
was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for
saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced or persuaded aw ay, even by the most astute or dazzling ar
gument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway
were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever
they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however
much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had
consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men
nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality, and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy was the esteem in which “natural” women were held—women who
were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no
birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables
too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children, to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional ways for bearing the children—they were not labeled “bad” or
shunned—but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her
child—poor and relatively outcast—wandering within the counterculture changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got
in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck—and the
fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with
children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned,
a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal.
Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to
fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their
own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want
to die.
It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s—not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.
The decriminalization of abortion—for that was the political goal
—was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free. ” The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were
not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting