The Sixties (7 page)

At thirteen I came across an item in a home medical encyclopedia about ‘self-abuse’. Though it suggested quite liberally that
there was nothing dangerous about it, the name itself, and the fact that it had an entry, made it clear that it was a medical
problem. It described ‘touching the private parts’, and I realised that I did that every night, drifting off to sleep, curled
up in bed with my hand between my legs, holding my vulva. I had not the slightest notion of orgasm, nor did the article talk
about the purpose of the touching, only that it was nothing to worry about, though it was a good idea to talk about it to
a doctor if you did it regularly. I had my first sexual terror. Later, I would be regularly consumed with worry that I might
be pregnant or have a venereal disease, but this was my first sexual bodily alarm (as it happened I didn’t faint with fright
on getting my period, though I wondered, when I told my mother, whether I shouldn’t slap her shocked face). I was consumed
by uncertainty, that cloud of sexual unknowing that hovered over our heads, fearing something was wrong with me, though I
couldn’t work out from the encyclopedia what exactly it was and what the consequences would be. Being fearful, vaguely guilty
and feeling alone was what burgeoning sexuality meant to large numbers of people in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

However, by the late Sixties, although we may not have done recreational drugs, we did do casual sex. We tried hard to make
sex as casual as sleeping. There were, of course, couples. Two individuals bound together for longer or shorter periods, madly
in love, or loving friends, or one of them having their heart broken by an unfaithful other, being betrayed or betraying in
the old-fashioned way that casual sex didn’t permit. But they were anomalies, we supposed, or were discovered to be people
who had minded all along about things that we were supposed to have stopped caring about. People had sex because they and
it were there, like climbing mountains but with less effort and preparation required, and, as we thought then, danger-free.
It was late, someone would stay over or not go back to their own room. You might even really fancy someone, suddenly, or you’d
think: why not? There never seemed to be a legitimate answer to that. It was on the one hand part of the vital and present
task of experiencing experience, and on the other a contemporary version of good manners. Sex was a way of being polite to
those who suggested it or who got into your bed. It was very difficult not to fuck someone who wanted to fuck you without
feeling you were being very rude. My guess, no, my certainty, is that large numbers of people slept with friends, acquaintances
and strangers that they had no desire for. I also guess that this was more desultory for women, few of whom, I regret to say,
seemed as jaunty the following day as the men who waved them a cheery farewell. Part of the newness of the world we were creating
was the abolition of jealousy, and the idea of possessing other people. The ‘that’s your problem’ catch-all for complaints
applied to sexual relations, too. You took responsibility for yourself and this meant not making demands on others whose wishes
were different from your own. Clearly, this was not an equally balanced provision. Wanting overrode not wanting. To stop someone
having something they wanted was to be a drag, really controlling, just laying ‘your problem’ on others who were unburdened
by your hang-ups. But I do recall a few gentle souls who wandered into my room and asked tentatively, ‘Want a fuck?’ and then
wandered out again without stopping to debate my problem if I replied with a sleepy, ‘No, thanks.’

But there was a large principle at state. If sex was no longer going to be a taboo then it was hard to think of a good reason
not to have it with anyone who came along. It was uncool to say no. It was easier to say yes than to explain. It was difficult
to come up with a justification for refusing to have sex with someone that didn’t seem selfish. The idea that rape was having
sex with someone who didn’t want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late Sixties. On the basis that no means no, I was
raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for an answer. But not wanting wasn’t the main thing.
It doesn’t sound so exciting, this sexual revolution, does it? Mostly it wasn’t. Open relationships were frequently tried,
but I never came across any where at least one of the pair was not suffering and eventually unable to suppress it. There was
a commune set up near my place which a friend of mine stayed in when he needed somewhere to live. The rules of the commune
were that you weren’t allowed to sleep with the same person for more than three nights in a row, so that no couples developed.
Sex was free, relationships were forbidden. In order for the non-possessive rule to work, everyone there had to be prepared
to sleep with everyone else – though I believe that men were exempted from having to have sex with men if they didn’t want
to. My friend found it very tiring packing up his bag and moving on to the next room every few days, and turned up at my flat
from time to time to get a few regular nights’ sleep.

In order to fight against the arbitrary moral codes the bourgeois world imposed on the young, the young imposed on themselves
arbitrary physical requirements that took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections. We cut a swathe
through the conventions, but invented new conventions that gave us just as much heartache. Liberation, at least in its sexual
form, was a new form of imposed morality, quite as restricting and causing at least as much repression as we accused our parents’
generation of creating. Our elders called it permissiveness, but the permission we gave ourselves was more like a set of orders
for disobeying our elders.

The journalist John Lloyd describes his experience of a commune, which sounds remarkably similar to the very one my friend
had occasionally to escape from.

Another version is Richard Neville’s afterthought:

Communes weren’t a brand new idea, but we could hardly avoid investigating them. The nuclear family model was beginning to
look very limited. So we set up communes or lived communally in our flats, sharing the washing-up and each other’s lovers,
and then discovered what that meant in the actual day-to-day living. Usually a terrible mess and a lot of anger – regarding
both the washing-up and the sex. The communal dream invariably ended in acrimony as all the tensions of the old way of living
pulled the group idea apart. Children, love, money, work, privacy and ownership were all ancient and crucial issues that for
the most part we failed successfully to negotiate. To tell each other that other cultures lived in this way didn’t take into
account our lack of experience in living in any way at all. All the time, in every aspect of our lives, the thing we forgot,
and the thing that enabled us to do what we did, was the fact of our being young.

The permission was already available, long before the Sixties generation were blamed for instigating the permissive society.
During his time as Home Secretary, Jenkins (hardly a radical socialist) oversaw the relaxation of a series of legal curbs
on sexual and social freedom: on divorce, the abolition of theatre censorship, the legalisation of abortion and the decriminalisation
of homosexuality. The world wasn’t waiting for the post-war children to make it free, the post-war children were reinventing
their own freedom in a climate made ready for them. Jenkins’s near contemporary Mary Whitehouse, a woman who described herself
as an ‘ordinary housewife’ and was in the vanguard of the backlash against all things permissive, complained about the terrible
freedoms the young were taking, but she complained much more about the liberality of those like the Home Secretary, the BBC’s
director-general Hugh Carlton Greene, and the Bishop of Woolwich. All of them, as far as we were concerned, were the establishment,
the grown-ups, those whom we gave ourselves permission to rebel against.