Nascent feminists in cities across the country saw how males
dominated both the political “New Left” and hippie culture (the two were often
at odds) and began to protest.
“Women discovered, to our surprise and dismay, that despite
the New Left change in head, shape, hip action and buttons — most of all
buttons — that the position of women was no less foul, no less repressive, no
less unliberated, than it had ever been,” wrote three early Chicago-based
feminists in a famous 1967 essay titled “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.”
For many of the guys, free love really meant free sex.
“I think there was a general feeling that the whole idea of
free love was a very attractive idea to men because it meant love without
responsibility,” Evelyn Goldfield, one of the essay’s authors, recalls.
So women decided they were going to have to mount their own
revolution. Modern-day feminism took to the streets and helped raise a
generation of assertive women who not only agitated for political parity, but
erotic parity as well.
“The long-lasting reaction was to create the conditions for
a vision of sexual liberation that includes women, and if anything, allows
women to take the lead” in sex, suggests Ellen Du Bois, feminist history
professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
The age’s radical feminist notion of eliminating marriage
never materialized, but demand from 40 years ago to have “the freedom to love,
to chose whom to love and how to love,” written by Goldfield and her essay
collaborators Sue Munaker and Naomi Weisstein, is taken for granted by the
young women — and men — of the MySpace generation.
Goldfield now is a prominent university chemistry professor
with children and grandchildren. Though she now seems somewhat chagrined at
some of her theatrical language, the key word in that essay is “freedom.”
The Summer of Love helped contribute to today's cultural freedoms, from dirty dancing teens to talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible before the 1960s.
Freedom is the true legacy of the Summer of Love era,
according to Eli Coleman, Director of the Program of Human Sexuality at the
University of Minnesota and editor of the International Journal of Sexual
Health.
“They made sex a central focus of their lives,” and popularized the idea “of sex as fun” that has now become a mantra of the younger generation, Coleman says.
From the excesses of the free-love movement came a less
self-destructive, yet more open-minded approach to relationships, both for the
baby boomers and their children.
“Some [people] are monogamous, but they are choosing to be,
rather than following some script. Maybe they are not having sex with 10 people
at a time, but now they are following their own script,” says Coleman.
Studies support his assertion. Among women born between
between 1933 and 1942, 93 percent had their first union with a man when they
married, according to the University of Chicago's landmark 1994 study of
American sex by professor of sociology Edward O. Laumann and his colleagues.
Among those born between 1963 and 1974, only 36 percent did, meaning that 64
percent formed a non-marital cohabitation unit before marriage.
Though the Summer of Love collapsed on itself by Labor Day
of 1967, leaving many damaged people in its wake, its lingering contribution
has been the freedom to choose one’s own sexual path through life, with all the
possible pitfalls and joys that freedom suggests.
Baby boomers are chucking down Viagra and sticking on
hormone patches so they can still enjoy sex, Coleman says. And their children —
in some cases, their grandchildren — are dirty dancing in school gyms, making
pornography as a statement of feminist power, using condoms at increasing rates
and most of all, talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible
before the 1960s.
NOTE: The author is MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist and a
contributing editor to Glamour magazine. His latest book, America Unzipped:
In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, will
be published by Harmony Books in January.
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