Authors: Jenny Diski
The Sixties (6 page)
We had these appetites that we understood and it was wonderful that they were taken care of. It was a moment where everybody
was giving to the other person what they wanted. The women knew that’s what the men wanted.
Interview with Leonard Cohen
in the
Globe and Mail
, Weekend Review, Canada, 26 May 2007
People fucked back then just as much as they do now. We just didn’t talk about it as much.
Henry Miller in the film
Reds
, 1981
In 1973 I was teaching at a girls’ state comprehensive school in Hackney, East London. One day after an English lesson with
a class of fourteen-year-olds, a girl stayed behind to speak to me. She looked very awkward, near to tears, surprising because
she was an outspoken, knowing young woman.
‘What’s up?’
It took her a while to explain, or for me to understand exactly what the problem was. She didn’t know what to do, she said.
What about? Well, she’d put a Tampax in, you know, inside her, when she got her period last week. And? The string, she didn’t
know how, but the string sort of went up, too. She forgot to pull it out first, she supposed. And? Well, what should she do?
About what?
Finally, it dawned on me.
‘You mean it’s still in there? After a week?’
‘Yes, Miss. I don’t know what to do. Should I go to the doctor?’
I still hadn’t got the problem.
‘Just take it out.’
‘But I can’t. The string’s not there.’
‘Put your fingers into your vagina and take it out.’
Her face changed from worry to pure disgust.
‘What, put my fingers up inside me? I’m not touching myself there. Miss!’
The next day I brought my copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
by the Boston Women’s Health Collective into school and left it in an unlocked cupboard in my room. It described women’s and
men’s bodies, how they worked, what they did, how they did it, in straightforward language with simple drawings and photographs.
The coffee-table-sized paperback, a US import, became so dog-eared and smudged with page-turning and fingermarks I had to
replace it every couple of terms with a new copy. I’d arrive in my classroom after break and lunch to see knots of girls already
there, crowded round one of the tables and the book open in front of them.
This, as I say, was in 1973. Long after the
Lady Chatterley
ban and the Beatles’ first LP. People may well have fucked freely back in the early twentieth century, and even for Philip
Larkin sexual intercourse had started ten years previously, as indeed it probably had already for many of the girls poring
over the book, but in 1973 in Hoxton, London, a fourteen-year-old young woman who used the word ‘fuck’ like a comma, told
smutty jokes and almost certainly knew what a penis looked and felt like had been walking around with a week-old tampon inside
her because it was ‘dirty’ to put her fingers into her vagina.
The year before I had helped to set up a free school for some local hardcore truants, which was eventually funded by Camden
Council and sited in one of several sheds in an old soon-to-be-built-on freightliner depot, along with a youth club, an old
people’s lunch club and a women’s centre. After a few weeks, there were complaints from the women’s centre that the free school
kids were breaking in to their shed at night. Nothing was taken, nothing damaged, apart from the door lock and the light left
on all night. We asked the kids about it. Yeah, they said, the boys, anyway. There was this poster stuck on the wall of the
women’s centre. They’d broken in to look at it. What was it? Shrugs. Y’know. Nope, don’t know. What was it? No one would say.
We went to look, and saw on the wall, opposite a window, a two foot by two foot colour poster, all pinks, reds and purples,
of a vulva, spread wide open, showing the labia and entrance to the vagina. At the time, women’s groups were keen on investigating
their own bodies. They examined their sexual parts with the aid of speculums, mirrors and their friends, familiarising themselves
with what was felt to have been appropriated by men for their own private gaze. The free school boys, children and young adolescents,
wanted to see as well.
‘What did you do?’
‘Looked at it.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, we jerked off. Obviously.’
It did seem obvious, speaking to them. The women were furious. They were being violated, they said. We explained this to the
free school kids.
‘Well,’ one of them said. ‘I’d never seen one just there on a wall like that before. What else you supposed to do with it?
What do they expect?’
It was an interesting point, and quite a fruitful discussion began about the nature of different points of view of a single
subject. The boys went to the woman in charge and apologised for breaking in. They weren’t well received. If it happened again,
she was going to call the police. The women’s centre and the free school kids never did see eye to eye.
Taking off our clothes was an important part of the project of undoing the constraints we perceived our elders to have been
immobilised by. We stripped conscientiously in front of each other and made nothing of it. Sex was written about and acted
out in private and public with enthusiasm in the name of the sexual revolution. The idea was to have fun, because having fun
with our bodies was a completely new way of being with our peers. Of course we were young and therefore taking our clothes
off was relatively unproblematic, because what we saw was on the whole easy to look at. We scorned covering ourselves up for
any other reason than aesthetics – and warmth. Clothes (except the beautiful, floaty, diaphanous kind that invited the slightest
zephyr to puff them away) were an obstacle to the freedom of bodies, and also signified the draping of the mind. In 1973 –
the early Seventies, a seminal period it seems for discovering that not so much had changed – Erica Jong’s heroine Isadora
Wing
4
had finally defined what it was the Sixties generation were in search of, and evidently still hadn’t found. It was ‘the zipless
fuck’. It seemed to be several things all at once, not all of them compatible: it was wildly romantic, a teen dream of you
didn’t quite know what glimpsed frustratingly in vague erotic prose and on movie screens:
Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion
fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.
It was also emotionally utopian. Free from the complexities of possessive responses trained by the rigid, repressive social
apparatus that caused the Fifties generation to moulder, as we saw it, in sexual frustration. All done up in tight-waisted,
hobble-skirted, corseted clothing and manners.
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the
woman is not ‘giving.’ No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or
get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never
had one.
The reality of the zipless fuck was as far removed from romance as it was possible to get. That was the point:
For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well.... So another condition
for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better.
Of course, the zipless fuck absolutely required the pill, without which fumbling and anxiety, no matter how advanced the mind
might be, was unavoidable. It was invented in 1961, but was available only to married women or those brave enough to get a
cheap ring from Woolworths and brazen it out in grim family planning clinics. Between 1962 and 1969, the number of users in
the UK rose from approximately 50,000 to one million. It helped not to have to rely on men to use condoms properly or withdraw
at the right moment, or have to remember to put in the diaphragm before, but not too long before, it was likely you were going
to have sex. It was a great advance for women in general, worldwide, even for the cause of sexual liberation. But the fact
that Isadora was still looking for this unencumbered encounter in 1973, and that women found
Fear of Flying
a compelling read, tells us a lot about the difficulty of achieving the sexual revolution we had been trying so hard for.
The post-war generation was brought up by parents who aimed for respectability, and to conceal any suggestion that the body
was not under the strict control of the civilised mind. The great weapons were shame and embarrassment. It was not only difficult
to find yourself unmarried and pregnant (bringing up children is at any period a very tough one-person activity), it was a
disgrace. Hiding the fact was far more important than dealing with it. Our parents, a generation that had responded to the
uncertainty of war with a good deal of sexual licence (the writer John Mortimer remembered VE Day, when the grassy expanses
of Hyde Park heaved with copulating couples), and during the bombings and enforced separations snatched physical pleasure
in the face of absence and death, now scurried back to the social straight and narrow and impressed on its children the need
to conform. Working-class or middle-class, respectability, in the sense of not doing anything the neighbours didn’t want you
to think they did, was a very high priority.
The sexual revolution is certainly an idea people have about the Sixties. It was also an idea that the Sixties had about itself
even though there was, as Henry Miller said, nothing new about small groups of usually affluent or arty people having complicated,
delightful and miserable sex with each other. Screwing, joyfully or grimly or even obediently, like rabbits, as if there were
no tomorrow. Sex is presumably always a brand new discovery to every generation. A secret they had better not tell their parents
about, in case, God forbid, they take it up. In some periods this has happened in spite of the parents doing their damnedest
to keep it a secret not just from their children but also from themselves. The Fifties was not an optimum time for sexual
openness. Books that had any bearing on the subject were banned or not published without much challenge. It was very hard
to get any information about the body. Ignorance and received morality were believed to stroll hand in hand, just like back
before we were cast out of the garden. This time it was back gardens and yards with fences just the right height to gossip
over. In any case, in the Fifties, England was not conducive in a practical way to bodily delight. Houses were cold and damp,
with no central heating. Bathrooms were grim, icy affairs of chilled, cracking lino and uncertain waterheaters that gave up
their hot water, after a good deal of clanking and groaning, in a thin stream that was inclined to run cold when the money
in the gas meter ran out long before the bath was more than a puddle. The spa experience was a long way off. The sensual pleasures
of steaming scented wet-rooms where bodies were (worth it, worth it) deservedly pampered, muscles relaxed, skin moisturised
in preparation for a night of love of self or other, alone or in company, was too remotely in the future even to daydream
about in the draughty washrooms of 1957. When you’d brushed your teeth and washed your face, you stripped off your clothes
and pulled on your nightdress or pyjamas and dived into bed as quickly as you possibly could. Hot water bottle. Eiderdown.
Being naked just meant being cold well into the mid-Sixties. Hard to tell if people made love under the covers out of primness
or protection against the frost.
Language was the equivalent of the icy bathroom. The euphemism ruled. As if ‘period’ was not evasive enough, my mother described
her monthly bleeding, and eventually mine, as ‘being unwell’. It was not at all surprising to have to spend several days a
month on a sofa, suffering, though why, and from what exactly, remained a mystery to me until I was twelve. She warned me
when I was eleven that when I ‘became a woman’ she might have to slap my face because of the shock I would receive one day
in the bathroom. Blood wasn’t mentioned. The worst thing I and my classmates could imagine was someone – a boy especially,
but even another girl, oh, anyone – seeing a sanitary towel hidden in our schoolbag. And the terror of ‘coming on’ and finding
you had been walking around with a spot of blood on the back of your skirt... The shame was that people would know you were
doing what every woman does once a month for a third of her life – bleeding.