The Sixties (7 page)
Authors: Jenny Diski
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.
In America the Beats, along with Humbert and his nymphet, were shocking readers and still getting banned for sexual explicitness,
but in England we fell on
Lady Chatterley
in 1961
,
when it was finally published in an accessible paperback edition after a notorious court case (‘Would you want your wives
and servants reading this book?’ the prosecuting counsel asked the jury). We were searching for information, though we got
very little. Sexuality was there in the pages of books, but diffuse, metaphorised out of existence. Metaphor is little better
than euphemism to information-hungry adolescents. Somerset Maugham and Neville Shute wrote what were thought to be steamy
novels, but they were steamy in the same way that a bathroom mirror is steamy – you fail to see what you are looking at. I
read them all hopefully, but only found my misty surmises effloresced into jungles of confusion. Yes, wellings and rushings
and pumpings, and never-before-experienced experiences, but
what had actually happened
, what did they
do
and
how
? It was only when social class became a serious subject in novels, plays and films that sexual and many other silences were
released into the wild.
Room at the Top
came out in 1957, and
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
in 1960,
A Taste of Honey
and
The L-Shaped Room
in 1961 and ’62. They began to clear the mist away, and linked a vivid sexuality to youth, education and social anger, though
mostly for men. The women still longed, loved and feared that they’d get knocked up, and weren’t so much sexually vivid as
socially timorous or occasionally brave.
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.
In our flat, which we ran as a commune, the whole sex thing was extremely earnest. There was a lot of promiscuity, everybody
had to swap partners. We didn’t get into homosexuality, it was all heterosexuality. I’m not sure whether we really did elevate
it above wife-swapping. It was quite exploitative of male and female. It was a lot of men liking to fuck a lot and saying
to women, ‘Why won’t you fuck me?’ I remember saying that quite a lot. And some women who were strong and sensible enough
said, ‘Because I don’t want to,’ but quite often it was ‘Well... all right...’ Contraception was generally available, and
there was an ethos of doing it, and it was good and it was liberating and it was an act of friendship or love. But we weren’t
really liberated – all of us had a lot of hang-ups. We had been brought up traditionally, even strictly, and to try to leap
out of your own habits and upbringing into this blissful state where there were not hang-ups was of course interesting psychologically,
but it was completely impossible. And all the jealousies and tensions just grew exponentially.
5
Another version is Richard Neville’s afterthought:
Part of battling against a joyless morality – don’t fuck until you get married, and when you do you’ll both be so dreadful
you’ll probably get divorced. I had come from a very bad marriage and I was interested in men and women working out a different
sort of sexual/social behaviour. But of course there is some truth in the idea that this was institutionalising getting laid,
providing a political framework for sex. I loved women and I loved making love to them. I loved fucking and there were lots
of people around who felt the same. I don’t think that anyone was pushed into bed by me. A lot of girls climbed through my
window.
6
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.
And once again, as with the funding for our radical ways of life, it wasn’t the young really who were in charge of enabling
this sexual revolution that our elders and ourselves talked so much about. The pill, the great enabler of fearless sex (for
a short while) was developed by that older generation. And the easing of sexual repression in the UK began, if it had a beginning,
in the heart of everything we most despised: government. Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary of the Labour government between 1965
and 1967. Born in 1920, he was not part of the Sixties generation but an upper-middle-class liberal with no time for Victorian
morality. In 1959 he wrote a pamphlet called
Is Britain Civilised?
The need is to campaign for a general climate of opinion favourable to gaiety and tolerance, and opposed to puritanical restriction
and a drab, ugly pattern of life. It is not really a job for politicians, of course, although they, like any other leaders
of opinion, can do something to set the tone...But the important thing is to encourage them all, and to recognise that one
form of intolerance breeds another and one type of drabness makes another more likely. Let us be on the side of those who
want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide in an adult way and provided they
do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side too of experiment and brightness,
of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater
freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than even the most perfect of economic policies.
7
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.
