KEY POINTS
- It was not ‘the free love culture’ which caused her death, they insist, but her own self-indulgence. After all, we all have choices, don’t we? To me, this is one of the most fascinating issues of our time – raising so many questions about freewill, and cause and effect.
- Yet the damaging consequences of that Sixties revolution are obvious in the society we now live in – ranging from the utter mess made of education in this country (directly attributable to the overturning of traditional ideas in the Seventies, an orthodoxy which still prevails), to the dangerous ‘anything goes’ attitude which challenges any idea of restraint in speech or behaviour.
- Of course any individual is a unique, complex, multi-faceted creation – shaped by family, by personal reactions to events, and by the random nature of sex and love. Nevertheless it’s absurd to suggest that we exist in isolation, that we are not shaped by the culture we inhabit.
- Oh yes, they were heady days, out of which many good things came. But at university I could see close-up the impact of the sexual revolution and the ‘new’ pressure to sleep around. It was expected; nobody wanted to be called ‘uncool’ or ‘uptight’.
- People have always had sex before (and illicit sex within) marriage. You only have to think of the excesses of the first sexual revolution – the ‘roaring’ Twenties. But our sexual revolution was more sweeping and long-lasting.
- Most of us embraced the hippie-esque idea that sexual freedom was a beautiful thing to be celebrated. ‘Seize the day,’ we shouted, and threw old notions like fidelity out of the window.
- As the writer and feminist pioneer Rosie Boycott has said: ‘What was insidious about the underground was that it pretended to be alternative. But it wasn’t providing an alternative for women. It was providing an alternative for men in that there were no problems about screwing around.’
- The artist Nicola Lane, another young woman of the age, adds: ‘It was paradise for men – all these willing girls. But the problem with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people concerned but because they felt they ought to. There was a lot of misery.’
- Sex, which in previous eras was private (even taboo), became public, with the result that women were expected – in their love lives – to demonstrate the expertise of prostitutes. Except these ‘liberated’ women gave it away for free.
- Bleakly, Amis commented: ‘It’s astonishingly difficult to find a decent deal between men and women and we haven’t found it yet.’
- As the young American writer Ariel Leve has said: ‘Even though this new world of beer and babes feels foreign to Sixties revolutionaries, it is actually… a repercussion of the very forces they put into motion.’ She’s right. We did start it – and those who followed paid the price, and are paying it still.
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