The Sexual Revolution: A Selection from Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love (2017)

“We are all heirs to the sexual revolution. Whatever our sexual preferences, we now live and date in the world that revolution created, and we do so freer from fears of ostracism, persecution, or unwanted pregnancy than we would be if it had not taken place. But the expression came to refer to such a wide range of phenomena that it can be difficult to know what exactly we mean when we say it.

It is also easy to forget that the 1960s marked its second coming. The term ‘sexual revolution’ was first used to describe the antics of the Flappers and Fussers of the Roaring Twenties. . . . There have always been rebels and libertines. Plenty of statistics show that turn-of-the-century shopgirls and dykes, Greeks and fairies, could be just as promiscuous as the hippies who succeeded them. The difference was that the first group had often described their own activities as unnatural, or at least exceptional. Their sex was sexy because it felt illicit.

By contrast, the soldiers of the second sexual revolution declared that no desire could be unnatural. If prior generations had winked that rules were made to be broken, more and more young people seemed to believe that no rules should exist. They agreed with the Flappers that everyone had a ‘right to be sexual.’ However, they did not stress the equality that this right gave them. Instead, they argued that having sex was a way to express another inalienable right: freedom. . . .

The ways that sexual revolutionaries spoke about sex often echoed the ways that free-market advocates were beginning to speak about the economy. Both wanted to maximize individual liberty. Both agreed that a laissez-faire approach was best.

While Marcuse was in Berkeley demanding sexual liberation, the economist Milton Friedman was in Chicago arguing for market liberalization. Friedman wanted to make markets as ‘free’ as possible, by shrinking the state and slashing social protections. He believed that removing all barriers to economic activity was the fastest way to create a wealthy society.

The sexual revolutionaries said the same things about sexuality. Even though Friedman and Marcuse came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, each wanted to liberate individuals from all external restraints. The second sexual revolution is often cited as the moment when dating died. Dating did not die; it was simply deregulated. ‘Free love’ turned the meet market of dating into a free market. . . .

On the surface, The Feminine Mystique and Sex and the Single Girl seem like very different books. One is set in suburbia; the other takes place in the city. The narrator of one is a bored housewife; the heroine of the other is a sexually liberated career girl. Yet the two books share more in common than it seems. Both embraced the idea that once individual women took paid work outside their homes, all women’s problems would be solved. Both also shared the same blind spot. They imagined that ‘allowing’ women to work would eliminate gender inequality.

The opportunities that certain women gained in the 1960s to work outside their homes and earn money did give them choices. As Brown emphasized, Single Girls could now support themselves. They had the income to buy all kinds of things—particularly if they opted not to have children. But this freedom to choose how they spent their time and money did not end gender inequality. It simply gave women a chance to work harder trying to break even in a system that was rigged against them. . . .

Black feminists and working-class feminists tended to be much more perceptive than their white middle-class counterparts about the limitations of Fun Fearless Feminism. Because African American women had always worked outside their homes, ever since their ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, they did not mistake the ‘opportunity’ to work as an adequate solution to all the problems that women had to deal with. . . .

When the young black writer Gloria Watkins published her first book, Feminist Theory, in 1984 under the pen name bell hooks, she faulted Betty Friedan’s school of feminism for its obliviousness of the majority of American women.

‘Friedan’s famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,’ actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life,’ hooks wrote. ‘The one-dimensional perspective on women’s reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement.’

The new feminine mystique that Brown hyped has also persisted. Cultural icons from Britney Spears to Sheryl Sandberg still tell young women that, for them, the prerequisite to a good life is an insatiable appetite for effort. . . . If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything. . . .

In her essay about the Summer of Love, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’ Joan Didion described her encounter with ‘Max,’ a young man who earnestly insists to her that it is possible to have loving relationships without any responsibilities or constraints.

‘Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. ‘I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been balling some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say ‘That’s me, baby’ and she laughs and says ‘That’s you, Max.’’

‘Max,’ Didion concludes, ‘sees his life as a triumph over ‘don’ts.’’ Max may have rejected the repressive laws that had governed the lives of his parents. But what is striking about the relationship between Max and his ‘old lady’ is how traditional it sounds. Max mentions his partner’s cooking offhand; he takes it for granted that she should make him meals and love him unconditionally. . . .

Many ‘hippie chicks’ ended up paying for ‘free’ with more than shopping and washing dishes. They endured a culture of rampant sexual violence—of rape or sex they forced themselves to endure. . . . Within the counterculture, gameness for any sexual adventure was seen as proof of sophistication. Women felt enormous pressure to act on the principle of ‘free love,’ even when their desires told them to act otherwise. . . .

The sexual revolution did encourage many women to do what they wanted, when they wanted, despite any cultural inhibitions they inherited. But when free lovers described the revolution as the freedom from all inhibition, they failed to acknowledge that individuals should also have the freedom to remain as inhibited as they like. . . .

The free love that promised to liberate individuals from social conventions took a very particular model of male individuality for granted. It was based on a fantasy of manliness that media like Playboy sold. Freedom from having to feel certain ways about sex turned into an imperative not to feel anything about sex. This free love could start to look a lot like freedom from love.

Today, conservatives often say that the sexual revolution duped women into seizing freedoms they did not actually want. The opposite is true. The sexual revolution did not take things too far. It did not take things far enough. It did not change gender roles and romantic relationships as dramatically as they would need to be changed in order to make everyone as free as the idealists promised. It tore down walls, but it did not build a new world.”—Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017)