Revenge of the victims of the sexual revolution
BOMBSHELL of the week was Marianne Faithfull’s revelation that she hated sex back in those free-lovin’, flower-power days of the Sixties.
What? The deliciously beautiful Marianne, much-envied girlfriend of Mick Jagger?
Those were the days when groupies queued up to have sex with rock stars. We all thought Marianne was the luckiest girl on the planet. But no. She could only have sex when she was high or drunk so much did she dislike it. Marianne added that she didn’t begin to enjoy sex until her 50s when she was at last free of drugs and alcohol.
Marianne’s background was one of the reasons for her dysfunctionalism. Both her Austrian grandmother and her mother had been brutally raped by Red Army soldiers during the war. Their subsequent hatred of men was absorbed by the delicate Marianne, hauntingly beautiful but also troublingly vulnerable.
I started thinking about those times when the Pill and massive social change irrevocably altered young girls’ feelings about sex. I was at university in the late Sixties and the attitude was that since sex was now risk-proof (risk-free of pregnancy that is – no one had yet heard of Aids) that to be cool (and how we ached to be that) a girl had to go along with it.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I turned propositions down only to be asked with a leer and a sneer: “Are you frigid?” It was humiliating. Men thought casual sex was absolutely their right. Sometimes it seemed easier, less awkward, to go along with it even if you didn’t want to.
And now 50 years later we see an endless stream of famous men, who were in their prime in the Sixties and Seventies, being accused of historic sexual abuse. Could it be that those compliant girls who felt pressured into having sex with men who took it as their due, absolutely hated having to do it? But that their teenage preoccupation with being thought “cool” meant they couldn’t articulate a reason to refuse? Men could be truly nasty if they felt rejected.
Is what we are seeing now a new form of female revenge? Are these women now waking up to the fact that those men exploited their vulnerability? They consented to what they did. But they hated and resented it. Are they at last getting their own back? Just a thought.
