Meditations on MeToo and the sexual climate in mid-20th Century America.
If you didn't live it, you won't believe it. But it happened.
Disclaimer: This is about reality, not morality.
It’s been a while since a random woman strolled up to me and said, “I want to go down on you.”
This was a fairly routine occurrence a half-century ago in college. Some girls were less subtle, voicing their desires in sentences built around verbs like “suck.” Regardless of language used, these interludes often led to an activity whose slang verb form rhymes with “suck.” (Indelible college memory: I spent my lunch periods with my football buddies in a section of the caf we’d commandeered for ourselves. One day Leslie B walks up to our table and announces, “My class just got canceled and I’ve got a free hour. Who’s gonna fuck me?” Stu M took the assignment.) Leslie was one of a half-dozen gals whose now-and-then greeting to guy pals was to walk up and cup them. Right there in the cafeteria. I saw it, I experienced it.
Even after I got out of college and went into shop-at-home sales (long story), things were much the same. I’d be sitting on the couch with the customer-housefrau next to me, and as I’m writing up the paperwork for $1000 worth of custom wall mirrors, she’d speak the words above or just lean over, saucily unzip me and do her thing. Or a woman who’d been dressed for the day when I arrived would at some point disappear into the bedroom and return in a negligee, holding a bottle of wine. She’d pour us a glass, we’d both take a few sips, then it was off to bed. There was little discussion of what was happening; there was no need. We both knew.
Then there were the small handful of female customers who answered the door in lingerie. Think about that. These women had no idea who was going to show up—our appointments were arranged by phone—so they’d obviously made up their minds to offer themselves to whoever. I suppose they could’ve run back and put clothes on if they didn’t like what they saw through the peephole, but I suspect the seduction fantasy was the thing for them, not the skin-and-bones man, per se.
Not infrequently these women had husbands who were at work. Several times I was taken back to an unmade bed that still bore the poor guy’s imprint.
Such was the urban America I knew from the mid-60s all the way through at least the early 80s, when I traded my sales bag for a typewriter. (This is why I chortle at those “look-back” laws that allow adjudication of ancient sexual assaults. By the textbook definition, I was sexually assaulted a dozen times in college alone.) Even when my TV movie got made in 1991 I’d go to Los Angeles gatherings where it was just assumed that everyone there was gonna get coked up and fuck someone else who just happened to be there. This wasn’t every gathering every time, but it wasn’t a rarity. (For the record, I don’t do coke.)
When all this began in the late-60s, The Pill was new and every woman was suddenly on it. With Cosmo and Ms. and Janis Joplin and Donna Summer urging them on, American women sought to make up for a few hundred years of sexual repression. The Bacchanalia was catalyzed by Sangria, hash, mescaline and other designer drugs. (It was as if Woodstock moved into the mainstream.) And remember, we were still in those unspoiled times when any bugs you picked up could be zapped with a shot or two of penicillin. Deadly sex was a decade or so away.
There was no such thing as formal consent. Let me repeat, consent did not come up. (Compare that to today, when one is supposed to ask for a mere kiss or whether a woman is even receptive to being spoken to.) Women were every bit as aggressive as men, and actually took more liberties because they assumed that every guy wanted it 24/7. This was something men did not assume about women; even at the height of the insanity, you still felt you had to get a signal before you made a move—but damn women were giving signals galore! They may not all have strolled up and said, “I want to go down on you,” but they left no doubt.
By the time AIDS came along and chilled things somewhat, my writing career had taken me to Denver and Chicago and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and Miami and Philly and Phoenix and the Big 3 cities in Texas. The Sexual Revolution had arrived there, too. There was no mistaking what I saw going on around me in bars, discos/clubs and even donut/bagel shops. I have it on good authority that life was rather libertine in workplaces too. There was no talk of power imbalances or hostile environments. If people began twitching over each other between 9 and 5, they found a way to get it on. And if other workers objected to these pairings, they chose not to look. It was the culture, they understood.
A one-time compatriot of mine spoke of life at the service organization Kiwanis, where he worked as an editor: “Everyone had their official spouse and their workplace spouse, and we rotated the latter often.”
The exploding MeToo movement totally misperceived, or was deliberately disingenuous about, this climate. I guarantee you that some of the very same women who became MeToo militants in their 50s and 60s were part of the sexual free-for-all back in their 20s. Wholly willing participants.
Now, did MeToo need to happen? Absolutely! 1000 times yes!!
You had celebrity scumbags like Weinstein and Cosby who bullied women and/or drugged women’s drinks and/or made the most despicable quid pro quo “offers.” Some college men took unforgivable advantage of coeds who were passed-out drunk. Those pigs were long overdue for a reckoning. (Some college men still take advantage and deserve whatever comeuppance they get.) That aside, in the world of my young-adulthood, women and men were pretty much indistinguishable in their sexual mores. Thus I also chortle at the official numbers on “body count,” which appear to suggest that my female contemporaries have had just two or three partners, lifetime.
Nonsense. Not unless they lived their whole lives in a Baptist town with a population under 5,000. And probably not then, either. Now, from what I read, it’s possible that today’s women will have fewer partners than the fingers on the dominant hand they use to grasp a man—but citified Boomers and Gen Xers? I’m chortling anew.
Folks, a woman my age who grew up in a city or attended a major public college likely boasts a body count in the dozens if we include oral or hand-jobs, which most people don’t, but we really ought to. (Again, the word disingenuous occurs.) Sex is sex. If an orgasm occurred… Even without the orgasm, if you had your mouth or hands in places that are the operational theaters for gynecologists and urologists, you had sex. Even lousy, clumsy sex that doesn’t really go anywhere is still sex.
I’m told I was a good-looking guy back in the day, and I was certainly a physical specimen, a well-muscled 6-4+; I could bench-press the college gym. But all around me women were lustily going down on penises attached to all sorts of ordinary-looking fellows. Remember Stu M, who accepted Leslie B’s challenge? He was nothing much to look at (I’m being kind), yet Leslie didn’t care; he wanted her and that’s what mattered. No man who had options was faithful to his steady, or maybe you were faithful for three weeks till somebody else caught your eye or unzipped you, so you simply swapped steadies. A guy might have 10 “steadies” in a year.
We did have our share of women who were waiting for a man to put a ring on their finger, but there were plenty enough of the other type to keep things climaxing along. And most of the ones who wanted the ring would still find ways to keep their man happy while he accrued his diamond fund. Such was also the origin of the anal craze that continues to this day—women looking to preserve their technical virginity.
Now, was it good that America’s sex life was so robust and uncomplicated? Would we have been better off if we all walked around then with the paranoid circumspection since brought about my MeToo? I’m half-and-half on that point. That’s an argument for another day, and best made by someone else.
Here, though, is the key takeaway: The men of the era weren’t soulless predators and the women of the era weren’t disgusting sluts.
We all simply grew up in an environment where people behaved as noted. Everybody looked, everybody touched. Everybody was screwing (or chewing on) everybody else, at will, no questions asked. Anyone from that environment who tells you different is contriving some kind of politicized fantasy, or, more simply, is full of shit.