How did we go from a permissive society to #MeToo in the space of 50 years? A woman who remembers her own period of miserable promiscuity in the ’60s talks us through it
Things have happened so fast, sexually speaking, in the last 50 years, that it’s difficult to keep up. I’ve lived through the repressive 1950s to the liberal ’60s and ’70s and now, with #MeToo, we’re back in a sexual straitjacket. It’s almost as if the Summer of Love in 1967 never existed.
WHY?
In the ’50s, sex outside marriage was completely taboo. At Woman magazine journalists weren’t even allowed to use the word “bottom” at all in the magazine—not even in “bottom of the garden” or “bottom of the saucepan”, according to The Evelyn Home Story by Evelyn Home. Answers to sexual questions were delivered to readers in stamped addressed plain brown envelopes.
At the same time, if you got pregnant your father might well throw you out of the family house. Abortion was illegal, and difficult to access even if you lived in London and had money.
So just imagine what it was like to emerge from all this repression into the “swinging ’60s”, equipped with a contraceptive pill that had only recently been announced as a completely reliable form of birth control, and was free on the NHS. Just think how ill prepared young people were for what was to follow.