99. Women's Lib: 40 Years On

Love is also tenderness...

these writers advocated we opened our legs often

Back between the 60s and 70s when us youngsters were stamping our feet on floorboards to “She Loves You yeah, yeah, yeah...” we were also bombarded by writers who advocated what is termed as “Women’s Lib”.

These writers, women of course, gave us girls to think that our mummies and daddies did not bring us up right and we were all suffering from sexual repression and neurosis brought on by a frustration of not being able to achieve fulfilment as a female because men wouldn’t let us. One lady led us to believe that we had been castrated, become sexless and hence from where all our suffering sprang. Another told us we should not be afraid to soar up high, open our legs as often as possible and cry out with the joy of satisfaction!

Now, I understand what that song the Rolling Stones brought out was all about- as some may remember it was called- “I can’t get no satisfaction”. At the time the penny didn’t drop.

The penny didn’t drop because I simply could not see where my neurosis, these ladies were on about, was; nor how I was sexually repressed; or where the chains were that prevented me from soaring to whatever heights I wanted... Maybe my idea of heights was not what these ladies had in mind!

These writers were important writers. They sold millions of books translated in dozens of languages, even the Chinese fell for it... the whole world was full of their message... those liberators and defenders of our womanhood.

my world consisted in innocent fun

Up to that point, I had been quite a normal teenager, happy to prance around “She Loves You...” it was sweet, innocent fun until those “well meaning” ladies decided to spoil it by offering a totally brand new world- fornication, abortion, promiscuity... all compiled in explicit descriptions of women’s sexuality. Women were to find their own voice through these garish, loud sounding brash examples of crudeness. Many of us were jolted out of our soft, or not so soft, depending which backstreet you lived in, nest and stripped of any idea that sex could accompany love with tenderness, fidelity and true joy. All those ideas were old fashioned, fetters from keeping women from soaring to heights never touched before by woman kind.

But what in fact was being slammed down our throats at the time was a new kind of slavery... if in fact there had been any previous slavery, at least I had not been aware that I had been repressed. This new kind of slavery consisted that a woman had practically to be a whore and place herself in a prominent position in order to avail herself of those pleasures that a male could, should, would, had to, place before her. That in a nutshell was to be the new woman’s life, a slave to the pleasures, grandiose pleasures of sex. A woman was admonished to keep her cunt perennially unzipped and use it again and again. If a baby came along, you threw it down the loo. A woman’s only duty was to her own desire, her own wild, unimaginable pleasure that she could obtain by working a man up and make him dribble for her, day after day, night after night, and it made no difference of course how many times the face of that man changed- so long as ‘he’ were to use his instrument to give full satisfaction it didn’t matter who it was. Gosh... it was enough to make one want to dash off to a nunnery!

And these writers sold millions of this mind twisting rubbish. Women went crazy to buy, in my humble opinion, cheap thrills. There are also, on the other hand, hordes of women, need I say, who go to church on Sundays and eat fish on Fridays who have, happy sexual fulfilled existences. However, to have sold so much, these writers must have filled a void of some sort. It was obviously what SOME women wanted. They wanted to be jolted because normal life was so bland, so boring, so insignificant. The masses, when you think of it have nothing of their own to cling to, to make their own life interesting so they feed off those who can provide such thrills. That’s one explanation for their books having sold so much.

Another explanation is perhaps because these books in spite of their explicit crudeness they were selling dreams, illusions, a world that was so monstrously attractive. But as soon as women became aware that when you prick the bubble it bursts and you are left with nothing in your life, that when, in spite of making these books your template for happiness, a woman still doesn’t get an orgasm, a woman realizes that these books do not hold the key to paradise, that it is not sex or pleasure that brings fulfilment. The difference between then and now is that women, 40 years on are fully aware that what makes life worth living does not simply depend on an orgasm, but on something far beyond that surface, a surface these writers do not even scratch upon.

there is much more to life