Re: "the downside of what is really male liberation"
Aha! You've hit the nail on the head, Blue!
I have always felt that the so-called "sexual revolution" benefited males more than females.
Frankly, what the "sexual revolution" meant for young males, especially young teen-aged males, that they no longer had to walk around with a perpetual hard-on; they could find relief, and an ideological justification for it. (Sorry to be so coarse, but that is exactly the way I have heard young males put it.)
And remember when the young folk started openly living "in sin"? (Before the '60's, that was frowned upon by almost everyone.) In my observation, that meant, all too often, that the man got all the advantages of matrimony (free sex, free maid service, free meals) but none of the responsibilities.
Yet women have gotten something out of it, though. Something less tangible, but perhaps more important. And that is that if they "slip," or if they "live in sin," they are no longer shunned as "fallen women."
In the boarding house I lived in during my college days in Washington, I had a roommate from Mississippi, who used to love reading True Confessions magazines. Well, in those days, the "confessions" were all the same. A girl "sins" once. Just once. And of course she gets pregnant. And of course she is covered with shame. Only after many years of whatever, is an honest man willing to take her on...
And of course my Mississippi roommate was in despair, because the soldier she had "sinned" with no longer wanted to marry her (because she was no longer a "good" girl in his mind). I don't think she was pregnant, though...
Joan |
