Sex Was More Fun in the 1970s

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Sex Was More Fun in the 1970s

By Katherine Forsythe, National Sexuality Resource Center. Posted April 27, 2009.

The original "Joy of Sex" emphasized pleasure. The new version of the book seems like one more manual on how to perform and impress.



The new ultimate revised edition of The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort is finally here, thirty-seven years later. Here’s a review from The Washington Post. The reviewer is a woman who was not around for the first The Joy of Sex. Though she gives comparison of the new and old edition fair treatment, she can’t possibly understand what a radical icon of freedom the original book became. You had to be there to understand what this book really meant. It gave us permission to begin the sexual liberation we enjoy today (and continue to liberate) to be the men and women we were meant to be.

I remember when The Joy of Sex came out. I kept it in my bedroom, and read it with my new husband, and sometimes without him. It was "far out". It was titillating. It was rebellious. It was freeing.

It was 1972. The Vietnam war was finally, and humiliatingly, coming to an end. Two years earlier, I had graduated from The University of Michigan. A liberated woman coming of age in the '60s -- that’s how I saw myself. A bra burner. A protester (I remember locking elbows and holding a candle in a huge circle two hundred yards in diameter, on the "Diag" at U of Michigan, singing We Shall Overcome, interlocking arms with the black students, a radical action for both of us. Who knew that in the presidential election of 2008, we really would overcome? We had yet to get past the dreaded Orwellian 1984!.

Somehow, however, my "liberation" led me to being married in 1970 upon graduation. It never occurred to me that being liberated did not include marriage. After all, I had marched in the moratorium on Washington. I had lain in the mud at Woodstock. So what if I got married? It didn’t mean I was giving up my cause(s). By the way, I was also in a sorority. Sorority girls got married after graduation. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/138642/sex_was_more_fun_in_the_1970s/

[MrScorpio]

1. This sucks

I started having sex in the 1980s

I missed all the good stuff

[marmar]

2. You can rent some vintage blue movies.......

:)

And as a GenXer, neither was I.

[peace frog]

3. I've been saying the same thing for years

As a younger womnan I used to receive and order from Victoria's Secret catalog. Early on, the models were sultry and beautifully sensuous - they turned pricey, frilly undies into high erotic art for a busy working mom. I couldn't wait to order the merchandise to thrill my husband and please myself. However by the late 90s the models looked hard, soulless and mechanical. Perusing the catalog was once a pleasant pastime that had become a dead bore. Thank the gods sex still had a beating pulse in my marriage but I missed the sexy, exciting VS of old. Just one example of how the joy of sex has died in much of Middle America.

[leveymg]

4. In the early '80s, the look had already turned "hard, soulless and mechanical"

I remember a 1982 article in the local weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, CA titled, "All pumped up with nowhere to go" about this. In the 1930s, Wilhelm Reich had talked about how fascists insulated and armored themselves with muscles, which made them less human.

The Terminator (1984) was the model for the New Fascist American Superman (and Superwoman). "Hard, soulless and mechanical", indeed.

[peace frog]

5. Well, I was no Superwoman

but I worked like a gosh darn dog at a full time job, attending college part time, bearing and raising children, and running a houshold. On second thought maybe it was a superhuman task, after all. :-)

[leveymg]

6. Just so long as you get some occasional exercise.

Enough to raise a good sweat and put a smile on your face. :bounce: