In reply to Laura Perrins: This, sisters, is what sexual liberation looks like, Damaris Tighe wrote:
It has taken me a lifetime (I came of age in the 70s) to understand that the new sexual licence my generation of women enjoyed wasn’t a liberation but the fulfilment of many men’s dreams – the fully available woman. In general, women still deep down want sex to mean something, to reflect a bond or a relationship. With male testosterone the act is a biological imperative, in the moment, without further meaning.
The Pill and the sexual liberation movement gave women to men on a platter. It wasn’t women who were freed but men – freed from the social mores that made women (except those considered ‘a certain type’) inviolable until a bond of relationship was formed. Traditional mores didn’t so much restrict women as they restricted men.
No wonder the modern woman is often unhappy. She feels obliged to repress her innate desire for meaning in sex and pretend it’s just recreational ‘fun’ (notice how that word is often used about sex by women in denial) rather than the almost spiritual coupling between lovers that in her heart of hearts she yearns for.
