The Hippies and American Values

Chapter 2: The Ethics of Sex

Chapter 2 The Ethics of Sex Take off your clothes, unless you’re cold, and touch each other—yes, even strangers. Make love—not to one guy or chick who you grab onto and possess out of fear and loneliness —but to all beautiful people, all sexes, all ages. —Ron Norman, Seventy-Nine Cent Spread, November 5, 1968 We do not announce the “sex orgy.” We announce the true spirit of the high holy act of fucking. People must be free to fuck without molestation, without fear, without guilt. —“Om,” Berkeley Barb, June 5–11, 1970 In its use of dope the counterculture proclaimed freedom of access to mental pleasure. Sex did the same for physical pleasure: free people should express their sexuality as they choose. To the hippies, any special character that sex might have did not mean that it should be restricted. Sex was, rather, a range of powerful and wonderful feelings and activities that one should feel free to enjoy at will. No person was to be forced to engage in any sexual activity, but neither was any person required to restrain his or her sexual impulses. Sex was good. Sex was fun. Sex was healthy. And this hip approach to sex helped revolutionize attitudes and practices in the nation as a whole. A note from the introduction needs to be repeated here: the heyday of hip came before the widespread dissemination of contemporary feminist thought, 26 the ethics of Sex and some hip writing on sex looks, several decades later, distinctly unenlightened . Sex roles were often traditional in the counterculture, and when feminist ideas first began to be raised in progressive circles, around 1968, many male hippies turned out to be as disinclined to give women equal rights and privileges as males elsewhere in society.1 A fair number of the early new feminists were influenced by the counterculture. One could argue that they tended to take seriously the talk of equality that heretofore had been conceived in class and racial terms, and perhaps the gap between expansive hippie rhetoric and the disinclination of many hip males to liberate themselves from old sexual thinking helped some spur new feminists into revolt. In any event, sexual liberation was presented in the underground press in largely male-oriented terms. The point of the sexual “revolution” was, disproportionately , male pleasure. The counterculture bloomed before either contemporary feminism or homosexual activism amounted to much. Roe vs. Wade was still years down the road as well, and devastating disease was not much in the picture (yes, there were sexually transmitted diseases, but the common ones were easily curable). Many former hippies reading their old utterances on sexual liberation would probably put things differently today. the Broad case for Liberated Sexuality The concept of free sexuality is hardly new. Its advocates have run from the ancients through such phenomena as the “complex marriage” of the Oneida Community and the larger free-love movement in the nineteenth century to more recent advocates of sexual liberty such as Albert Ellis. Sex, in the counterculture, was fun and free, certainly more fun to engage in than to write about. “Anyone who has time to write articles protesting sexual mores should fuck more,” one hip author intoned.2 At the same time, sex was understood as an expression of humanness, a means of human communication that operated at the deepest levels of being. It was the “human touch, without conquest or domination, and it obviates self-consciousness and embarrassed speech.”3 As Leah Fritz of Berkeley wrote, “As for sex—like eating, like walking in fresh air, like all human activity—it should recreate us, help us to find one another, make us real, and tangible as the earth. It should put us together again, body and soul, male and female, in harmonious intercourse.”4 Pleasure and communication, then, were the two main touchstones of countercultural sexuality. To a lesser degree, sex was also held to be revolutionary.5 As one countercultural author put it, the ethics of Sex 27 Sexual repression is counter-revolutionary. It is the denial of our most basic self. When sex is both repressed and sublimated it is the driving force of civilization. “Don’t let those slaves fuck around, man, we’ve got a pyramid to build.” Fortunately, as we all know, civilization is teetering on the brink.6 The hippies were in the vanguard of a revolutionary...