(1) Frances Bolton wrote:
> Hey Charles--
> >
> >Charles: Yea, I didn't mean to say that those posts were comprehensive
> discussions. I was speaking more specifically of the 60's sex lib movement,
> and of the dimensions that don't seem to be discussed anymore. It's like
> they have been silenced or tabooed. People don't even talk about it. It is
> an amazing example of sexual repression and thorough counterrevolt.
> >
> I think the problem with the 60s sex lib movement was that it became the
> 70s. Meaning, it almost immediately became surburbanized, controlled,
> commodified, about consumption rather than liberation. Another reason for
> its repression is of course the AIDS outbreak. But returning to the first, I
> wonder if there was some flaw in what was going on in the 60s that left the
> movement so open to being appropriated and sanitized by the swinging
> bourgeois.
Um, perhaps instead of looking for a "flaw in what was going on in the 60s" you might want to look at the material conditions that first *allowed* something like that to emerge, and then made the cultural re-assimilation so rapid.
There are obvious things, such as the invention of the pill, the long postwar economic boom, etc. fading gradually into more cultural manifestations, such as the baby boom & the altered commitment of resourses and changed attitudes toward children and education (unconsciously taught them WAY too much critical thinking skills without even realizing it, for one thing!), the relatively uncontolled explosion of pop culture driven by artists (derived in large measure from black and poor white sources), the parallel explosion of drugs -- marijuana & hallucinogens -- that had the capacity to enhance critical consciousness is the right set & setting, the obvious contradictions of 50s Cold War politics that delegitimized authority generally, most notably with respect to Civil Rights (kids grow up dancing to Chuck Berry--the original Michael Jackson--just can't UNDERSTAND segregation, much less take seriously the "need to be pragmatic" in dealing with it politically), and then, of course, Vietnam... the list just goes on and on and on.
What I'm trying to say here, Frances, is that the way you've put this assumes a kind of unity to 60s sexual liberation and distinctness from everything else that was going which is utterly mistaken from the get-go. While it's fashionable to dismiss this aspect of the 60s when it's not simply ignored, I think the truth is that it's just INCREDIBLY difficult to deal with, simply because its so damn complex and interconnected to everything else. Then the 70s came along and simplified it radically (in ways you mentioned) which makes it SO much easier to talk about, but utterly misses the dense complexity at its core.
(2) Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Hi Charles:
>
> You might check out the original Free Love movement in the
> United States. In the 19th century, when women like Victoria
> Woodhull spoke of Free Love initially, they didn't simply mean
> men and women having sex with each other without the sanction of
> the State & the Church. They also meant women saying 'no' without
> encountering pressures from lovers to say 'yes.' They were most
> often opposed to abortion as well.
I think an understanding of this era is utterly crucial for American leftists, and especially an understanding of Victoria Woodhull because she was such a central figure involved in so many contributing and oft-contradictory aspects of social, cultural and political movements of the day.
The one thing I'd object to here is the characterization that "They were most often opposed to abortion as well." What they were opposed to was male-enforced abortion, which, of course, was the only kind that had broad (though hardly universal) social sanction.
Woodhull came from a family situation custom made for "Jerry Springer", and she had a profoundly down-to-earth materialist outlook on the nature of "freedom" that clashed intensely with the refined old-stock New England feminists. Woodhull was also strongly associated with prostitutes, having worked among them much of her life (whether she ever was one herself is a matter of some dispute), not as a "redeemer," but as a seamstress and in other related jobs. Her understanding of "free love" had profoundly down-to-earth meaning, as in minute-by-minute autonomy for women who were SUPPOSED to labor under a multiplicity of interlocking systems of obligation and subjugation. As mentioned before onlist, Marx rather foolishly and prudishly tossed her out of the First International -- she was by far the most charismatic figure in America associated with socialism at the time.
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