>>> "Frances Bolton" <fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu> 02/11 5:27 PM >>>
Hey Charles--
>Charles: Indeed, the movement had strengths and weaknesses, and some of the
latter was >that it was a heavily petit bourgeois movement especially in its
articulating members which is >a vulnerability to bourgeois corruption.
Like (like they said in the 60's) the labor movement >has had strengths and
weaknesses, the civil rights/Black power movement. You know the >rest. This
movement has gone underground more than the others.
You're right, Charles, they all did/do have their weaknesses, but I don't any were as deeply flawed as the "free love" movment, and none of them have so well served their purpose in maintaining and strengthening a bourgeois, sexist, heterosexist power structure. Post free-love movement women are objectified and sexualized to a far greater extent than women before the movement were. Standards for sexual attractiveness in women are much more rigid and difficult to attain, and women are judged more harshly if they don't attain them. Eleven year old girls feel compelled to wear makeup and diet when they should still be out riding bikes and getting scabby knees. _________
Charles: Yes, there was a Reaganite counterrevolution against all phases of the 60's-70's radical reform. I mean they arer trying to make it seem like Viet Nam has given up on the path to socialism, thereby overturning one of the greatest victories, but that is false, although even Viet Nam has had to retreat some. I am not ready to agree at all that the free love movement is the one that failed the most or was overturned the most. Reaganite racism is a horrendous and shocking betrayal and PARTIAL reversal of the civil rights/Black power movement. Some of the gains of the free love and women's movements are definitely still had. I'll list and analyze more if you request. ________
Frances: I hear what you're saying about male supremacy being the biggest problem facing the "heterosexual liberation" movement, I'm just not convinced that the "free love" movement was separate from male supremacy. I think the f.l movement was part of that supremacy, in the same way that "ending preferential hiring practices" is a part of white supremacy that wasn't recognized as such. _______
Charles: By "ending preferential hiring practices" you mean affirmative action ? If yes, ending aa has never been even slightly not recognized as part of white racism ! It is a main and obvious part of it. I definitely disagree that free love is analogous to ending affirmative action. You are overstating the male chauvinism of the free love movement. Women were in and are still in it. The idea that women are not for free love is false in my experience. A lot of times they are the promoters of it, but not necessarily shouting it in a movement. I would say anti-free love is the more male supremacist, patriarchal position. Suppression of woman loving sex is a main dimension of world-historic and 1990's male supremacy. Many women want to have sex too. It is not just men.
Charles Brown