> 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.
Further clarification on my previous post. The reason I brought up all the material & cultural conditions was to question the whole notion that there WAS a "'free love' movement."
Think of the analogy to the Civil Rights Movement. There was NOTHING like the infrastructure, national leadership, grassroots organizing, political agenda (constantly being struggled over), etc. when it came to free love. Of course, the Civil Rights Movement was the mother of all movements, but all other movements at least showed signs of all the above. In that sense, the notion of a "'free love' movement" can only be mean metaphorically. There was CERTAINLY nothing like "Woodhull And Caflin's Weekly" around, that's for damn sure.
Yet, of course, it did dramatically change things. But precisely because it WASN'T a movement, it was particularly subject to all the reversals, distortions, appropriationes, what-have-you. That's why I suggested, and repeat my suggestion that we need to look at the totallity of forces at work, and understand "'free love' movement" in the 1960s as a sort of shorthand for a much more complex set of interactions.
One more thing that I didn't highlight before is that this was part of the shift in influence of capitalism's need for obediant workers to it's need to affluent consumers. The 1960s was a period of transition in emphasis. Sex didn't get as tightly wound into the consumer-push side of things until the 70s, but it's a post hoc fallacy to blame this on "free love". (This also has relevance to the thread on students. The more deskilling and commodity oversupply there is, the more hedonic goof-offs the system produces.)
In fact, "free love" was exactly the opposite of this. It was NOT about using and commercializing sex, in fact it wasn't about physical appearance, that was one of the things to get free of. I mean, Janis Joplin was NOT a cover girl, ya dig?
> Post free-love movement women are objectified and sexualized to
> a far greater extent than women before the movement were.
True, but not to be blamed on a "movement" that didn't exist.
> 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.
Agreed, 100%. But, again, the blame is misplaced here.
> Charles, 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.
Well, I've just recently finished defending Affirmative Action against a gang of libertarian lunatics over at IntellectualCapital.com, so I'm intensely famliar with the later term in your comparison. I think it's a good ANALOGY, but ONLY an analogy, one that's particularly useful if one is confronting someone who thinks that 60s sexuality was unproblematic, but that be pretty misleading if taken too literally. It's certainly true that "free love" in the 60s wasn't separate from male supremacy, but is ANYTHING sexual even in our culture today "separate from male supremacy"? It's a matter of degree, and of the direction(s) of tendency. IMHO, "Free love" was a tendancy which male supremacy wrecked more than dominated, while it was simlutaneously, in part, a result of male supremacies destabilization.
So, one last stab at restating my position: The objections you raise are all valid, but they relate to the overall direction of sexual expectaion/representation/mores, etc. in the culture at large, of which "free love" was but a brief marginal episode, so far as the cultural mainstream is concerned. The revolutionary potential of everything gets drained away as it's appropriated, but when something is quite amorphous, there's relatively little capacity to resist this process. And that's certainly an apt description of what happened to 1960s "free love", precisely because it couldn't really be called a movement.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
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