'Free Love,' Etc. (was Re: heterosexism vs homophobia)

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Sat Feb 13 03:03:28 PST 1999



> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > Yoshie: Michael Hoover
> > says that what is memorable and memorably bad about the hippie scene is
> > men
> > calling their girlfriend 'my old lady.'
>
> That went both ways, Yoshie. "My old man" meant boyfriend & was used
> equally freely. If that's the worst you got...
> Paul Rosenberg

Yoshie suggested in her post that I put in my 2 cents...now my father used to tell me that my 2 cents weren't worth a plug nickel...

btw: Yoshie's reference to word 'chicks' deleted above....

the worst? no - symptomatic? yes...'ole lady' and 'ole man' were hardly analogous phrases - use of lady & man at most obvious level...but in a lot of instances, 'old man - or at least 'older man' was applicable (I knew one 25 yr. old guy who went by the name Abbie because he looked like Hoffman who had a series of 'ole ladies' the youngest of which was 13)...

seems cliched now: 'revolutionary mamas' & 'earth mothers' making coffee or baking bread as guys talked politics or played music (new left and counterculture weren't always same phenomena) and providing the 'free love' guys found so 'liberating'...

dialectically, women's movement/'second wave' feminism in US was both a product and repudiation of the 'movement'...regarding latter, turned out that many 'movement' men weren't really any different from 'establishment' men when it came to their relations with women...

rather than bore/regale listers with anecdotes - personal or otherwise - about "the '60s" (which have now met their ultimate fate in being reduced to a 4hr tv 'event' by NBC), folks could check out (or go back to as the case might be) Marge Piercy's 'The Grand Coolie Damn' essay, Robin Morgan's 'Goodbye to All That' article, 'Redstockings Manifesto'...

Michael Hoover



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