State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Ironically, the crucial point about the sexual revolution is that it made sex not more but less important. Before the early 1970s, having sex had ‘immense emotional, economic and symbolic weight’ attached to it, as Cook puts it, because to sleep with another person was ‘tantamount to choosing them as a life partner’. Even in the kitchen-sink plays and novels of the early 1960s, for example, having sex is a literally life-changing moment and something to be taken intensely seriously. The plot of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving (1960) shows the consequences of getting it wrong: when Vic, the protagonist, gets an office typist pregnant, he is condemned to spend the rest of his life with her, even though he clearly does not love her. But by the mid-1970s this had clearly changed. The bohemian academics Howard and Barbara in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) or the Robin Askwith character in the film Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) may have sex with anybody they fancy, but they take it much less seriously: the ubiquity of contraception and availability of abortion have taken the danger out of it. And of course this helps to explain why, from the mid-1970s onwards, sex became the perfect vehicle for advertisers and marketing men. Supposedly liberated from its ‘social ceremony and emotional baggage’, no longer seen in terms of a life-changing commitment, it was increasingly presented as the ultimate consumer luxury. As Jeremy Seabrook noted after observing teenage girls discussing their love affairs in Blackburn, ‘their concern with their sexuality, their looks, their sensuality, is readily turned to profit’, from cosmetics that promised to make girls more alluring to magazines offering tips on getting and pleasing a man. And all of this hammered home the simple message that sex was no longer serious; it was fun.11

  With the link between sex and childbearing broken, the new orthodoxy emphasized sex as pure pleasure, not just a means of self-indulgence but a form of self-expression. ‘An active and rewarding sex life, at a mature level, is indispensable if one is to achieve his full potential as a member of the human race,’ wrote the Californian sex therapist David Reuben in his manual Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), published in 1969. Of course sex manuals were nothing new: between 1941 and 1964, Eustace Chesser’s Love Without Fear had sold an estimated 3 million copies, despite being available only through mail order and in backstreet shops. But in its emphasis on pleasure rather than procreation, on gratification rather than reproduction, Reuben’s manual typified the new mood. Even the wording of the title – ‘sex’ rather than ‘love’ – reflected the deeper change, a point made even more emphatically by another bestseller three years later. Published in 1972 by the London-based obstetrician, anarchist and poet Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex was an urbane, explicit sex manual modelled on a cookery book: hence the subtitle, ‘A Gourmet Guide’, and the section titles ‘Starters’, ‘Main Courses’ and so on. Groundbreaking in the frankness of its recommendations, the book also boasted some now splendidly dated illustrations that gave the male participant a shabby beard and the woman a luxuriant growth of underarm hair. But the illustrations were not the only things that soon proved anachronistic. Prostitutes, Comfort explains at one point, are usually motivated by ‘an active dislike of males’, while ‘the expression of erotic astonishment on the face of a well-gagged woman when she finds she can only mew is irresistible to most men’s rape instincts’. These sections, needless to say, did not survive in later editions. But they did no harm to the original version’s prospects: not only did it sell hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain, it spent a stunning seventy weeks in the American bestseller list between 1972 and 1974, and never went out of print.12

  It is impossible to know how many people actually followed Comfort’s recommendations, or indeed how many read the book for titillation rather than instruction. But there is little doubt that in the course of one generation, sexual behaviour and attitudes had undergone a tremendous change. Now that having sex was no longer a necessarily life-changing decision, manuals, newspapers and medical experts alike began to treat it not as a private expression of intimacy between husband and wife, but as the ultimate form of recreation. Just as contemporary travel guides opened readers’ eyes to the pleasures of Mediterranean holidays, just as cookery books recommended exotic new dinner-party recipes, so magazines like Cosmopolitan advised readers to set their standards ever higher, urging them to maximize the quantity and quality of their orgasms, the bewildering variety of their partners and positions, the intensity and frequency of their sexual experiences. Even the female body was no longer sacrosanct; to anybody who read Cosmopolitan, it seemed less like a temple and more like a playground. ‘To awaken your body and make it perform well, you must train like an athlete for the act of love,’ advised another manual, The Sensuous Woman, in 1970. In this context, the idea of remaining chaste until your wedding day seemed not merely unproductive but downright bizarre. The days when nice girls said no seemed to be long gone: by 1978 a divorced teacher in her thirties could write to Cosmopolitan complaining that ‘nowadays you go out with a man and it’s simply assumed that you are an emancipated woman who will fall into bed’.13

  Of course not all women fell into bed on their first date: in a survey published in 1976, the researcher Michael Schofield reported that only 60 out of 376 young adults he interviewed were genuinely promiscuous (although even this figure marked a dramatic shift from ten years earlier). Still, given the context, the disgruntled teacher’s suitors were not being excessively optimistic. In the first half of the 1950s, most girls had lost their virginity between the ages of 19 and 23; by the first half of the 1970s, most lost their virginity between 17 and 20. Perhaps more importantly, the vast majority of young women by the mid-1970s lost their virginity before they were married. As late as 1963, two-thirds of the population had believed that sex before marriage was immoral (even though many people fell short of their own high moral standards). By 1973, however, just one in ten people did so, and as attitudes changed, so did behaviour. More than 86 per cent of women who reached adulthood in the first half of the 1970s had sex before marriage, and by the end of the decade premarital chastity had almost died out. By the late 1980s, in fact, fewer than 1 per cent of women were virgins on their wedding day – an extraordinary transformation given that the equivalent figure in the late 1960s was more like two out of three. At the same time, the taboo on unmarried couples living together was clearly evaporating, not just among the young, but among their elders too. When the journalist Mary Ingham interviewed a group of 30-year-old women at the end of the 1970s, many recalled that their parents had actively encouraged them to live together before marriage. One young couple, Shirley and John, were always ‘worried’ how much their parents knew about their relationship, yet, as Shirley recalled, in 1971 her mother ‘suggested it would be cheaper if we lived together and I thought heavens, it’s my mother saying that!’14

  From one perspective, of course, the sexual revolution of the 1970s represented a genuine moment of liberation, allowing generations of young men and women to experience physical pleasures, apparently free from guilt or consequences, that had been denied their predecessors. And yet even at the time perceptive observers recognized that despite the naive optimism of the manuals and magazines, sexual self-indulgence did not come without a cost. One obvious consequence, for instance, was the stunning rise in illegitimacy. In 1964, just 7 per cent of children had been born out of wedlock; by 1971, the equivalent proportion was up to 8.4 per cent, by 1981 almost 13 per cent, and by the 1990s it was well on its way towards 40 per cent. It is true that single parents and illegitimate children were no longer ostracized as they once had been: in 1967 special tax allowances were extended to unmarried mothers, in 1975 illegitimate children were granted inheritance rights, in 1976 family allowances were extended to the first child in a one-parent family, and in 1979 the Law Commission recommended that courts no longer distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate children – all of which infuriated conservatives, for whom the state itself was undermining th
e traditional family. Even so, single mothers still found life hard and society highly censorious, which perhaps explains why abortion clinics saw so much trade.15

  When abortion had been legalized in 1967, most people had seen it as a long-overdue measure to regulate an appallingly dangerous backstreet business. Most historians agree that there were perhaps 100,000 illegal abortions a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, many of them horrifyingly rushed and bloody affairs in dingy flats and dirty bathrooms. As the vast majority of the public saw it – as well as the Anglican churchmen who were in the vanguard of the movement for change – legalizing abortion was a humane and sensible measure to safeguard the lives of thousands of frightened women; by the mid-1960s, polls showed that at least seven out of ten people supported it. What nobody had expected, however, was that the abortion figures would then go through the roof; indeed, most experts predicted that after a brief flurry, abortion would decline as better contraception and sex education made it unnecessary. In fact, the opposite happened. In 1968, there were 23,641 abortions; a year later there were 58,819; a year after that there were 83,851; and by 1973 the total was up to 169,362. At the time, critics insisted that this must mean that young women were treating abortion as merely another form of birth control, and that its popularity reflected ‘an increase in promiscuity and immorality coupled with a crude, cynical, hedonistic attitude to sex’, as one academic study put it in 1972. But the same study went on to debunk that argument. Most of the unmarried women who had had abortions, it emerged, were ‘generally sexually inexperienced’, and their plight was the result of excessive naivety rather than cynical calculation. No doubt some had been reckless or foolish, but they surely deserved pity rather than condemnation.16

  Perhaps not surprisingly, many people were deeply disturbed at the enormous surge in legal abortions, and throughout the 1970s the Catholic Church and other conservative groups organized rallies, demonstrations and lobbying efforts, which in turn provoked feminists to set up the National Abortion Campaign to defend women’s newfound rights. Yet while the great majority were essentially indifferent to the abortion controversy, it was a powerful reminder that the sexual revolution came at a price. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, there had been plenty of childish waffle about sex as liberating, radical, even subversive, inspired by the legacy of fashionable cod-Marxist thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.* By the mid-1970s, however, it was already clear that there was a darker side to the sexual revolution, typified by the last scene in The History Man, in which, even as the predatory academic Howard is seducing a colleague at one of his debauched parties, his wife Barbara is slashing her own arm open in an apparent suicide attempt. Indeed, for all the talk about sex as emancipation, it was predators like Howard, who played on the insecurity, confusion and vulnerability of others, that were the real winners – in the short term at least. Women ‘were so brainwashed by the desire not to appear repressed and old-fashioned’, wrote Mary Ingham, that they were frightened to say no to men, even when they were recoiling inside. ‘The line was, we’re all friends, we all sleep with each other, and it’s all fine,’ another woman recalled. ‘Actually, it never was fine for us girls. But you had to pretend that it was.’17

  The irony is that within just a few years, many of the people who had initially welcomed the sexual revolution – who had, indeed, congratulated themselves at their own emancipation and looked forward eagerly to the collapse of international capitalism beneath the tide of sexual self-expression – were lamenting that it had gone badly wrong. One book published in 1978 even called it The Illusory Freedom. Perhaps that was going too far: the new freedoms allowing a couple to sleep together before marriage, homosexuals to lead open and unashamed lives, and women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, were real enough. Yet while people no longer chafed under the legal restraints that had survived until the late 1960s, they had arguably replaced one set of pressures with another. At the beginning of the following decade, a survey by 19 magazine found that 70 per cent of readers had lost their virginity by the time they were 17, yet 69 per cent agreed that young women came under ‘too much pressure’ to have sex, and two out of three admitted that they sometimes found it difficult to say no.

  What you became terribly aware of in the seventies [one woman said later] was that it wasn’t free for women, it was an absolute imposition. The Pill removed your autonomy. Suddenly, you were supposed to think that it was absolutely fabulous to wave your legs in the air and get fucked … What did women get out of it? Lots of bad sex that they probably didn’t want, men thinking that this was Christmas, and lots of sexually transmitted diseases.

  The sexual revolution ‘may have expanded women’s access to sex’, concluded the feminist Beatrix Campbell, ‘but it was the same old kind of sex’.18

  Thin, drawn and anxious, her pale face staring out under her reddish fringe, 19-year-old Janice Baildon lives at home with her parents on a nondescript suburban estate in Harlow. Her father, a stern and industrious man from Liverpool who once served in the army, works in a large store. Her mother, an overbearing woman of distinctly old-fashioned opinions, is the soul of upper-working-class conservatism. Earnest and respectable, the Baildons are baffled by their daughter’s listless, disaffected behaviour: she drifts from job to job, seems unable to put down roots, and collapses on the Tube, apparently for no reason. As time goes on, Janice’s condition worsens; as her parents nag and pester her, she retreats deeper into herself, ever more lethargic, ever more withdrawn. She falls pregnant by one of her student friends; her parents, horrified at the ‘disgusting and unchristian’ thought of an illegitimate baby, cajole her into having an abortion. Not surprisingly, her mental state worsens, and her parents take her to a sympathetic young experimental psychiatrist, complete with standard-issue black polo neck, who encourages his staff to call him Mike and gets his patients to talk through their problems in long encounter sessions. But when Mike is kicked out of the hospital by reactionary, upper-class administrators, Janice’s condition takes a turn for the worse. She falls into the hands of a cold, clipped doctor who plies her with drugs and electro-convulsive treatment, and although she is briefly rescued by a scooter-riding boyfriend, another doctor forcibly retrieves her with the help of the police. Her mind collapses altogether; when we last see her, she is utterly sullen, apathetic and uncommunicative, staring blankly at an audience of uncaring, half-interested medical students while the doctor invites them to take notes. Her life has been reduced to a schizophrenic case history, her individuality crushed beneath the suffocating expectations of her family and the weight of the state machine. ‘I think the clinical picture is a fairly clear one,’ the doctor says dismissively. ‘Any questions?’

  As a portrait of the typical British family, Ken Loach’s film Family Life, released in January 1972 and based on a script by the radical playwright David Mercer, was bleak indeed. Loach and Mercer had already worked together on a similar project for television – In Two Minds, which was shown in the BBC’s Wednesday Play slot five years earlier – and like its predecessor, Family Life attracted praise and controversy in equal measure. Nobody questioned its disturbing power, the brilliance with which Loach had created an atmosphere of utterly convincing naturalism, or his skill at making a tiny budget stretch to capture the texture of everyday life in the early 1970s. And yet, wondered the critic John Russell Taylor in The Times, ‘is it possible to be at once deeply moved and impressed by a film, and at the same time deeply distrustful of it?’ As Taylor pointed out, it seemed at the very least highly unfair to present the first psychiatrist, played by a practising young therapist, Michael Riddall, as a straightforward ‘goody’, while the second, ‘a professional actor doing it all crisp and thin-lipped, is presented as a baddy’. And for all its emotional punch, other reviewers found the film equally one-sided, even mendacious in its partisanship – a criticism that could, in fact, be levelled at so many of Loach’s films. Contemplating ‘the brutalism of electro-shock treatme
nt in the traditional hospital; the soulless arrangement of rows of beds like a conveyor-belt set-up; the Gestapo-like dispositions of medical attendants who come to cart the girl back to the wards at the end’, Alexander Walker wondered why ‘people otherwise so humane and sophisticated still feel the need to allow an audience no choice but to see things their way’. Even the Socialist Worker’s Peter Sedgwick, who applauded Loach’s left-wing commitment, thought that Family Life ‘panders to the common prejudices which create the stigma of mental illness’. The film could not ‘possibly encourage any person with serious mental trouble to seek voluntary treatment from any existing NHS facilities,’ Sedgwick wrote, in a review that attracted a deluge of angry complaints. ‘It can only discourage and frighten them. And it cruelly mocks (through its caricature of the family situation of a schizophrenic patient) the awful dilemmas which confront thousands of actual families in which all, perhaps, are “ill” but one particular person is actually crazy.’19