war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in
what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction. ” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,
they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:
fucking. The men grew more m anly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women— found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his
buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and
hers too)— traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,
turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated
into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose— it turned
out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,
and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was
an intensification of the experience of being sexually female— the
precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for
themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety
of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the
impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. T hey
discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,
ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were
characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex
as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female
fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.
In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and
practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an
issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and
it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not
climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of
and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.
When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored,
often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman
white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was
likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When
a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to
describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist.
When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of
recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and
white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given
time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them.
A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not
jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of
rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against
her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the
counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that
force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women
would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so
that it was repression, not force, that stood in the w ay of freedom.
Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-
intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor
did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of
women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited
that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by
more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No
persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of
women, unless the women themselves were blamed— usually for
not com plying in the first place. These were in the main women
who wanted to com ply—who wanted the promised land of sexual
