freedom— and still they had lim its, preferences, tastes, desires for
intim acy with some men and not others, moods not necessarily
related to menstruation or the phases of the moon, days on which
they would rather work or read; and they were punished for all
these puritanical repressions, these petit bourgeois lapses, these
tiny exercises of tinier wills not in conformity with the w ills of
their brother-lovers: force was frequently used against them, or
they were threatened or humiliated or thrown out. No diminution
of flower power, peace, freedom, political correctness, or justice
was seen to be im plicit in the use of coercion in any form to get
sexual compliance.
In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture, pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male
demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross,
preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties,
the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was
sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access
to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion
was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for
saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced or persuaded aw ay, even by the most astute or dazzling ar
gument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway
were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever
they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however
much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had
consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men
nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality, and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy was the esteem in which “natural” women were held—women who
were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no
birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables
too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children, to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional ways for bearing the children—they were not labeled “bad” or
shunned—but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her
child—poor and relatively outcast—wandering within the counterculture changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got
in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck—and the
fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with
children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned,
a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal.
Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to
fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their
own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want
to die.
It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s—not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.
The decriminalization of abortion—for that was the political goal
—was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free. ” The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were
not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting
laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the w ay
great numbers of boys and men had always wanted— lots of girls
who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it aw ay.
The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued
for and even organized for and even provided political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The Left was m ilitant on the issue.
Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms— women who had been both politically and sexually active— became radical in new terms: they became
feminists. T hey were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. T hey had
