The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives:
they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent
about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a w ife’s attitude
toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy,
fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as
a class— be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men— and
at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the
girls for sex, it was hard for the girls to understand how to like
boys and men without also liking the sex boys and men wanted.
The girls were told nice things about human sexuality and also told
that it would cost them their lives—one w ay or another. The
mothers walked a tough line: give the girls a good attitude, but
discourage them. The cruelty of the ambivalence communicated
itself, but the kindness in the intention did not: mothers tried to
protect their daughters from many men by directing them toward
one; mothers tried to protect their daughters by getting them to do
what was necessary inside the male system without ever explaining
why. T hey had no vocabulary for the w h y— w hy sex inside marriage was good but outside marriage was bad, w hy more than one man turned a girl from a loving woman into a whore, w hy leprosy
or paralysis were states preferable to pregnancy outside marriage.
T hey had epithets to hurl, but no other discourse. Silence about
sex in marriage was also the only w ay to avoid revelations bound to
terrify— revelations about the quality of the mothers’ own lives.
Sexual compliance or submission was presented as the wife’s natural function and also her natural response to her sexual circumstance. That compliance was never seen or presented as the result of actual force, threatened force, possible force, or a sexual and
social cul-de-sac. It has always been essential to keep women
riveted on the details of submission so as to divert women from
thinking about the nature of force—especially the sexual force that
necessitates sexual submission. The mothers could not ward off the
enthusiasm of sexual liberation— its energy, its hope, its bright
promise of sexual equality— because they could not or would not
tell what they knew about the nature and quality of male sexuality
as they had experienced it, as practiced on them in marriage. T hey
knew the simple logic of promiscuity, which the girls did not: that
what one man could do, ten men could do ten times over. The girls
did not understand that logic because the girls did not know fully
what one man could do. And the mothers failed to convince also
because the only life they offered was a repeat version of their own:
and the girls were close enough to feel the inconsolable sadness and
the dead tiredness of those lives, even if they did not know how or
why mother had gotten the way she was. The girls, having been
taught well by their mothers to like men because they were men,
picked flower-children boys over their mothers: they did not look
for husbands (fathers) as dictated by convention but for brothers
(lovers) as dictated by rebellion. The daughters saw the strained
silence of their mothers on sex as a repudiation of the pleasure of
sex, not as an honest though inarticulate assessment of it. The disdain, disapproval, repugnance for sex was not credited as having any objective component. What their mothers would not tell them
they could not know. They repudiated the putative sexual conservatism of their mothers for so-called sexual radicalism: more men, more sex, more freedom.
The girls of the counterculture Left were wrong: not about civil
rights or the Viet Nam War or imperial Amerika, but about sex
and men. It is fair to say that the silence of the mothers hid a real,
tough, unsentimental knowledge of men and intercourse, and that
the noisy sexuality of the daughters hid romantic ignorance.
Times have changed. The silence has been shattered—or parts
of it have been shattered. Right-wing women defending the traditional family are public; they are loud and they are many. Especially they are loud about legal abortion, which they abhor; and what they have to say about legal abortion is connected to what
they know about sex. They know some terrible things. Right-wing
