When I was in high school sex-before-marriage was forbidden (for girls). What did we do with our raging hormones? I don’t get national credit for this but: I invented the lap dance in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy. As long as there was some jeans fabric separating your tunnel from his little red wagon, you were okay.
My mother, who was an expert on the rules of the time said, “You’re either a nice girl or a nafka.” Nafka was Yiddish for prostitute and the word whore was also forbidden. “If you have sex and the boy brags about it—which he will–your reputation will be ruined, you’ll be damaged goods and you’ll never get a good husband. The best you’ll get is living in a trailer park with a drunk. If you get pregnant, you’ll be sent to a home for unwed mothers run my mean nuns and after the baby is born, you’ll have to move to some other state.”
After Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1962, (the year I graduated from high school) everything changed. Brown said if a girl was unmarried and had a career, she could have sex and not think of herself as a whore. I so agreed, especially since I had already lost my virginity around my 16th birthday (in the back of that same ’57 Chevy). Coincidentally (and luckily), the Pill came out around the same time–so the timing could not have been better. Thus began the Sexual Revolution (where I became a foot soldier). We went from being junior Jackie Kennedys to swimming naked at Woodstock in just a few years’ time. I thank Helen Gurley Brown for that.
How about you? Were you for her or against?
Coming up on two weeks. 1st week and a half dragged on, because of several unexpected hurdles -- one messed up prescription and one major appliance breaking, which generated 5 extra car trips. Now the time is going faster. I have set limits, though t
Oh, absolutely FOR her!!!!
I paid no attention to her (or anyone else in the media, for that matter) …I’ve never allowed others to influence me……. Even at age …teenager….. I knew who I was and what I wanted to be. I wasn’t at Woodstock, while my contemporaries were smoking, pot, getting naked, yadda, yadda….I was in the army, so I didn’t relate to my generation in that respect.
I don’t think Helen Gurley Brown was out to influence anyone, she was just the voice of a generation of young women. She put into writing what was happening…..A lot of those young women didn’t “get naked, smoke pot” or any of those things, still they changed in more ways than one during the 60s.
Just to clarify, I didn’t personally swim naked at Woodstock. I was a very square wife and mother with a two-year old in 1969. I was speaking in general terms about a time in history and Brown’s influence for a generation of woman.