Genevieve Fox: FIRST PERSON
Sarah Monie is 18 years old. She lost her virginity at 15, married at 16, divorced a year later. A one-night stand in a nightclub resulted in the birth of her daughter, Olivia, now 15 months old. Monie’s aim had been to get pregnant and bring up the child on her own. She had her mother’s approval and the three generations now live happily together under one roof.
Monie teaches sex education in secondary schools, prisons and adult education centres. Scarred and scared by the experience of an unhappy marriage, she hasn’t wanted, or needed, a man in her life since. She had always wanted children, though, when she was young, freeing her to pursue a career later on. Today, Monie is in control of her body, her sexuality, her life.
So, has the sexual revolution that began in the Sixties finally come of age, heralded by archetypal modern woman Monie? Have the status quo and sexual freedom our swinging feminist sisters only ever dreamed of finally been realised? How far the Sixties have shaped the ensuing decades is the subject of a British documentary Sex Bomb.
Let’s examine the evidence. Contraception and abortion are widely available. A record number of women are choosing to remain childfree, career women are on the rise, single mothers are broadly accepted rather than stigmatised, rising divorce rates indicate that women no longer feel obliged to stay in unhappy marriages and marriage itself is on the decline. Meanwhile, young women have role models, from All Saints to Geri Halliwell, proclaiming Girl Power.
But while Girl Power may pay lip service to female ambition, it is not the same thing as sexual freedom. The latter, Monie believes, has been displaced by sexual pleasure. “You got the freedom to sleep with as many people as you like, but if you are a teenager and you’re not having sex, you’re a social outcast. It’s gone too far, the pressure is the other way round now. It is unusual to be 15, a virgin and feel proud of it.
“Teenagers fall into two groups. Those who have sex all the time and think it is something to boast about and lie about to make themselves look big, and those who would like to do it but are too scared. Some of the girls are embarrassed that they haven’t done it yet. They get bullied.”
Some do actually have lots of sexual partners, in which case the age-old double standard kicks in. “A girl who has had a lot of partners gets called a slag,” Monie says. “But when boys do, it’s oh yeah, he’s a stud.”
Janet Holland, co-author of The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power, agrees. “In theory, women are on an equal footing with men when it comes to sexual freedom, but not in practice. Women are technically free to do what they want, but the social pressures are on them not to.”
The problem, she explains, is that women don’t have a female consciousness regulating their behaviour in the way men do. One of those prevailing rules is that girls should be nice, not naughty, when it comes to sexual appetite. For a short while, in the late Sixties and Seventies, it was the other way round.
In 1974, Christina Lewis, now 45, moved to London from a small town. “The freedom was there, so I dived in at the deep end,” she recalls. “I probably overdid it! I had sex every night and with different people, male and female – help! Cosmopolitan told me I could have an orgasm. I felt protected because I was on the Pill. We didn’t think about sexual diseases in those days.”
Those halcyon days live on, if Cosmo editor Mandi Norwood is to be believed. For women today, she says, “anything and everything goes. It’s not about being needy and demanding of your partner. It’s about being confident and doing what you want to do, what turns you on, not what your sexual partner wants.”
The thing that stops women fulfilling their sexual appetites, Norwood says, is not the absence of sexual freedom but the “pressure they feel to be a great boss, ideal wife, good mother and the ultimate sex goddess. Women barely have the energy to climb the stairs. Something’s got to give.”
She may be right about the energy drain, but wrong about an “anything goes” ethos. Why else do politicians and moralists alike repeatedly decry our “permissive” society? Why are sexually active women labelled promiscuous?
Take Sarah Hudson and Louise Watson, the two young Yorkshire women who did what turned them on during their holiday in the sun last year. On their return, the media laid into them. Watson and Hudson “boasted of having 40 lovers during a fortnight’s holiday in Ibiza”, screeched one broadsheet. “Watson had no regrets, and apparently no shame,” reported another.
Casual sex, we continue to be told, takes place in the absence of a moral framework. Yet the same publications fetishise virgins, splashing them across headlines, serving them up as social freaks for the rest of us to gawp at.
Forget sexual freedom. When it comes to women and sex, we clearly live in confused times, as retired nurse Margot Saint-Yves (59) has found to her peril. Interviewed for the documentary Sex Bomb, she spoke freely about how she swang in the Seventies and has continued to do so. “I play golf, I’ve got golf friends. I play bridge, I’ve got bridge friends. I like sex, I’ve got sex friends,” she says coolly.
But the open marriage she has had for the past 35 years with Ian, a retired doctor who has remained faithful, is news to her neighbours on the island of Arran. For them, anything does not go. Their moral indignation has sent Saint-Yves scurrying for cover. Even her close friends “find it difficult to accept”, she says. “I’m pleased I’ve got a husband who accepts [it]. It wouldn’t suit everybody. Most people think it’s disgusting, but it suits me.”
Fair enough. We live in a post-Christian, individualist age, after all, and the “me” culture of the Seventies may have come full circle. Psychologist Oliver James certainly thinks so, lamenting today’s sexual expectations as one source of our social malaise.
But Chrissie Lewis’s experiences suggest there may be a middle way. Divorced from her husband four years ago, nowadays she has affairs from time to time. “I can choose whether or not I’m in a relationship,” she says. “I have that freedom again.” She is happy for her son Michael (13) to enjoy the same freedom, as long as it is not exercised in a moral vacuum. “I don’t want him to think he has total sexual freedom without respecting other people’s feelings.” Now we’re talking sexual revolution.