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
fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them
were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights,
and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and
lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a
1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:
Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of
what passes for common practice in many places. A man can
bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and
remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for
no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up,
or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a
ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for
no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent
with her. If a
by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that
anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5
Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and
he’s our friend. And dangerous. ” 6 Acknowledging the forced sex
so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if
she didn’t want to be raped. ” 7 These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded
women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used
women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers—they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing
