Was sex really better in the 1960s, as Marianne Faithfull insists? In an article in this month’s The Oldie magazine, the 77-year-old singer says: ‘Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter, too — more repressed.’ So has she got a point — was sex forbidden fruit and more thrilling than today’s all-you-can-eat buffet? Or are her rose-tinted spectacles fogged with misplaced nostalgia? Two writers argue across the generations…
Yes, says Libby Purves, 74
A French kiss was an event thought about for days Marianne Faithfull is on to something when she says, defiantly, that ‘sex was hotter… more repressed’ in her heyday. She was talking more widely about the hippy world she knew then, being a muse for painters like Francis Bacon and swinging with the Rolling Stones. But that line about sex has certainly got a bit of shocked attention from a 21st-century generation which thinks ‘repression’, or even moderation, is an antique concept. Nobody wants to go back to harsh moralities and slut-shaming, but I have to say that groovy old Marianne has a case. The difference is obvious even to me as a 1960s teenager, three years younger than her and in most ways her opposite. She was a gorgeous blonde, descended from Austro-Hungarian nobility, a hot chick who was discovered singing in coffee houses and fell in with Mick Jagger. I, meanwhile, spent the 1960s as a lumpen convent girl and then university student. In the convent we weren’t even allowed to dance to dodgy lyrics: they banned the Stones’ Satisfaction, even though we argued it was all about not getting sex, and Manfred Mann was suspect for singing the Bob Dylan lyric ‘if you gotta go, go now, or else you gotta stay all night’. Again, we argued, but nuns can be implacable that way. Yet even at school we admired Marianne from afar, identifying with her air of glamorous adventure, gasping at news of her emerging from a drugs bust wearing only a fur rug, and quite often listening to her breathy version of As Tears Go By whenever we got dumped. But we lived in the same cultural frame: as hems went up and then down again, and the decade swung along towards the equally louche early-1970s, the same surge of artistic and musical defiance affected all our generation, and sex was a big part of it. Even we squares felt the bohemian urge to defy old rules, though our excesses might go little further than heavily mascara-ed pick-ups of strange boys, illicit trips downtown when we had to flee from flashers, and having narrow escapes from dirty old men. And then we too came to the occasional heartfelt night of once-forbidden love. Usually followed by a terrifying pregnancy scare: the Pill was only just becoming attainable by the young and single. Being a young woman then was not all fun: even apart from the fear of pregnancy and anguished decisions about abortion, we were still considered by a patriarchal society as secondary, not likely to be leaders or entrepreneurs. Secretarial jobs were freely advertised as wanting ‘dollybirds’ to work in a ‘fun office’. Read early Jilly Cooper novels to catch the spirit of that age, including the way young women were often treated like children (Jilly has one hunky hero actually spanking the heroine). Even world famous supermodels like Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton remember being manipulated, curated and managed by bossy men. Not a perfect world, not yet a feminist one. But it had its points. For when it came to ordinary life, that sense of sexual freedom outside the confines of marriage was new to everyone, and that includes the young men. Therefore they were — no other way to put it — grateful. They didn’t yet feel the modern ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) sense of aggrieved entitlement, and there’s nothing like a promise of forbidden fruit to stir a chap up. Of course, the most beautiful girls got a lot of attention, became pin-ups and fed laddish dreams, but any half-presentable lass had a very good chance of being chatted up. Slow-dancing was inexpressibly exciting for both parties; even a ‘French kiss’ was an event to be thought about for days afterwards. The stages of ordinary courtship were often slow, and you found that your breasts, which had previously rather annoyed you, were regarded as amazing treasures. So if the attraction was mutual on a human, friendly level, there was real excitement in even a stolen half-hour on the sofa while supposedly babysitting. For young men before the age of constant pornography it was an immense, life-changing thing to be in a room with an undressed woman: even if, dare I say it, you didn’t have a super-perfect,
