Sex actually was hotter within the Sixties

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, beach-ready Instagram body.

One chap once gave me a big sexy hug and murmured: ‘You’re built like a Volkswagen!’ We were both able to laugh about it, even in the age of stick-thin fashion.

Sex at its best is not an athletic contest but a warm, shared animal pleasure, a grateful human connection. And when, as the 1960s saying was, we ‘went all the way’, there was power in its ancient capacity to bond people together emotionally. Arousal and orgasm do that: it’s primitive.

Couples could learn together, possibly using an occasional handbook (a lot of men really needed that). Sometimes breaking off that connection was, as it always will be, terribly painful. But it did not then include the terrifying modern atmosphere of judgment: a demand on women for hairless, flawless perfection and marks out of ten for being ‘good in bed’.

Some people did talk that way, some have always enjoyed the idea of one-night stands. But today’s culture of expecting them as the norm is new. I can remember a lot of discussion about a film called John And Mary, in which Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow meet in a bar, sleep together, and only gradually get to know one another. Among my friends it was considered a very daring idea: fancy having sex before you’d even had a proper conversation!

Some defiantly backed it on the grounds it might save time. But it was decades before we got to the modern idea that having a series of uncommitted hook-ups was normal and even a necessary health precaution, like flossing. And another couple of decades before our weird smartphone habit of sending digital pictures of your bits to strangers for approval on a cold screen.

So yes, I’m with Marianne. It was fun then.

 No, says Flora Gill, 33

Don’t forget the rampant sexism in the 1960s

The idea that sex was hotter in the 1960s is constantly being rehashed by older generations.

Marianne Faithfull declares that the current ‘hipster-lite’ youth don’t know how to have a good time, and that she and her peers had more fun, better parties, and, yes, sexier sex because it was ‘repressed’ and therefore, the implication is, thrillingly illicit. But the truth is that we’re living in a much better time for sex. Let’s take a clear-eyed look at what sex involved in the 1960s. And stop ignoring the outright sexism, abuse and sexual assault that was prevalent at the time.

Faithfull was a rock star who may have moved in a wonderfully bohemian London world of glamorous and decadent parties and nightclubs, but the mainstream music industry was producing records that described the abject treatment of women within sexual relationships back then.

Some of the lyrics blow a Millennial’s mind, quite frankly. Run for Your Life by The Beatles includes the line ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’. Then there’s He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss) by The Crystals, and almost every sentence of the Rolling Stones Under My Thumb (‘The way she does just what she’s told down to me’) which reads like a manual for what our more enlightened times calls coercive control.

Jenny Diski, author of The Sixties, summed it up: ‘The idea that rape was having sex with someone who didn’t want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late Sixties. On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

Perhaps sex was better for some in the 1960s, but I’m sure the majority of women would rather be having it after the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act or after marital rape was legally recognised in the 1990s. Or following the #MeToo movement.

Marianne seems to think sex was better when it was ‘repressed’ and a ‘cool’ elite ruled the cultural roost. She sounds like a petulant teenager who hates any group that becomes too ‘mainstream’. Something doesn’t become less cool or fun just because it’s more inclusive, attainable and equitable. You shouldn’t need large swathes of the population to feel sexually repressed to get your own socks off. And anyway, wasn’t it female desire that was largely being ‘repressed’?

Certainly women weren’t allowed (or didn’t know how) to express their needs very much. Instead, they largely existed — in the now questionable culture of Bond films, the Carry On franchise and any number of mind-bogglingly sexist sitcoms and novels — as sex objects for the male gaze.

I would argue that sex is better now, particularly for women, because we have the language, the means and the legal framework to be in control in a way that hardly existed 60 years ago.

We understand our own bodies better and have an expectation of pleasure. We’re not afraid to say so either. If we need to take control, we do. And we know about safe sex. We’re still far from perfect in any of these respects, but we’re moving in the right direction.

Technology has also made other facets of modern-day sex superior. Now, a sexually liberated person can open an app and find someone in minutes. They can state exactly what they’re looking for and access it.

Now, you can find communities for every quirk online, and no one is alone.

If you don’t want to have sex at all, we’re all informed enough to know that’s OK, too. Being less repressed doesn’t make sex worse, it makes it better — you can proudly be the person you want to be and into whatever you like.

And let’s not forget that for most of the 1960s, homosexual acts were criminalised, even in private. Today, men and women no longer have to repress their sexuality.

I’m not denying there are modern problems: the excess of choice, the increase in violent pornography and the rise of incel culture, to name a few.

And I’m also not pretending that I wouldn’t give my left nipple to enjoy some of those wild parties that Marianne thinks back on fondly, but I’d always want to return to the liberated 2020s.

Maybe Marianne was having great sex in the 1960s. But it’s dangerous to glorify the past and not appreciate how far we’ve come. You can reminisce about your personal score card without dismissing the present. If we constantly look over our shoulder with a melancholic nostalgia, we might forget to look forward and make sex even better.