I was in grade school when the pill spawned the free love movement in the 1960's, but I do have memories of it. I had much older cousins who (I thought) were cool and liberated because they openly discussed their sex lives in front of me. I remember visiting Florida during spring break (with my family) and the local news running a very descriptive story about college students getting VD while there on break. Being born in the early 1960's put me in the middle of the sexual revolution because it has been part of my life from the beginning.
We (society) threw off some unhealthy, stifling and just plain wrong ideas about sex and sexuality in the past 50 years, but did we lose some of the good stuff along the way?
As I've mentioned before I am writing a novel, specifically a romance novel. My characters are falling in love and, so far, they have yet to get to the part between the sheets, but it (they) are just as steamy outside the bedroom. It's the mental seduction, the loooong build up, the teasing dance that is in my book, but quite often missing from relationships today.
There is something to be said for restraint (not the 50 Shades/tie em up kind). Restraint as in holding back, waiting, seducing, flirting, chasing and being chased. Skipping all that is like settling for the frozen-dinner version of fettuccine alfredo (noodles and paste) when you can have the sinful, sensual and so much more satisfying real thing if you will just invest the time and effort.
We are losing the art of seduction and the expectation of being seduced.
In its place, we've created dry, mechanical rules. Cosmo and other magazines for (supposedly) liberated women love to run articles debating which date is the correct one to jump in bed with a new boyfriend. (I think 3 is the current calculation.) There are also everything short of medical charts showing which parts of him you need to do steps 1-5 to in order to make him want to stay with you forever.
What if we all took a collective step back? Not back to the 'no sex before marriage' days. I think a lot of very horny young people jumped into life-long commitments for the wrong reasons back then. I am proposing a step back to slow seduction, to a time when the chase was half the fun (and it wasn't a predetermined 3 dates).
There was a very sexy power dynamic that was lost because it was deemed inappropriate for the new gender-mixed work place created by the women's liberation movement (and rightfully so). But the same rules don't need to apply to the dating (and marriage) world. There needs to be a time and place to flirt and seduce and chase and be chased. Those activities produce an addictive, heady cocktail of endorphins and lust that can build up to some amazing between the sheets action on date 10 or year 10, (but who the hell would be counting then?)
I think it's time for the sexual revolution to take a turn. Not a U turn, but a turn in a new direction. Let's keep the open and frank discussions that clear up so many wrong ideas from the past, but let's also start a new campaign for seduction. Instead of marching with large signs on sticks, let's send secret notes, handwritten, to those we lust.
Labels: between the sheets, seduction, sex, sexual revolution
