Sexual Freedom

I was listening to a French commentator talking about the May 1968 protests in France, which continue to have cultural influence to the present day. He mentioned looking at the earliest protests, the far-left student protests, and the signs that were being carried and noticing that the call for "no restraints," was much more common than he had seen reported in the histories.  As he had not been born then and had had only such reports to inform him, he decided to look into the origins more closely. He found that issues of sexual freedom were often referred to among the students.  They wanted to be able to go into the girls' dormitories because that was "more natural." They wanted society to judge them less for premarital sex. (In France?  Who knew?*) The placard phrase "no restraints" seemed to have primarily sexual meaning, even if it had an image of Mao on it. Though yes, Mao could be a poster child for No Restraints sexual practices, though this was not known at the time.

That is the revolution I remember here as well, and I have mentioned it many times over the years, sometimes in colorful terms. "They wanted to get laid more, and part of that was convincing girls that this is what modern women were supposed to be like." Well, students are young and constantly alert to sexual signals and possibilities. It is hardly surprising that they would imbue even intellectually legitimate revolutionary fervor with sexual themes. 

Thus I have assumed ever since that this was behind revolutionary thought in the West, before and especially after 1968.  I think I believed this even as I supported it, but certainly since. So listening to my French commentator was initially validating, that perhaps one of my earliest blogging topics about black-and-white morality might finally have a chance to come into its own! Yet this was followed instantly by the possibility that the sexual aspects of the 60s political revolution may have been a much greater part of the whole than they were in other eras, and I might have been overvaluing this - and misjudging later young revolutionaries - in my estimations.

*Among American students, the belief was that the French had premarital sex all the time and no one much minded. The arrival of a female European exchange student, but especially a French one, caused eyes to widen. Yet when my wife visited France with a student group shortly after these events, the French boys thought it was the American girls who were easy, and might be quickly talked into bed. To be fair, she was quite the innocent and may not have had the most knowledgeable basis for drawing such conclusions. 

I have since concluded that at least part of this supposed tolerance was mostly about the extramarital sex of powerful men, and actually an expression of quite regressive ideas stretching back centuries in France and elsewhere, dressed up in progressive language. "Mitterand's mistress openly attended his funeral and was not shunned. The French understand these things so much better than the puritanical Americans."