Placing myself imaginatively there, I have to wonder if there were not thousands of semi-rapes of semi-conscious women at Woodstock.
Kids nowadays want to project their present values backwards. But this is impossible, and it is impossible for me to believe hippy men were any less slimy than men generally. Granted a “free love” ethos, what could be wrong with as much fucking as possible?
Here, I found this:
And Woodstock was not all peace and love anyway. There was at least one rape reported following the event in 1969 and probably a great deal more that went unreported, given the approach to dealing with rape at the time. And rape could be a very challenging area when intersected with the “free love” movement. It is notable that, by the 1980s, some women viewed their experiences with “free love” and the sexual revolution somewhat skeptically. While there was an undoubted change in the way women dealt with sex during the Sixties, the perspective that many women took by the 1980s was far from a total endorsement their sexual lives from the time. For example, Lillian Rubin interviewed one woman who argued that the revolution, which had freed them to say yes, also disabled them from saying no. “It was weird; it was so hard to say no,” said 38-year-old Paula…“The guys just took it for granted that you’d go to bed with them, and you felt like you had to explain it if you didn’t want to. Then if you tried, you couldn’t think of a good reason why not to, so you did it.” A number of other women interviewed by Rubin repeat this theme. Rubin herself notes that “it was the coercive force of a movement that, in fact, had wide appeal to women, while it also rested on a deeply entrenched structure of roles and relationships that was bound to corrupt the ideals on which it was founded.” Thus free love without sexual equality could lead to coercive expectations on women around sex.
So, as a stoned hippy man, you stumble across a stoned hippy female, and you say “let’s fuck”, and she doesn’t actively say no, so you lay her down, pull down her pants, and do your thing, then say “Groovy” and move on to watch more of the show.
Can you doubt this happened thousands of times?
That link actually has some other good points:
Paul Lyons writes about how he sends his undergraduates out each year to interview people who lived during the Sixties.
He describes the reaction of students who are sent to interview baby boomers about their experiences during the decade. Inevitably these students complain that they are “not finding the right people” and that those they interviewed “weren’t really part of the Sixties.” This is because their subjects do not confirm to the tropic understanding of the Sixties held by these students: that the Sixties involved Woodstock, hippies, civil rights and the Vietnam War.
So, in the case of Lyons’ students, they are so fixated on the tropes of the Sixties – the sex, drugs, protest and rock and roll aspect of it – that they are unable to understand that in fact, that isn’t what constituted the experience of most people during the period. And by then denying the voice of the non-tropic recollections of history, the idea that those things constituted the decade becomes further reinforced.
You will probably find that, if you asked, most baby boomers have been to a hell of a lot less protest marches, taken less drugs, had sex with fewer people than most people 20 years younger than them. But not in all cases of course. Someone the other day was saying it would have been exciting to be young in the Sixties. Maybe – if you came from the socio-economic class where you could afford a higher education, where you might, maybe, at university have engaged with political movements. For the majority of young people growing up at the time, it was nothing like that. There is as much excitement and change and pioneering going on nowadays.
Most kids now do not realize that the Vietnam War enjoyed popular support for a very long time. Our country was conservative enough to elect Richard Nixon in 1968, and again in 1972. It took what amounted to a legislative coup to remove him from office. That coup, in turn, revolved around efforts Nixon was making–with the wrong men, to be sure, as became subsequently obvious–to reduce the amount of treason taking place within his government, oriented around ending the Vietnam War on a note of failure, rather than the victory on the ground our troops achieved at great cost, and with unimaginable sacrifice.
As I will never tire of pointing out, until it becomes general knowledge, as it should be, we won the war on the ground. We decimated the VC and NVA in the South Vietnam. They had no bases of operations. They were militarily defeated. That is why they signed the Peace Treaty everyone has forgotten. In 1972 South Vietnam was as safe as America. It fell to successive conventional invasions, not different in kind from the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslavakia by the Soviets, or for that matter, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. They led with tanks and conventional arms and tactics. They won in the precise domain where America excelled. But we were gone, and we were gone because a small cadre of lunatics, backed by the media, convinced Congress that the war was lost, or ignoble. John Kerry played a large role in that latter narrative. The media, of course, has since always played Vietnam as a hopeless, lost war. This is a naked and demonstrable lie.
Fuck John Kerry. And Fuck the hippies.