""Free love" for instance is a hard sell. We got lots of it around 1970, but people (especially women) pulled back because lots of them didn't like it."

LOL

Free love predates the '60s and '70s by nearly a century.

Its come in fits and starts. But largely its been so successful that you just take it for granted that society's values didn't stem from it.

Certainly by the '20s it was presumed that sex outside of marriage wasn't the sole domain of the prostitute. All those Flappers and Sheiks were having fun without necessarily precluding the possibility of later marriage. ( Of course this was because of the groundwork laid down by Suffragette era free-love advocates like the Bloomsbury group. [ Yes, I mentioned both THEM and free-love earlier, but you seem VERY uninterested in looking up anything where someone with a smidge of historical fact corrects you. ] )

By this time too a Woman's finances no longer stemmed from the man in her life. And so her transfer as a financial patient from Father to Husband was no longer a foregone conclusion.

Even as the '50s got a bit less hedonistic; adultery laws were starting to fall away, and nobody longed to return to the bit where a woman couldn't hold a bank acct.

In the '60s we begin to see the mass acceptance that sexual pleasure was an inherently good thing.

I don't know where you live. But in my neck of the woods premarital sex is almost a given ( as is postmarital [ and sometimes extramarital.] ) Women who believe that sex can be for pleasure are everywhere. And I know of none who doesn't feel as though a lack of sexual pleasure wouldn't be a dysfunction. ( Before free-love this was seen as a sign that procreative sex hadn't tarnished the delicate flower. ) And single women who DON'T live with their parents are more the case than the exception. ( Though with today's economy.................... )

Free love was tried, was entirely successful, and has suffused our cultural and legal norms. At this point marriage and procreation are options, not necessities. And a woman can choose a man, or choose otherwise without NEEDING a man to live legally.

Where do you live that they tried this out in the '70s and women backed-out?

This time I'll cite, so that maybe the next time I speak to you about "free love" you might have a clue that the term actually has a history outside of your amusing fantasy analogies.

"My hunch remains that if you really freed children sexually and removed all their hang-ups and inhibitions, they would use the freedom mostly for prostitution."

Hmmmmm.

I'll just say that neither of my step-daughters were interested in prostitution.

I'm not sure which girls you've been hanging out with?

But I suspect that this speaks volumes about you and not at all for the expressed choices of any girls in your life.

Dante







• ( http link ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
[Anonymouse]