Modern love would ‘shock’ 60s women
THE ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s made men think women were as available as food at an all-you-caneat buffet, a historian has claimed.
But Virginia Nicholson said women from that time still believed sex was intertwined with love and would be ‘shocked’ at today’s casual ‘hook-up’ culture using apps such as Tinder.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Miss Nicholson said: ‘There was an assumption that you were cool, hip, on the Pill and if you wouldn’t sleep with a man you were frigid, frightened and generally a bit of a loser. I spoke to a lot of women who said, it just didn’t seem very polite [to say no]. They’d been brought up by a 1950s mother who said if a man takes you out, you have to say thank you nicely.
‘There was a sense of total entitlement by men that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years.’
Miss Nicholson, whose book, How Was It For You, examines the sexual revolution of the 1960s, added: ‘The hook-up culture that women are buying into now... I think that would have shocked some people in the 1960s.’