. . . now that I know, I want to kill him. Tragically so little’s changed since I was young
All mothers dread the time when their daughters become vulnerable to boys. But reading Kitty’s experience now for the very first time I’m horrified — and incandescent with rage — that a 19-year-old man would force a shy, very unconfident girl of 14 into a sexual act. Yes, I could kill him.
And yet, though I did not have similar experiences during my own girlhood, sadly as a young woman I also came up against my share of unwelcome advances.
In my day, the late 1960s, nobody had heard of ‘consent’. The sexual taboos of the 1950s and early 1960s had disappeared down the plughole in the great sloshy bath of so-called ‘liberation’. No girl who wanted to be thought ‘cool’ would say ‘No’.
When I went up to University College london in 1966, I had no idea what to expect. The capital was daunting, the distance from bedsit to college enormous, my fellow students intimidating.
And in the middle of it all, aged 20, I was desperately lonely, missing my parents, my cosy bedroom in our semi, that safe life.
Student life was far from safe. You had to be careful of your male tutor, because he’d take a pop at you if he could. Mine did.
If there were charming male students who didn’t think it their absolute right to get you into bed, I rarely met them. I hung out with left-wing types who believed the Marxist idea, ‘property is theft’ — so why would any girl feel she owned her own body? When you despise traditional values, it’s your right to take what you want — and up the revolution, comrades.
With the condition of the working class and nuclear war to protest about, those students had no time for women’s rights. The women’s liberation movement was a mere squeak of protest — and leftist men agreed with the mantra ‘A woman’s place is underneath’.
Perhaps it was my own fault. Blaming yourself is par for the course for many women — silly girls should take more care of themselves. Of course, you’re to blame if your skirt is short and you’re so careless you miss the last bus so agree to stay the night in the flat of a guy you hardly know. Fool!
He reassures you that he’ll ‘crash’ on the beaten-up old sofa, but then he jumps on you. You’re so pretty, so sexy, he says, he can’t control himself. When a lithe 22-year-old male straddles you and pins your arms, you’re helpless.
Oh, you try to push him off, squeaking, ‘No, I don’t want this’. But do you knee his groin, scratch his face, go for his eyes? Of course not.
Girls like me (and I was never drunk) were conditioned to think being attractive to men was a badge of femininity.
Girls like me (who secretly thought themselves unattractive) were actually quite grateful to be desired. Yes — thank you, kind sir, for forcing sex on me. Nowadays they call it ‘date rape’. The reward for my stupidity was the morning ‘walk of shame’ — and being ignored the next day.
When The Shirelles recorded Will You love Me Tomorrow in 1961 it was a brave, ground-breaking lyric about female anxiety over ‘giving in’ to sex. It recognised that for the man it was probably just a lustful one night stand.
I loved it because the pathetic hopefulness of the lyric sounded like all the horrible mistakes I made. In 1967, I’d be listening to Aretha Franklin singing Respect in the realisation that respect was an illusion. Forget All You Need Is love — the real song of the age was ‘all you need is sex’.
I look back now with some horror to those days when the zeitgeist was so exploitative. Forced to think about it for this article, I still feel a shudder of shame. But not shame for the men who thought it their right to treat the opposite sex so badly. Why? Instead, I’m ashamed of the highly intelligent young woman I was whose spirit loved literature, who painted and wrote poetry — but who let herself be used, again and again. Without ever questioning her own pathetic behaviour or the greedy, domineering, entitled, predatory sexuality of the men she didn’t always even fancy.
I had no idea of my own worth — and now wonder why nobody had enlightened me.
THe wild 1970s decade was on the horizon —and it all became worse for women. ‘Free love’ was, in reality, ‘free bonking’ — and I can honestly say I didn’t know anybody who questioned it. The idea of boys being taught about ‘consent’ was half a century away — but so was the terrible age of online pornography which would make all such enlightened 21st-century ideas utterly irrelevant.
Nothing changes. Young women these days have embraced porn culture so readily they objectify themselves without needing men to do the job. What’s more, there is a powerful liberal elite that abets them.
Would you believe that leicester University has just produced a ‘toolkit’ for student sex workers? It reads quite simply as a guide telling 18-year-olds what they can legally do and what their options are for entering this industry — and its acceptance of exploitation is horrifying. Yet I’ve already read mealy-mouthed ‘woke’ defences of a toxic betrayal of university values.
Now I am in my 70s, I can look back with pride at astounding female achievements in all areas from politics to science, yet acknowledge the bitter truth that real advancement remains out of reach for the majority. The backlash against real freedom for my sex is like waves of scummy filth on a polluted shore — on and on and on. Women’s lives all over the world are as subject to constraint and violence as ever.
‘Respect’ and ‘consent’ are admirable notions, but with sexual exploitation rife they feel further away than ever before.
I’m horrified to hear of Kitty’s experiences and I weep to imagine what it might be like for my granddaughter.