Sex in the '60s

Most of our bloggers are too young to remember the '60s and don't realize what it was like growing up in those days. They hear about the Summer of Love, hippies and Woodstock in those pre-AIDS days and think it was one long orgy.

I was reminded of that when I saw a story that a poll of 3000 women between the ages of 18 and 24 showed they had an average of 5.65 partners between 2000 and last year. In the '60s, it was 1.67 and by the 70s increased to 3.72 and by the '90s was just under five. Only eight per cent of today's women said they had more than 10 partners by their mid 20s.

So you can see the '60s wasn't the era of free love that it is often now portrayed to be. The problem was that abortion was still illegal (Roe vs. Wade was in 1973 although New York had legalized it before then) and the pill wasn't invented until the mid 60s and in the early years had a lot of side effects.

So for young women, sex risked pregnancy, which was still taboo for young women and illegal abortions were dangerous. One of my wife's college classmates died in an illegal abortion. So it was the era when foreplay (I actually think some of today's young people miss the joys of foreplay because they go straight to sex) and petting were much more common than having sex.

Of course, the pill and legal abortion freed up women to be able to experience their sexuality without the fear of pregnancy but that wasn't the case in the '60s. Now compared to how repressed things were in the '50s (married couples always slept in separate twin beds on TV), the times were changing in the '60s. But not as fast as people think they were.

Don't know if this interests today's women but I thought I'd pass it along.

FD