Baby Boomer Women, Sexuality, and Decades of Change: Sorta

“So I’m licking jelly off my boyfriend and all of a sudden, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother.'”

–Sarah Silverman

Sexual Equality

Baby Boomer and other older women are experiencing their postmenopausal years with a confusing accumulation of social dictates.  For decades, they have been patriarchally conditioned on the definition of a sexually appropriate woman.  For example, Judy, a friend of mine, was born in 1940 just ahead of the Baby Boomer explosion.  She grew up with the “good girls don’t have sex until marriage” belief system imposed upon her.

Judy married at age eighteen and had her first child a year later. “I felt I always had to please my husband over myself.  Sex between us was on his terms.”  Judy also felt subjugated in their method of birth control since her husband wanted not only his pleasure but to determine how many children they would have.  However…

Author Wajcman cites examples of how women had long taken birth control into their hands via “magic, herbal potions, infanticide, abortion, coitus interruptus, vaginal sponges, douches, and pessaries.” (Wajcman, 1991)  However, women were essentially forced to use those means of birth control in secrecy.

With the availability of birth control pills in the 1960s, women hoped they had found a form of sexual equality.  Feminists expected the cultural tie between female reproduction and sexuality to be severed now that the “pill” allowed sex when they wanted, and with whom they wanted, without the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy.

“My sexuality is not an inferior trait that needs to be chaperoned by emotionalism or morality.”

–Alice Bag

Promiscuity and the Sexual Revolution

In hindsight, although the 1960s was a decade with the potential for enormous advances in women’s sexuality given the increasingly permissive environment of “free love,” and birth control pills, male sexual pleasure still governed the availability and use of contraceptives. (Wajcman, 1991)

Religious and conservative patriarchal viewpoints condemned birth control pills as a threat to women’s—and therefore the USA’s—decency.  “The charge in the 1960s was that the pill was responsible for the sexual revolution,” historian Andrea Tone says.  “It was relaxing moral standards. … It was promoting promiscuity.” (Tone, 2001)  Quietly, as the sexual revolution frayed on the rising winds of cultural debate, vibrators reappeared in stores and advertisements as an adjunct to female sexual satisfaction.  For sexual ownership, the old social camouflage was shed, and vibrators were labeled openly as sex toys.

Orgasmic Postmenopausal Women

In the 1970’s women like Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and Betty Dodson emerged as feminist activists.  Dr. Betty Dodson, a Ph.D. sexologist, dedicated her life to teaching women about their genitals and deriving sexual pleasure.  Early in her career, she was surprised to learn many of her female clients were not only unaware of, but loathed touching or seeing, their nether regions.  Choosing to respond on a larger scale than her one-on-one consultations, Betty developed unique workshops that encouraged women to look at each other’s vaginas with the goal of seeing and accepting individual anatomy and differences.  Betty vigorously promoted self-pleasuring through the use of vibrators then and continues to do so now at the age of eighty-two.  In an email exchange, Betty told me the following, “I have a dream: America will be equally governed by orgasmic postmenopausal women!”  Given Betty’s strong pro-vibrator voice and influence, it is ironic that in 1973 Texas banned the sale of sex toys such as vibrators.  Other states soon followed. The move towards governing women’s sexuality in the privacy of their homes set off a firestorm of anger amongst women that are still being fought in courts today.

“I consider the 70s to be the youth of old age. So all you women out there who are afraid of getting older, just keep your orgasms in place, eat a lot of vegetables, take exercise, and you’ll be fine.”

–Dr. Betty Dodson

It Was the Strangest Flashlight I’d Ever Seen

In 1990, it was estimated that sixty percent of older women were unmarried and living alone and the numbers are growing as life spans increase. (B.Doress-Worters, 1994)  Growing up in rural Minnesota I thought all older women lived alone because that was the norm in my community.  My grandmother was widowed when she was only 57 years old and her sister, Margaret, was widowed at the age of 45.  After their husband’s deaths, neither sibling ever remarried nor had another partner.  In my youth, I was too naive to understand the challenges my grandmother, and Margaret faced as relatively young Lutheran widows desiring sexual release.

They only talked about sex in quiet whispers if they talked about it at all. And yet, as a child of about nine or ten years of age, I vividly remember finding a dildo-shaped vibrator among the folded blankets in Grandma’s closet (Read more about that here).  She had sexual needs and figured out a way to meet them. It’s sad to me that she felt shame in wanting pleasure.

Do you have any memories or your mother, grandmother, and/or other favorite female and how they felt about sex?  I’d love to hear about it!

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