The Sixties by Jenny Diski

relatively unproblematic, because what we saw was on the whole easy to look at. We scorned covering ourselves up for
     any other reason than aesthetics – and warmth. Clothes (except the beautiful, floaty, diaphanous kind that invited the slightest
     zephyr to puff them away) were an obstacle to the freedom of bodies, and also signified the draping of the mind. In 1973 –
     the early Seventies, a seminal period it seems for discovering that not so much had changed – Erica Jong’s heroine Isadora
     Wing 4 had finally defined what it was the Sixties generation were in search of, and evidently still hadn’t found. It was ‘the zipless
     fuck’. It seemed to be several things all at once, not all of them compatible: it was wildly romantic, a teen dream of you
     didn’t quite know what glimpsed frustratingly in vague erotic prose and on movie screens:
    Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion
     fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.
    It was also emotionally utopian. Free from the complexities of possessive responses trained by the rigid, repressive social
     apparatus that caused the Fifties generation to moulder, as we saw it, in sexual frustration. All done up in tight-waisted,
     hobble-skirted, corseted clothing and manners.
    The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the
     woman is not ‘giving.’ No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or
     get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never
     had one.
    The reality of the zipless fuck was as far removed from romance as it was possible to get. That was the point:
    For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well.... So another condition
     for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better.
    Of course, the zipless fuck absolutely required the pill, without which fumbling and anxiety, no matter how advanced the mind
     might be, was unavoidable. It was invented in 1961, but was available only to married women or those brave enough to get a
     cheap ring from Woolworths and brazen it out in grim family planning clinics. Between 1962 and 1969, the number of users in
     the UK rose from approximately 50,000 to one million. It helped not to have to rely on men to use condoms properly or withdraw
     at the right moment, or have to remember to put in the diaphragm before, but not too long before, it was likely you were going
     to have sex. It was a great advance for women in general, worldwide, even for the cause of sexual liberation. But the fact
     that Isadora was still looking for this unencumbered encounter in 1973, and that women found Fear of Flying a compelling read, tells us a lot about the difficulty of achieving the sexual revolution we had been trying so hard for.
     The post-war generation was brought up by parents who aimed for respectability, and to conceal any suggestion that the body
     was not under the strict control of the civilised mind. The great weapons were shame and embarrassment. It was not only difficult
     to find yourself unmarried and pregnant (bringing up children is at any period a very tough one-person activity), it was a
     disgrace. Hiding the fact was far more important than dealing with it. Our parents, a generation that had responded to the
     uncertainty of war with a good deal of sexual licence (the writer John Mortimer remembered VE Day, when the grassy expanses
     of Hyde Park heaved with copulating couples), and during the bombings and enforced separations snatched physical pleasure
     in the face of absence and death, now scurried back to the social straight and narrow and impressed on its children