“We paid the price for free love”

To make things worse, there were two added factors that made promiscuity so difficult to avoid. Firstly, there was very little awareness of sexually transmitted diseases – HIV wasn’t yet an issue – and very few men, now that the pill was on the scene, had any clue about how to put on a condom. Again, there was even less reason to say ‘no’ to sex, and the result was that lots of us girls spent the entire 60s in tears, because however one tried to separate sex from love, we’d been brought up to associate the two; so every time we went to bed with someone, we’d hope it would lead to something more permanent…and each time it never did.

The other reason that sex was so grim was that now it was so easy, the art of seduction had flown out of the window. I’m sure this was partly why working-class men became so much more attractive to everyone in the 60s. They’d always found, with less birth control available among the working classes and expensive abortion
not an option, that in order to get a girl into bed they had to work really hard at the chat-up lines. But as for men considering women’s feelings – why should they? They continued to satisfy their own needs and never for a moment considered whether the women they were having sex with found it pleasurable or satisfying. Most of us girls, at least those on the London rock scene as I was, didn’t have a clue as to what sex could be like when it was good. When we weren’t crying, we’d giggle, like the schoolgirls we were, about our exploits, without realising how damaging our sexual behaviour was both to our self-esteem and our souls…

After a decade of sleeping around pretty indiscriminately, girls of the 60s eventually became fairly jaded about sex. It took me years to discover that continual sex with different partners is, with very few exceptions, joyless, uncomfortable and humiliating, and it’s only now I’m older that I’ve discovered that one of the ingredients of a good sex life is, at the very least, a grain of affection between the two partners involved.