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DORIS LESSING
It certainly went with the French Revolution and the Russian Revolu–
tion. Does being interested in sexual freedom make you less interested in
economics? Not necessarily. But there is something interesting here,
which I was thinking about recently: God knows at what age, maybe
fifteen or sixteen, and living on a farm in the bush in Southern Rhodesia,
I read a remark by Shaw, who said that we were all badly oversexed
animals. Now, the fact that he said this was not the point. The point is
my reaction was as if someone were trying to take something away from
me. Now why should I have felt that?
What was there in the air, what is there in the air, that makes sex a
right? What it has become for us is a right. Maybe I'm talking pre-AIDS.
But it certainly, for our generation, was a right and a way of defining
ourselves against our parents, because our lot went in for free love,
which is very different from what happened in the sixties. It was
extremely romantic. I think my generation was probably the first
generation to have sexual freedom as a right, as something that we were
due. Because we were fairly new on in this revolution, it had nothing to
do with what a friend of mine calls the horizontal handshake; that is,
you go to bed with anyone, any time. You had to be in love, you see.
Furthermore, we were not worried about getting pregnant because what
are now regarded as fairly primitive birth control methods worked.
None of us ever had all these sexual diseases people have now.
I personally think that sexually we were the luckiest generation in
the history of the world. But that isn't even interesting. What is
interesting is that we should have had those attitudes. Why did we have
them? Was it because of war or was good old nature at it again, trying
to get us to have a lot of children because so many people had been
killed. That's also possible, because most of our attitudes were due to
something - we were being manipulated by nature or society or
something - and we weren't even aware of it. This is what is so
frightening. You think that you're a part of something new, original and
marvelous, and you discover afterwards that in fact you were just another
straw in the wind.
