DORIS LESSING
From
Walking in the Shade
S omewhere towards the end of the sixties, I found that I was laughing,
unexpectedly, helplessly: first, a disbelieving and incredulous yelp, and then
a real laugh, ha ha, oh my God, but it's so funny ...
What was? Sex, that's what. This laugh is out of its proper place only
chronologically, because it was not merely the sixties I was looking at but
the fifties too: as I have already hinted, sex did not begin in the sixties.
What distinguished the fifties, and then the sixties, was that there
were no rules. Surely this must have been the first time in history- in
any history that we remember-that there were no commonly accepted
conventions and at the same time there was access to birth control.
Anything went. And there were to be no rules until the advent of AIDS,
which restored morality at a stroke.
I would say that in the fifties, in the way of love, or sex, the most obvi–
ous thing-obvious later-is that people were going to bed because it was
expected of them. (The Zeitgeist demanded.) Some people were coupling
like hypnotized fish bumping into each other. Curiosity? Perhaps, a little.
Sexual fever, not at all. These embraces had nothing to do with love, and
not much to do with sex either. I mean, real sexual attraction. There was
a passivity about it all.
No one knew how to behave, neither men nor women. And this is
why there was so much unhappiness, so much incomprehension. Do I
exaggerate? Yes, I do, because I am leaving out of this account the enjoy–
able and happy encounters.
We are all now well equipped with handbooks explaining the basic
differences between men and women, but the sixties coincided with a stage
in the feminist movement which denied all differences between men and
women. Or, as D. H . Lawrence put it, women were just as good as men,
only better.
No ideological rages are likely to be aroused now at the news that men
and women are biologically programmed to want different things-at the
root of their natures, never mind how civilization or culture or current
morality decides to tame us. There is no man who has not dreamed of that
Editor's Note: From
Wtllking in the Shade
by Doris Lessing, published by
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright
©
1997 by Doris Lessing.
