Romance for Real Women

Okay, I did it. I watched Swingtown. I not only watched it, I watched it with Mom, an authority on all things having to do with the sixties and seventies.

The plot is paper thin. A young couple moves to a more expensive neighborhood and is introduced to swinging by neighbors. Friends from the old neighborhood visit and are as horrified by the couple swapping as the first couple is, dare I say, seduced.

From the perspective of a viewer, the show didn’t work on any level. Viewers with a prurient interest in swinging are bound to be disappointed. The network only hints at the sex. It never shows any. Anyone interested in why swinging appeared to erupt mini-phenomenon in the seventies is also going to be disappointed. The network doesn’t offer a single clue into what prompted middle class interest in it.

Not surprisingly, Mom had a few ideas. She conceded that the network did get a few things right. Some men did wear high waisted polyester pants, she said, although she didn’t know any. Disco enjoyed a brief popularity and Mom says it was kind of fun, but nothing anyone reared on Dylan, The Band or Eric Clapton took seriously as “real” music.

She started to leave then. Like Forrest Gump, this appeared to be all she had to say about that.

I wouldn’t let her. I made some English tea and insisted she tell me why. Why did obviously middle class people, people with responsible jobs and children get into swinging? What was in it for them?

She looked at me like I’m an idiot.

“Oh, Bunny,” she said. “Don’t you get it?”

“No,” I said with some irritation. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“But it’s obvious.”

“Not to me.”

“Well, dear,” she finally said. “People like this, suburban types, slept all the way through the sixties. Think of what went on. Civil rights. The war. Women’s rights. Social justice. A lot of hard work went into the movement. These were issues that changed society and changed our perceptions of government, relationships, work, and most of all ourselves and what we wanted from life. Sex was only a part of it.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking I was about to get another lecture on the righteousness of the sixties. “So what?”

“They didn’t participate. Do you honestly think a guy in polyester slacks has a thought on women’s rights?” (Mom’s something of a snob, but I was beginning to understand her.)

“So when they woke up in the seventies, they found everything had changed. And, they realized they’d missed out. They felt they were owed something. Why I don’t know, since they choose to opt out and, remember, Bunny, there was still plenty of work to do in the 1970s. Still is, for that matter.”

“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t want to get into a discussion of the environment. Mom despises what she calls my “Goldwater” tendencies.

Again, she started to leave. Again, I stopped her. “So, that’s it?” I asked. “That’s all there is to it?”

“Yes, dear. That’s all there is to it. People like this were selfish in the sixties and selfish in the seventies. Really, dear, they’re dead bores. I don’t understand why you’re so interested.” Then, she did leave.

I thought about what she’d said and have to admit.

She’s got a point.

CBS is set to air a new series tonight called Swingtown, a “drama with comic elements” about three Midwest couples “wading into the rising waters of the sexual revolution sweeping the nation during the mid-seventies.”

Well, not to challenge the network’s grasp of social history, but the sexual revolution swept the country in the middle sixties. The pill which liberated women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy became available in the United States in 1960. Three years later, some 1.2 million were using it to prevent pregnancy.

The availability of the pill was a crucial influence in creating the sexual revolution, but so, too, was the confluence of several other important events. Betty Friedan spoke to millions of women in The Feminine Mystique,” an examination of the hollowness of the post-war roles prescribed for women. A string of assassinations, JFK, RFK and MLK, rocked the nation before Vietnam tore it apart. By the mid-70s, Nixon was gone, the war was over, and so, too, was the sexual “revolution,” although clearly sexual mores had changed forever.

Those of you who have read any of this blog know that my mother was a charter member of the sixties generation. Some of you might even remember it was called the “free love” generation, a term she’s always detested. So when I noticed that Swingtown was set to air, I asked her about it. Swinging, that is.

“Bunny,” she said, “none of us ever thought about swinging. It’s so cold, so clinical. If we wanted to make love, we did. We still do.” (Author’s note: Mom insisted I include that part of her quote. Author’s second note: Yes, she calls me ‘Bunny.”) “But I certainly never went to any party to swap partners,” she concluded.

She actually didn’t conclude. Mom said a lot more on the subject of free love in the sixties, her own in particular, which I firmly declined to quote and would frankly rather not know. Nevertheless her point is a good one. Physical love freely given and received between consenting adults outside a committed relationship is fine. Not for me. But fine.

But parties…with tubs of whip cream, bowls of cherries and cheap wine…communal romps in dirty sheets…crowding against naked strangers in a hot tub? CBS may see the potential for “drama with comic elements.” I see heartache.

Which brings me to my own experience. I’ve known couples who were swingers. They confused Mom’s philosophy of free love, a young, exuberant pushing of the envelope, with the sterile coupling of strangers in a futile effort to recapture youth or grasp at empty pleasure.

To a person, all the couples I’ve known who tried swinging, broke up. Their relationships fractured under the weight. Not surprising, but pitiful.

I haven’t seen Swingtown yet and I’m not sure I will. I’ve seen what it can do to decent people and the danger is far greater than the risk of STD or HIV, something Mom’s generation never worried about.

If you’re tempted, think very carefully. Then, my advice is: Take a pass.

            In most markets, the quality of local media range from mediocre to poor. Real women know there are some exceptions, but not many.

            This is not such an exception.

            Yesterday I posted a report from University of California at Davis about men confusing a comment such as “it’s getting late” with “let’s skip the preliminaries and get it on.”

            This is egregious stuff. After finally dragging rape out of the shadows; after all the serious work that’s been done in the area of spousal and child abuse; after all the sensitivity courses in the workplace and in school, it appears that a large number of men still confuse what they want to hear with what’s actually said.

            This isn’t funny.

            But it apparently did tickle the funny bone of a Davis CBS13 reporter Mike Dello Stritto who went to the Davis campus and chatted up some of the students about the report.

            Led by an infallible news sense, Stritto asked the kids some of the same questions the professor posed on his study.

Yuk. Yuk. Giggle. Giggle. 

How did he think those kids would react when asked about their sex lives with a camera pointed in their noses?

Lost was any sense of the serious implications of the study.  Although as noted the professor did not study rape, this is moving very close to the line.  And it ain’t funny.

Check out this meathead and his compadres on the news desk.  And it may interest you to know that later in his video blog Stritto opined “this was kind of funny and a fun story to do.”

What a jerk.

The video is at http://cbs13.com/local/men.hear.yes.2.706568.html

A new study out of University of California at Davis ought to have real women calling their collage age daughters right this minute.

Scratch that.

Call your daughters however old they are. Call them at work. Get them in the kitchen after school for a chat. Do it now. And, while you’re at it, call your friends, too.

The study, by communication professor Michael Motley, found that men frequently, no, make that nearly always, misinterpret “indirect” messages from women resisting the “escalation of sexual intimacy.”

According to Motley, when a woman says, “It’s getting late,” the male hears, “Let’s get it on more quickly.” When she says, “Let’s be friends,” the male hears, “I’m not committed, but let’s get it on.”

UC Davis reports that fully eighty five percent of college women have had at least one “unpleasant” experience where physical intimacy escalated without her consent.

The study did not look at rape. But if you ask me, this kind of stuff is getting pretty close to it.

It’s hair raising.

When you’re talking with your daughters, tell them to forget being “nice.” Tell them to forget worrying about his feelings.

If the guy is pawing them beyond what they like, they have to be unambiguous.

“Knock it off.”

“Quit that.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“I’m going home.”

You undoubtedly can think of other, similar unambiguous messages.

Make your daughter repeat them after you.

I’m going to.

Right now.