I was at my local the other day with Don, Pete, and Ben, having a beer. Seems like it’s been months since we were able to get together and just be guys. We have dinner parties with the wives, sure. And even though the gents always end up in the kitchen and the ladies end up in the living room, we mind our manners and watch our tongues. It’s still mixed company. At the bar, we can let down our guard, ogle the young women, and basically act like the Neanderthals that we are deep inside. A cute twenty-something waitress brought another round. She was wearing hip huggers cut so low that her thong underwear showed like a jock strap. We looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, and sighed.
As I’ve mentioned before, our particular generation of men seems to be under unusual pressure to be sensitive, politically correct, even to be feminists ourselves. If you’re between the ages of thirty and forty-five, you know what I’m talking about. We married the last of the hardcore feminists, the women for whom sex is always connected to issues of social equality, justice, and personal politics. What does this mean, exactly? Don and Ben agreed that it seems like we’re surrounded by folks who have life a bit easier than we do: Gen-Y kids in their twenties and baby boomers in their fifties have a lot in common. They do seem aware that sex can be a political as much as physical issue, but they don’t seem to let that get in the way of having a good time. They compartmentalize.
Now, I have several good friends in their fifties, both men and women. And the general consensus is that they grew up at the tail end of the mid-seventies “sexual revolution.” For the first time in five decades, women were publicly acknowledged as beings with sexual appetites, just like men. (Something like this happened in the twenties, the age of the flapper.) Of course, many boomer men took advantage of this and had a lot of sex without commitment or passion. They excused their behavior by claiming they were fulfilling women’s right to have unattached sex too. Women probably felt a great deal of pressure to loosen up, liberate themselves, have fun. That meant agreeing to casual sex every time it was demanded. Ironically, the real vanguard of the feminist movement came from the older end of this generation—people like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem saw the sexual revolution as more than a generational orgy: it was a political opportunity for women to achieve all that men had achieved—as well as liberation from both sex and sexuality. When they became mothers, they planted the seeds of strident feminism in their daughters.
Who are the women that Ben, Pete, and I married, as opposed to the kind of “post-feminist” woman now serving us another round. Don’s last girlfriend, a twenty-something, described herself as post-feminist (“the radical notion that women are sexual people too,” is how she described this, paraphrasing a popular bumper sticker), and she was one of the few women I’ve encountered in recent years who could hang with all of us guys and not be horrified by the conversation, even when it turned naughty. It was kind of liberating for us aging hipsters. We could let our depraved inner selves show without fear of getting browbeaten.
True, when you’re in your twenties, you’re still playing the field. I remember with fondness the quality and quantity of romance I had fifteen years ago and have to admit that I couldn’t have done it without the enthusiastic participation of several lovely women of my supposedly prudish generation. Perhaps we’ve all changed for the worse.
There’s hope things will improve. This is the lesson I’ve learned from my fifty-something friends: Life is too short and too hard to live in repression, and being dishonest is at least as harmful as being politically incorrect. If I’m going to be PC, let me do it for the right reasons and be sincere about it. And let me admit out loud that I have some awfully non-PC impulses. Like staring at that waitress’s bottom and offering my heartfelt gratitude for its existence, just beyond my reach (in both the literal and the moral sense—as Ben likes to say, I can look at the menu, I just can’t order).
Maybe my friends and I are just feeling henpecked. Maybe we’re just spineless, and need to learn to communicate more honestly with our lovers as we get older. Still, I think there are some interesting generational differences, and if you speak candidly to nearly any thirty-something man, he’ll tell you that he leads this dual life—walking on eggshells at home while never fully betraying the secret NASCAR fan inside.
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