The so-called revolution walked hand in hand with something altogether more repressive: a backwards tug that enabled the old double standards so far as men and women go not just to survive, but to thrive. Just as the 60s would not really get going for most people until some time in 1975 (at least), the 50s hung about like a bad smell long after 1960.
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But still, this story of corduroy trousers, unyielding even in the face of so much antipodean determination, illustrates rather neatly the difference between perceptions of the 60s and reality – a yawning gap that Peter Doggett makes the most of in Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties, his fascinating but deeply strange new book about the decade.Īs he notes, the montages so beloved of TV documentary-makers – the fuzzy clips of gyrating hippies with flowers in their hair – don’t tell even half the story. It probably goes without saying that Greer was a swashbuckler her bravado, which would endure long after the 60s ended, should always be taken with a pinch of salt. By her own admission, she was elated at what she saw as “the vastness” of the opportunity for “proselytising”.īut, alas, the male fleshpots of Cambridge – otherwise known, I assume, as pubs – turned out to be a disappointment: “For six months after I arrived, the only sex I experienced directly, apart from endlessly repeated discussions in which I found it necessary to explain that there had been improvements upon coitus interruptus as a contraceptive method … was the sight of three grubby, scrawny men in their 40s, who derived some satisfaction from exposing to me their genitals, pallid and bluish in the frosty air.”Ī strip club in Old Compton Street, London, August 1964.
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Cambridge, with its large population of men in what she described as “the full flower of their potency”, seemed to Greer to be “an ideal spot for the dedicated practitioner of the arts of love”. The subject of her thesis was love and marriage in Shakespeare’s early comedies, but in truth, Petruchio and co were not her only preoccupations. In 1964, Germaine Greer arrived in Cambridge from Australia to study for a PhD in English Literature.
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