We wore robes everywhere and flowers in our hair. We made sand candles on Venice Beach. We painted our house bright orange and yellow and red and named it Rainbow Flower. Our bathroom featured a mural of giant mushrooms and fairies with glow-in-the-dark stars and a crescent moon. We skinny-dipped on Oregon beaches. We drank alcohol, smoked pot. And Jimi Hendrix played with agonizing consistency in our house, driving me to a seven-year-old’s distraction. I still can’t listen to “Foxy Lady” without cringing. And the smell of marijuana makes me sick.
My mother was raised Catholic. When my parents divorced (I was six), she ran hell-bent for leather in the opposite direction. Suddenly realizing that being a good girl nets you nothing, she tried the other extreme: sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. My good little Catholic mom drank and fucked like a pro. For her birthday, we macraméd a bell system over her bed that she rang with her toe when she orgasmed.
Sexual innuendos came fast and furious in our house. The randier a joke, the funnier. No matter that neither my baby brother (six years younger) nor I knew what the hell we were laughing at. For my tenth birthday, my mom organized a striptease for me and my friends, with bawdy music from The Sting and racy nightgowns. I learned to masturbate with my Chatty Cathy. Sex is fun. Sex is a game. Sex is sport.
The free love movement was a wonderful theory. My parents and their friends were reacting to war, violence, and governmental betrayal. They wanted a better world, and thought free love was a way to achieve it. Make Love Not War. All You Need Is Love. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines free love as “sexual relations without any commitments by either partner.” But let’s break it down.
Free. Definition number fifteen states: “open to all comers.” Oh, yeah, baby. The good dictionary goes on to say, “Free stresses the complete absence of external rule” — yep — “and the full right to make all of one’s own decisions.” Kids, too?
Love. Definition number seven: “copulation.” That’s it — no need to read further. Free love meant sex, and lots of it. Free love meant you did it anywhere and everywhere to prove you were hip, unencumbered by society’s rules. Countering her religious upbringing, my mother was born again, as a twentieth-century fox. She slept with a fifteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, a musician or three, a forty-year-old neighbor. I heard her sexual ecstasies from the bedroom I shared with my brother. The bells over her bed rang frequently. I was a wild child of a newly minted wild child.
Hippies were outside of society, better than society. I still remember a family friend saying I was too good to like a certain black-humored movie. My mother chirped right up. “She’s not good. She’s bad.” Good is bad and bad is good. No wonder I’m in therapy.
I have an immediate negative response to people who smoke pot and wear bell-bottoms. Unfortunately, my college campus is full of people who nostalgically look at the sixties as the pinnacle of our century. But they weren’t there. They didn’t see the day after the orgy, when my four-year-old brother wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and had to dodge the flying wine bottle my mother was throwing at her drummer boyfriend.
Free love, in practice, set me up for a lifetime of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. I learned that sex is a should. If someone wanted to sleep with me, I let him. It didn’t matter — never mattered — if I didn’t want to. Free only went one way. And love meant sex. If you ask me, free love ain’t either. It’s not love, and it’s not free. I’ve been paying the price for thirty years.
When I was in the third grade, my babysitter came to live with us, staying two years. Several teenage boys started hanging around, adding to the hormonal stew. Suddenly I had older siblings, and I loved it. I was free to act like a kid, not the responsible oldest child taking care of my mother and brother. And my mom got to be even more of a wild child — experimental, free, and easy. No worries.
One day my babysitter’s friend Geoff said we should bond. He sliced my hand, then his, and smeared our blood together. I was nine. He was on acid. My new blood brother leered at me when his girlfriend left the room. My mother’s brother also leered at me, as did a few of my father’s friends. There was nowhere, after I developed breasts, that was safe.
My father felt free to comment on strangers’ bodies — even those of twelve-year-olds. What I learned as a child of the sixties — fuck everyone and let him fuck you — has definitely shaped my adulthood. Want to screw on the beach? under the desk at work? in the alley? on the side of the road? in the car driving eighty miles an hour? Sure. My function on earth, said society, said hippies, said my mother, was to be fuckable. Extremely fuckable. Did I want sex? Who cares? Open your legs and let me in or I’ll call you a square, mainstream, conservative. God forbid. When I was fourteen, I was molested by a talent agent. When my brother was twelve, he was molested by his best friend’s father.
Sex. Not simple, not easy, not free. And not love.
My mom routinely took us to the Fox Theatre to watch movies. We popped our own corn and smuggled thermoses of Gallo wine (unless we were boycotting). Once she dragged us to Performance and something I only remember as Bye-Bye Blackbird. Both rated R, both semi-pornographic. Nuns sodomized and killed. Mick Jagger fucking a starlet. My brother cried for a month with nightmares, and decades later I still remember those violent images. Some things are too graphic for kids to see, but we saw them, and later tried them, or at least consented to them. It may be why, years later, I beg a boyfriend to whip me. And, more recently, why I throw up when a new friend wants to shop in a sex store.
No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred. And yet, as a kid, everyone envied my mother. She let me do anything. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends. She even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.
Maybe my mom believed that all you do need is love, that love will heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late. I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty note after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.
As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a “legitimate” excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t ménage à trois. My boyfriend, you know.
The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. I guess I’m lucky to be alive, no STDs, HIV-negative. But these days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.
Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist found objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.
I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung-up. Liberal. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free. These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I couldn’t walk down the street; I couldn’t even leave the house. Nowhere felt safe except, paradoxically, my bed. Depression and sex, with bed as part of the disease and the cure. If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such away that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was 9 1/2 Weeks. Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, “Everybody copulate!” Some would call me frigid.
I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport. Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.
For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head. I call myself bisexual, but in truth, I’m asexual. Celibate. Scared to even flirt. Because flirting leads to sex — inevitably, mandatorily. So I don’t even start. Everyone I know is safely partnered up. Deep down inside I am conservative: I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (and abusing) myself. Sex was love for me–a substitute love–not sport, not just fun. Love my body, love me. Simple, easy. Not.
I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine. I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize. But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.
Eventually I’II have to reconcile this with the abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel degraded and ashamed. Bad. Not good. I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason (Bye-Bye Blackbird?) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.
Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent. The cost of “free” love? Self-esteem. Happiness.
A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.
When I emerge from my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. I can almost imagine it. l am learning that I am free to choose. I can choose who to kiss, who to embrace, who to love. Just because someone likes the looks of me doesn’t mean I have to jump in the sack. I can decide how it’s going to go. And it’s not an all or nothing proposition. I can explore a few feet down that path, then stop and turn around. My parents couldn’t teach me boundaries, but I am teaching me these things. Out of love — real love.
Previously published in the Seal Press Anthology Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, edited by Chelsea Cain, 1999. Edited by Shé 2024.
essays by shé 