The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [125]
Some say the sexual revolution was a lot of fun. By other accounts (or even the same memory at another time), it wasn’t much fun at all: women felt coerced into sex, worried that if they refused they would seem conservative or repressed. For men and women, there was the question of living up to the new freedom and all the pleasure they were supposed to be having. I hope if anyone is squeamish about language they will find this poem worth its little shock. It is by the English poet Philip Larkin, from his book High Windows, first published in 1974. I offer it here as evidence that it matters when you live. It is also evidence that it does not matter, but if we take it at its word, the poem believes it matters when you live.
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The poem has a definite sour charm. Larkin lived from 1922 to 1985 and reported that history, in his lifetime, seemed marked by a progression of enviable releases from social bondage, only some of which had arrived in time for him. It harbors envy and anger; imagining the joy of “going down the long slide” (a splendid invocation of ease and also of sexuality); then a reverse envy where he counts his own blessings; and then that transcendent last stanza, where he takes himself (with some coaxing) into a place beyond these calculations. Talk about “through the looking glass.” It feels as if in trying to escape the mundane, Larkin gets momentarily stuck in the windowpane itself, and then pushes through, out beyond beyond.
For those who took a more active part in the sexual revolution, there were other kinds of trouble. Most important, both men and women got their hearts broken. What kills free love is not convention; what kills free love is romantic love. And then came AIDS. By the 1980s, fear of the spread of HIV effectively ended the sexual revolution. Sex is great, but if you find something else to do tonight, you won’t have to get tested. AIDS is a big part of what darkened the image of the sexual adventurer.
Yet despite the darkening of public rhetoric about sexual freedom, there has developed a huge, underarticulated assumption that a happy, fulfilled life must have some regular amount of sex in it. Sitcoms and TV dramas often have a character mention not having sex in a while—say, seven months—and the surrounding characters respond with a scolding insistence, jokes, and phone numbers of possible partners. We know what we are supposed to be doing. The other half of that historically odd social insistence that you should be having sex is that you should be having it in an essentially monogamous way that doesn’t much call attention to itself.
TV characters who have sex with many different partners are today depicted as a bit sad. It has not always been this way. Consider a few of television’s sexual profligates. The sexual freedom touted in the free-love doctrine of the 1960s made it to the small screen in 1970s cop shows, comedies, and melodramas. Fonzie, on Happy Days, was representative. The carnal encounters are implied: we see the sexual virtuoso summon a woman to his arms, and in a later scene we see her kissed good-bye. The assumption is always that everyone had a good time: the man is a hero and the woman enjoys him in this special category. As the