When I was in high school sex-before-marriage was
forbidden (for girls). What did we do
with our raging hormones? I don’t get
national credit for this but: I invented the lap dance in the back seat
of a ’57 Chevy. As long as there was
some jeans fabric separating your tunnel from his little red wagon, you were
okay.
My mother, who was an expert on the rules of the
time said, “You’re either a nice girl or a nafka.” Nafka was Yiddish for prostitute and the word
whore was also forbidden. “If you have
sex and the boy brags about it—which he will--your reputation will be ruined,
you’ll be damaged goods and you’ll never
get a good husband. The best you’ll get
is living in a trailer park with a drunk. If you get pregnant, you’ll be sent to a home
for unwed mothers run by mean nuns and after the baby is born, you’ll have to
move to some other state.”
After Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1962, (the year I graduated
from high school) everything changed.
Brown said if a girl was unmarried and had a career, she could have sex
and not think of herself as a whore. I
so agreed, especially since I had already lost my virginity around my 16th
birthday (in the back of that same ’57 Chevy). Coincidentally (and luckily), the Pill came
out around the same time--so the timing could not have been better. Thus began the Sexual Revolution (where I
became a foot soldier). We went from
being junior Jackie Kennedys to swimming naked at Woodstock in just a few years’
time. I thank Helen Gurley Brown for
that.
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