Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 24

This was probably the most dominate informal standard in the U.S. until 1968. This assumes that man’s nature is such that he must have sexual outlets. Boys will be boys. Men were often encouraged to lose their virginity while girls were expected to be virgins until they married. In some states a women not being a virgin could be grounds for the annulment of the marriage.

We also had double standards in employment and legal rights with the core idea being female inferiority. The extreme of this was early laws that treated women as their husband’s property.

Men in the 1960s who practiced the double standard tended to group women into five different levels based on their sexual availability.

1.Prostitutes

2.Party girls who would have sex with any man who took them out

3.Those who were known to have sex with other men, but were highly selective

4.Those who would have sex if they were engaged to be married

5.Those who wouldn’t have sex until marriage vows had been taken

In the 1960s I had reports that some fraternities kept a list of girls known to be easily available sexually. I had an incident in one of my classes in the mid ’60s of one of the women in class standing up and accusing one of the men of putting her name on such a list because he was angry with her.The class gave her a round of applause.

Even those engaged to be married could have problems with the virginity issue. One of my clients in the ’60s, who was pregnant after having had sexual intercourse after much pressure from her boyfriend, had been told by him he no longer wanted to marry her because she was no longer a virgin. They did marry, but it was a demonstration of the strong desire of men to marry only virgins.

As a result, some women would re-virginize because they recognized the need to appear to be a virgin if they wanted to get married. I was told that in some cultures small vials of blood could be purchased to be put on the bed sheet the marriage night so it could be hung out the window the next morning to prove the woman had been a virgin.

When I first started working with rape victims in the ’60s, we found that many jury members believed that a woman who had premarital sex couldn’t be raped. That is, once they had had sex, further sex, even under threats of violence was not rape.