sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
Welcome to Hippyland
- Thread starter sweetnpetite
- Start date
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
Edited to say: the following words are not my own they are from the following link:
http://www.hipplanet.com/books/atoz/way.htm
What’s a hippie? What’s the difference between an old hippie and a new hippie? Once a hippie, always a hippie? These and similar questions are the source of much debate today. New subcategories like web-hippies, cyber-hippies, even zippies have become fashionable. But what is a hippie and are you one?
To answer this question, let’s see what defines a hippie. Some say it’s the way people dress, and behave, a lifestyle. Others classify drug users and rock and roll fans or those with certain radical political views as hippies. The dictionary defines a hippie as one who doesn’t conform to society’s standards and advocates a liberal attitude and lifestyle. Can all these definitions be right?
It seems to me that these definitions miss the point. By focusing on the most visible behavioral traits these limited descriptions fail to reveal what lies in the hippie heart that motivates such behavior. To understand The Way of the Hippy, we must look at those circumstances that preceded the birth of the hippy movement, the important events that changed our lives, our resulting frustration with society, and the philosophy that came from our spiritual maturation. This book will examine these developments and put them in the context of humanity's ongoing social evolution.
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
Timothy Leary The Politics of Ecstasy
My view is that being a hippie is a matter of accepting a universal belief system that transcends the social, political, and moral norms of any established structure, be it a class, church, or government. Each of these powerful institutions has it's own agenda for controlling, even enslaving people. Each has to defend itself when threatened by real or imagined enemies. So we see though history a parade of endless conflicts with country vs. country, religion vs. religion, class vs. class. After millennia of war and strife, in which uncounted millions have suffered, we have yet to rise above our petty differences.
The way of the hippie is antithetical to all repressive hierarchical power structures since they are adverse to the hippie goals of peace, love and freedom. This is why the "Establishment" feared and suppressed the hippie movement of the '60s, as it was a revolution against the established order. It is also the reason why the hippies were unable to unite and overthrow the system since they refused to build their own power base. Hippies don't impose their beliefs on others. Instead, hippies seek to change the world through reason and by living what they believe.
Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
John Lennon (Imagine)
To be a hippie you must believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among peoples, ideologies and religions. The way to peace is through love and tolerance. Loving means accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances. This is the core of the hippie philosophy.
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958
The hippy movement erected signposts for all to see. Some warn us of impending danger, others direct us towards richer, more fulfilling lives, but most show us the road to freedom. Freedom is the paramount virtue in this system. Freedom to do as one pleases, go where the flow takes you, and to be open to new experiences. This engenders an attitude that allows for maximum personal growth.
If you want to be free, be free, because there's a million things to be.
Cat Stevens (If You Want to Sing Out)
Our society only permits you one or two weeks a year of freedom to pursue your own agenda. The rest of the time we are slaves to the system. Hippies reject the 9 to 5 lifestyle and therefore are objects of ridicule by those whose lives run by the clock. They are jealous and resent the freedom we possess. The unmitigated freedom that hippies represent is the greatest threat to any system in which control equals power.
I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom - external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.
Jim Morrison
With all this freedom comes a lot of responsibility. The system does not make it easy for us to survive without sacrificing our values. Therefore we must discover alternative ways to make a living without being a drag on our planet's resources and our fellow humans. Hippies have pioneered numerous lifestyles and alternative businesses including communes, cooperatives, Holistic medicine and health food. We focused everyone's concern on the environment to highlight our responsibilities to our planet and to future generations.
I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one.
And I believe it could be, someday it's going to come.
Cat Stevens (Peace Train)
Other beliefs that spring from our core philosophy are an earthy spirituality such as a belief in Gaia (the earth as an organism), the Greens movement (political activism), even shamanism and vegetarianism. These philosophical and political views reflect a respect for nature and the planet as a whole, something lacking in our capitalistic and materialistic societies. The world needs hippies to point out alternatives to the entrenched system and warn of the impending disasters that await us if we don’t change our lifestyles. The goal is not to make everyone a hippie (what would we have to protest?). Rather we can try to influence others by example, through tolerance and love and teaching the virtues of the hippie way.
You create your own reality.
Seth (Seth Speaks)
So being a hippie is not a matter of dress, behavior, economic status, or social milieu. It is a philosophical approach to life that emphasizes freedom, peace, love and a respect for others and the earth. The way of the hippie never died. There have always been hippies from the first time society laid down rules, to Jesus, to Henry David Thoreau, to John Lennon, to you and me. I believe there's a little hippy in all of us. It's just been repressed by our socialization process. We need to find it and cultivate our hippie within. Only then can we reach our true potential.
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)
As hippies age they come to terms with the same situations all humans must face. Wiser than before, let’s help the younger hippies find a way to save the earth and achieve more freedom than exists in our wildest dreams. Let’s find our common ground, build a worldwide community, and once again let our freak flags fly and become all we are destined to be.
http://www.hipplanet.com/books/atoz/way.htm
What’s a hippie? What’s the difference between an old hippie and a new hippie? Once a hippie, always a hippie? These and similar questions are the source of much debate today. New subcategories like web-hippies, cyber-hippies, even zippies have become fashionable. But what is a hippie and are you one?
To answer this question, let’s see what defines a hippie. Some say it’s the way people dress, and behave, a lifestyle. Others classify drug users and rock and roll fans or those with certain radical political views as hippies. The dictionary defines a hippie as one who doesn’t conform to society’s standards and advocates a liberal attitude and lifestyle. Can all these definitions be right?
It seems to me that these definitions miss the point. By focusing on the most visible behavioral traits these limited descriptions fail to reveal what lies in the hippie heart that motivates such behavior. To understand The Way of the Hippy, we must look at those circumstances that preceded the birth of the hippy movement, the important events that changed our lives, our resulting frustration with society, and the philosophy that came from our spiritual maturation. This book will examine these developments and put them in the context of humanity's ongoing social evolution.
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
Timothy Leary The Politics of Ecstasy
My view is that being a hippie is a matter of accepting a universal belief system that transcends the social, political, and moral norms of any established structure, be it a class, church, or government. Each of these powerful institutions has it's own agenda for controlling, even enslaving people. Each has to defend itself when threatened by real or imagined enemies. So we see though history a parade of endless conflicts with country vs. country, religion vs. religion, class vs. class. After millennia of war and strife, in which uncounted millions have suffered, we have yet to rise above our petty differences.
The way of the hippie is antithetical to all repressive hierarchical power structures since they are adverse to the hippie goals of peace, love and freedom. This is why the "Establishment" feared and suppressed the hippie movement of the '60s, as it was a revolution against the established order. It is also the reason why the hippies were unable to unite and overthrow the system since they refused to build their own power base. Hippies don't impose their beliefs on others. Instead, hippies seek to change the world through reason and by living what they believe.
Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
John Lennon (Imagine)
To be a hippie you must believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among peoples, ideologies and religions. The way to peace is through love and tolerance. Loving means accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances. This is the core of the hippie philosophy.
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958
The hippy movement erected signposts for all to see. Some warn us of impending danger, others direct us towards richer, more fulfilling lives, but most show us the road to freedom. Freedom is the paramount virtue in this system. Freedom to do as one pleases, go where the flow takes you, and to be open to new experiences. This engenders an attitude that allows for maximum personal growth.
If you want to be free, be free, because there's a million things to be.
Cat Stevens (If You Want to Sing Out)
Our society only permits you one or two weeks a year of freedom to pursue your own agenda. The rest of the time we are slaves to the system. Hippies reject the 9 to 5 lifestyle and therefore are objects of ridicule by those whose lives run by the clock. They are jealous and resent the freedom we possess. The unmitigated freedom that hippies represent is the greatest threat to any system in which control equals power.
I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom - external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.
Jim Morrison
With all this freedom comes a lot of responsibility. The system does not make it easy for us to survive without sacrificing our values. Therefore we must discover alternative ways to make a living without being a drag on our planet's resources and our fellow humans. Hippies have pioneered numerous lifestyles and alternative businesses including communes, cooperatives, Holistic medicine and health food. We focused everyone's concern on the environment to highlight our responsibilities to our planet and to future generations.
I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one.
And I believe it could be, someday it's going to come.
Cat Stevens (Peace Train)
Other beliefs that spring from our core philosophy are an earthy spirituality such as a belief in Gaia (the earth as an organism), the Greens movement (political activism), even shamanism and vegetarianism. These philosophical and political views reflect a respect for nature and the planet as a whole, something lacking in our capitalistic and materialistic societies. The world needs hippies to point out alternatives to the entrenched system and warn of the impending disasters that await us if we don’t change our lifestyles. The goal is not to make everyone a hippie (what would we have to protest?). Rather we can try to influence others by example, through tolerance and love and teaching the virtues of the hippie way.
You create your own reality.
Seth (Seth Speaks)
So being a hippie is not a matter of dress, behavior, economic status, or social milieu. It is a philosophical approach to life that emphasizes freedom, peace, love and a respect for others and the earth. The way of the hippie never died. There have always been hippies from the first time society laid down rules, to Jesus, to Henry David Thoreau, to John Lennon, to you and me. I believe there's a little hippy in all of us. It's just been repressed by our socialization process. We need to find it and cultivate our hippie within. Only then can we reach our true potential.
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)
As hippies age they come to terms with the same situations all humans must face. Wiser than before, let’s help the younger hippies find a way to save the earth and achieve more freedom than exists in our wildest dreams. Let’s find our common ground, build a worldwide community, and once again let our freak flags fly and become all we are destined to be.
Last edited:
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
of particular interest to litizens...
Sex, Love and Hippies
Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth, but it's usually too battered with rules to be heard. We cripple ourselves with lies. Most people have no idea of what they're missing, our society places a supreme value on control, on hiding what you feel. It mocks primitive culture and prides itself on the suppression of natural instincts and impulses.
Jim Morrison
Many people accuse hippies of being promiscuous, having wild sex orgies, seducing innocent teenagers and every manner of sexual perversion. There's no denying that many hippies were involved in temporary sexual relationships and sexual experimentation unlike any generation before them. Yet this huge experiment with Free Love was an actual sexual revolution that liberated millions of Americans from the prevailing puritan sexual attitudes and hang-ups of the 1950's.
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgiastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion,
if not a contemptuous mockery.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) 1963
As kids growing up in America in the '50s and early '60s we were exposed to a variety of mixed signals regarding sex and love. Love was romanticized in the media as something that either just happened to you (love at first sight), or a thing that grew over time as a couple got to know each other better. Sex was something that was rarely discussed and when it was, our elders admonished us against such horrors as masturbation and premarital sex. This lack of communication between adults and children helped create the generation gap.
First came love, then came marriage, then came (you) in the baby carriage!
Children's song
We were taught that proper sex was reserved for those who loved each other, got married, and had children. Thus sex, love, marriage and children were sold as a complete package that couldn't be separated. Any other type of sex was considered deviant and would lead to unfortunate consequences (bastard children, disease, perversion, and even death). These messages about sex never made it seem like fun much less an intimate loving activity. The few interesting things we knew about sex we gleaned in whispers from our friends or from furtive glances at a hidden copy of Playboy magazine.
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have
analysed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex.
Aleister Crowley
Then in 1966 a book was published called Human Sexual Response by Masters and Johnson. An extremely thorough clinical study, it shed light on just what happens during sex. All of a sudden, sex became the hot topic in America. Another popular book, Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) answered some common questions about sex (not very well). Then came The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, which by its very title reflected America's changing attitude (in 1972) towards sex. At long last, the secret was out, sex can be fun.
We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents,
always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents,
all of a sudden have discovered that sex is
good not only for procreating children.
Oriana Fallaci (Italian author)
This rather sudden enlightenment concerning human sexuality didn't just happen due to a few books. America's willingness to discuss sex was a result of the profound Sexual Revolution already well underway. Sex was everywhere, and the media played it up. Sexually suggestive advertising took off once ad agencies discovered that sex sells. Foreign "blue" movies like I Am Curious Yellow challenged obscenity laws and paved the way for the porno industry.
The fashion industry took its cue and raised hemlines drastically, creating the mini-skirt and see through blouses. Women expressed their newfound freedom by going one step further and freeing their breasts from the confinement of brassieres, much to the fashion industry's dismay and many a man's delight!
If it feels good, do it!
popular hippie saying
So what led to this sexual revolution in the '60s? How did we get from "No sex before marriage" to "If it feels good do it"? The answer is simple. Hippies. The hippie movement had a profound influence on sexual freedom in the U.S. and elsewhere. This revolution in sexual attitudes was more than a reaction to the prudish mores of the 50s and early 60s. It was a release from all social inhibitions that characterized hippies.
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
W. H. Auden
Again the Beat generation must be credited with living and writing about sexual freedom. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and others lived unusually free, sexually expressive lives. Their writings influenced the hippies to open up when it came to sex, and to experiment without guilt or jealousy.
All you need is love
The Beatles
Ginsberg was there at the first Human Be-In in San Francisco telling everyone to love one another. At Love-Ins, the hippies listened to, and experienced a different view of love and sex. We learned that sex is just another part of life like eating and sleeping. It's a completely natural way to express ourselves. We learned to overcome those fears programmed into us, and to share our bodies as easily as we share our food or our thoughts.
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with…
Steven Stills
The concept of Free Love as expressed by hippies meant you were free to love whomever you pleased, whenever you pleased, however you pleased. This encouraged spontaneous sexual activity and experimentation. Group sex, public sex, sex with minors, homosexuality, all the taboos went out the window. This doesn't mean that straight sex, between two adults, or monogamy was unknown, quite the contrary. Nevertheless, the open relationship became an accepted part of the hippy lifestyle. This meant that you might have a primary relationship with one person, but if another attracted you, you could explore that relationship without rancor or jealousy.
'Tis the most commonplace thing in the world, to love one man to distraction and to fuck frenziedly with another; you don't give your heart to him, just your body . . . . There are two manners of loving a man: morally and physically.
Marquis de Sade
Free love made the whole love, marriage, sex, baby package obsolete. Love was no longer limited to one person, you could love anyone you chose. In fact love was something you shared with everyone, not just your sex partners. Love exists to be shared freely. We also discovered the more you share, the more you get! So why reserve your love for a select few? This profound truth was one of the great hippie revelations.
Your daughter is old enough to do what she pleases . . . she likes to fuck, loves to fuck . . . she was born to fuck, and . . . if you do not wish to be fucked yourself, the best thing for you to do is to let her do what she wants.
Marquis de Sade
The feeling among hippies was that what two (or more) consenting adults (or teenagers) did in private was their business. It's likely that many a naïve youngster was seduced by an older more experienced hippy. Many of the young kids who ran away from home and joined the hippie movement were victims of child abuse (as are many runaways today). The hippie subculture thus rejected the prevailing moral code due to the manifest hypocrisy of adults. The tools of teenage rebellion were (and still are) sex, drugs and rock and roll.
For hippies, sex was something spontaneous. If you met someone you were attracted to, and the circumstances were suitable, you had sex. It could happen in a crash pad, in a van, in the woods or at a festival. Free love was everywhere, but especially in places like communes where sex was a commodity. Hippies didn't care what other people thought. I remember seeing TV news footage of hippies screwing in a city park, enjoying themselves with abandon, oblivious to camera crews and passersby.
It may be necessary to remind younger readers that all this occurred before AIDS became a scourge. Nevertheless, venereal disease was a common problem among the sexually active. Teenage pregnancy became so prevalent that the social stigma faded somewhat. Fortunately, the sexual openness that created these problems was soon to be addressed in public, resulting in the opening of free clinics, sex education in schools, the liberalization of abortion laws, and sexual product advertising. These things are a direct result of the sexual promiscuity that the hippies unleashed upon society.
The puritanical inhibitions programmed by our parents, churches, peers and schools were suddenly irrelevant. But the biggest release of inhibitions came about through the use of drugs, particularly marijuana and the psychedelics. Marijuana is one of the best aphrodisiacs known to man. It enhances the senses, unlike alcohol, which dulls them. As any hippie can tell you, sex is a great high, but sex on pot is fuckin' far out!
The three inevitable goals of an LSD session are to discover
and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself,
and to discover and make love with a woman.
Timothy Leary, Playboy Interview, September, 1966.
More importantly, the use of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD was directly responsible for liberating hippies from their sexual hang-ups. The LSD trip is an intimate soul wrenching experience that shatters the ego's defenses, leaving the tripper in a very poignant and sensitive state. At this point, a sexual encounter is quite possible if conditions are right. After an LSD trip, one is much more likely to explore one's own sexual nature without inhibitions.
All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose.
Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting
is the very secret of nature itself.
Graham Swift
The hippy reverence for nature and all things natural is part of the pagan belief system many adopted. Pagans see sex as a joyful expression of our animal nature and not as something to be repressed. Many hippie events resemble the pagan rituals of old (remember the maypole dance - Pagan!). Music, drink, dancing, and drugs are as much a prelude to sex as a celebration.
Sex has been condemned so much, you cannot enjoy it.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Many hippies on the spiritual path found enlightenment through sex. The Kama Sutra, the Tantric sexual manual from ancient India is a way to cosmic union through sex. Some gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) formed cults that focused on liberation through the release of sexual inhibitions.
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.
Kate Millett (feminist)
This breaking down of society's sexual mores by hippies led directly to the Gay and Women's Liberation movements. Hippies brought sex out into the open, not as consciously as those two movements did, but automatically, because of their experimentation with free love. In fact the Gay and Women's Liberation movements are examples of what can be achieved through a more refined agenda and better organization. Hippies take note!
So hippies freed Americans from their puritanical sexual inhibitions through the practice of free love, experimentation with psychedelics, and rejection of the prevailing hypocritical morality. This resulted in the free flow of information about sex, an expansion of women's and gay rights, and society's keen interest in the health issues surrounding sex.
http://www.hipplanet.com/books/atoz/sex.htm
Sex, Love and Hippies
Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth, but it's usually too battered with rules to be heard. We cripple ourselves with lies. Most people have no idea of what they're missing, our society places a supreme value on control, on hiding what you feel. It mocks primitive culture and prides itself on the suppression of natural instincts and impulses.
Jim Morrison
Many people accuse hippies of being promiscuous, having wild sex orgies, seducing innocent teenagers and every manner of sexual perversion. There's no denying that many hippies were involved in temporary sexual relationships and sexual experimentation unlike any generation before them. Yet this huge experiment with Free Love was an actual sexual revolution that liberated millions of Americans from the prevailing puritan sexual attitudes and hang-ups of the 1950's.
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgiastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion,
if not a contemptuous mockery.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) 1963
As kids growing up in America in the '50s and early '60s we were exposed to a variety of mixed signals regarding sex and love. Love was romanticized in the media as something that either just happened to you (love at first sight), or a thing that grew over time as a couple got to know each other better. Sex was something that was rarely discussed and when it was, our elders admonished us against such horrors as masturbation and premarital sex. This lack of communication between adults and children helped create the generation gap.
First came love, then came marriage, then came (you) in the baby carriage!
Children's song
We were taught that proper sex was reserved for those who loved each other, got married, and had children. Thus sex, love, marriage and children were sold as a complete package that couldn't be separated. Any other type of sex was considered deviant and would lead to unfortunate consequences (bastard children, disease, perversion, and even death). These messages about sex never made it seem like fun much less an intimate loving activity. The few interesting things we knew about sex we gleaned in whispers from our friends or from furtive glances at a hidden copy of Playboy magazine.
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have
analysed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex.
Aleister Crowley
Then in 1966 a book was published called Human Sexual Response by Masters and Johnson. An extremely thorough clinical study, it shed light on just what happens during sex. All of a sudden, sex became the hot topic in America. Another popular book, Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) answered some common questions about sex (not very well). Then came The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, which by its very title reflected America's changing attitude (in 1972) towards sex. At long last, the secret was out, sex can be fun.
We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents,
always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents,
all of a sudden have discovered that sex is
good not only for procreating children.
Oriana Fallaci (Italian author)
This rather sudden enlightenment concerning human sexuality didn't just happen due to a few books. America's willingness to discuss sex was a result of the profound Sexual Revolution already well underway. Sex was everywhere, and the media played it up. Sexually suggestive advertising took off once ad agencies discovered that sex sells. Foreign "blue" movies like I Am Curious Yellow challenged obscenity laws and paved the way for the porno industry.
The fashion industry took its cue and raised hemlines drastically, creating the mini-skirt and see through blouses. Women expressed their newfound freedom by going one step further and freeing their breasts from the confinement of brassieres, much to the fashion industry's dismay and many a man's delight!
If it feels good, do it!
popular hippie saying
So what led to this sexual revolution in the '60s? How did we get from "No sex before marriage" to "If it feels good do it"? The answer is simple. Hippies. The hippie movement had a profound influence on sexual freedom in the U.S. and elsewhere. This revolution in sexual attitudes was more than a reaction to the prudish mores of the 50s and early 60s. It was a release from all social inhibitions that characterized hippies.
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
W. H. Auden
Again the Beat generation must be credited with living and writing about sexual freedom. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and others lived unusually free, sexually expressive lives. Their writings influenced the hippies to open up when it came to sex, and to experiment without guilt or jealousy.
All you need is love
The Beatles
Ginsberg was there at the first Human Be-In in San Francisco telling everyone to love one another. At Love-Ins, the hippies listened to, and experienced a different view of love and sex. We learned that sex is just another part of life like eating and sleeping. It's a completely natural way to express ourselves. We learned to overcome those fears programmed into us, and to share our bodies as easily as we share our food or our thoughts.
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with…
Steven Stills
The concept of Free Love as expressed by hippies meant you were free to love whomever you pleased, whenever you pleased, however you pleased. This encouraged spontaneous sexual activity and experimentation. Group sex, public sex, sex with minors, homosexuality, all the taboos went out the window. This doesn't mean that straight sex, between two adults, or monogamy was unknown, quite the contrary. Nevertheless, the open relationship became an accepted part of the hippy lifestyle. This meant that you might have a primary relationship with one person, but if another attracted you, you could explore that relationship without rancor or jealousy.
'Tis the most commonplace thing in the world, to love one man to distraction and to fuck frenziedly with another; you don't give your heart to him, just your body . . . . There are two manners of loving a man: morally and physically.
Marquis de Sade
Free love made the whole love, marriage, sex, baby package obsolete. Love was no longer limited to one person, you could love anyone you chose. In fact love was something you shared with everyone, not just your sex partners. Love exists to be shared freely. We also discovered the more you share, the more you get! So why reserve your love for a select few? This profound truth was one of the great hippie revelations.
Your daughter is old enough to do what she pleases . . . she likes to fuck, loves to fuck . . . she was born to fuck, and . . . if you do not wish to be fucked yourself, the best thing for you to do is to let her do what she wants.
Marquis de Sade
The feeling among hippies was that what two (or more) consenting adults (or teenagers) did in private was their business. It's likely that many a naïve youngster was seduced by an older more experienced hippy. Many of the young kids who ran away from home and joined the hippie movement were victims of child abuse (as are many runaways today). The hippie subculture thus rejected the prevailing moral code due to the manifest hypocrisy of adults. The tools of teenage rebellion were (and still are) sex, drugs and rock and roll.
For hippies, sex was something spontaneous. If you met someone you were attracted to, and the circumstances were suitable, you had sex. It could happen in a crash pad, in a van, in the woods or at a festival. Free love was everywhere, but especially in places like communes where sex was a commodity. Hippies didn't care what other people thought. I remember seeing TV news footage of hippies screwing in a city park, enjoying themselves with abandon, oblivious to camera crews and passersby.
It may be necessary to remind younger readers that all this occurred before AIDS became a scourge. Nevertheless, venereal disease was a common problem among the sexually active. Teenage pregnancy became so prevalent that the social stigma faded somewhat. Fortunately, the sexual openness that created these problems was soon to be addressed in public, resulting in the opening of free clinics, sex education in schools, the liberalization of abortion laws, and sexual product advertising. These things are a direct result of the sexual promiscuity that the hippies unleashed upon society.
The puritanical inhibitions programmed by our parents, churches, peers and schools were suddenly irrelevant. But the biggest release of inhibitions came about through the use of drugs, particularly marijuana and the psychedelics. Marijuana is one of the best aphrodisiacs known to man. It enhances the senses, unlike alcohol, which dulls them. As any hippie can tell you, sex is a great high, but sex on pot is fuckin' far out!
The three inevitable goals of an LSD session are to discover
and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself,
and to discover and make love with a woman.
Timothy Leary, Playboy Interview, September, 1966.
More importantly, the use of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD was directly responsible for liberating hippies from their sexual hang-ups. The LSD trip is an intimate soul wrenching experience that shatters the ego's defenses, leaving the tripper in a very poignant and sensitive state. At this point, a sexual encounter is quite possible if conditions are right. After an LSD trip, one is much more likely to explore one's own sexual nature without inhibitions.
All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose.
Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting
is the very secret of nature itself.
Graham Swift
The hippy reverence for nature and all things natural is part of the pagan belief system many adopted. Pagans see sex as a joyful expression of our animal nature and not as something to be repressed. Many hippie events resemble the pagan rituals of old (remember the maypole dance - Pagan!). Music, drink, dancing, and drugs are as much a prelude to sex as a celebration.
Sex has been condemned so much, you cannot enjoy it.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Many hippies on the spiritual path found enlightenment through sex. The Kama Sutra, the Tantric sexual manual from ancient India is a way to cosmic union through sex. Some gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) formed cults that focused on liberation through the release of sexual inhibitions.
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.
Kate Millett (feminist)
This breaking down of society's sexual mores by hippies led directly to the Gay and Women's Liberation movements. Hippies brought sex out into the open, not as consciously as those two movements did, but automatically, because of their experimentation with free love. In fact the Gay and Women's Liberation movements are examples of what can be achieved through a more refined agenda and better organization. Hippies take note!
So hippies freed Americans from their puritanical sexual inhibitions through the practice of free love, experimentation with psychedelics, and rejection of the prevailing hypocritical morality. This resulted in the free flow of information about sex, an expansion of women's and gay rights, and society's keen interest in the health issues surrounding sex.
http://www.hipplanet.com/books/atoz/sex.htm
Virtual_Burlesque
Former Ecdysiast
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2004
- Posts
- 4,083
Calling anyone old enough to have been an Original Hippy.
Am I crazy?
Or should I find it remarkable that so much verbiage can be produced about what Hippies were,
without once referring to The Diggers.
Am I crazy?
Or should I find it remarkable that so much verbiage can be produced about what Hippies were,
without once referring to The Diggers.
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
I'll post other hippie links as I find good ones.
feel free to share yours if you have 'em.
feel free to share yours if you have 'em.
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
pop_54
The young Aviator LOL
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2003
- Posts
- 6,893
Whoa far out sweet's girl... takes me back a year or several.
Yeppers burl.. I was there... Sgt Pepper uniform... Joss sticks burning... flower in my lapel... so freekin stoned don't ask me any more about it
Although I do remeber the 'Festival of the flower children', back in 1960-something or other in the grounds of the Duke of Bedford's stately home... Three day event and by hell did we go for the free love and peace
Yeppers burl.. I was there... Sgt Pepper uniform... Joss sticks burning... flower in my lapel... so freekin stoned don't ask me any more about it
Although I do remeber the 'Festival of the flower children', back in 1960-something or other in the grounds of the Duke of Bedford's stately home... Three day event and by hell did we go for the free love and peace
Virtual_Burlesque
Former Ecdysiast
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2004
- Posts
- 4,083
Pop,pop_54 said:
Do you mean . . .
The Festival Of The Flower Children @ Woburn Abbey in August, 1967?
Can you remember Eric Burdon
Or the following year, July 1968.
Remember an afternoon with Donovan?
Weird Harold
Opinionated Old Fart
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2000
- Posts
- 23,768
Virtual_Burlesque said:Calling anyone old enough to have been an Original Hippy.
Am I crazy?
How about those of us just old enough to be Hippy Wannabes?
Iwas never actually a hippy, but I oftn refered to myslef as a "Northwestern Short-hair Variety" Hippy because I agreed with a lot of the philosphy without joining in on the behavior.
pop_54
The young Aviator LOL
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2003
- Posts
- 6,893
Virtual_Burlesque said:Pop,
Do you mean . . .
The Festival Of The Flower Children @ Woburn Abbey in August, 1967?
Can you remember Eric Burdon
Or the following year, July 1968.
Remember an afternoon with Donovan?
Yeppers that's the joker's... all good clean fun.. Yes I remember Eric Burden and the Animals... Donovan our answer to Dylan.. but could sing in tune
I still have most of my old Donovan cassettes, (and Dylan), Stones, Beatles, Animals, Who, Manfred mann, God too many to list... Just an innocent 19 and 20 yr old when those festivals were running... I remember we went to the first on motorbikes... second in my mates MG Midget.Bloody old git aint I.
Virtual_Burlesque
Former Ecdysiast
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2004
- Posts
- 4,083
More Links for Geriatric Hippies
And Hippie Wannabes
http://www.newbohemian.com/gallery_images/sojourneroftruth.jpg
The New Bohemian
The Old Hippie’s Groovy Site
Recommended Reading List for Wannabe Hippies
And Hippie Wannabes http://www.newbohemian.com/gallery_images/sojourneroftruth.jpg
The New Bohemian
The Old Hippie’s Groovy Site
Recommended Reading List for Wannabe Hippies
dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
An ideal place for a plug for a fuck story set in the Haight in 1969:
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=135972
Pretty much as I lived it. I'll never forget that hippy smell of patchouli incense, dope, and litter-box.
---dr.M.
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=135972
Pretty much as I lived it. I'll never forget that hippy smell of patchouli incense, dope, and litter-box.
---dr.M.
killallhippies
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2003
- Posts
- 60,313
dr_mabeuse said:
i know that smell. half the places i've lived have had that smell.
G
Guest
Guest
I've forgotten it thank god. No, I wasn't a hippy; at 18 in '64 I was one of the last beatniks, way cooler than hippiesdr_mabeuse said:
I never wanted to be hippy-ish either, they were all gringos. Not having come from the middleclass or ever having a parent with money to spare I had no desire to give anything up, even for "Luv", and I thought granola was horse feed.
I first heard Dylan before hippytimes, he only had one album out and played the small beats' cafe in Detroit to a very small crowd, Joni Mitchell too (still with her husband). Folk and rock weaned me off Motown then.
I don't even feel nostalgic for those times, only for old Motown.
Perdita
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
dr_mabeuse said:
I've read that story. I remember I liked it. It made me want to read some more of your stories.-- was it the hippy theme that hooked me, you bet!
sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
Virtual_Burlesque said:More Links for Geriatric Hippies
As a wannabe-- thanks burely!
Virtual_Burlesque
Former Ecdysiast
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2004
- Posts
- 4,083
What positive effect did the protests during the Republican convention really have?
A March To Irrelevance
By Matt Taibbi
New York Press.
September 11, 2004.
Hey, you assholes: The ‘60s are over!
I'm not talking about your white-guy fros, mutton-chops and beads. I'm not talking about your Che t-shirts or that wan, concerned, young Joanie Baez look on the faces of half of your women. I'm not even talking about skinny young potheads carrying wood puppets and joyously dancing in druid circles during a march to protest a bloody war.
I'm not harping on any of that. I could, but I won't. Because the protests of the last week in New York were more than a silly, off-key exercise in irrelevant chest-puffing. It was a colossal waste of political energy by a group of people with no sense of history, mission or tactics, a group of people so atomized and inured to its own powerlessness that it no longer even considers seeking anything beyond a fleeting helping of that worthless and disgusting media currency known as play.
I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. I admire young people with political passion, and am enormously heartened by the sheer numbers of people who time after time turn out to protest this idiot president of ours. But at the same time, I think it is time that some responsible person in the progressive movement recognize that we have a serious problem our hands.
We are raising a group of people whose only ideas about protest and opposition come from televised images of 40 years ago, when large public demonstrations could shake the foundations of society. There has been no organized effort of any kind to recognize that we now live in a completely different era, operating according to a completely different political dynamic. What worked then not only doesn't work now, it doesn't even make superficial sense now.
Let's just start with a simple, seemingly inconsequential facet of the protests: appearance. If you read the bulletins by United for Peace and Justice ahead of the protests, you knew that the marchers were encouraged to "show their creativity" and dress outlandishly. The marchers complied, turning 7th Ave. into a lake of midriffs, Billabong, bandanas and "Buck Fush" t-shirts. There were facial studs and funny hair and man-sandals and papier-mache masks and plenty of chicks in their skivvies all jousting to be the next young Heather Taylor inspiring the next Jimi Hendrix to write the next "Foxy Lady."
And the New York Post and Fox were standing on the sidelines greedily recording all of this unbowed individuality for posterity, understanding instinctively that each successive t-shirt and goatee was just more fresh red meat for mean Middle America looking for good news from the front.
Back in the '60s, dressing crazy and letting your hair down really was a form of defiance. It was a giant, raised middle finger to a ruling class that until that point had insisted on a kind of suffocating, static conformity in all things – in sexual mores, in professional ambitions, in life goals and expectations, and even in dress and speech.
Publicly refusing to wear your hair like an Omega house towel boy wasn't just a meaningless gesture then. It was an important step in refusing later to go to war, join the corporate workforce and commit yourself to the long, soulless life of political amnesia and periodic consumer drama that was the inflexible expectation of the time.
That conformist expectation still exists, and the same corporate class still imposes it. But conformity looks a lot different now than it did then. Outlandish dress is now for sale in a thousand flavors, and absolutely no one is threatened by it: not your parents, not the government, not even our most prehistoric brand of fundamentalist Christianity. The vision of hundreds of thousands of people dressed in every color of the rainbow and marching their diverse selves past Madison Square Garden is, on the contrary, a great relief to the other side – because it means that the opposition is composed of individuals, not a Force In Concert.
In the conformist atmosphere of the late '50s and early '60s, the individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, "This is bullshit!"
That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the individual's every conceivable political action into mainstream commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.
Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the '60s – and this not only did not stop the war, it didn't even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an anti-war candidate.
There was a time when mass protests were enough to cause Johnson to give up the Oval Office and cause Richard Nixon to spend his nights staring out his window in panic. No more. We have a different media now, different and more sophisticated law enforcement techniques and, most importantly, a different brand of protester.
Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest or the next election. They are not going to go home and bomb draft offices, take over campuses, riot in the streets. Instead, although there are many earnest, involved political activists among them, the majority will simply go back to their lives, surf the net and wait for the ballot. Which to our leaders means that, in most cases, if you allow a protest to happen... Nothing happens.
The people who run this country are not afraid of much when it comes to the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage of profit – that is where this system is vulnerable. That means boycotts and strikes at the very least, and these things require vision, discipline and organization.
The '60s were an historical anomaly. It was an era when political power could also be an acid party, a felicitous situation in which fun also happened to be a threat. We still listen to that old fun on the radio, we buy it reconstituted in clothing stores, we watch it in countless movies and documentaries. Society has kept the "fun" alive, or at least a dubious facsimile of it.
But no one anywhere is teaching us about how to be a threat. That is something we have to learn all over again for ourselves, from scratch, with new rules. The '60s are gone. The Republican Convention isn't the only party that's over.
A March To Irrelevance
By Matt Taibbi
New York Press.
September 11, 2004.
Hey, you assholes: The ‘60s are over!
I'm not talking about your white-guy fros, mutton-chops and beads. I'm not talking about your Che t-shirts or that wan, concerned, young Joanie Baez look on the faces of half of your women. I'm not even talking about skinny young potheads carrying wood puppets and joyously dancing in druid circles during a march to protest a bloody war.
I'm not harping on any of that. I could, but I won't. Because the protests of the last week in New York were more than a silly, off-key exercise in irrelevant chest-puffing. It was a colossal waste of political energy by a group of people with no sense of history, mission or tactics, a group of people so atomized and inured to its own powerlessness that it no longer even considers seeking anything beyond a fleeting helping of that worthless and disgusting media currency known as play.
I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. I admire young people with political passion, and am enormously heartened by the sheer numbers of people who time after time turn out to protest this idiot president of ours. But at the same time, I think it is time that some responsible person in the progressive movement recognize that we have a serious problem our hands.
We are raising a group of people whose only ideas about protest and opposition come from televised images of 40 years ago, when large public demonstrations could shake the foundations of society. There has been no organized effort of any kind to recognize that we now live in a completely different era, operating according to a completely different political dynamic. What worked then not only doesn't work now, it doesn't even make superficial sense now.
Let's just start with a simple, seemingly inconsequential facet of the protests: appearance. If you read the bulletins by United for Peace and Justice ahead of the protests, you knew that the marchers were encouraged to "show their creativity" and dress outlandishly. The marchers complied, turning 7th Ave. into a lake of midriffs, Billabong, bandanas and "Buck Fush" t-shirts. There were facial studs and funny hair and man-sandals and papier-mache masks and plenty of chicks in their skivvies all jousting to be the next young Heather Taylor inspiring the next Jimi Hendrix to write the next "Foxy Lady."
And the New York Post and Fox were standing on the sidelines greedily recording all of this unbowed individuality for posterity, understanding instinctively that each successive t-shirt and goatee was just more fresh red meat for mean Middle America looking for good news from the front.
Back in the '60s, dressing crazy and letting your hair down really was a form of defiance. It was a giant, raised middle finger to a ruling class that until that point had insisted on a kind of suffocating, static conformity in all things – in sexual mores, in professional ambitions, in life goals and expectations, and even in dress and speech.
Publicly refusing to wear your hair like an Omega house towel boy wasn't just a meaningless gesture then. It was an important step in refusing later to go to war, join the corporate workforce and commit yourself to the long, soulless life of political amnesia and periodic consumer drama that was the inflexible expectation of the time.
That conformist expectation still exists, and the same corporate class still imposes it. But conformity looks a lot different now than it did then. Outlandish dress is now for sale in a thousand flavors, and absolutely no one is threatened by it: not your parents, not the government, not even our most prehistoric brand of fundamentalist Christianity. The vision of hundreds of thousands of people dressed in every color of the rainbow and marching their diverse selves past Madison Square Garden is, on the contrary, a great relief to the other side – because it means that the opposition is composed of individuals, not a Force In Concert.
In the conformist atmosphere of the late '50s and early '60s, the individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, "This is bullshit!"
That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the individual's every conceivable political action into mainstream commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.
Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the '60s – and this not only did not stop the war, it didn't even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an anti-war candidate.
There was a time when mass protests were enough to cause Johnson to give up the Oval Office and cause Richard Nixon to spend his nights staring out his window in panic. No more. We have a different media now, different and more sophisticated law enforcement techniques and, most importantly, a different brand of protester.
Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest or the next election. They are not going to go home and bomb draft offices, take over campuses, riot in the streets. Instead, although there are many earnest, involved political activists among them, the majority will simply go back to their lives, surf the net and wait for the ballot. Which to our leaders means that, in most cases, if you allow a protest to happen... Nothing happens.
The people who run this country are not afraid of much when it comes to the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage of profit – that is where this system is vulnerable. That means boycotts and strikes at the very least, and these things require vision, discipline and organization.
The '60s were an historical anomaly. It was an era when political power could also be an acid party, a felicitous situation in which fun also happened to be a threat. We still listen to that old fun on the radio, we buy it reconstituted in clothing stores, we watch it in countless movies and documentaries. Society has kept the "fun" alive, or at least a dubious facsimile of it.
But no one anywhere is teaching us about how to be a threat. That is something we have to learn all over again for ourselves, from scratch, with new rules. The '60s are gone. The Republican Convention isn't the only party that's over.
