What does a hippie father want for his daughters?

Promiscuity is in the news again with the slutwalks. I thought it was timely, therefore, that the Australian Women's Weekly (May 2011) should run an interview with Richard Neville. Neville was one of the Australians most influential in bringing about the 1960s:

certain essential aspects of the Sixties, even overseas, were in part the creation of two late hangers-on of the Push, Richard Neville and Germaine Greer.

Neville and Greer both believed in the therapeutic effects of "free love". They did so for very specific reasons, which I'll cover in a future post. What I want to point out now is that Richard Neville went on to have two very attractive daughters. On having his daughters, he suddenly gave up on the 60s mantra of free love and drugs, becoming instead a strict dad:

Lucy Neville, his 28-year-old daughter, still chafes at the memory of her teenage years. "Dad became a colonel when I was a teenager...We used to call him Colonel Neville...I wasn't allowed to do stuff that everyone else was allowed to do...I was always screaming at them [my parents] and telling them they were hypocrites"

Julie and Richard had strict rules about boyfriends. They had to come home first to meet them, say hello, shake hands (a firm handshake was compulsory) and look them straight in the eye...

According to Lucy her parents went into a "state of hysteria" when they overheard her talking about drugs on the telephone. "Mum used to pick up the phone on the other end and listen," she says. "They were full on. They threatened to send me to a boarding school in the desert. The fact that my father had written glowingly in the 1970s about recreational drugs was irrelevant."

It shows, I think, that the hopes that Richard Neville had for his daughters involved something more than casual sex and drug use. His 1960s hippie philosophy just didn't cut it when it came to those closest to him. His protective paternal instincts kicked in.

While we're on this topic, Dalrock has penned an interesting piece on the slutwalks. His theory is that women respond to male validation more than most men realise. Hence the wounded response of feminist women to criticisms of slutty behaviour and the attempt by feminists to make such criticisms socially unacceptable.

Also interesting is a comment following Dalrock's piece on feminist Jaclyn Friedman. She admits that she doesn't find her feminist male allies sexually appealing because they are too deferential and therefore come across as unmasculine:

Interviewer: So do you meet guys who pass the feminist test but then turn out to be disappointments for other reasons?

Friedman: Oh God. There is a type of feminist guy who is so eager to fall over himself to be deferential to women and to prove his feminist bona fides and flagellate himself in front of you, to the point that it really turns me off. And it makes me sad, because politically, these are the guys that I should be sleeping with! You know what I’m talking about?

Interviewer: YES.

Friedman: Everyone knows what I’m talking about. And some of them are even really cute! I want to say to them, “If you could be a person, like a whole, complicated person, who I feel like I could crack jokes around, then I would really like you.” But they’re so serious about their feminism at every moment that I don’t feel like a person to them. I feel like I’m on a pedestal, almost. I know that they’re not going to disagree with anything I say under any circumstances. . . I hate to be critical of our allies in any way, because we need them, but there’s something about that certain kind of hyperfeminist guy that makes them unappealing to date, to me. I suspect it has something to do with our internal conceptions of masculinity, which is terrible on my part.

Here, again, feminism is like a "beta test" for men: a left-wing girlfriend might want you to say the politically correct things, but how she really wants you to act is something else again.