1968 Quotes

“But it was a time of terrible insecurity, at home and in the foxhole, and people didn’t want more excitement. They wanted normality. They got the Eisenhower fifties. The desire for security ossified into conformity and conservatism. Anyone who was overly eccentric in public was scorned as a “beatnik,” though actual pot-smoking, dirty-word-using, free-loving beatniks were always a rare and endangered species. A non-beatnik person coming of sexual age in the fifties had to contend with obstacles more profound than a forest of crinoline, a prison of girdle. Nice girls didn’t do It. They just plain didn’t. If they wanted It, they were nymphos. If they loved a boy enough, or were passionate enough, to do It, they were promoted from nympho to slut.”
― Joe Haldeman, 1968