sex in The Age of Nixon

"Sometimes I felt like I was writing a book about the history of sexual neuroses in the American ’60s. You had cops saying about antiwar protesters, “You pull down their pants, and they ain’t got no pecker.” You had a janitor after the march on the Pentagon being quoted in Time saying this absurd, impossible thing, that all the garbage was panties. You had Richard Nixon saying in 1971, when these brave anti-war Vietnam veterans are encamped in the Mall, “They’re just screwing chicks in their sleeping bags.” On the other side, you have one of the leaders of the Columbia University strike in 1968 telling women that the cops are so sexually screwed up that if you “pick up your shirt, they won’t know whether to jerk off or go blind.” You have people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin describing their ideological adversaries as “menopausal men.” Basically you have every side accusing the other side of sexual dysfunction because of their ideological disagreements.

Sex was a weapon. Everything was a weapon. During the Kent State situation, which ended with four students being shot by the National Guard, part of the provocation these National Guardsmen felt was that women were looking up their names on their nameplates, calling their wives in Akron, and saying, “Guess what? I’m screwing your man over here at Kent State!”

Even putting a flower in the barrel of a gun is to a certain degree an act of cruelty. If you have someone whose job it is to follow orders and do their duty, and you taunt them for not being able to respond on a human level to an act like that, you’re basically just lording your superiority over them. Love can be a hateful thing..."