16 JULY 1965, Page 11

Sexual Freedom .

SIR,—Most of the recent outcries On behalf of sexual freedom strike a wistful, pipe-dream note. And a middle-aged 'pipe-dream at that few of the advocates, I guess, are really young. The young— from memory and present observation—are not so busy romping in buttercup meadows as we, sitting over our typewriters, might imagine. When they are not frowning over the loose moral attitudes of their elders, they are preoccupied with the enormous dif- ficulty of finding someone to roily with. The sad fact is, that desire is not equated with desirability. If you are spotty and plain, you are no better off than the elderly and varicosed--in the same category as the old men Simon Raven dislikes so much. Perhaps it would be nice, as he says, if sex were as natural as food and drink, hut he must know that. although eating incurs no moral opprobrium,, half the world goes hungry. Which is to say that you can't legislate for the millenium: it is a matter of economics and luck. The rich will have food in their bellies and the lucky, sexual freedoni, which must mean---if it means anything—being able to find someone who wants to have sex with you at the precise moment you want to have sex with them, and being able to have it without guilt of any kind. Anything less than this would not be freedom, but to achieve it. we would have to be not only mind- less and uncomplicated but fairly equal, all of us, in physical attraction. As I said, it sounds like a pipe—or cigarette-and-whisky—dream.

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