What was the Sexual Revolution? It was a time when women willingly participated in sex outside marriage. Men had always had affairs and availability of sex if they had money, while  preserving one’s virginity was regulated to women.

Women lacked sexual freedom because the biological fact was that women got pregnant. I certainly proclaimed, “No!” loudly even in the throws of back-seat, passionate high school necking. My oldest sister had to quit college, marry a man, and become a mother. She had said “Yes.”

Once freed from pregnancy, women in the Sixties and Seventies did as they wanted. And much of that, as usual in human history, was that women did as men wanted. If you wanted to get a guy, you said “Yes” to him and the Pill. If you wanted to keep a guy, you said “Yes” to him and the Pill. 

Once I was on the Pill for 39 cents a month, my inner male persona overtook my female self and became addicted to sex. Making love was traveling in a male’s psyche, getting to really know a man, an exotic member of the human race – which, with six sisters and no brothers - I was clueless. It was an adventure I could afford while working my way through college dependent on food stamps.

With the Pill, I was as free as any man. Psychiatrists insisted I was searching for love. Wrong! I needed to love. IMHO, humans need to love as much as they need to be loved. If either need is blocked, once freed, an orgy trying to fulfill that need will naturally occur.

Along with the freedom to act as a man, women learned they could have orgasms. Soon they demanded them. Even counted them! When a friend confided she had five orgasms the night before, I said, “How could you bother to count them! I would be too busy enjoying them!”  Having orgasms for me was natural. Later, when friends and even a sister, told me they didn’t have an orgasm until they were in their 30s, I was shocked.

In the end, like all vulnerable and unprotected young people, I and other women like me, suffered the consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Seemed men got away Scot free. They got their baby-free sex and their companionship with no commitment. They retained their freedom while enslaving women. Willing women, so it seemed. Then the full ramification permeated American society: Marriage and commitment from men became near-impossible to get.

Nowadays I hear how pedophiles find their victims: they look for vulnerable children, children who are poor and often lacking a father in their lives. Society’s throwaway people. Sadly, I see that was what I was. My parents, ensnarled in their own emotional insanities, didn’t know how to shelter their children from the ravages of the outside world. I wasn’t taught rules that were based on the understanding of society, the give and take, the consequences of social pacts. I learned how to survive like an animal, without the finesse of the well-indoctrinated, socialized middle class. I hadn’t learned to defend myself against predators. After a while, I adopted the predator’s stance. It was more attractive than the weak female, pining away, sitting next to the telephone waiting for the guy/despoiler to call.

In 1984 AIDS came and eventually changed all sexual encounters around the world. AIDS became the new weapon to say, “No.”  But it was too late. I had gone overseas, where the availability of men pretty much made saying “Yes” or “No” a dream from the far distant past.

As I aged and became healthier, able to see life for what it really is, my ability to enjoy sex evaporated. Sex without the possibility of a future became boring. Lovemaking without the future attached to the “Oh my God!” feelings was unsatisfying. It was as if in my youth, I had made love to myself, giving my inner self the love it had craved and desired, as if I had been the Empty Quarter Desert desiring rain. Once I matured, and better understood male and female human nature, I was no longer a participant in the game.

I finally understood one of childhood’s great mysteries. My mother often used to say, “If I knew then what I know now…..”   

Actually, I'm slightly scared to give friends a copy of VIRGINS!  I finished writing it 25 years ago. By 1984, I had stopped sleeping around and tried to be somewhat normal. Then I went overseas to teach English in Saudi Arabia. As soon as I went overseas, it's like my sex life DIED big time. This is not to say I remained a virgin in Saudi Arabia. It’s funny, I had a lover in Saudi Arabia, but not in Korea or Taiwan. 

Looking back on my life, even I have finally managed to shock myself. My mentor at the University of British Columbia said I purposely shocked people. In all truth and reality, and I told him so, I did not do that. I simply wrote what I knew about, and if it shocked him, that was his reaction - not my intent. My intent was to communicate. 

Obviously I was an intensity junkie with a very high sex drive.... weaned on my crazy family’s intense passions of sanity, insanity, alcoholism, Irish-Catholicism, female teenage angst with no brothers, etc. And the sexual revolution. 

It’s amazing, like being in love, how reality creates a cocoon and while within that cocoon, it’s difficult to see and understand the full reality. The 60s and 70s were Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, with Viet Nam and kill or be killed realities.

When talking to someone in the USA over the phone – I’m still overseas  – I asked why college students were not demonstrating against the war in the Gulf. She said, “They aren’t being drafted.”

It’s the same kind of war that was done in the 60s and 70s that spurred the Sexual Revolution. D. H. Lawrence, in one of his books, wrote how a normal, human reaction to death is to make love, to confirm that one is still alive and breathing. Present day media coverage of the Gulf War, however, is so controlled, there is no comparison with Vietnam. Vietnam destroyed an American generation’s youth and an entire country – Vietnam. The Gulf War is killing families in the United States and an entire country and culture in Iraq.

Who profits? Yes, that’s the answer to the puzzle of War. Not “Search for the woman” but “Follow the money”.  Every American war has enriched the wealthy. That is the lesson my mother meant to teach me when her mantra was, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

                                               Peace and love,
                                                                           Zola

So, here I am, with a cover for VIRGINS! I think I should change it. Off I go surfing the Net to find exactly what I want…..  Visiting the Louvre in Paris, I once found an astonishing postcard, and on another trip I found the sculpture.  Cupid Awakening Psyche.  Not only is the sculpture lovely in its pure white, but even the title fits the book exactly. - sculpture by Canova Gouppo.

 Then I thought of another postcard from the Louve which tells an exciting story of two  lovers in the 1700s locking the door to their bedroom as their foreplay seems to have pushed them to a state of passion that IMMEDIATELY needs to be fulfilled. The Lock....

Then I found this incredible painter’s site Josephine Wall http://josephinewall.co.uk whose paintings are so 60-ish, I really wanted one of her paintings as the cover…. 

Then I ran across a few of these that were so relaxing and exhilarating to look at…. Eros & Psyche. It's amazing to see that the idea of my memoir shares its realities with human art from so many different times and cultures... that being a virgin, and being 'awakened' by Eros, Cupid, or Psyche.... I and millions other would have to say that yes, making love the first time does awaken a person into an entirely different realm of reality. It's almost like moving to another planet, IMHO.
 


However, when the Louvre wanted $1,200 for the rights to use one of the paintings, I decided to stick with the cover I had, but fix up their fonts.  I had thought to change the red to blue and pink. Blue seems to attract men, and pink women. But then I decided to go back to the original…. 

 

1.   Women can get pregnant during their period.
2.  A woman can get pregnant her very first time.
3.  For a man, too much self-touching before a first time can ruin it.
4.  Guys, don’t even think of putting it in until the woman has had an
    orgasm!
5.  Foreplay is necessary for both: to heat up the woman’s body and
    to heat up the man’s heart.
6.  Guys, a quick self-touching before starting (in the privacy of the
    bathroom) can cure premature ejaculation and help sustain an erection for
    much longer than the cliche 20 minutes.
7.  It’s far better to use foreplay, kissing and touching than Vaseline for
     easy access.
8.  Even if a woman uses Tampax, her first time can be painful.
9.  Talking during lovemaking can be as seductive as kissing.
10. A five-hour, drug-free lovemaking session includes food and drink,
      banter, sweat, laughter and lots of give and take.

 And, sad but true, as you age guys, being rock hard erodes.