Sex and the fortysomething
Stacey May Fowles' free-love story puts things in perspective
BY John Degen
In probably the most finely realized small press novel to come out in Canada last year, Toronto writer Stacey May Fowles puts a small cast of twentysomething characters through the surprisingly painful sex and gender contortions of what should really be an emancipated and gloriously free generation. University mates Hannah, Morgan and friend Finn speak and live in that earnest-yet-casual dialect of today’s ultra-ironic urbanites, a difficult trick for any writer to pull off without seeming to grasp at coolness, but Fowles seems effortless in the task. I loved these characters, but was deeply saddened by their story. To fortysomething eyes, Be Good is a postsexual- revolution folly, full of characters living a freedom won by their predecessors, yet not quite knowing how best to take advantage of it. Kids these days: they can sleep with whomever they choose, relatively guilt-free, yet still they trap themselves in cycles of denial and restraint.
Back in the day, if your idea of the day (like mine) is the late 1980s, gender roles, sexuality and relationships on university campuses were about as casual and free wheeling as a parole board hearing. When women’s studies departments were sprouting across the continent, literary canon-busting was all the rage, and we all felt proud to know at least one gay person, sex was suddenly more studied than practiced, and the actual business of getting it on reached a stultifying complexity. We all took a good long look at our patriarchies, and the now legendary “free love” of yesteryear fell away like a collapsing drunk—all self-conscious apologies and misplaced hands. Dating became a tentative yet deliberate process of choosing the person you felt the least guilty about desiring. It was the sexual version of Czechoslovakia, circa 1970, only without the consolations of cheap vodka.
Throw in an economic recession the size of the western hemisphere, no cellphones and terrible dance music, and a painful sub-era emerges. I call it The Great Dry Spell. If you didn’t enter The Great Dry Spell already in an established relationship, you were screwed. And I mean that absolutely metaphorically, because literal screwing required paperwork, and the forms were impossible to find.
Happily, our arid little campus gender and sexuality revolution set in motion one of the greatest eras of social change Western civilization has ever seen. Feminism is an unfinished project but, checking the recent U.S. presidential primaries, I note some important forward progress. As well, a recent study has shown a fourfold increase in same-sex coupling somewhere, most of which can be chalked up to folks no longer being deathly afraid to admit gayness. Society has indeed come a long way. And yet, on the fictional dating front it looks like a case of plus ça change.
Ms. Fowles is the beneficiary of my troubled undergrad era—a self-actualized, strong, independent young professional of indeterminate, none-of-your-business sexual leanings, who couldn’t care less about my sufferings during the collapse of male power. In her other life, she’s the publisher of Shameless, a magazine for teen girls that encourages them to become, well, a lot like Ms. Fowles. Her fictional characters are much the same, but you’d never know it from their interpersonal relationships.
Freshly hormonal and released into a sexual playground where anything goes, Be Good’s good girl, Hannah, makes up her own pointlessly restrictive sex-role rules and then lives by them, miserably following an unloving boyfriend to miserable Vancouver as though it’s 1975 and she has no real choice. Of course, she could absolutely be canoodling with the smokin’ hot bad girl Morgan back in Montreal if she just admitted her own desires and acted on them; but where’s the fun in that? These two fourth-wavers circle each other for much of the novel, seemingly unaware that there’s nothing stopping them from being together. And when they finally do act, it takes a funeral to get them into bed.
Really? We live in an age when even my seventysomething parents watch The L Word (admittedly, for different reasons). And even now youngsters are holding themselves back from a good time so they can experience the cleansing powers of a bad one? Thank you, Stacey May Fowles. I feel better about my own frustrated early gropings at true fulfillment. And now, I’m starting to wonder whether all that “free love” stuff I hear from my sixtysomething friends is just so much good-old-days bull.
