Erica Jong Quotes

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don't know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

You can't have rock and roll without drugs, you can't have rock and roll without sex.

The outburst of sexual freedom in the '60s was bound to happen because the '50s were so oppressing. You had to live that way; women had to be like this - it was all locked into a false reality.

What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

It's not really cool any more to have sex all the time. It's cooler to be strong and independent.

By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"

I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that... I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it? Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.

I was raised in a typical Puritan Midwestern Methodist home and there was a lot of hurt and hypocrisy in those times. And I think that whatever part Playboy played and that I managed to play in terms of the sexual revolution came out of what I saw in the negative part of that life and tried to change things in some positive way so that people could choose alternate personal ways of living their lives.

You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.

But obviously, things have changed in many ways since the '50s, when the show is started, in terms of sexuality, and how much access we have to images of it and information about it. But, the same problems always apply. It doesn't matter whether we know a lot more about sex now or if there's a lot more access to it. The same problems of intimacy, of dealing with other people, of connecting and being vulnerable with other people, which is what the show is ultimately about, still applies now, I think.

It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination--and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.

I sort of feel sorry for gays being the last ones at the sexual revolution window. We've had liberalizing rules on divorce. We've had the sexual revolution. We've had, you know, the pill, and burning bras and rampant premarital sex and polymorphous perversity.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them. Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.

I worry about kids today - because of the sexual revolution, they're going to grow up and never know what "dirty" means.

Punk rock will never die, until something more dangerous replaces it.

There's nothing more political than sex. The church has had its hand on our crotch for more than 2,000 years, and the government is moving in that direction.

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.