Bohemian love is basically free love. Hippie love. That 70s love. The kind of love that has you buying a yellow Volkswagen van and driving around North America with your two-year-old son who you conceived with all that free sexy love you’ve been sharing with your partner.
These days, there’s no such thing as bohemian love because nothing comes for free. Free love usually means free sex and in the age of rampant STIs and AIDS we can’t really have a whole lot of that free experience.
The movement for free love in the 60s was definitely a crucial and important one. We had a super repressed and prudish society and we needed to start taking our sexuality and our sexual expression into our own hands. Women especially needed this. We needed a sexuality that was our own, defined by us, not by some white male privileged, patriarchal culture. Since then we’ve had technology and science to help support and fuel this sexual revolution, but we’ve also had some major backlashes and issues that have given ‘free love’ a pretty big hit. Probably for the best really. It’s irresponsible to think that we can run off and just do whatever the fuck we want with whomever and not worry about the consequences. Not that I’m big on morality or keeping up with the Joneses, or whatever. Of course, if we lived in a society that wasn’t so highly judgmental of sexual activity, maybe we’d be more likely to be honest and upfront with our sexual partners.
I’d say the biggest hit is the fundamental Christian right wing conservative batshit crazy one. We are surrounded by those who’d just love (and, frankly, get off on) dictating the sexual rules and regulations of our society under the guise of ‘god said so’. This group of crazies would love to keep everyone else from having fun, exploring and expressing sexual identity and making our own choices for our own bodies. This group wants power and control and is oddly freaked out by the idea of people having sexual freedom.
If only that world of bohemian love didn’t necessarily involve the passing of herpes and the hep. I’d probably be way more into it. The whole STI thing kind of put a damper on all of the possibilities of freedom within love. The truth is that I’m kind of bohemian, in the sense that I’m a writer and I don’t spend a lot of time living super conventionally, but I still manage to get my sex partners to use condoms or dental dams. Mostly because I’m not interested in getting syphilis and not quite catching it in time, going insane and dying from it. I also don’t really want to get cervical cancer.
1. My parents were total hippies. My dad had this awesome beard and my mum had gorgeous long straight hair and they were all bell-bottom jeans and music and weed and Woodstock. They were totally into the bohemian love thing.
2. If only I believed in bohemian love. Unfortunately, I’m much more into bohemian hate.
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