In 1963, middle-class young women generally evaded and refused sexual activities with men who had not proposed. Of course, some such women did become sexual without proposals, but people watching Dirty Dancing should recognize that Lisa's and Baby's sexual initiatives with Robbie and Johnny would have been unusual in 1963.
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Popular movies of the early 1960s featured heroines who cleverly and successfully evaded male seduction. The female audiences admired such heroines, whose examples provided encouragement and ideas.
For example, in the popular "beach movies" starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, the Funicello character frustrates the Frankie character through the entire series -- Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party(1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Pajama Party (1964) and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965).
This battle of the sexes begins at the very beginning of Beach Party. Frankie has rented a beach cabin for several days, intending to have sex there with Annette. When they arrive at the cabin, however, Frankie finds that Annette has invited a large number of friends to stay with them in the cabin for the entire time. Annette has done so in order to evade Frankie's intention.
None of the characters in the beach movies ever have sex. Movie historian Thomas Lisanti -- in his book Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-1969 -- explains the girls' resistance to sex as follows.
... William Asher commented in The New York Times, "The key to these pictures is lots of flesh but no sex. It's all good clean fun. No hearts are broken and virginity prevails."
The films may have been innocent and the kids chaste but they were also very sexy with all the curvaceous bikini-clad girls and shirtless surfer boys frolicking in the sand.
According to Donna McCrohan, author of Prime Time, Our Time, these films were also reassuring to parents because with girls like Annette and Chris Noel as the defenders of virtue they showed that "it's possible to spend the whole summer on the sand in practically no clothes, fall in love with another terrific-looking nearly naked person and still not 'go all the way'."
It was this wholesomeness, real or imagined, that attracted the kids and their approving parents. It is the same wholesomeness and naivete that make these movies popular to this day. Their innocence has a nostalgic aspect to them as sort of "pop mythology" as noted by Andrew J. Edelstein in The Pop Sixties.
[Page 13]
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| The cover of "Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies" by Thomas Lisanti |
The times they were a-changin' in late 1966 and early 1967, so it is no surprise that young people began abandoning the innocent carefree beach, movies, which had become passé.======
The Civil Rights movement was marching on. The counter-culture was in full swing with hippies and flower children. College students were turning on, tuning in and dropping out. They fought the establishment in every way -- from protesting the US presence in Vietnam to taking LSD to practicing free love.
During the Age of Aquarius, teenagers weren't buying the beach films, because there was nothing meaningful in them. Their plots about clean-cut all-American lily-white teenagers whose only problems seemed to be trying to get their virginal girlfriends to put out or worrying when the next big wave would roll in seemed outdated amid the problems in the world.
The innocence of the early sixties was being replaced by the cynicism of the late sixties. American International Pictures [the main producer of such films] sensed this change first and began catering to this new, hipper audience with biker films and "alienated youth" movies.
[Pages 25-26]
The female movie audience's admiration for heroines who resisted male seduction extended beyond teenage characters. For example, Doris Day played career women in their twenties resisting seduction in a series of very popular movies -- Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962).
Another example of a movie featuring a career woman in her twenties is he 1963 movie Sunday in New York. This movie was adapted from a successful Broadway play of the same name. The play ran for 188 performances -- from November 1961 into May 1962 (Robert Redford played a leading role).
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The movie's heroine is 22-year-old Eileen Tylor (played by Jane Fonda), who is 22 years old and works on a newspaper staff in Albany, New York. Eileen has been living with her parents, who are quite religious. For a few years she has been dating a successful, wealthy man, Russ Wilson, in Albany.
As the movie's story begins, Eileen has just been dumped by Russ because she has refused to become sexual with him while he has not proposed to her. (The movie does not clarify whether she intends to remain a virgin until marriage.)
In order to recover emotionally from being dumped, Eileen travels to Manhattan to stay a while in the apartment of her brother Adam Tyler, who is an airline pilot. During her first day there, a Sunday, she meets a man, Mike Mitchell, on a city bus, and they spend the day sightseeing together.
At dusk Eileen and Mike get drenched in a rainstorm, and so they go back to the apartment of her brother, who is supposed to be flying an airplane out of town. Eileen and Mike get out of their wet clothes and put on robes. Eileen becomes drunk and decides to have sex with Mike. When he finds out that she is a virgin, however, he refuses to have sex with her. He advises her to stick to her moral principles.
I will not reveal the movie's ending, but the entire movie revolves around Eileen's inner conflict about losing her virginity before marriage -- or at least before an engagement.
I will say that young women watching the movie to its end would not feel that the movie undermines a principled determination to remain virginal until marriage. This intention of Eileen is portrayed as admirable.
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An important factor in the quick, mutual attraction between Eileen and Mike is that they share an appreciation of jazz music. In particular, they both love Peter Nero's jazz piano. In the second half of the movie, Eileen's Albany boyfriend Russ comes to visit Eileen in Manhattan, and they go together to hear Nero play in a nightclub. You can see toward the end of the following video clip that Eileen wishes she were sharing this jazz-music experience with Mike rather than with Russ -- whose major interest is not jazz, but rather boxing.
(The same scene is played twice in the above video clip.)
The movie Sunday in New York depicts the conduct, fashions, and attitudes of middle-class, professionally employed young adults in New York City in 1963.
Such people generally liked jazz and folk music much more than rhythm-and-blues.
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In 1963, most young people conformed with society's guidelines. Young couples got married and soon gave birth to children. Then the women would stay home to raise the children, while the men would earn enough money to pay all the expenses. People who conformed expected to prosper economically.
A key element of this social conformity was that middle-class young women avoided sexual intercourse until after they at least became engaged to marry. In 1963, that was the social norm that was depicted in the popular movies that were made during that period.
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The movie Sunday in New York is worthwhile to watch.
* The TCM television channel broadcasts it several times every year.
* On the Amazon webpage, 70% of reviewers give it five stars (the best), and 22% give it four stars.
* On the Rotten Tomatoes webpage, 100% of the professional reviewers rate it positively, and 79% of casual viewers rate it positively.
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