"I, who had naively believed in peace and love"

I mentioned how much I enjoyed Trina Robbins' memoir Last Girl Standing.  In light of the recent success of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and it's arguably problematic handling of hippies, Manson, and the far left in general, here's another passage worth quoting:

"In August 1969, beautiful actress Sharon Tate, almost nine months pregnant, was murdered in Los Angeles along with a group of her friends, all stabbed multiple times.  In November, the killers were found: a hippie commune of young men and women, but mostly women, led by a charismatic madman named Charles Manson.  I was horrified, but to a lot of hippies guys, including some of the underground cartoonists, he became a kind of cult figure.  Here was a guy who not only convinced women to sleep with him and whatever pals he had, but convinced them to kill for him, too.  They thought he was cool!  Kim [Deitch] was one of those guys who thought Manson was cool; so was his sometimes-cartoonist, drug-addled brother Simon, and so, it seemed, was Crumb, who drew comics obviously inspired by Manson.  He drew a cover for Print Mint's San Francisco Comic Book Club in which a Mansonesque guy hypnotizes a nubile teenybopper, and another comic in which the same Mansonesque character has brainwashed his chick followers into killing each other.  That one ends with a pile of naked women's bodies, on top of which sits the Manson character, fucking the dead bodies.  And it was supposed to be funny!  I, who had naively believed in peace and love, was beginning to realize that there was a lot of hostility toward women in these guys."

I generally find games of punch-the-hippies (pretty much the national past-time of even "centrist" news sources like CNN or MSNBC, or The Washington Post or New York Times) to be, at the very least, incredibly tedious.  But I don't think that was at all what Tarantino was up to in OUATiH.  His point was centered around changes in Old, Classic Hollywood and the New Wave represented by no other than Roman Polanski himself.  It's the two "old school" actors who heroically "save" the New Wave by, indeed, murdering the fuck out of those silly hippies.

I mean, there's a hell of a lot going on the last 15 minutes of that film.  To say that Tarantino is endorsing a punch-the-hippy world view, let alone a reactionary one, is only one piece of a larger whole.

Anyhow, I think Robbins has an important insight here (as does the rest of her book) as to how for men in the counter-culture free love meant just that -- non consequential hook-ups.  For the women,  they were welcome to as much sex as they wanted as well, but were still expected to make the beds and do the dishes and raise the babies, alone.