ABSTRACT
For the hippies, insistence on equality in smoking and the taking and dismissing of lovers is already quaint, and drinking is increasingly irrelevant. But the theme of sexual equality is still important with respect to cultural differences between the sexes, and evident in the insistence that men may be gentle and women aggressive, and in the merging of sexually related symbols of adornment. The contemporary hippie fascination with American Indians has a triple attraction: They were oppressed, they were nobly savage, and by a symbolic act of identification they became a part of one's American collective unconscious, reachable under the influence of drugs. Hippie morality, then, at least that part of it perceivable from the outside, seems to be only the most recent expression of a long tradition. Exactly unlike Michael Harrington's invisible poor, the hippies are unequally distributed in ways that magnify their visibility.
