| Part of the Counterculture of the 1960s | |
Buttons from the Sexual revolution
| |
| Date | 1960s - 1980s |
|---|---|
| Location | Worldwide |
| Participants | Regional Sexual revolution in 1960s United States Social/commercial movements Free love Gay liberation Golden Age of Porn |
| Outcome | Wider acceptance of sexuality and contraception |
The sexual revolution, also known as a time of sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the United States and subsequently, the wider world, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage). The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.
Previous sexual revolutions
Several
other periods in Western culture have been called the "first sexual
revolution", to which the 1960s revolution would be the second (or
later). The term "sexual revolution" itself has been used since at least
the late 1920s.
When speaking of sexual revolution, historians
make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution.
In the first sexual revolution (1870–1910), Victorian morality lost its
universal appeal. However, it did not lead to the rise of a "permissive
society". Exemplary for this period is the rise and differentiation in
forms of regulating sexuality.
Classics professor Kyle Harper uses the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the displacement of the norms of sexuality in Ancient Rome with those of Christianity as it was adopted throughout the Roman Empire. Romans accepted and legalized prostitution, bisexuality, and pederasty.
Male promiscuity was considered normal and healthy as long as
masculinity was maintained, associated with being the penetrating
partner. On the other hand, female chastity was required for respectable
women, to ensure integrity of family bloodlines. These attitudes were
replaced by Christian prohibitions on homosexual acts and any sex
outside marriage (including with slaves and prostitutes).
History professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala cites the Age of Enlightenment—approximately the 18th century— as a major period of transition in the United Kingdom. During this time the philosophy of liberalism
developed and was popularized, and migration to cities increased
opportunities for sex and made enforcement of rules more difficult than
in small villages. Sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church (called the "Whore of Babylon"
by some Protestant critics) undermined credibility of religious
authorities, and the rise of urban police forces helped distinguish crime from sin.
Overall, toleration increased for heterosexual sex outside marriage,
including prostitution, mistresses, and pre-marital sex. Though these
acts were still condemned by many as libertine,
infidelity became more often a civil matter than a criminal offense
receiving capital punishment. The rate of out-of-wedlock births went
from about 1% in 1650 to about 25% in 1800, with about 40% of brides being pregnant. Masturbation, homosexuality, and rape
were generally less tolerated. Women went from being considered as
lustful as men to passive partners, whose purity was important to
reputation.
Commentators such as history professor Kevin F. White have used the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the Roaring Twenties. Victorian Era attitudes were somewhat destabilized by World War I and alcohol prohibition in the United States. At the same time the women's suffrage movement obtained voting rights, the subculture of the flapper girl included pre-marital sex and "petting parties".
Formative factors
Youngsters participating in Wet T-shirt contest during spring break 2004, in Panama City Beach, Florida
Indicators of non-traditional sexual behavior (e.g., gonorrhea
incidence, births out of wedlock, and births to teenagers) began to rise
dramatically in the mid to late 1950s. It brought about profound shifts in attitudes toward women's sexuality, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality, and the freedom of sexual expression.
Psychologists and scientists such as Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey influenced the changes.
As well, changing mores were both stimulated by and reflected in
literature and films, and by the social movements of the period,
including the counterculture, the women's movement, and the gay rights movement.
The counterculture contributed to the awareness of radical cultural
change that was the social matrix of the sexual revolution.
The sexual revolution was initiated by those who shared a belief
in the detrimental impact of sexual repression, a view that had
previously been argued by Wilhelm Reich, D. H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, and the Surrealist movement.
The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free
the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of modern
America, as well as from 1940s-50s morals in general.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s was grew from a conviction that the
erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life and not repressed
by family, industrialized sexual morality, religion and the state.
The development of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women access to easy and reliable contraception. Another likely cause was a vast improvement in obstetrics, greatly reducing the number of women who died due to childbearing, thus increasing the life expectancy
of women. A third, more indirect cause was the large number of children
born in the 1940s and early 1950s all over the western world—the "Baby Boom Generation"—many
of whom would grow up in relatively prosperous and safe conditions,
within a middle class on the rise and with better access to education
and entertainment than ever before. By their demographic weight and
their social and educational background they came to trigger a shift in
society towards more permissive and informalized attitudes.
The discovery of penicillin led to significant reductions in syphilis mortality, which, in turn, spurred an increase in non-traditional sex during the mid to late 1950s.
There was an increase in sexual encounters between unmarried adults.
Divorce rates were dramatically increasing and marriage rates were
significantly decreasing in this time period. The number of unmarried
Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 4.3 million
in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1976.
Men and women sought to reshape marriage by instilling new
institutions of open marriage, mate swapping, swinging, and communal
sex.
The Freudian school
Sigmund Freud of Vienna believed human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily by the libido or "Sexual Energy". Freud proposed to study how these unconscious drives were repressed and found expression through other cultural outlets. He called this therapy "psychoanalysis".
While Freud's ideas were sometimes ignored or provoked resistance
within Viennese society, his ideas soon entered the discussions and
working methods of anthropologists, artists and writers all over Europe,
and from the 1920s in the United States. His conception of a primary sexual drive that would not be ultimately curbed by law, education or standards of decorum spelled a serious challenge to Victorian prudishness, and his theory of psychosexual development proposed a model for the development of sexual orientations and desires; children emerged from the Oedipus complex,
a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. The idea of
children having their parents as their early sexual targets was
particularly shocking to Victorian and early 20th century society.
According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage of a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic
sensation. Much of his research remains widely contested by
professionals in the field, though it has spurred critical developments
in the humanities.
Anarchist Freud scholars Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich
(who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution") developed a
sociology of sex in the 1910s to 1930s in which the animal-like
competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral
human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per the freudian
interpretation, and hence the liberation of sexual behavior a mean to
social revolution.
The role of mass media
Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa
The publication of anthropologist Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa
brought the sexual revolution to the public scene, as her thoughts
concerning sexual freedom pervaded academia. Published in 1928, Mead's ethnography focused on the psychosexual development of adolescents in Samoa.
She recorded that their adolescence was not in fact a time of "storm
and stress" as Erikson's stages of development suggest, but that the
sexual freedom experienced by the adolescents actually permitted them an
easy transition from childhood to adulthood. Mead called for a change
in suppression of sexuality in America, and her work directly resulted
in the advancement of the sexual revolution in the 1930s.
Mead's findings were later criticized by anthropologist Derek Freeman, who investigated her claims of promiscuity and conducted his own ethnography of Samoan society.
Kinsey and Masters and Johnson
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred C. Kinsey
published two surveys of modern sexual behaviour. In 1948
Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-workers, responding to a request by female
students at Indiana University for more information on human sexual behavior, published the book Sexual behaviour in the Human Male. They followed this five years later with Sexual behaviour in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality.
It is said that public morality
severely restricted open discussion of sexuality as a human
characteristic, and specific sexual practices, especially sexual
behaviours that did not lead to procreation. Kinsey's books contained
studies about controversial topics such as the frequency of
homosexuality, and the sexuality of minors aged two weeks to fourteen
years. Scientists working for Kinsey reported data which led to the
conclusion that people are capable of sexual stimulation from birth.
Furthermore, Kinsey's method of researching sexuality differs
significantly from today's methods. Kinsey would watch his research
subjects engage in sexual intercourse, sometimes engaging with his
subjects as well. He would also encourage his research team to do the
same, and encouraged them to engage in intercourse with him, too.
These books laid the groundwork for Masters and Johnson's life work. A study called Human Sexual Response in 1966 revealed the nature and scope of the sexual practices of young Americans.
The Playboy culture
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Playboy Bunnies aboard US Navy ship (USS Wainwright (CG-28)), 1971
In 1953, Chicago resident Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, a magazine which aimed to target males between the ages of 21 and 45. The coverpage and nude centerfold in the first edition featured Marilyn Monroe, then a rising sex symbol.
Featuring cartoons, interviews, short fiction, Hefner's "Playboy
Philosophy" and unclothed female "Playmates" posing provocatively, the
magazine became immensely successful.
In 1960, Hefner expanded Playboy Enterprises, opening the first Playboy Club in Chicago, which grew to a chain of nightclubs and resorts. The private clubs offered relaxation for members, who were waited on by Playboy Bunnies.
While Hefner claimed his company contributed to America's more liberal attitude towards sex, others believe he simply exploited it.
Erotic novels
In the United States in the years 1959 through 1966, bans on three
books with explicit erotic content were challenged and overturned. This
also occurred in the United Kingdom starting with the 1959 Obscene
Publications Act and reaching a peak with the LCL court case.
Prior to this time, a patchwork of regulations (as well as local
customs and vigilante actions) governed what could and could not be
published. For example, the United States Customs Service banned James Joyce's Ulysses by refusing to allow it to be imported into the United States. The Roman Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum carried great weight among Catholics and amounted to an effective and instant boycott of any book appearing on it. Boston's Watch and Ward Society, a largely Protestant creation inspired by Anthony Comstock, made "banned in Boston" a national by-word.
In 1959 Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. The U.S. Post Office confiscated copies sent through the mail. Lawyer Charles Rembar sued the New York City Postmaster, and won in New York and then on federal appeal.
Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; an edition was printed by the Obelisk Press
in Paris and copies were smuggled into the United States. In 1961 Grove
Press issued a copy of the work, and dozens of booksellers were sued
for selling it. The issue was ultimately settled by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 decision in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein.
In 1963 Putnam published John Cleland's 1750 novel Fanny Hill. Charles Rembar appealed a restraining order against it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won. In Memoirs v. Massachusetts,
383 U.S. 413, the court ruled that sex was "a great and mysterious
motive force in human life", and that its expression in literature was
protected by the First Amendment.
By permitting the publication of Fanny Hill, the
U.S. Supreme Court set the bar for any ban so high that Rembar himself
called the 1966 decision "the end of obscenity". Only books primarily
appealing to "prurient interest" could be banned. In a famous phrase,
the court said that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social
importance"—meaning that, conversely, a work with any redeeming social
importance or literary merit was arguably not obscene, even if it contained isolated passages that could "deprave and corrupt" some readers.
Nonfiction
The court decisions that legalised the publication of Fanny Hill
had an even more important effect: freed from fears of legal action,
nonfiction works about sex and sexuality started to appear more often.
These books were factual and in fact educational, made available in
mainstream bookstores and mail-order book clubs to a mainstream readership, and their authors were guests on late-night talk shows. Earlier books such as What Every Girl Should Know (Margaret Sanger, 1920) and A Marriage Manual
(Hannah and Abraham Stone, 1939) had broken the silence and, by the
1950s, in the United States it had become rare for women to go into
their wedding nights not knowing what to expect.
The open discussion of sex as pleasure, and descriptions of
sexual practices and techniques, was revolutionary. There were practices
which, perhaps, some had heard of. But many adults did not know for
sure whether they were realities, or fantasies found only in
pornographic books. The Kinsey report revealed that these practices
were, at the very least, surprisingly frequent. These other books
asserted, in the words of a 1980 book by Dr. Irene Kassorla, that Nice Girls Do — And Now You Can Too.
In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men.
In 1969 Joan Garrity, identifying herself only as "J.", published The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman, with information on exercises to improve the dexterity of one's tongue and how to have anal sex.
The same year saw the appearance of Dr. David Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). Despite the dignity of Reuben's medical credentials, this book was light-hearted in tone.
In 1970 the Boston Women's Health Collective published Women and Their Bodies, reissued a year later as Our Bodies, Ourselves).
Though not an erotic treatise or sex manual, the book included frank
descriptions of sexuality, and contained illustrations that could have
caused legal problems just a few years earlier.
Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making appeared in 1972. In later editions, Comfort's exuberance was tamed in response to AIDS.
In 1975 Will McBride's Zeig Mal! (Show Me!),
written with psychologist Helga Fleichhauer-Hardt for children and
their parents, appeared in bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic.
Appreciated by many parents for its frank depiction of pre-adolescent
sexual discovery and exploration, it scandalised others and was pulled
from circulation in the United States and some other countries. The book
was followed in 1989 by Zeig Mal Mehr! ("Show Me More!").
Pornographic film
In 1969, Blue Movie, directed by Andy Warhol, was the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States. The film helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon in modern American culture. According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando, and released a few years after Blue Movie was made.
In 1970, Mona the Virgin Nymph became the second film to gain wide release. The third, Deep Throat, despite being rudimentary by the standards of mainstream filmmaking, achieved major box office success, following mentions by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and Bob Hope on television as well. In 1973, the far-more-accomplished (though still low-budget) The Devil in Miss Jones was the seventh-most-successful film of the year, and was well-received by major media, including a favorable review by film critic Roger Ebert.
In 1976, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw) was released theatrically and is considered by Toni Bentley the "crown jewel" of "the golden age of porn."
By the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, newly won sexual freedoms
were being exploited by big businesses looking to capitalize on an
increasingly permissive society, with the advent of public and hardcore pornography.
Explicit sex on screen and stage
Swedish filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Vilgot Sjöman
contributed to sexual liberation with sexually themed films that
challenged conservative international standards. The 1951 film Hon dansade en sommar (She Danced One Summer AKA One Summer of Happiness) displayed explicit nudity, including bathing in a lake.
This film, as well as Bergman's Sommaren med Monika (The Summer with Monika, 1951) and Tystnaden (The Silence,
1963), caused an international uproar, not least in the United States,
where the films were charged with violating standards of decency. Vilgot
Sjöman's film I Am Curious (Yellow), also was very popular in the United States. Another of his films, 491, highlighted homosexuality. Kärlekens språk (The Language of Love) was an informative documentary about sex and sexual techniques that featured the first real act of sex in a mainstream film.
From these films the myth of "Swedish sin" (licentiousness and
seductive nudity) arose. The image of "hot love and cold people"
emerged, with sexual liberalism seen as part of the modernization
process that, by breaking down traditional borders, would lead to the
emancipation of natural forces and desires.
In Sweden and nearby countries at the time, these films, by virtue of
being made by directors who had established themselves as leading names
in their generation, helped delegitimize the idea of habitually
demanding that films should avoid overtly sexual subject matter. The
films eventually progressed the public's attitude toward sex, especially
in Sweden and other northern European countries, which today tend to be
more sexually liberal than others.
Normalization of pornography
The somewhat more open and commercial circulation of pornography was a
new phenomenon. Pornography operated as a form of "cultural critique"
insofar as it transgresses societal conventions. Manuel Castells
claims that the online communities, which emerged (from the 1980s)
around early bulletin-board systems, originated from the ranks of those
who had been part of the counterculture movements and alternative way of
life emerging out of the sexual revolution.
Lynn Hunt
points out that early modern "pornography" (18th century) is marked by a
"preponderance of female narrators", that the women were portrayed as
independent, determined, financially successful (though not always
socially successful and recognized) and scornful of the new ideals of
female virtue and domesticity, and not objectifications of women's
bodies as many view pornography today. The sexual revolution was not
unprecedented in identifying sex as a site of political potential and
social culture. It was suggested that the interchangeability of bodies
within pornography had radical implications for gender differences and
that they could lose their meaning or at least redefine the meaning of gender roles and norms.
In 1971 Playboy
stopped airbrushing pubic hair out of its centerfold picture spreads;
this new addition caused the magazine to hit its all-time peak
circulation of more than seven million copies in 1972 and men started
having more choices when it came to magazines.
In 1972 Deep Throat
became a popular movie for heterosexual couples. The movie played all
over America and was the first porn movie to earn a gross of a million
dollars.
Pornography was less stigmatised by the end of the 1980s, and more mainstream movies depicted sexual intercourse as entertainment. Magazines depicting nudity, such as the popular Playboy and Penthouse magazines, won some acceptance as mainstream journals, in which public figures felt safe expressing their fantasies.
Some figures in the feminist movement, such as Andrea Dworkin, challenged the depiction of women as objects in these pornographic or "urban men's" magazines. Other feminists such as Betty Dodson went on to found the pro-sex feminist movement in response to anti-pornography campaigns.
In India, an organization named Indians For Sexual Liberties is
advocating the legalization of the porn business in India. The
organization's founder, Laxman Singh, questioned the reasoning behind
deeming as illegal the depiction of legal acts.
Modern revolutions
The Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century and the growth of science and technology, medicine and health care, resulted in better contraceptives being manufactured. Advances in the manufacture and production of rubber made possible the design and production of condoms that could be used by hundreds of millions of men and women to prevent pregnancy at little cost. Advances in chemistry, pharmacology, and biology, and human physiology led to the discovery and perfection of the first oral contraceptives, popularly known as "the Pill."
All these developments took place alongside and combined with an increase in world literacy
and decline in religious observance. Old values such as the biblical
notion of "be fruitful and multiply" were cast aside as people continued
to feel alienated from the past and adopted the lifestyles of
progressive modernizing cultures.
Another contribution that helped bring about this modern revolution of sexual freedom were the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, who took the philosophy of Karl Marx and similar philosophers.
"No-fault" unilateral divorce became legal and easier to obtain in many countries during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
The women's movement redefined sexuality, not in terms of simply
pleasing men but recognizing women's sexual satisfaction and sexual
desire. "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" by Anne Koedt
illustrates an understanding of a women's sexual anatomy, arguing
against Freud's "assumptions of women as inferior appendage to man, and
her consequent social and psychological role."
The women's movement was able to develop lesbian feminism, freedom from
heterosexual act, and freedom from reproduction. Feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique
in 1963, concerning the many frustrations women had with their lives
and with separate spheres which established a pattern of inequality.
1997 LGBT poster, New York City
The Gay Rights Movement started when the Stonewall Riots
of 1969 crystallized a broad grass-roots mobilization. New gay
liberationist gave political meaning to "coming out" by extending the
psychological-personal process into public life. During the 1950s the
most feared thing of the homosexual culture was "coming out", the
homosexual culture of the 1950s did everything they could to help keep
their sexuality a secret from the public and everyone else in their
lives, but Alfred Kinsey's research on homosexuality alleged that 39% of
the unmarried male population had had at least one homosexual
experience to orgasm between adolescence and old age.
The "coming out" phenomenon helped mobilize people to live full-time as
a homosexual, they no longer had to live in secret. They no longer had
to sneak around and occasionally receive the sexual attention that they
desire or force themselves into a heterosexual relationship in which
they had no interest, and was full of lies. Brad Gooch
wrote in the "Golden Age of Promiscuity" that the gay male community
finally had reached a rich culture of "easy sex", sex without
commitment, obligation or long-term relationships.
Feminism and sexual liberation
Coinciding with second-wave feminism and the women's liberation movement
initiated in the early 1960s, the sexual liberation movement was aided
by feminist ideologues in their mutual struggle to challenge traditional
ideas regarding female sexuality and queer
sexuality. Elimination of undue favorable bias towards men and
objectification of women as well as support for women's right to choose
her sexual partners free of outside interference or judgement were three
of the main goals associated with sexual liberation from the feminist
perspective. Since during the early stages of feminism, women's
liberation was often equated with sexual liberation rather than
associated with it. Many feminist thinkers believed that assertion of
the primacy of sexuality would be a major step towards the ultimate goal
of women's liberation, thus women were urged to initiate sexual
advances, enjoy sex and experiment with new forms of sexuality.
The feminist movements insisted and focused on the sexual
liberation for women, both physical and psychological. The pursuit of
sexual pleasure for women was the core ideology, which subsequently was
to set the foundation for female independence. Although whether or not
sexual freedom should be a feminist issue is currently a much-debated
topic, the feminist movement overtly defines itself as the movement for social, political, and economic equality of men and women. Feminist movements are also involved the fight against sexism and since sexism is a highly complex notion, it is difficult to separate the feminist critique toward sexism from its fight against sexual oppression.
The feminist movement has helped create a social climate in which
LGBT people and women are increasingly able to be open and free with
their sexuality,
which enabled a spiritual liberation of sorts with regards to sex.
Rather than being forced to hide their sexual desires or feelings, women
and LGBT people have gained and continue to gain increased freedom in
this area. Consequently, the feminist movement to end sexual oppression
has and continues to directly contribute to the sexual liberation
movement.
Nevertheless, among many feminists, the view soon became widely
held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution
of the 1960s, such as the decreasing emphasis on monogamy, had been largely gained by men at women's expense. In Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, Sheila Jeffreys
asserted that the sexual revolution on men's terms contributed less to
women's freedom than to their continued oppression, an assertion that
has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist sex wars broke out due to disagreements on pornography, on prostitution, and on BDSM, as well as sexuality in general.
Contraception
As birth control
became widely accessible, men and women began to have more choice in
the matter of having children than ever before. The 1916 invention of
thin, disposable latex condoms for men led to widespread affordable condoms by the 1930s; the demise of the Comstock laws in 1936 set the stage for promotion of available effective contraceptives such as the diaphragm and cervical cap; the 1960s introduction of the IUD and oral contraceptives for women gave a sense of freedom from barrier contraception. The Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI (1968) published Humanae vitae
(Of Human Life), which was a declaration that banned the use of
artificial contraception. Churches allowed for the rhythm method, which
was a natural method of regulating fertility that pushed men and women
to take advantage of the "natural cycles" of female fertility, during
which women were "naturally infertile." The opposition of Churches
(e.g. Humanae vitae) led people who felt alienated from or not represented by religion to form parallel movements of secularization and exile from religion. Women gained much greater access to birth control in the Griswold "girls world" decision in 1965.
The landmark Griswold v. Connecticut case ruled that the prohibition of contraception was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples' rights to marital privacy.
In addition, in the 1960s and 1970s the birth control movement
advocated for the legalization of abortion and large scale education
campaigns about contraception by governments. The Griswold v. Connecticut
case and subsequent birth control movements created a precedent for
later cases granting rights to birth control for unmarried couples (Eisenstadt v. Baird, 1972), rights to abortion for any woman (Roe v. Wade, 1973), and the right to contraception for juveniles (Carey v. Population Services International,
1977). The Griswold case was also influential in and cited as precedent
for landmark cases dealing with the right to homosexual relations (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015).
Free love
Beginning in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, a new culture of "free love" emerged, with thousands of young people becoming "hippies", inspired by Indian culture, who preached the power of love and the beauty of sex as part of ordinary life. This is part of a counterculture that continues to exist. By the 1970s, it was socially acceptable for colleges to permit co-ed housing.
Free love continued in different forms throughout the 1970s and
into the early 1980s, but its more assertive manifestations ended
abruptly (or at least disappeared from public view) in the mid-1980s
when the public first became aware of AIDS, a deadly sexually-transmitted disease.
Non-marital sex
Premarital sex, heavily stigmatised for some time, became more widely accepted. The increased availability of birth control (and the legalisation of abortion
in some places) helped reduce the chance that pre-marital sex would
result in unwanted children. By the mid-1970s the majority of newly
married American couples had experienced sex before marriage.
Central to the change was the development of relationships
between unmarried adults, which resulted in earlier sexual
experimentation reinforced by a later age of marriage. On average,
Americans were gaining sexual experience before entering into monogamous
relationships. The increasing divorce rate and the decreasing stigma
attached to divorce during this era also contributed to sexual
experimentation.
By 1971, more than 75% of Americans thought that premarital sex was
acceptable, a threefold increase from the 1950s, and the number of
unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from
1960 to 1976. Americans were becoming less and less interested in
getting married and settling down and as well less interested in
monogamous relationships. In 1971, 35% of the country said they thought
marriage was obsolete.
The idea of marriage being outdated came from the development of
casual sex between Americans. With the development of the birth control
pill and the legalization of abortion in 1973, there was little threat
of unwanted children out of wedlock. Also, during this time every known
sexually transmitted disease was readily treatable.
Swinger clubs were organizing in places ranging from the informal suburban home to disco-sized emporiums that offered a range of sexual possibilities with multiple partners. In New York City in 1977, Larry Levenson opened Plato's Retreat, which eventually shut down in 1985 under regular close scrutiny by public health authorities.
Legacy
Fraenkel
(1992) believes that the "sexual revolution" the West supposedly
experienced in the late 1960s is a misconception, and that sex is not
actually enjoyed freely, rather observed in all the fields of culture, a
taboo behavior called "repressive desublimation".
Allyn argues that the sexual optimism of the 1960s waned with the
economic crises of the 1970s, the massive commercialization of sex,
increasing reports of child exploitation, disillusionment with the
counter-culture and the New Left, and a combined left-right backlash
against sexual liberation as an ideal. The discovery of herpes escalated anxieties rapidly and set the stage for the nation's panicked response to AIDS.
Among radical feminists,
the view soon became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms
gained in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as the decreasing
emphasis on monogamy, had been largely gained by men at women's expense. In Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, Sheila Jeffreys
asserted that the sexual revolution on men's terms contributed less to
women's freedom than to their continued oppression, an assertion that
has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist sex wars broke out due to disagreements on pornography, on prostitution, and on BDSM, as well as sexuality in general.
Although the rate of teenage sexual activity is hard to record, the prevalence of teenage pregnancy in developed nations such as Canada and the UK have seen a steady decline since the 1990s.
For example, in 1991 there were 61.8 children born per 1,000 teenage
girls in the United States. By 2013, this number had declined to 26.6
births per 1,000 teenage girls.
