Sexual revolution

Based on Wikipedia: Sexual revolution

In 1960, a small pill did something that no legislation, no philosophy, and no social movement had ever fully accomplished: it separated sex from its consequences. The birth control pill didn't just prevent pregnancy. It rewired the relationship between desire and danger, pleasure and permanence. Within a decade, everything from marriage rates to censorship laws to the very definition of obscenity would be transformed.

We call this transformation the sexual revolution, but that phrase obscures more than it reveals. The changes that swept through Western societies between the late 1950s and early 1970s weren't a single coordinated uprising. They were an accumulation of medical breakthroughs, legal challenges, demographic shifts, and intellectual movements that happened to converge in one extraordinary generation.

Not the First Revolution

Here's something that might surprise you: scholars have identified at least four different periods in Western history that could claim the title of "first sexual revolution."

The earliest occurred when Christianity displaced Roman sexual norms across the ancient empire. Romans had a strikingly different moral framework than what came after. Male promiscuity was considered normal and healthy, with one crucial caveat: a man had to maintain his masculinity, which meant being the penetrating partner. Prostitution was legal and regulated. Bisexuality was unremarkable. Pederasty, which involved sexual relationships between adult men and adolescent boys, was accepted in certain contexts.

Women faced an entirely different standard. Respectable Roman women were expected to be chaste, primarily to ensure certainty about paternity and the integrity of family bloodlines. This asymmetry tells us something important: sexual revolutions aren't simply about more or less freedom. They're about reconfiguring who has freedom, and under what conditions.

Christianity swept these norms away and replaced them with prohibitions on any sex outside marriage, including with slaves and prostitutes. Homosexual acts became sins. The revolution went the other direction: more restriction, not less.

The Enlightenment Shift

Jump forward more than a thousand years to eighteenth-century Britain, and you find another transformation underway. The Age of Enlightenment brought liberalism as a political philosophy, and people began migrating in large numbers from villages to cities. This migration mattered enormously for sexual behavior.

In a small village, everyone knew everyone. Violations of sexual norms were noticed, reported, and punished by the community. In cities, anonymity became possible. Enforcement became impractical. The same act that would destroy a reputation in a village could vanish into urban crowds.

Something else happened that undermined the moral authority of the church: a series of sexual scandals involving Catholic clergy. When the enforcers of sexual morality were caught violating their own rules, their credibility collapsed. Meanwhile, the rise of professional police forces created a new distinction between crime and sin. Not everything sinful needed to be illegal.

The result was increased tolerance for heterosexual sex outside marriage. Prostitution, mistresses, and premarital sex were still condemned by many as libertine behavior. But adultery gradually shifted from a criminal offense sometimes punishable by death to a civil matter handled in divorce proceedings.

Interestingly, this era of loosening standards for heterosexual behavior saw no similar relaxation for homosexuality, masturbation, or rape. And women's sexuality was reinterpreted in a peculiar way. Where medieval and Renaissance culture had assumed women were just as lustful as men, perhaps more so, the Enlightenment reimagined women as passive partners whose purity was essential to their reputation. Sexual desire became something that respectable women simply didn't have.

The Roaring Twenties

The third "first sexual revolution" arrived in the aftermath of World War One. Victorian Era attitudes, which had dominated Anglo-American culture for half a century, were destabilized by the trauma and social disruption of the war. Young men had seen unspeakable horrors in the trenches. Young women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers while the men were away. The old certainties seemed less certain.

In the United States, Prohibition created a strange parallel world. Alcohol was illegal, but everyone who wanted a drink knew where to find one. Speakeasies became spaces where conventional rules were suspended. If the law against drinking was being flagrantly violated, why not other conventions too?

The flapper emerged as the iconic figure of this moment: a young woman with bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and a cigarette in hand, attending "petting parties" and engaging in premarital sex. The women's suffrage movement had just won voting rights, and a new generation of women was testing what other freedoms might be available.

Setting the Stage

But none of these earlier revolutions matched the scale and permanence of what happened in the mid-twentieth century. To understand why the 1960s revolution was different, we need to understand the intellectual and scientific foundations that had been laid in the preceding decades.

Sigmund Freud's ideas were the first ingredient. The Viennese psychoanalyst proposed that human behavior was driven by unconscious forces, primarily sexual energy, which he called libido. Freud argued that this sexual energy couldn't ultimately be controlled by law, education, or social propriety. It would find expression somehow, either directly or through what he called sublimation into other activities.

His theory of psychosexual development was genuinely shocking to Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities. Freud proposed that children were sexual beings from infancy, that a mother's breast was the "formative source of all later erotic sensation," and that children experienced sexual desire toward their opposite-sex parent, a scenario he called the Oedipus complex. Whether Freud was right about these specific claims remains hotly contested. But his broader point, that sexuality was fundamental to human psychology and couldn't simply be wished away through moral instruction, proved enormously influential.

Two of Freud's followers, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich, pushed these ideas in explicitly political directions. Both were anarchists influenced by Marxism, and both saw sexual repression as a mechanism of social control. Reich actually coined the phrase "sexual revolution" and argued that liberating sexual behavior would be a form of political revolution. If capitalism and the state maintained their power partly by regulating desire, then freeing desire would undermine their authority.

Mead in Samoa

Meanwhile, anthropologist Margaret Mead was gathering evidence that challenged assumptions about the universality of Western sexual norms. Her 1928 book, "Coming of Age in Samoa," described adolescent sexuality in Samoan culture and reached a provocative conclusion: Samoan teenagers didn't experience adolescence as a time of storm and stress the way American teenagers did.

Why not? Mead argued it was because Samoan culture allowed adolescents considerable sexual freedom. Teenagers could experiment, explore, and transition gradually into adult sexuality without the guilt, shame, and confusion that American culture imposed. The implication was clear: sexual repression wasn't natural or necessary. It was a cultural choice, and perhaps not a wise one.

Mead's findings were later challenged by anthropologist Derek Freeman, who conducted his own fieldwork in Samoa and accused Mead of being misled by informants who were telling her what they thought she wanted to hear. The controversy has never been fully resolved. But Mead's book shaped a generation's thinking about the relationship between culture and sexuality.

Kinsey's Numbers

If Freud provided theory and Mead provided cross-cultural comparison, Alfred Kinsey provided data. His two massive reports, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" in 1948 and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1953, were based on thousands of detailed interviews conducted over nearly two decades.

What Kinsey found scandalized America. Behaviors that were considered marginal or deviant turned out to be far more common than anyone had publicly admitted. Kinsey's research suggested that roughly four percent of men were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, but that a much larger percentage had at least some homosexual experience. Masturbation was nearly universal among men and common among women. Pre-marital and extra-marital sex were widespread.

The Kinsey Reports became bestsellers, which tells you something about the gap between public morality and private curiosity. Americans were officially shocked by what Kinsey revealed, but they bought his books by the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps they recognized themselves in his findings.

Kinsey used his research to advocate for legal reform. Many sexual behaviors that his data showed were common were still technically crimes. In some states, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private could result in lengthy prison sentences. Kinsey argued that laws based on the assumption that such behaviors were rare aberrations needed to be reconsidered.

The Researchers Who Watched

William Masters and Virginia Johnson took sex research in a direction Kinsey hadn't gone: they actually observed sexual behavior as it happened. Their studies, conducted at Washington University in St. Louis starting in 1957, used scientific instruments to measure physiological responses during sexual arousal and orgasm. They observed hundreds of subjects engaging in masturbation and sexual intercourse in laboratory conditions.

Their books, "Human Sexual Response" in 1966 and "Human Sexual Inadequacy" in 1970, became classics. Masters and Johnson described the human sexual response cycle in detail, challenged myths about female sexuality, and developed therapeutic techniques for sexual dysfunction. They helped transform sex from a taboo subject into something that could be discussed clinically, treated medically, and studied scientifically.

The Pill Changes Everything

All of this intellectual groundwork might have remained academic if not for a technological breakthrough. In 1960, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first oral contraceptive pill. Within five years, six million American women were taking it.

The pill was different from previous contraceptive methods in several crucial ways. It was highly effective when taken correctly. It was under the woman's control. It was taken at a time separate from sexual intercourse itself. And it was invisible to partners who might not want contraception used.

This last point matters more than it might seem. Previous contraceptive methods required cooperation or at least knowledge of both partners. The pill allowed a woman to control her own fertility without negotiation, permission, or even disclosure. This shifted power in sexual relationships in ways that are still playing out today.

But the pill didn't become universally available overnight. In many states, laws prohibited or restricted the sale of contraceptives even to married couples. It took a 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold versus Connecticut, to establish that married couples had a constitutional right to use contraception. That case articulated a right to privacy in intimate decisions that would prove crucial to later rulings on abortion and same-sex relationships.

Other Medical Factors

The pill wasn't the only medical advance that enabled the sexual revolution. Penicillin had been discovered in 1928 and came into widespread use during World War Two. By the 1950s, it had dramatically reduced mortality from syphilis, one of the most feared consequences of sexual activity outside marriage.

For centuries, syphilis had been a terrifying disease. It progressed over years or decades, causing disfigurement, madness, and death. It could be transmitted to children in the womb. There was no effective treatment. The fear of syphilis was a powerful deterrent to casual sex.

When penicillin made syphilis curable, that deterrent weakened. People who might have hesitated to take sexual risks became more willing to experiment. Epidemiologists actually documented an increase in non-traditional sexual behavior beginning in the mid-1950s, correlating with the decline in syphilis deaths.

Improvements in obstetrics also played a role. Childbirth had always been dangerous for women. Throughout most of human history, a significant percentage of women died giving birth. By the mid-twentieth century, maternal mortality had plummeted in developed countries. Women who might have limited their sexual activity out of fear of pregnancy could now be more confident that pregnancy, if it occurred, wouldn't kill them.

The Baby Boom Grows Up

These medical and scientific developments were occurring as an enormous generation was coming of age. The Baby Boom, the surge in births that followed World War Two, created a demographic bulge that would reshape society in countless ways.

These were children born into relative prosperity. Many grew up in middle-class suburbs with access to education and entertainment that their parents couldn't have imagined. By the 1960s, they were teenagers and young adults, and their sheer numbers gave them cultural weight.

When the Baby Boomers questioned traditional sexual morality, they weren't a tiny fringe. They were a massive cohort whose attitudes would eventually become mainstream simply because there were so many of them. The counterculture wasn't a few isolated radicals. It was a substantial portion of an entire generation.

The Courts Step In

Sexual behavior depends not just on what people want to do, but on what they're allowed to do. The legal landscape was transformed during the 1960s through a series of court battles over obscenity.

Before this period, censorship of sexual content was haphazard but often severe. James Joyce's novel "Ulysses" had been banned from import into the United States. The Roman Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books could effectively suppress a work among Catholic readers. "Banned in Boston" became a national joke because the city's Watch and Ward Society was so aggressive about prohibiting books they considered obscene.

In 1959, Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which had been written in 1928 but never legally published in full in English-speaking countries. The U.S. Post Office confiscated copies. Grove Press sued the New York Postmaster and won.

Similar battles followed over Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and John Cleland's eighteenth-century novel "Fanny Hill." Each victory expanded what could legally be published and sold. The decisive moment came in 1966, when the Supreme Court ruled that "Fanny Hill" could not be banned.

The lawyer who won that case, Charles Rembar, called the decision "the end of obscenity." The Court had established that sex was "a great and mysterious motive force in human life" and that its expression in literature was protected by the First Amendment. Only material that appealed primarily to "prurient interest" and was "utterly without redeeming social importance" could be banned. Since almost any book could be argued to have some literary or social value, this effectively ended serious censorship of written sexual content.

From Screen to Bedroom

Film followed literature. Swedish filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Vilgot Sjoman pushed boundaries that Hollywood wouldn't approach. A 1951 Swedish film, known in English as "One Summer of Happiness," included explicit nudity that shocked international audiences. Swedish cinema developed a reputation for frankness about sexuality that gradually influenced filmmakers everywhere.

As what could be shown on screen expanded, what could be discussed in public expanded too. Topics that had been utterly taboo became subjects of mainstream conversation. Homosexuality. Premarital sex. Contraception. Masturbation. Each taboo that fell made the next easier to challenge.

The Movement Coalesces

By the late 1960s, these various threads had woven together into something that participants and observers alike recognized as a movement. The counterculture embraced sexual freedom as part of a broader rejection of what it saw as the repressive conformity of mainstream American society. If the previous generation valued stability, property, and propriety, the counterculture would value authenticity, experience, and liberation.

"Free love" became a slogan. The phrase didn't necessarily mean promiscuity, though it sometimes included that. More fundamentally, it meant that the state should have no role in regulating sexual behavior between consenting adults. Marriage should be a personal choice, not an economic or legal necessity. Birth control should be freely available. Homosexuality should not be criminalized.

The women's movement and the gay rights movement drew energy from and contributed to the sexual revolution. Feminists argued that women's liberation required control over their own bodies and sexuality. Gay activists argued that freedom meant nothing if it didn't include the freedom to love whom you loved.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The transformation showed up in demographic statistics that would have seemed unimaginable a generation earlier. In 1960, about 4.3 million Americans between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were unmarried. By 1976, that number had more than doubled to 9.7 million. Marriage was happening later, if it happened at all.

Divorce rates climbed steeply. Marriage rates fell. Cohabitation without marriage, once scandalous, became increasingly common and increasingly accepted. Some couples experimented with open marriages, mate swapping, or communal living arrangements that included shared sexual partners.

Premarital sex went from something shameful to something normal. Studies showed that by the 1970s, a majority of young adults had sexual experience before marriage. The change in behavior was real, but the change in attitudes was perhaps even more dramatic. What had been a source of guilt and secrecy became, for many, simply part of growing up.

The Revolution Stalls

Nothing lasts forever. The sexual revolution that seemed unstoppable in the 1970s encountered serious headwinds in the 1980s.

The most significant was a new disease. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, first identified in 1981, was transmitted sexually and was, at the time, invariably fatal. The epidemic hit gay communities with particular severity. Suddenly, sexual freedom could mean death.

The carefree attitude toward casual sex that had characterized the previous decade became impossible to sustain. Safe sex practices, condom use, and monogamy came back into fashion not for moral reasons but for survival. The "free love" movement declined sharply.

At the same time, conservative political and religious movements gained strength. The Moral Majority and similar organizations pushed back against what they saw as the moral decay of American society. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought to power an administration sympathetic to traditional values. The pendulum swung back, at least partway.

What Changed Permanently

Yet much of what the sexual revolution accomplished proved permanent. Contraception remained available and widely used. Abortion rights, established in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe versus Wade, remained the law for nearly fifty years. Divorce remained accessible. Cohabitation remained common. Premarital sex remained the norm rather than the exception.

Most dramatically, attitudes toward homosexuality continued to liberalize even during the conservative backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. The AIDS crisis, for all its devastation, ultimately brought gay communities into greater visibility and sympathy. By 2015, the Supreme Court would recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a development that would have seemed literally unimaginable during the sexual revolution itself.

The revolution also permanently changed how we think about sexuality. The Freudian insight that sexuality is fundamental to human psychology, the Kinsey data showing that sexual behavior is more varied than public morality acknowledged, the Masters and Johnson research demonstrating that sex could be studied scientifically and sexual problems treated therapeutically, all became part of mainstream culture.

The Ongoing Conversation

Every revolution leaves unfinished business, and the sexual revolution is no exception. Questions about consent, harassment, and power dynamics in sexual relationships have come to the fore in recent years with movements like Me Too. The very freedoms the sexual revolution established created new contexts for exploitation and abuse.

Technology continues to reshape sexuality in ways the 1960s couldn't have anticipated. Dating apps. Pornography accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The ability to explore identities and find communities that would have been invisible in the pre-digital age. Each development raises new questions about privacy, safety, and human connection.

The relationship between sexuality and reproduction continues to evolve as well. In vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and other reproductive technologies have separated conception from sex in ways the pill's inventors couldn't have imagined. Same-sex couples can have children. Single people can become parents. The nuclear family of the 1950s, already destabilized by the sexual revolution, continues to fragment into new forms.

Looking Back and Forward

When we call something a revolution, we imply that it's complete, that the old order has been overthrown and a new order established. But sexual revolutions don't work that way. They're ongoing renegotiations between desire and social structure, between individual freedom and collective norms, between new possibilities and persistent fears.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was real. It changed laws and behaviors and attitudes in ways that persist today. But it was also one chapter in a much longer story, a story that includes the Christianization of Rome, the Enlightenment, the Roaring Twenties, and whatever comes next.

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the mid-twentieth century sexual revolution was not any particular change in behavior or law, but a change in how we think about change itself. The revolutionaries of the 1960s demonstrated that sexual norms, which had seemed as fixed and natural as the seasons, were in fact social constructions that could be questioned, challenged, and transformed.

That insight, once gained, cannot be unlearned. We now know that how we organize desire and reproduction and intimacy is a choice, not a destiny. Future generations will make different choices than we have made. The revolution continues.