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The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged the merit of traditional Sexual ethics related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sexual intercourse outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships, primarily marriage. The legalization of "the pill" as well as other forms of Birth control, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, Sexual identity, and abortion all followed.Germaine Greer and The Female Eunuch
The term “first sexual revolution” is used by scholars to describe different periods of significant change in Western sexual norms, including the Christianization of Roman sexuality, the decline of Victorian morals, and the cultural shifts of the Roaring Twenties. Sexual revolution most commonly refers to the mid-20th century, when advances in Birth control, medicine, and social movements led to widespread changes in attitudes and behaviors around sex. The sexual revolution was influenced by Sigmund Freud theory of Unconscious mind Libido and psychosexual development, Margaret Mead ethnographic work on adolescent sexuality in Samoa, Unwin’s cross-cultural studies, and the groundbreaking research of Kinsey Reports and later Masters and Johnson, all of which challenged traditional norms and expanded understanding of human sexuality.
The widespread availability of Birth control from the early 20th century onward empowered individuals with reproductive choice, spurred legal and cultural shifts such as Griswold v. Connecticut, and influenced later landmark rulings on privacy, abortion, and LGBTQ people rights. Free love is a related social movement advocating for the separation of the state from sexual matters like marriage and birth control, emphasizing Civil liberties in relationships, though it faced decline in the 1980s due to the AIDS crisis.
By the 1970s, Premarital sex and non-marital sex had become increasingly accepted in the U.S. due to the rise of birth control, later marriages, declining stigma around divorce, and the normalization of Casual sex and Non-monogamy sexual relationships.
When speaking of the sexual revolution, historiansThe First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America. Kevin White (New York: New York University Press: 1992) 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. In contrast, female chastity was required for respectable women, to ensure the 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 undermined the 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. 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".
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 surrealism.
The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of traditional American values.Kevin Slack, "Liberalism Radicalized: The Sexual Revolution, Multiculturalism, and the Rise of Identity Politics," The sexual revolution sprung from a conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life, dodging religion, family, industrialized moral codes, and the state.
The development of the The Pill in 1960 gave women access to easy and more 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 throughout the 1950s all over the Western world, as 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 Postmaterialism 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.Brown, Callum G. "Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c.1950–75: The Importance of a 'Short' Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the 1960s." 20th-Century British History, 22, 2, 2010, pp. 189–215 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 experimenting with new practices consisting of open marriage, mate swapping, swinging, and communal sex.
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 libido 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.
Two Anarchism and Marxism proponents of Freud, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution"), developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s through the 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. Hence, the liberation of sexual behavior was considered by them to be a means to social revolution.
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 based his findings in both these books on interviews that he and his team of researchers conducted with thousands of Americans, beginning in the 1930s. The interviews were extensive and could last for several hours; they were supplemented by diaries and other documents that the interviewees were willing to have copied, and sometimes film of them masturbation or having sex with others, if they volunteered and it was practical. Kinsey found in the course of these interviews that many sexual behaviors which had previously been seen as marginal or "abnormal" were in fact more common than previously recognized and were part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behavior; for instance, he is the source of the widely quoted statistic that 4% of the male population is primarily homosexual. He advocated using this information to reform sex-related laws, which at the time were often draconian (for example two men having consensual sex in private was considered a crime).
Kinsey's books became bestsellers when published, and laid the groundwork for researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson to study the nature and scope of sexual practices among young Americans. Their books, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970 respectively, were also best-sellers, and are now considered classic texts in the field.
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 the 1928 novel 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 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.
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.
The open discussion of sex as pleasure, and descriptions of sexual practices and techniques, was revolutionary. There were practices that some had heard of, but many adults did not know if 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 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 Terry 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 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 scandalized 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!").
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 objectification 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 the meaning of gender differences, 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 stigmatized 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.
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 Bunny.
While Hefner claimed his company contributed to America's more liberal attitude towards sex, others believe he simply exploited it.
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.
All these developments took place alongside and combined with an increase in the world literacy and a 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 divorce" 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 (1970) by Anne Koedt illustrates an understanding of a women's sexual anatomy including evidence for the Clitoris orgasm, 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.
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 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.
The 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut 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 continued in different forms throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, but its more assertive manifestations faced increased pushback in the mid-1980s, when the public first became aware of AIDS, a deadly sexually-transmitted disease.
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 Extramarital sex. 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.
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 Western countries 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.United Nations Statistics Division (2014). Demographic Yearbook 2012: "Live births by age of mother". New York: United Nations. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from
Women and men who lived with each other without marriage sought "palimony" equal to the alimony. Teenagers assumed their right to a sexual life with whomever they pleased, and bathers fought to be topless or nude at beaches.
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