Sexual Revolution
Introduction The Swinging Sixties was a time of massive social change and brought with it dramatic shift in values related to Sex and Sexuality. Sex became more socially acceptable outside the strict boundaries of heterosexual marriage. Similarly, during this time, a culture of “free love” emerged. Beginning in San Francisco in the mid1960s, this culture of “free love” was propagated by thousands of “hippies,” who preached the power of love and the beauty of sex. Towards the end of the decade and the start of the seventies, people began to realise that Sexual Libertation wasn’t all as glamorous as it seemed.
The True Drug of the Sixties
The introduction in 1961 of a reliable, convenient oral contraceptive pill available on the National Health Service was a godsend to British women. But the medical establishment wasn’t quite ready to embrace free love in 1961. When the Pill was first introduced it could only be prescribed to married women. This didn’t change until 1967. The legalisation of the contraceptive pill gave women sexual equality with men. Free from the fear of pregnancy, young people could make love without getting married. Couples began to “shack up” together. Some individuals chose to have multiple sexual partners. Victorian attitudes to sex imploded under the assault of the swinging sixties. Women on the Pill were at the forefront of that assault.
Sex and the Single Girl “When Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl hit bookstores in 1962, the sexual revolution was launched and there was no turning back. Brown did something few other American women had dared to do: She gleefully admitted, in print, that she had lost her virginity before getting married. It was a wild confession, the kind of revelation that could destroy a woman’s reputation, cost her her closest friends, wreck her marriage. But Brown did more than admit to a single indiscretion, she hinted at a long history of casual contacts, and she extolled unmarried sex as a positive virtue.” Bubbling with optimism, Sex and the Single Girl reflected the spirit middle-class America during the heyday of Camelot. [Make Love, Not war].
Women were being encouraged into free sexual expression. Pre-marital sex became casual and largely accepted. However it was not all as glamorous as Brown makes out. For a lot of women it was full of unsurity, confusion and heartbreak, Virginia Ironside looks back “To be honest, I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.” Women brought up to kowtow to their fathers’ and men’s wishes were then launched into a sexual revolution which they were not mentally prepared for. “When it came to sex, we were, of course, the trailblazers for a completely new attitude, and blazing trails is always horribly uncomfortable.”
“Instead of men and women freely choosing to have sex if they wanted to, we are now in a generation of young adults that are compelled to engage in sexual intercourse. It is a generation that is incapable of saying ‘no.’” Virginia Ironside
Women against pornography march, Times Square, 1977. By the mid seventies, with the economy stagnant, crime and drug abuse on the rise, and porn theaters and prostitution spreading, the sexual optimism of the prior decade quickly faded. Though a few radical feminists continued to champion personal pleasure, many targeted pornography, claiming it inspired men to harm women. To the dismay of other liberals, the organizers of Women Against Pornography were so intent on fighting sexual “filth that they were willing to work with the leaders of the Religious Right to do so. [Make Love not War, Allyn David]
“But now, armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly. Now, for them, ‘no’ always meant ‘yes’.” Virginia Ironside
TIME magazine cover, 1982. In the pessimistic climate of the late 1970s, the discovery of a new, incurable, STD was widely interpreted as a sign that the sexual revolution was defunct and that the promiscuous would inevitably be punished for their activities. The media helped fuel the backlash against sexual liberism; this backlash would influence the nation’s response to AIDS in the 1980s and eventually result in the “culture wars” of the early 1990s.
Although the Sexual Revolution brought with it some good things, it is part responsibility for widespread STD’s and STI’s, a rise in divorce and single parents, pornography and loss of the meaning of Love. “We’ve got young girls being asked to write their names on their boobs and send pictures. Parents would be really shocked to know this is happening in pretty much every school in the country. Our children are growing up in a very sexualized world.” Claire Perrp MP, 2013 “Never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault - from ads, alcohol marketing, girls’ magazines, sexually explicit tv programmes and the hard pornography that is regularly accessed in so many teenagers bedrooms... Boys are under pressure too, being led to believe that girls will look and behave like porn stars. Our children are becoming victims of pornification.” Steve Biddulph author of ‘Raising Boys.’