The Sexual Revolutions
of the 1960s in the US
”Movements” and ”Revolutions”
• 1960s in the US: jokes and realities
• legacy of the 1950s: conformity and rebellion
(teenager)
• social criticism: Whyte, Riesman, Beats
• under the surface: race, ethnicity, gender
• 1960s criticism: Vietnam, Cold War, nature
• social sciences: ”conflict” histories, New Left
• ”sex, drugs, and rock and roll”
• ”movements” become ”revolutions” from draft
resistance through CRMs to feminism
Before the Sexual Revolutions
• sexual taboos: abortion, prostitution, etc.: sin,
crime, or illness? cf. Freud
• language of abuse: perv, freak, deviant, faggot
• 1950s: Gay Rights Movement starts as
homophile movement (ONE magazine)
• 1952: Transvestia: Journal of the American
Society for Equality in Dress
• traditional roles: whose place where?
• drive-ins, double features and teenagers: sexual
liberation and contraceptives
Reich and the Sexual Revolution
• Wilhelm Reich, Freud and psychoanalysis
• The Sexual Revolution (1945): originally: Die Sexualität
im Kulturkampf (1936)
• Authoritarian states suppress sexual drives and desire to
promote ”bourgeois sexual morality”
• Sanctity of marriage, lack of sexual education,
persecution of ”deviance”, opposition to abortion (focus
on the SU) = unnatural controls make people sick
• Arrested several times in the US, books burnt by
authorities, etc.
• Christopher Turner, Adventures in Orgasmatron.
Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (London: Fourth
Estate, 2011).
The Kinsey Report(s)
• Alfred Kinsey: biologist and zoologist, studied
human and animal sexual behavior at the Kinsey
Institute
• Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948):
instant bestseller, a media scientist
• 0-6 scale from hetero- to homosexuality, with X
for sexual inactivity
• follow-up: Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female (1953)
• homosexuality in the animal world demonstrated
• avoided ”taboo” issues like transsexuality
Sexual Revolutions 1: Women’s Lib
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
and ”the problem that has no name”
• NOW (1966) and its BofR
• hippie communes and free sex and a new
generation of contraceptives and condoms
• ERA second try, second failure
• abortion: Roe vs. Wade, 1973 SC decision
• radical feminism: Anne Koedt, ”The Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm” (1970) and the ”sexually
expendable male”
• ”The Redstockings Manifesto” (1969)
Sexual Revolutions 2: Hollywood
• film set the women’s movement back: male filmmakers
and the female body
• Hays Code: no graphic sexual content or violence (193268)
• challenge from France: Godard, Truffaut
• 1967: Bonnie and Clyde, 1968: The Wild Bunch, 1969:
Easy Rider, 1970: Zabriskie Point and Woodstock
• softcore: 1974: Emanuelle
• emergence of hardcore, but in separate movie theaters:
1970: Mona, the Virgin Nymph and 1972: Deep Throat
• 1953: Playboy launched w. MM as centerfold (Hugh
Hefner)
Sexual Revolutions 3: Gay Lib
• the last of the movements, confined largely to
NYC and SF: ”gay pride parades” and ”coming
out”
• language: queer, dyke, drag
• 1966: Vanguard (SF) and Gay Manifesto (Carl
Wittman, 1970)
• persecution by police: Stonewall Riots, NYC
1969: national media attention
• backlash in the 1980s, revived in the 2000s: gay
marriage, military service, etc.
Sexual Counterrevolution
• 1980s: Reagan and back to the 1950s + AIDS
as ”God’s punishment for homosexuals”
• Early 1990s: the ”rape” debates, and MC and
PC
• 9/11: return of the Christian rhetoric: gay
marriage, abortion (pro life vs. pro choice), ”don’t
ask, don’t tell” in the military
• 2012 campaign: contraceptives, abortion, gay
marraige, etc. again: mobilizes the conservative
right
• key: private sphere drawn into politics: reason
vs. ethics (or supposed ethics)
Additional Reading
Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood. Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in
American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Escoffier, Jeffrey, ed. Sexual Revolution. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2003.
Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty. A History of Women in America. New York:
Free Press, 1989.
Farber, David R. The Age of Great Dreams. America in the 1960s. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1994.
Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hardcore. How the Struggle over Censorship Saved
the Modern Film Industry. New York and London: New York University
Press, 2002.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed. A History of Transsexuality in the
United States. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Sides, Josh. Erotic City. Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San
Francisco. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Toffoletti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. Feminism, Popular Culture and the
Posthuman Body. New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.