How Has Sexuality Changed Over The Years

It was January 1964, and America was on the brink of cultural upheaval. In less than a month, the Beatles would land at JFK for the first fourth dimension, providing an outlet for the hormonal enthusiasms of teenage girls everywhere. The previous spring, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, giving voice to the languor of middle-class housewives and boot-starting second-wave feminism in the procedure. In much of the country, the Pill was still only available to married women, but it had nonetheless become a symbol of a new, freewheeling sexuality.

And in the offices of Time, at least one writer was none also happy about it. The U.s. was undergoing an ethical revolution, the magazine argued in an un-bylined 5000-word cover essay, which had left young people morally at body of water.

The article depicted a nation brimful in sexual activity: in its popular music and on the Broadway stage, in the literature of writers like Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, and in the look-but-don't-touch boudoir of the Playboy Club, which had opened four years earlier. "Greeks who have grown up with the memory of Aphrodite can only gape at the American goddess, silken and seminude, in a one thousand thousand advertisements," the magazine declared.

But of greatest concern was the "revolution of [social] mores" the commodity described, which meant that sexual morality, once fixed and overbearing, was now "private and relative" – a affair of individual interpretation. Sex activity was no longer a source of consternation simply a cause for celebration; its presence not what made a person morally suspect, only rather its absence.

The essay may have been published half a century ago, but the concerns it raises keep to loom large in American culture today. TIME's 1964 fears about the long-term psychological effects of sexual practice in pop culture ("no 1 can really calculate the effect this exposure is having on individual lives and minds") mirror today's concerns about the impacts of internet pornography and Miley Cyrus videos. Its descriptions of "champagne parties for teenagers" and "padded brassieres for twelve-twelvemonth-olds" could have been lifted from any number of contemporary articles on the sexualization of children.

We can see the early traces of the belatedly-2000s panic about "hook-up culture" in its observations about the ascent of premarital sex activity on higher campuses. Fifty-fifty the legal furors information technology details feel surprisingly contemporary. The 1964 story references the arrest of a Cleveland mother for giving data most birth control to "her runaway daughter." In September 2014, a Pennsylvania mother was sentenced to a minimum of 9 months in prison house for illegally purchasing her xvi-year-old daughter prescription medication to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

Simply what feels most modern about the essay is its conviction that while the rebellions of the past were necessary and mettlesome, today'southward social changes have gone a bridge too far. The 1964 editorial was titled "The 2nd Sexual Revolution" — a nod to the social upheavals that had transpired 40 years previously, in the devastating wake of the First World War, "when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and all-powerful itself as the Jazz Age." Dorsum then, TIME argued, young people had something truly oppressive to rise up against. The rebels of the 1960s, on the other hand, had only the "tattered remnants" of a moral code to defy. "In the 1920s, to praise sexual liberty was still outrageous," the magazine opined, "today sex is simply no longer shocking."

Today, the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s are typically portrayed as brave and daring, and their predecessors in the 1920s forgotten. Merely the overarching story of an oppressive past and a debauched, out-of-command present has remained consequent. Every bit Australian newspaper The Age warned in 2009: "[m]any teenagers and young adults have turned the gratuitous-sexual activity mantra of the 1970s into a lifestyle, and older generations simply don't have a inkling."

The truth is that the past is neither every bit neutered, nor the present equally sensationalistic, as the stories we tell ourselves about each of them suggest. Contrary to the famous Philip Larkin poem, premarital sex did not begin in 1963. The "revolution" that we now associate with the late 1960s and early 1970s was more than an incremental evolution: prepare in motion every bit much past the publication of Marie Stopes'due south Married Love in 1918, or the discovery that penicillin could exist used to treat syphilis in 1943, every bit information technology was past the FDA'due south approving of the Pill in 1960. The 1950s weren't equally buttoned upward as we similar to call up, and nor was the decade that followed them a "complimentary love" gratis-for-all.

Similarly, the sex lives of today's teenagers and twentysomethings are not all that different from those of their Gen Xer and Boomer parents. A written report published in The Journal of Sex Research this year found that although young people today are more probable to have sexual practice with a casual date, stranger or friend than their counterparts 30 years ago were, they do not have any more sexual partners — or for that matter, more sex — than their parents did.

This is not to say that the world is still exactly as it was in 1964. If moralists then were troubled by the emergence of what they chosen "permissiveness with amore" — that is, the belief that honey excused premarital sex – such concerns now seem amusingly old-fashioned. Love is no longer a prerequisite for sexual intimacy; and nor, for that matter, is intimacy a prerequisite for sex. For people built-in later on 1980, the most of import sexual ethic is non about how or with whom you have sexual practice, just open-mindedness. As ane immature human being amongst the hundreds I interviewed for my forthcoming book on contemporary sexual politics, a 32-year-old call-eye worker from London, put it, "Zippo should be seen as conflicting, or looked down upon as wrong."

But America hasn't transformed into the "sex-affirming culture" TIME predicted information technology would half a century ago, either. Today, simply as in 1964, sex is all over our Tv screens, in our literature and infused in the rhythms of popular music. A rich sex life is both a necessity and a fashion accompaniment, promoted equally the key to skillful wellness, psychological vitality and robust intimate relationships. Only sex also continues to exist seen as a sinful and corrupting force: a view that is visible in the ongoing ideological battles over abortion and birth control, the discourses of abstinence education, and the treatment of survivors of rape and sexual assail.

If the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s made a error, it was in bold that these two ideas – that sexual activity is the origin of all sin, and that it is the source of human being transcendence – were inherently opposed, and that one could exist overcome by pursuing the other. The "2d sexual revolution" was more than than just a change in sexual behavior. It was a shift in ideology: a rejection of a cultural order in which all kinds of sex were had (un-wed pregnancies were on the ascension decades before the advent of the Pill), but the only type of sex it was adequate to have was married, missionary and between a man and a woman. If this was oppression, it followed that doing the reverse — that is to say, having lots of sex, in lots of dissimilar means, with whomever you liked — would be freedom.

Only today'southward twentysomethings aren't just distinguished by their ethic of openmindedness. They as well have a different accept on what constitutes sexual liberty; one that reflects the new social rules and regulations that their parents and grandparents unintentionally helped to shape.

Millennials are mad near slut-shaming, homophobia and rape culture, yep. But they are likewise disquisitional of the notion that being sexually liberated means having a certain blazon — and corporeality — of sex. "There is notwithstanding this view that having sex is an achievement in some way," observes Courtney, a 22-year-onetime digital media strategist living in Washington DC. "Only I don't want to just be sex-positive. I desire to exist 'good sex'-positive." And for Courtney, that ways resisting the temptation to have sex she doesn't desire, fifty-fifty it having it would make her seem (and experience) more progressive.

Back in 1964, TIME observed a similar contradiction in the boxing for sexual freedom, noting that although the new ethic had alleviated some of pressure to abstain from sex, the "competitive coercion to prove oneself an adequate sexual machine" had created a new kind of sexual guilt: the guilt of not beingness sexual enough.

For all our claims of openmindedness, both forms of anxiety are still alive and well today – and that's not but a function of either backlog or repression. It'due south a outcome of a contradiction we are yet to find a mode to resolve, and which lies at the heart of sexual regulation in our culture: the sense that sexual practice can be the best thing or the worst thing, merely it is always important, always significant, and always cardinal to who nosotros are.

It's a contradiction nosotros could still stand to claiming today, and doing and so might just be key to our ultimate liberation.

Rachel Hills is a New York-based journalist who writes on gender, civilization, and the politics of everyday life. Her first book, The Sex activity Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, will be published past Simon & Schuster in 2015.