Sexual Revolutions
Last week we took a tour of the idea of liberalization in the 20th century as it applies to sexuality. Clearly, both behavior and attitudes about sex and sexual behavior have changed enormously in the century we just left. Liberalization, however, generally contains an idea of progress, a sense that there is a direction for sexual relations. We can only find directions of change and meanings like progress retrospectively and then retrofit those directions and meanings onto a much more chaotic set of developments. Depending on the timeframe you examine or the point of view you take on any set of changes, you may have a difficult time believing in the liberalization model when you go to bed at night.
Another way of understanding changes in sexuality in the 20th century is through the notion of revolution. This has become a well-established image in historical change, as in “the scientific revolution,” “the industrial revolution,” “the democratic revolutions.” It is also at the heart of Marxist thought, where revolution results from the continual conflicts generated by changes in economic systems and their associated class systems. The analogy with sexuality works fairly well. A set of repressive ideas and systems are challenged by innovators, new ideas, social change, and raw libido until the old sexual system caves in and startling new practices and ideas prevail. We’ve all taken for granted, for most of our lives, that a sexual revolution tore through American society in the 1960s (or thereabouts) that has given us the sexual freedom we enjoy today. Revolution may work as a stand-in for liberalization if you don’t feel you can abandon it entirely. Rather than a steady progression from repression to freedom you can see repression wrecked by the forces of sexual revolution, resulting in the freer standards and actions that most of us (except parents) agree make life better. So, if we want to think seriously about sex in the 20th century, we have to look at revolution.
Historians today do not give much time or attention to sexual liberalization, except to attack it as an intellectual red herring. Revolution, on the other hand, enjoys wide acceptance. Most social historians would agree that the 20th century gave us two sexual revolutions. Judge Ben Lindsey, writing in the 1920s, had already begun to chronicle the “ways, customs, purposes, visions, and modes of thought” of the “flapper-flipper world” that had challenged the wisdom of the adult world. Historians such as Gilman Ostrander, Paula Fass, John Modell, and Kevin White (and Spurlock and Magistro) have generally agreed that economic and social changes, ranging from urbanization to mandatory school attendance (with a mix of World War and technology) undermined Victorian attitudes and replaced them with a far more open and permissive attitudes toward sex. In 1900 a girl who stayed out all night, kissed, petted, and drank with boys could end up in front of a juvenile court judge and face a sentence to one of the new reformatories designed especially for girls and young women with precocious sexuality. By 1925 a girl who acted the same way might be elected prom queen. Now that is a revolution!
The second 20th century revolution began in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s. Beth Bailey has recently chronicled the changes in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas. The youth culture that opposed segregation and war in Asia also took aim at the repressive sexual attitudes of postwar America. A growing segment of adolescents and young adults assumed an entitlement to sex before marriage, and by the 1970s even young women rapidly gave up prospective marriage as a necessary rationale for intercourse. The birth control pill became available, in theory, in 1960, and by the 1970s was available in practice even to unmarried women. Abortion, illegal everywhere in 1960, was legal everywhere in 1973. Even gay sexualities gained more visibility and legitimacy following the Stonewall riot of 1969 and the gay pride movement of the 1970s. Taken together, the sexual revolutions of the 1920s and the 1960-70s can provide sufficient explanation for the end of Victorian morality and the kind of physical intimacy that we practice today.
But, while the sexual revolutions seem to explain everything, for such important developments they can be devilishly tricky to pin down. When did the revolutions occur? We talk about the 1920s and the 1960s, but there are claims for a sexual revolution in the late 19th century. Pretty much everyone agrees that the 1930s to early 1940s were pretty un-revolutionary, but Pitrim Sorokin was already writing about The American Sex Revolution in 1956. At the OAH two weeks ago Alan Cecil Petigny presented a paper on the rapid changes that took place in American sexual mores during the 1950s. Afterwards, in his comments, he pointed out that it was in the 1940s that illegitimacy and pre-marital pregnancy rose more rapidly than ever before or since, suggesting that the revolution had begun long before acid-dropping hippies declared “make love not war.” And you can also easily argue that the real changes took place in the 1970s. Or, take another look at the chart showing the increase in 19-year old women who had engaged in intercourse. From its baseline in 1906, the line of increase rises without any apparent hesitation until in levels off in the 1980s. So what sends the percentages upward so relentlessly if not a revolution with widening consequences as the century goes on? This all suggests a kind of Trotsky-ist permanent sexual revolution.
But what, exactly, do we mean when we talk about a “revolution?” In political history this issue has demanded careful attention. Back in the late 1970s, when I was earning a master’s degree in history, revolution had a charisma that I’m not sure it still holds. Marxist historians contrasted “real” revolutions like the French one and the Russian one with sort of half-baked revolutions like the American one. My only sense that these invidious comparisons still hold meaning is the persistent debate of “how revolutionary was the American revolution?”
In the history of sexuality, however, we need to ask what it is that we consider revolutionary? I’ve noted the remarkable change of attitudes from 1900 to the 1920s. Sociologist Ira Reiss, in Premarital Sexual Standards in America asserted that in 1960 when the book was published, the United States held to the formal standard of abstinence but also practiced an informal double standard (i.e., abstinence for girls and women, but promiscuity for boys and men). Yet even at that time it was clear that most women must have accepted some version of what Reiss called “permissiveness with affection,” since most women by then lost their virginity to lovers or fiancés before marriage. Permissiveness with affection, in fact, has become the accepted standard for sexual relations unless you are an evangelical minister or a politician.
So when, and how, did this standard become, uh, standard? And why do we so readily accept coitus as the sine qua non of physical intimacy? Because permissiveness in the form of kissing and petting became the common, almost universal practice of teenagers by the 1920s. And it wasn’t permissiveness with affection, either. Once we abandon a coito-centric view of sexuality, new possibilities arise (so to speak).
Revolution certainly helps us make sense of change in sexual beliefs, attitudes, and practice. Change apparently happens pretty rapidly, after a long period of mounting opposition to prevailing standards. And when change comes, it also seems to come in attitudes and behaviors of all kinds. Still, revolution seems clearer and more powerful as an explanation the further we stand from it. Like liberalization, we need to retrofit it to our understanding of the past. There now exists another widely accepted view in discussions of sexual change. We’ll take it on next week.
Comments
There's a tremor building pressure under the very surface of present day Indian society and most people aren't aware that it's been sneaking up on them for a while now.
But I do have a question (surprise surprise). Why is it that liberalization or "an idea of progress" is measured with how comfortable a generation is with discussing sex? Is there no other yardstick? Or is there a direct relation with sexual freedom and how women are treated at any given point in time?
I'm not being cynical here. Just a little muddled.
Posted by: Neha | April 9, 2004 10:21 PM
Tune in again next week for more talk about sex? John, you're quite the tease...
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | April 9, 2004 11:21 PM
I will take Dr. Jerz' comment as a compliment. As a historian of sexuality, I know that it is possible, probably (alas) common, for scholars to make even sex boring. I hope not to do that--I expect discipline from Blue Monkey readers if I do.
Neha, you bring up some very good points. The sexual liberalization idea sounds like a neutral, social development. It's not. It is a value judgment imposed on a pattern that itself is imposed on the chaos of lived experience in past time. That judgment has it that more talk about sex, and just more sex, is good. It's Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness." It's Bentham's "greatest good for the greatest number." But if we want to do justice to the way sexual attitudes and behaviors have changed over the last century, then the unitary direction and value of liberalization doesn't quite cut it.
Posted by: John | April 10, 2004 10:27 PM
"Or is there a direct relation with sexual freedom and how women are treated at any given point in time?"
Spock:Has your research shown any connection here? It seems that in "repressive" societies we in the U.S. cite statistics and anecdotes how those societies/countries demean or abuse women. However, there also seems to be a connection between high levels of sexual liberty (like our high acceptance of dirty movies and pictures that are categorized by a four letter abbreviation that the SHU blogger has blocked but it starts with a p and rhymes with corn, for instance) and abuse of women (and children).
Is there a balance?
Posted by: ambrose | April 11, 2004 2:42 AM
Just to clarify -- the reason I blocked that word is because it's part of a list that blocks 90% of the comment spam (unrelated advertising placed in the comments fields) of the 50-80 weblogs I administer. There's supposed to be more advanced spam-blocking features in the next upgrade of MoveableType, which has been "just around the corner" for several months.
Before I added that spam filter, there were more spam comments being added to the site than real comments.
Meanwhile, a common workaround is to use the numeral zero for the "o" in that word.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | April 11, 2004 3:47 PM
Wouldn't the spammers figure that out, too? :-)
Posted by: ambrose | April 11, 2004 7:18 PM
Ambrose raised a very interesting point. In a society with a disparity in the advantages available to men and women, changes in the direction of freer sex standards can easily work in favor of the gender with greater advantages (i.e., the guys). One of the studies of the "s_x revolution" of the 1960s and 70s had a comment from a young woman that went something like: "Free love for men means the freedom to fug. For women it means the freedom to get fugged." Except she did not use the verb fug.
On the other side of the the repression coin, ms. a may remember from Women's History that during the 19th century middle-class women supported strict limits on the sex act, even in marriage, as a means of taking some control over sexuality and so also of childbearing. The sexual prudery of the 19th century, and women's putative "passionlessness" offer part of the explanation for the extraordinary drop in the birthrate for American women during the century and also for the growing status of women who became leaders in every important area of reform and social change.
I don't think this has to work just one way. But it does help us keep in mind that freer discussion of s_x, and more casual acceptance of s_x acts isn't necessarily a sign of a better world.
Posted by: John | April 11, 2004 8:58 PM
Perhaps, but their goal is to trick Google into thinking that their pages rank highly for a particular term... that word mis-spelled with a zero is not the word for which they want to be ranked highly.
Just testing... sex.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | April 11, 2004 11:13 PM
"I don't think this has to work just one way. But it does help us keep in mind that freer discussion of s_x, and more casual acceptance of s_x acts isn't necessarily a sign of a better world."
I can only imagine what it must have been like to have lived during the 70's. Thank you much. You just answered my question.
Posted by: Neha | April 11, 2004 11:55 PM
How could I forget ANYTHING from that women's studies classes. Normally 18-year-olds don't get to read Erica Jong for homework and have to discuss the Zipless Fug as a cultural metaphor.
There's something to that older ideal, though-- the Potent Power of Prudery. Okay, the alliteration is silly, but how different our world would be if Margaret Sanger had been a champion of that sort of attitude as birth control rather than the Pill.
Posted by: ambrose | April 12, 2004 3:19 AM
The two sexual revolutions Dr. Spurlock mentions in "Sexual Revolutions," undoubtedly spurred from cultural revolutions and scientific discoveries that occured in the 20th century. When the 1920's are mentioned in the same sentence as sex, I immediately think of Iceberg Slim's book "Pimp."
The pimp game really exploded during the 1920's while other cultures of the world were killing women if they lost their virginity before marriage, which, to the surprise of many, still happens today. What kind of influence do hookers have on little girls on vacation that happen to be driving through Nevada, where prostitution is legal. Is advertising sex okay?
Posted by: chance | September 9, 2004 7:20 PM
wow, this really hits home on why expressing sexual allusion in the media, as well as sexuality, is so prominent in today's society. i'm actually doing a project on sex in the media, because i am studying to be a sex therapist, and this really helped. more people should view this very unbias perspective of sexual liberation through the years, and take it into consideration. do you think you could an article on this same topic, except the view is sexual liberation through the years in other countries? thanks!! : )
Posted by: VJ Dorsey | November 6, 2007 12:38 AM
One of the main attractions of our thinking today in entertainment is sex. Sex is the main emphases in everything in our life today. It is on the radio. It is on TV. It is in the movies. It is in the advertisement. It is in the magazines. It is in the rap jungle noise. It is in the music we lessen to especially the country western stuff.
What are they saying in all the movies, rap, and advertisements is there is nothing wrong with homosexually, there is nothing wrong with lesbianism, there is nothing wrong with promiscuity, nothing wrong with having sex when you feel like it, and there is nothing wrong with having sex before marriage.
Where does all this come from? It comes from the human viewpoint of corrupt man and promoted by the pit of hell!
Solomon had more women in one year than anyone could have in a life time today. And what he says about it is it was futile, meaningless, empty, and vanity. Solomon is going to tell us the outcome of all this pleasure. If Solomon would have told us the excitement that pleasure gives without first making it clear that the side effects are devastating we would get caught up in the excitement and ignore the side effects.
I wonder if young people of today would listen to what Salomon says instead of the lies they are feed today. Solomon tells us about the side effects. The writers of today tell us about the excitement and fun without warning us of the side effects. Today they tell us if it feels good do it and this is subtly indicated in all the things we have mentioned.
o The pornography of today does not tell us all the heartache, misery, and suffering that come with this lustful pleasure. Is it worth it? Is all this pleasure worth the outcome of the suffering? If you think it is your missing the point. Go on the internet to www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/guide/sexual-health-stds and you can learn about all this misery and suffering that can come from sex apart from marriage. This web site is not published when they advertize about pornography.
According to the American Social Health Organization, one out of four teens in the United States becomes infected with an STD each year and by the age of 25, half of all sexually active young adults will get an STD.
STDs are serious illnesses that require treatment. Some STDs, like AIDS, cannot be cured and are deadly.
I’m telling you it is horrifying what people do for a little pleasure.
Alice Dexter a victim of AIDs wrote this when she found out she only had 9 months to live. All of my life being brought up in a religious home with parents who instilled moral values within me. I was taught to preserve myself sexually for the man I would marry. I remained a virgin until age 24. It was then that I met Ron and we dated a couple of times and then one night I had too much to drink. It was that night that I lost my virginity and contacted AIDs. Even thought we did what we are told to do today have safe sex. Ron had apparently picked up the disease from other sexual encounter that could not be traced. It was my first and last sexual experience.
Do you hear things like this when you watch this glamorization of sex on TV, the movies, and all the rest of the advertisement of sex. You do not hear things like this when you listen to the wicked rap noise which is designed to put a nation in bandage because it is evil and Satanic in origin.
Posted by: Harvey Ventrello | June 24, 2008 12:23 AM