James Killion
Sexual Revolution
9-6-2015
The sexual revolution, also known as a time of sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout theWestern world from the 1960s to the 1980s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage).The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, premarital sex, homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.
The term "sexual revolution" has been used at least since the late 1920s. Some early commentators believed the sexual revolution of 1960–1980 was in fact the second such revolution in America; they believe that the first revolution was during the Roaring Twenties after World War I and it included writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna Saint Vincent Millay, and Ernest Hemingway. However, the age of changes in perception and practices of sexuality that developed from around 1960 was to reach mainstream, middle-class, even middle-aged America as well as most of western Europe. It brought about profound shifts in the attitudes to women’s sexuality, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality and the freedom of sexual expression. Psychologists and Freudian theorists such as William Reich and Alfred Kinsey influenced the revolution, as well as literature and films, and the social movements of the period, including the counterculture movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement. The counterculture contributed to the awareness of...