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penelopekittyFebruary 17, 2025
It started out as women who had never been able to enjoy sex due to social stigmas or even think they deserved an orgasm talking about healthier sexuality. More reliable birth control reduced the very real fear of pregnancy.
However, like most movements designed to improve women's lives it was co-opted and perverted to benefit men.
Young women today would NEVER want to go back to the way things were before. It was horrific and too many young women seem unaware of that.
Elizabelch [OP]February 18, 2025
Young women today would NEVER want to go back to the way things were before. It was horrific and too many young women seem unaware of that.
Can't emphasize this enough.
Also, can we please not force-team trans and the sexual revolution? The sexual revolution was/is not about paraphilia or dysphoria or kink or social contagion.
readfreakFebruary 18, 2025
One reason was easy access to birth control which only happened in the *60s. The counterculture and the whole baby boomer generation rebelled. Women were just as promiscuous as men back then. It was a free for all sexually at least it was in big cities like LA where I grew up.
It started out as women who had never been able to enjoy sex due to social stigmas or even think they deserved an orgasm talking about healthier sexuality.
What was it about that point in history that facilitated these discussions? Why then? What catalyzed it?
m0RT_1February 18, 2025
There was a feminist researcher, Shere Hite who was hounded out of America because she published a study from surveying 1000s of women that indicated that 70% of those women hadn't had orgasms from thrusting intercourse (but were able to achieve orgasm easily by masturbation or other direct clitoral stimulation). It raised a debate on maybe it wasn't the women who were "sexually dysfunctional", but men's approach to sex that caused that gap. Men were furious.
There were other feminists like Germaine Greer writing and promoting books like The Female Eunuch which argued "traditional" patriarchal mores repress women's sexuality, devitalizes them, rendering them eunuchs. That women were shamed into being separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, and from their sexuality.
penelopekittyFebruary 18, 2025
Second wave feminism. Women were very, very unhappy in traditional roles.
Both grassroots movements and top-down influences.
It started as a youth culture/ feminist movement. Feminists wanted women to be free of sexual servitude to men. Challenging conventional norms around marriage, and monogamy, and questioning traditional sexual mores. Where women who wanted an enjoyable sex life were not shamed. The youth culture of the time embraced those ideals.
Enter the media, who saw the opportunity to make $$$ off showing tits and ass, producing endless titillating media products. Not the least bit interested in women's rights but using it as a platform to mainstream porn. It heavily promoted promiscuity without emotional connection.
LilithFebruary 17, 2025
I honestly think there was a lot of it coming from the top, specifically the sexologists who cared much more about men's sexual satisfaction than they did about women. (wanting to "solve" female frigidity and other male frustrations). IMO it was an intentional social experiment that women were dragged along into with the promise of things like less stigma on women and birth control.
PointerFebruary 17, 2025
Bottom-up
The Pill, 1960
Hippie culture, fantastic music, abundant weed, and a glut of young adults all born after their dads came home from WWII, 1967
Roe v. Wade, 1973
Lee-Side_February 17, 2025
The big change was birth control and the "teen" revolution - that young people were a separate culture to themselves for a period of time, between being children and married adults. They had their own movies, music, fashion.
IronicWolfFebruary 18, 2025
Here’s an interesting article from the journalist from Virginia Ironside. The sexual revolution happened to women who’d been taught to never say ‘no’ to men and that the only reason for not having sex was to avoid pregnancy. With the pill and legal abortion you had no excuse to say ‘no’ and would be marked out as a freak. Women felt they had to agree to sex to just be polite (sounds an awful lot like present day hookup culture). I think it was a top down men’s rights movement ultimately.
OxyToxinFebruary 17, 2025
This article has some interesting things to say about the 1940s: Link
ChernobogFebruary 17, 2025
The single motherhood thing definitely corroborates the suspicion that it was more of a men's rights movement to do whatever they wanted and not have any accountability, and whether or not women actually enjoyed any of it was irrelevant.
I think the editor of Cosmo had a large role. So did Gloria Steinem's Ms magazine, of course. Lawrence Lader the "father of abortion" i think had some role as the link suggests. I wonder if Susan Brownmiller's biography touches on it... maybe i am conflating abortion rights and the sexual revolution or maybe there is a link. But i think it's important to learn about how previous efforts were hijacked by men.
It might be worth your time to research media from that time period (1960s/early 70s) that talks about the sexual revolution, sex as part of women's liberation, "free love," birth control, etc. and see what they have to say and if you notice any patterns of media manipulation or advertisement. Anything more modern is going to be a look back through history, not a representation of what the movement looked like at the time.
I grew up "post-revolution" and what I remember is that it was about:
women's reproductive rights
women's control of their own bodies
stopping the shaming of women for ever wanting sex for its own sake (men weren't shamed the same way)
stopping the shaming of women for having sex or children outside of marriage (men weren't shamed the same way)
promoting the idea that women had the right to enjoy sex, not just endure it
None of which is bad and none of which we need to roll back.
What does need a big rethink is the idea that there is something wrong or prudish with not handing out sex to every man who wants it, or that the "sexual revolution" means all sex, all the time, women on demand but this time it's THEIR idea. Because that's the pendulum swinging too far to the other side.
What we do not need or want is for the pendulum to swing too far back the other way, because that wasn't working either. Pendulum swings in either direction mean handing control of women's bodies and sexuality over to men. No thank you.
A better way to even the scales would be to increase the shaming of men who engage in this behavior.