Sexual revolution

The sexual revolution was a substantial change in sexual morality and sexual behavior throughout the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The trigger for the revolution was the development of the birth control pill in 1960, which gave women access to easy and reliable contraception.

The nonfiction sex manuals

The court decisions that legalized the publication of Fanny Hill had an even more important effect: freed from fears of legal action, nonfiction works about sex and sexuality started to appear.

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In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men. The title itself would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. (In 1965 she went on to transform Cosmopolitan magazine into a life manual for young career women).

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1962 - Helen Gurley Brown - Sex and the Single Girl - 1965

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In 1969, Joan Garrity, identifying herself only as "J.", published The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman, replete with such things as exercises for improving the dexterity of the tongue.

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1969 - Joan Garrity - The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman

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The same year saw the appearance of Dr. David Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). Despite the dignity of Reuben's medical credentials, this book was light-hearted in tone. For many readers, it delivered quite literally on its promise. One middle-aged matron from a small town in Wisconsin was heard to say "Until I read this book, I never actually knew precisely what it was that homosexuals did."

Related Topics:
David Reuben - Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)

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In 1970, the Boston Women's Health Collective published Women and their Bodies (which became far better known a year later under its subsequent title, Our Bodies, Ourselves). Not an erotic treatise or sex manual, the book nevertheless included frank descriptions of sexuality, and contained illustrations that could have caused legal problems just a few years earlier.

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1970 - Boston Women's Health Collective - Our Bodies, Ourselves

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1972 brought Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making.

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1972 - Alex Comfort - The Joy of Sex

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In 1975 Will McBride's Zeig Mal!, Show Me!, written with psychologist Helga Fleichhauer-Hardt for children and their parents, appeared in bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic. Appreciated by many parents for its frank depiction of pre-adolescents discovering and exploring their sexuallity, it scandalized others and eventually it was pulled from circulation in the United States and some other countries. It was followed up in 1989 by Zeig Mal Mehr! ("Show Me More!").

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1975 - Will McBride - Show Me! - 1989

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These books had a number of things in common. They were factual and, in fact, educational. They were available to a mainstream readership. They were stacked high on the tables of discount bookstores, they were book club selections, and their authors were guests on late-night talk shows. People were seen reading them in public. In a respectable middle-class home, Playboy magazine and Fanny Hill might be present but would usually be kept out of sight. But at least some of these books might well be on the coffee table. Most important, all of these books acknowledged and celebrated the conscious cultivation of erotic pleasure.

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The contribution of such books to the sexual revolution cannot be overstated. Earlier books such as What Every Girl Should Know (Margaret Sanger, 1920) and A Marriage Manual (Hannah and Abraham Stone, 1939) had broken the utter silence in which many people, women in particular, had grown up. By the 1950s, in the United States, it had finally become rare for women to go their wedding night literally not knowing what to expect. But the open discussion of sex as pleasure, and descriptions of sexual practices and techniques, was truly revolutionary. There were practices which, perhaps, some had heard of. But many adults did not know for sure whether they were realities, or fantasies found only in pornographic books. Were they "normal," or were they examples of psychopathology? (When we use words such as fellatio we are still using the terminology of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis). Did married ladies do these things, or only prostitutes? The Kinsey report revealed that these practices were, at the very least, surprisingly frequent. These other books asserted, in the words of a 1980 book by Dr. Irene Kassorla, that Nice Girls Do -- And Now You Can Too!

Related Topics:
What Every Girl Should Know - Margaret Sanger - 1920 - Hannah and Abraham Stone - 1939 - 1950s - Psychopathology - Fellatio - Krafft-Ebing - Psychopathia Sexualis - Irene Kassorla - Nice Girls Do -- And Now You Can Too!

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