Timothy Birdnow

I was discussing the rise of the Sexual Revolution with my friend John Madric. John observed:

This changed in the 60's when very effective birth control became available to women. It meant sex for the most part without the consequences historically acting as a largely impenetrable wall. Before the pill, women for the most part agreed to sex only after marriage, or more commonly, only with the man they were going to marry. Whilst there's a place for sex outside of these confines, sexual freedom has evolved to generations now never knowing a time when sex and pregnancy were not connected. Like many changes were are witnessing, the long term consequences are difficult to predict.

I reply:

John I agree to a point. It certainly accelerated the trend, but that trend had been coming for a long time. I mentioned the Free Love movement which was a turn of the century thing, well before the Pill. And condoms were always available.

The fact is sexual mores had been in decline since the Victorian era, and had been even before that (Victoria and the stricter sexual mores was a reaction to this long-term trend, not something that caused it.) 

The causes are complex. I mentioned deSade, who was quite influential in his time and gave a philosophical basis for free and easy sex. (See  mises.org › library › leftism-de-sade-and-marx-hitler-and-marcuse
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and his work.)

I think this was a coefficient of the decline of Christianity in the West and the risie of the more radical form of Liberalism (the old meaning of the word), the embrace of the radical French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire and others, as well as directly via people like Percy Shelley and many of the German philosophers. The result was sex was seen as a revolutionary act, one that was both entertaining and that dug at the roots of "Christendom" and the power of the Church.

It made it's way into America (a hard nut to crack as America was profoundly religious compared to Europe) via the rising socialist movement, which adopted it from spiritism.

In the end the sexual revolution was a philosophical movement more than anything else, at least at first.

It was helped along by the World Wars where women suddenly found themselves taking on male roles, working in factories and munition plants and the like. They began drinking in taverns, and inevitably the boundaries began to break down, always with the blessing of the "Progessive" news people.

The Roaring Twenties were a time of great sexual experimentation, for instance.

So this has been coming for well over a century and, with the fifties break with traditional culture was ripe for the Sexual Revolution, spurred on by the freedom offered by the Pill. (Of course, the Pill offers zero protection from venereal disease, and we would pay for that later, especially with AIDS.)

I would add the development of penicillin had as much to do with the Sexual Revolution as did anything; you could knock out most of the diseases caught from going where no man should go. Syphillis is treatable with penicillin. Syphillis used to be a dreaded disease, one that took years to heal from if at all.

So I agree with you but I think it a much larger, more complex issue than just the development of contraception.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:53 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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