Liberalising Heterosexuality?

Abstract

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, distinctive features became evident in sexual mores and sexual behaviour, the essence of which is the now familiar epitaph, 'the swinging sixties'. In popular imagination, the decade of the 1960s in modern industrial societies is specifically associated with sexual liberation. The decade has its own iconography - the mini-skirt, flowers, long hair, public nudity, hallucinogenic drugs, All were the domain of the young and all directly or indirectly involved or entailed open confrontation of the sexual mores of the previous generation. Young people of this period adopted sex just as their own children were to adopt recreational drugs as a marker of the boundary between their world and that of their parents. There was both truth and oversimplification in this popular understanding. The 'truth' was that there was something distinctively different in the construction of heterosexuality in the second half of the twentieth century; the oversimplification lay in the assumption that, qualitatively, different equalled better.