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From Prudery to 'Freedom': A Brief Review of the Sexual Revolution
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15465 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1989 |
8,396 Words |
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J. Gordon Muir
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Revolutions often produce chaos without delivering the freedoms the participants were led to expect. The sexual revolution (which some say began with Alfred Kinsey) has been a case in point. The social consequences are everyday news: teenage pregnancy, abortion, and parents (often single and impoverished); unwanted children; child abuse; and the list goes on. The medical consequences are equally devastating: several venereal disease epidemics (largely unrecognized by those unaffected) bringing untold suffering and costing the U.S. economy several billion dollars each year. There are additional effects in terms of divorce, abandoned families, disturbed children, and the host of social and psychological consequences that follows these traumas.
What happened in the rush of sexual freedom was not the discovery of a new, free, and imaginative society, but one that threw out the baby (necessary codes of conduct for a healthy society) with the bathwater (Victorian prudery, repression, and hypocrisy). Of course, it was impossible for this morality pendulum to have stopped in some sane middle ground because, in addition to being impelled by its own momentum, it was commercially driven by the vast profits to be reaped by catering to a society in which large numbers of people wanted to see and hear everything. And a whole generation was told by many of the people it placed credence in that it was good to see, hear, and do everything.
The result is a society in the United States (and most Western countries) that is ecologically off the tracks--even more than its environmental ecology is derailed. The specifically human ecology is the biological and mental (some would add spiritual) state of society and its members and the interplay of factors (conduct, attitudes) that affect societal well-being. Biologically, the sexual revolution has been devastating--as we shall see. It follows that the psychological impact has been equally serious, if less easy to measure.
By the late 1960s society's moral ozone--the "old taboos"--was fast disappearing. A 1967 Newsweek special report chronicling the progress of the sexual revolution to that high point of the tumultuous sixties makes fascinating reading in retrospect:
The old taboos are dead or dying. A new, more permissive
society is taking shape. Its outlines are etched most
prominently in the arts--in the increasing nudity and
frankness of today's films, in the blunt, often obscene
language seemingly endemic in American novels and plays, in
the candid lyrics of pop songs and the undress of the
avant-garde ballet, in erotic art and television talk
shows, in freer fashions and franker advertising. And,
behind this expanding permissiveness in the arts stands a
society in transition, a society that has lost its
consensus on such crucial issues as premarital sex and
clerical celibacy, marriage birth control and sex
education; a society that cannot agree on standards
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