The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD
did behind closed doors. Although some of his data was debatable because of whom he chose or had available to interview, the general nature of his results changed attitudes as to what reality was when it came to what people were doing sexually.
Right on the cusp of the change in sexual behavior in 1966 came the Masters and Johnson report on Human Sexual Response. While almost too dull to read, it demonstrated the capacity of women to enjoy sex and opened the door to experimentation on how women could achieve orgasm. This was followed by their 1970 book on Human Sexual Inadequacy that was soon a standard on the desks of all therapists working with sexual problems of their clients.
Scientific breakthroughs
The birth control pill became available in the early ’60s giving women much more control over pregnancy. Previously one of the arguments women used against having sex before marriage was the danger of becoming pregnant. With the pill this argument became weaker. This was despite the fact that most physicians would not give a prescription for the pill to unmarried women.
Some of my older readers will remember that when a couple was discussing whether or not to have sex, it was often like a small debate with him giving arguments for and she giving arguments against. Besides her need to be a virgin when she married, the woman’s two big arguments against having premarital intercourse were the fear of pregnancy and the fear of sexually transmitted diseases.
The sexually transmitted disease argument became weaker after the discovery of penicillin during World War II. It was effective against two big STD’s at the time, syphilis and gonorrhea. The evolution of gonorrhea resistance was not a known factor at the time, and of course with the sexual revolution we discovered many new STD’s.The possibility of an STD is no longer a strong argument not to have sex, but instead an argument to have safe sex.
Wars
World War II introduced American troops to the sexual behavior of women around the world. They discovered women could enjoy sex and would actively take part in the process.Some of their experiences had been that American women were passive participants in sex and didn’t really enjoy it all that much. This seemed to be related to the Victorian attitude that good women didn’t enjoy sex and did it only to please the uncontrollable sex urges of men.
In 1947 and 1948 I had worked the grain fields of North Dakota with World War II veterans who at times seemed preoccupied with sharing their sexual experiences in France, Germany and Japan.Their changed expectations about women’s sexual responses would have had an influence upon the behavior of the women they had sex with.
In a more indirect way, a bigger influence was the ongoing conflict in Viet Nam. Students who came into our Counseling Center for counseling were trying to find ways to avoid the draft. Resistance to war was high, and with it a questioning of the wisdom of the government in going to war that opened the possibility that other rules of behavior that had previously been accepted as absolute might also be questionable.
The hippie movement appeared to be a direct outgrowth of the resistance to the war. The hippies were against most established institutions, opposed the Viet Nam War, favored the use of drugs and promoted sexual liberation. They got a great deal of media coverage for their Summer of Love in 1967.
Questioning the rules
At that time, the University of Missouri had rules governing student behavior, especially women’s. Dorms had hours at which the women had to be in their rooms with the doors to the dorm locked. Men were not allowed above the first floor, and a man found in a woman’s room would be banished from the university.Women in my classes had to wear skirts to class unless the temperature dropped below freezing.
A counterculture began to develop. Drug use went up; women went for the braless look and began to push for changes in the rules. At one point, the President’s Office at our university was taken over by students protesting the Viet Nam war, and the National Guard was called in to remove them.
At this time, I helped start Everyday People, a center outside the university regulations, to help students with problems concerning drug use, birth control and other sensitive topics because a considerable number of students no longer trusted the administration. I discuss Everyday People more fully in another chapter.
Nationally and on our campus in ’68 and ’69, we began to feel the power of the woman’s movement, gay organizations and Black Power. It was a society in ferment and the world changed.
Role models were different.
I think music is a major influence on behavior, both the words and the dances that go with it. Here, an earthquake in behavior change occurred. First came Elvis Presley whom the public had to be protected from on the Ed Sullivan show by filming him only from the waist up. Then the Beatles were followed by groups whose lyrics became ever more explicit.
In 1953 Playboy was born under the leadership of Hugh Heffner, who had the explicit goal of changing America’s sexual behavior. Between 1962 and 1965 he published a series of editorials he called the Playboy Philosophy, which he saw as a revolt against “narrow, prudish Puritanism.”
In it he predicted the sexual revolution that was just about to take place. Some of the philosophy was an attack on the religious attitudes that regarded women as objects or possessions and refused to recognize her sexual rights. In some ways I saw him as being in league with women’s liberation.
In one of my lectures I still cover the “battle of pubic hair.” The censors evidently watched the Playboy centerfold to prevent Heffner from showing too much, especially pubic hair. He went on a campaign to gradually show more and more. First by showing a black woman dancing across a stage in multiple shots, was there or wasn’t there? Then a woman on a bed with the shadow of a bedpost across her pubic area—again—was there or wasn’t there?
I remember getting copies of the philosophy that had been reprinted as separate documents and using them as stimulus materials in my graduate sex classes. They were not great literature or even particularly deep as thought pieces, but they were in tune with the changes that were taking place in society.
Other men’s magazines more explicit than Playboy entered the market. Bob Guccione began selling Penthouse in the U.S. in 1969. Penthouse was more explicit about sex and its pictures more detailed sexually. The magazine had a section that it claimed were letters from readers, but which appeared to me to have been written by someone with a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis on his desk next to his typewriter. The letters introduced readers to many aberrations.
The rules about what it is acceptable to publish in a magazine were thrown out the window in 1974 by Larry Flynt in his Hustler magazine, which just a few years before would have been seen as hardcore porn. Interestingly I was not aware of my students, graduate or undergraduate, reading the magazine.
Movies, books and censorship
The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (MPAA) in 1930 adopted the Hays rules of censorship that are quite long and forbid practically anything that has to do with sex.The rules or code had to be obeyed if a picture was to receive the office’s “seal of approval.”No showing of bare breasts, the inside of a woman’s thigh or a couple in bed together—one of them had to have two feet on the floor. Even words like “damn” or “hell” could not be used.
Previous to the 1950s censors had had considerable oversight as to what the public read and viewed, but in the ’50s censorship began to break down, introducing many people to models of behavior they would never have imagined under the old rules.
In Roth vs. United States in 1957 the Supreme Court ruled that sexually explicit content is protected by the First Amendment unless it lacks “redeeming social importance.” The ruling indicated that anything could be printed or sold unless it was utterly without redeeming social value, and in 1959 books previously considered obscene such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Naked Lunch became available