To this day, I continue to be puzzled as to how one disease could’ve put a screeching halt on sexual activity, while a veritable forest of STDs that have been around for centuries…some of them very much fatal, others debilitating…haven’t made on damn dent in shacking up. (Shagging…bonking…I’m not up on the slang-of-the-second, all right?)
Anyway, if sex is dead, why is it that I’m routinely bombarded with e-mail advertising every type of sex fetish imaginable? Why are hook-up services more prevalent than ever? I can now read Playboy in the LIBRARY, for crying out loud. (Not at all ashamed of doing so, either; it’s a fine publication.)
The revolution wasn’t crushed…it just got completely swallowed up by the free market. Like a lot of things in this country.
Sigh. I suspect the OP wasn’t born when the revolution started. The only reason you think the sexual revolution is over is because it is so pervasive that you cannot imagine life without it.
It was never about orgies and forced sex or any of those things. It was about allowing sex to come out in the open, and killing the shame that was put on people. Ever hear “Wake up Little Susie?” That was what life was like before. The first time I visited my gf, now wife at her college I had to stay in the boys dorm. A year later I could stay with her. She was in the south, in Boston those rules fell two years before.
The sexual revolution is about unmarried couples staying in hotels and not signing Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. It is about living together without your parents freaking. It is about gay people on TV. It is about no more double beds for married couples on TV.
Yeah, it is also about pubic hair in magazines, and more available porn, but that’s minor. All the abstinence classes in the world is not going to counteract a kid’s older brother living with his girfriend.
You’ll know the revolution is dead when you can no longer buy condoms in your chain grocer next to the canned peas. Until then, don’t worry.
What happened to the sexual revolution? Its over, the men won.
I think you have it exactly right, unmarried men and women living together was very uncommon before the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution resulted in many more single women living with men, and many more single women with children, as the US Census has shown. Essentially, the sexual revolution mostly benefited men, not women. The men won the sexual revolution, why buy the cow when the milk is free?
There is no cure for herpes. You don’t die from it, but your sex life is pretty much history (if you have a conscious, anyways.) Considering that the other STDs, including herpes, are much more common, that inevitable-death thing must be the factor that has had such a psychological impact. I suspect the psychological impact has had more effect on the population at large than the actual disease, only speaking in terms of youth’s sexual attitudes. Most teens have probably never met a person with AIDS, but they’ve had the fear of the disease pounded into their brains by sex-ed/health teachers for the duration of their formative years.
After all, as a heterosexual male in the USA, the chances of my getting AIDS are slim to none due to the nature of the virus’ transmission. But even a low probabilty risk will induce severe risk-prevention tactics when the potential loss is total. As ol’ Judge Learned Hand formulated it, the burden is weighed against the probability of loss times the magnitude of loss, and if b < p*l you’re begging for trouble.
I also suspect that, at least here in the Midwest (and probably in the South) there has been a religious revival of sorts, and abstinence before marriage is a popular view to hold among the Christian women I know (which, sadly, is a huge chunk of them.)
So women are only worth it if you get married to them ? That sounds like pre-60’s mentality.
What about the opposite view… that women can now have men and don’t need to marry them ? I don’t think men “won” or women “won”. Everyone “won” with less hypicrosy.
I thought the SR was about making choices that suited you. If so, then the the SR has permanently changed the way we think. Sex, no sex, birth control, no birth control, living together, not living together, etc. You pick.
You can’t really sustain a state of Revolution forever (BTW, the majority of the population of the USA did not adopt free-love in the 60s or swinging in the 70s, anyway). Eventually, the Revolutionary fervor is spent, or a sort of point-of-diminishing-returns is reached, and people say “OK, it’s good enough as far as we got!” (AIDS did, of course, serve as a signal for that PODR); or the Revolution becomes the institution, being co-opted by the marketplace. Then the next generation will have to figure when it’s time for the next revolutionary wave.