Sexual Revolution Quotes

“It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies"—namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman’s role in what Veblen called “vicarious consumption” was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“The sexual revolution completed the sexualisation of women. Both married and unmarried women were expected now to become experts in sexually servicing men, and to get over their own tastes and interests in order to become efficient at this task.
Where once a large group of single women might have escaped the destiny of servicing men and concentrated upon their own life work, they were now conscripted into compulsory heterosexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“For nearly a decade, their secret remained safe. Rumors of a lab study devoted to sex, operating in the heart of St. Louis, never appeared on television or radio or in print. As a personal favor to Masters, St. Louis Globe-Democrat publisher Richard Amberg vowed his daily newspaper wouldn’t breathe a word to its readers. The city’s other competing paper, owned by Pulitzer, stayed mum. Reporters for the Associated Press and United Press International, the two wire services beaming scoops across the world, also knew of this sensational human experiment but refused to say anything to the American public.”
― Thomas Maier, Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love

“When the entire social organization is plunged into a state of political upheaval, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality will of necessity reach an acute peak. Some will view this state of affairs as moral degeneration, while others will see it as a "sexual revolution." In any event, it is the breakthrough of natural sexuality that is looked upon as "cultural degeneration." This breakthrough is felt to be a "degeneration" only because it constitutes a threat to compulsive morality. Viewed objectively, it is only the system of sexual dictatorship that breaks down, a system devised to preserve compulsive moralistic values in the individual in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“We’ve all heard that women tolerate sex to get relationships, while men tolerate relationships to get sex. That is simply not true—but there is something truly chilling about the fact that most Americans believe it’s true and use this formula as a guide for behavior.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Women's anxiety is not just some unnecessary vestige of a past morality but a realistic response to most, if not all the practices and ideas about sex in this book. The Joy of Sex shows women to be rather unregenerately 'Victorian' in attitude to sex, never quite catching up to what is modern. Women's backwardness was the problem in all sexual-revolution advice literature.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“There is even a certain tendency to punish those who do try to see. A case in point: At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that children are better off when quarreling parents divorce, that broken homes are just as functional as intact ones, and that cohabitation has no influence on the stability of a subsequent marriage. As anyone conversant with the field now knows, newer and more careful studies show all that to be wildly false. A young, untenured family sociologist whom I know used to circulate the results of these new studies secretly among other scholars. But he asked me and his other friends never to mention his name. Why? Because calling the mirage a mirage is a good way to end a career.”
― J. Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex

“All across the region the sexual revolution would arrive by tank.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Sexuality is a terrain of fundamental political struggle and also a medium of emancipation, just as the sexual radicals claimed. A non-repressive society ... would be one in which sexuality is increasingly freed from compulsiveness. Emancipation thus presumes autonomy of action in the context of the generalisation of plastic sexuality. It is separate from permissiveness in so far as it creates an ethics of personal life which makes possible a conjunction of happiness, love, and respect for others.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Sexual emancipation, I think, can be the medium of a wide-ranging emotional reorganisation of social life. The concrete meaning of emancipation in this context is not, however, as the sexual radicals proposed, a substantive set of psychic qualities or forms of behaviour. It is more effectively understood in a procedural way, as the possibility of the radical democratisation of the personal. Who says sexual emancipation, in my view, says sexual democracy. It is not only sexuality at stake here. The democratisation of personal life, as a potential, extends in a fundamental way to friendship relations and, crucially, to the relations of parents, children, and other kin.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“The actors in this sexual revolution bore a closer resemblance to Plato's "huge strong beast" that could be easily tamed by clever guardians than Nietzsche's independent Supermen impelled solely by their own inner dynamic.”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols

“A 1966 book by Russell Trainer entitled The Lolita Complex demonstrates the effectiveness of this learning. It is a work of popular sexology which provides a vehicle for the author to describe the sexual abuse of children all over the world and in history, presumably for the titillation of his male audience. Russell Trainer claimed that 'Lolitaism' was spreading in American society. The sexual abuse of girls is here transformed into 'Lolitaism'. The agency is removed from the male abuser who is indeed scarcely mentioned, to become a problem caused by and consisting in sexually active young girls. This sleight of hand is reminiscent of the way in which male writers on prostitution have traditionally written as if women performed prostitution all on their own to themselves. The male abuser disappears in such work too, and prostitution becomes a problem created by women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The sexual revolution was heterosexual. Even the most progressive of sex-advice writers was unable to conceive of homosexuality in women or men as a reasonable alternative to heterosexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Male and female sexuality are very different, we are told, [...] None the less women are instructed to try to develop male sexual responses in order to be the 'ideal lover'. [...] So clearly sexual behaviour is not natural or inevitable. It can be learned where this serves the interests of male-dominant heterosexuality, and is only disconcertingly recalcitrant where such learning might serve women's interests.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The sexual revolution didn’t make life safer or healthier for women.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“Instead of exercising feminine restraint and dignity, women were “liberated” to engage in hook-up culture and suffer the plight of single motherhood.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“Then, it was easier to build the need for love and sex into the end-all purpose of life, avoiding personal commitment to truth in a catch-all commitment to "home" and "family." . . . . Irwin Shaw, who once goaded the American conscience on the great issues of war and peace and racial prejudice now wrote about sex and adultery; Norman Mailer and the young beatnik writers confined their revolutionary spirit to sex and kicks and drugs and advertising themselves in four-letter words. It was easier and more fashionable for writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: "the theater of the absurd." Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique