Sexual Revolution

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s significantly affected the development of masculinity in the United States. During this period, relationships between men and women shifted, and established expectations concerning sexual expression began to alter. There was an increasing liberation of attitudes toward premarital sex, homosexuality, pornography, divorce, abortion, birth control, and sex therapy; and sex itself took on a form of political expression with the increasing power of the feminist and gay rights movements. As a result, versions of masculinity began to emerge that required that men behave in ways that were less authoritative and controlling; they had to recognize the rights of women and sexual minorities and allow voices other than those of the dominant male to be heard. In one way this challenged a status quo that continued to privilege a masculine social ethos, but in another way it offered men the possibility of adopting a different social and cultural position. This revolution encouraged male expressiveness and a loosening of restrictions, and thus privileged male sexuality in an unprecedented way.

The Sexual Revolution had its roots in social, cultural, scientific, and intellectual areas. Socially and culturally, the peace demonstrations and draft-dodging of the 1960s allowed men to avoid or denigrate the machismo that had characterized American masculinity since World War II, while countercultural movements embracing a drug and sex culture pushed permissiveness to the fore and politicized the expression of masculine sexuality.“Make love, not war”was a popular slogan of the 1960s. This atmosphere encouraged the publication of more sexually explicit material for men (pornography became more available after the initial publication of Playboy magazine in 1953) and a growing awareness through school and college courses that masculinity and human sexuality can be carefree (contraceptives such as the birth-control pill, approved by the U.S. government in 1960, prevented pregnancy), promiscuous (awareness of sexually transmitted diseases sharply increased), and experimental (gay and bisexual lifestyles became valid).

In scientific terms, debates about sexuality had become popularized through the distribution of the work of Sigmund Freud (The Hogarth Press's Standard Edition of his complete works appeared between 1953 and 1974), and these became increasingly significant to understanding masculinity after the publication of Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin's book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). Enormous media interest in this book furthered public debate about male sexuality, affecting perceptions of masculinity as a subject of study. William Masters and Virginia E. Johnson furthered the empirical study of sexuality, and in 1966 they published Human Sexual Response, which detailed five stages of sexual encounter: desire, excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution. They advocated the idea of a healthy and multiform human sexuality, furthering a developing masculine consciousness. Their 1970 book Human Sexual Inadequacy prefigured male anxieties such as premature ejaculation and impotency, which came to be spoken about more openly.

Scientific research was mirrored by intellectual inquiry. Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955), argued that sexuality is varied and should be freed from social restriction, an argument that influenced his students at the University of California, Berkeley. At about the same time, Wilhelm Reich developed a theory of orgonamy, which offered liberation in purely genital terms and argued for a primeval and elemental sexual force of which human sexuality was only a part. Reich's book, The Sexual Revolution: Towards a Self-Regulating Character Structure appeared posthumously in 1974. Marcuse and Reich fused the theories of Marxism and psychoanalysis into a revolutionary sexual radicalism that shaped understandings of masculinity and sexuality for the remainder of the twentieth [Page 419]century. Their work created a new awareness of male sexuality, which previously had been taken for granted.

...