The Women’s Movement in the time of the Sexual Revolution helped contribute to redefining women’s sexuality, not in the terms of simply pleasing men any longer but instead there was recognition of women’s sexual satisfaction and sexual desire. Finally "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" by Anne Koedt discovered an understanding of a women’s sexual anatomy. The female anatomy was now given some scientific fact and reasoning for how and why women orgasm the way they do instead of Freud’s basis of women’s vaginal orgasm which was not based on a women’s anatomy, but rather upon his “assumptions of women as inferior appendage to man, and her consequent social and psychological role.” The women’s movement was able to develop lesbian feminism, freedom from heterosexual act, and freedom from reproduction as distillation of feminism during the time of the Sexual Revolution. Feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique in 1963, concerning the many frustrations women had with their lives and with separate spheres, which established a pattern of inequality.
The Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century and the growth of science and technology, medicine and health care, resulted in better contraceptives being manufactured. Advances in the manufacture and production of rubber made possible the design and production of condoms that could be used by hundreds of millions of men and women to prevent pregnancy at little cost.
Advances in chemistry, pharmacology, and biology, and human physiology led to the discovery and perfection of the first oral contraceptives also known as "the Pill". Purchasing an aphrodisiac and various sex toys became "normal". Sado-masochism ("S&M") gained popularity, and "no-fault" unilateral divorce became legal and easier to obtain in many countries during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
All these developments took place alongside and combined with an increase in world literacy and decline in religious observance. Old values such as the biblical notion of "be fruitful and multiply" were cast aside as people continued to feel alienated from the past and adopted the lifestyles of progressive modernizing cultures.
When speaking of sexual revolution, historians make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution. In the first sexual revolution (1870–1910), to caucasians, Victorian morality lost its universal appeal. However, it did not lead to the rise of a "permissive society". Exemplary for this period is the rise and differentiation in forms of regulating sexuality.
Feminism and sexual liberation
Coinciding with second-wave feminism and the women's liberation movement initiated in the early 1960s, the sexual liberation movement was aided by feminist ideologues in their mutual struggle to challenge traditional ideas regarding female sexuality and queer sexuality. Elimination of undue favorable bias towards men and objectification of women as well as support for women's right to choose her sexual partners free of outside interference or judgment were three of the main goals associated with sexual liberation from the feminist perspective. Since during the early stages of feminism, women's liberation was often equated with sexual liberation rather than associated with it. Many feminist thinkers believed that assertion of the primacy of sexuality would be a major step towards the ultimate goal of women's liberation, thus women were urged to initiate sexual advances, enjoy sex and experiment with new forms of sexuality.
The feminist movements insisted and focused on the sexual liberation for women, both physical and psychological. The pursuit of sexual pleasure for women was the core ideology, which subsequently was to set the foundation for female independence. Although whether or not sexual freedom should be a feminist issue is currently a much-debated topic, the feminist movement overtly defines itself as the movement for social, political, and economic equality of men and women. Feminist movements are also involved the fight against sexism and since sexism is a highly complex notion, it is difficult to separate the feminist critique toward sexism from its fight against sexual oppression.
The feminist movement has helped create a social climate in which LGBT1 people and women are increasingly able to be open and free with their sexuality, which enabled a spiritual liberation of sorts with regards to sex. Rather than being forced to hide their sexual desires or feelings, women and LGBT people have gained and continue to gain increased freedom in this area. Consequently, the feminist movement to end sexual oppression has and continues to directly contribute to the sexual liberation movement.
Nevertheless, among radical feminists, the view soon became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as the decreasing emphasis on monogamy, had been largely gained by men at women's expense. In Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, Sheila Jeffreys asserted that the sexual revolution on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression, an assertion that has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism.
Freudian school
Sigmund Freud of Vienna believed human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily by the libido or "Sexual Energy". Freud proposed to study how these unconscious drives were repressed and found expression through other cultural outlets. He called this therapy "psychoanalysis".
While Freud's ideas were sometimes ignored or provoked resistance within Viennese society, his ideas soon entered the discussions and working methods of anthropologists, artists and writers all over Europe, and from the 1920s in the United States. His conception of a primary sexual drive that would not be ultimately curbed by law, education or standards of decorum spelled a serious challenge to Victorian prudishness, and his theory of psychosexual development proposed a model for the development of sexual orientations and desires; children emerged from the Oedipus complex, a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. The idea of children having their parents as their early sexual targets was particularly shocking to Victorian and early 20th century society.
According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage of a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation. Much of his research remains widely contested by professionals in the field, though it has spurred critical developments in the humanities.
Anarchist Freud scholars Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution") developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s to 1930s in which the animal-like competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per the freudian interpretation, and hence the liberation of sexual behavior a mean to social revolution.
Kinsey and Masters and Johnson
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred C. Kinsey published two surveys of modern sexual behaviour. In 1948 Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-workers, responding to a request by female students at Indiana University for more information on human sexual behavior, published the book Sexual behaviour in the Human Male. They followed this five years later with Sexual behaviour in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality.