The fact that pornography was less stigmatised by the end of the 1980s, and more mainstream movies depicted sexual intercourse as entertainment, was indicative of how normalised sexual revolution had become in society. Magazines depicting nudity, such as the popular Playboy and Penthouse magazines, won some acceptance as mainstream journals, in which public figures felt safe expressing their fantasies.
Feminists have offered mixed responses to pornography. Some figures in the feminist movement, such as Andrea Dworkin, challenged the depiction of women as objects in these pornographic or "urban men's" magazines. Other feminists such as Betty Dodson went on to found the pro-sex feminist movement in response to anti-pornography campaigns. In India, an organization named Indians For Sexual Liberties is advocating the leglization of the porn business in India. The organization's founder, Laxman Singh, questioned the reasoning behind deeming as illegal the depiction of legal acts.[39]
Premarital sex
Premarital sex, which had been heavily stigmatised for some time became more widely accepted during the sexual revolution. The increased availability of birth control (and the quasi-legalisation of abortion in some places) helped reduce the chance that pre-marital sex would result in unwanted children. By the mid-1970s the majority of newly married American couples had experienced sex before marriage.
The central part of the sexual revolution was the development of relationships between unmarried adults, which resulted in earlier sexual experimentation reinforced by a later age of marriage. The counterculture and the new left were the source of this later age of marriage. Americans were attending colleges and rebelling against their parents' ideals, which caused them to marry later in age, if at all. This meant that on average, Americans were becoming more sexually experienced before they entered into monogamous relationships. The increasing divorce rate and the decreasing stigma attached to divorce during this era also contributed to sexual experimentation. By 1971, more than 75% of Americans thought that premarital sex was okay, a threefold increase from the 1950s, and the number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 1960 to 1976. Americans were becoming less and less interested in getting married and settling down and less interested in monogamous relationships. In 1971, 35% of the country said they thought marriage was obsolete.
The idea of marriage being out-of-date came from the new development of casual sex between Americans. With the development of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion in 1973, there was little threat of unwanted children out of wedlock. Also, during this time every sexually transmitted disease was treatable; there was no incurable bacterial STDs, no AIDS.
Swinger clubs were organizing in places ranging from the informal suburban home to disco-sized emporiums that promised a smorgasbord of sexual possibilities and free mouthwash. In New York City in 1977, Larry Levenson opened Plato's Retreat it was probably the closest that heterosexual America has ever gotten to the sexual frenzy of gay bathhouses. The retreat was eventually shut down in 1985 because of the constant hassle from public health authorities.[23]
Politics of sex
Politics in the United States has become intertwined with sexually related issues, called the "politics of sex".] A differing view of abortion pitted pro-life activists against pro-choice activists.
Women and men who lived with each other without marriage sought "palimony" equal to the alimony.] Teenagers assumed their right to a sexual life with whomever they pleased, and bathers fought to be topless or nude at beaches.]
Criticism
Fraenkel (1992) believes that the "sexual revolution", that the West supposedly experienced in the late 1960s, is indeed a misconception and that sex is not actually enjoyed freely, it is just observed in all the fields of culture; that is a kind of taboo behavior technically called "repressive desublimation".
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. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist sex wars broke out due to disagreements on pornography, on prostitution, and on BDSM, as well as sexuality in general.
Backlash
Allyn argues that the sexual optimism of the 1960s waned with the economic crises of the 1970s, the massive commercialization of sex, increasing reports of child exploitation, disillusionment with the counter-culture and the New Left, and a combined left-right backlash against sexual liberation as an ideal. The discovery of herpes escalated anxieties rapidly and set the stage for the nation's panicked response to AIDS.
Although the rate of teenage sexual activity is hard to record, the prevalence of teenage pregnancy in developed nations such as Canada and the UK have seen a steady decline since the 1990s. For example, according to some statistics, in 1991 there were 61.8 children born per 1,000 teenage girls in the United States. By 2013, this number had declined to 26.6 births per 1,000 teenage girls.
(Adapted 2018 from Wikipedia by Bob)
Ted Mark and his Man from O.R.G.Y.
In the context of the sexual revolution, a number of authors emerged in the late sixties who surfed on the movement. One of them was Ted Mark. He produced two scores of novels rife with sex scenes clothed with crime and espionage action and tongue-in-cheek parody.
His Man of O.R.G.Y, Steve Victor, probably the epitome of his work.
Mark’s (pseudonym of Ted Gottfried) novels are generally reviewed as “literate smut”. A somewhat too derogatory opinion offered by bourgeois critics. Literate they are in that they are rather well-written, although filled with many digressions about sexual habits in various countries, re-enforced by references to abundant formal literature on the subject. Too many digressions, in fact. Mark justifies them by having Victor as a researcher in the context of the Kinsey report (1948 and 1953) which really triggered the sexual revolution in the USA. He also uses knowledge derived fro the famous and pioneering Masters and Johnson work Human Sexual Response of 1966, without actually mentioning the work. Finally, he refers to a number of culture-based sex manuals of foreign civilizations. This makes it believable that Ted Mark is a scholar in the subject, somewhat like his Victor character, who, above and beyond his job as a spy is a sex investigator.
These digression virtually disappear as from the second installment in the series. References to political events remain abundant. This is especially notable in “The Beauty and the bug”, surfing rather explicitly on the Nixon Watergate affair.
The novels of Mark were a rage during the late sixties and early seventies, to be completely forgotten today. When they hit the market they were definitely shocking to an American public, rather puritan and religious. They were much better accepted in California, particularly in Los Angeles, were sexual liberations had its heyday.
During the seventies, they were also largely sold in the Netherlands, were the sexual revolution had hit rather hard as well. I imagine that was also the case in Sweden…
Mark has composed his spy, Steve Victor, in the wake of Spillane’s Mike Hammer, with the sadism toned down, and also in the wake of the James Bond frenzy (started in 1962 and having culminated with Goldfinger and Thunderball).