Sexual Revolution: Myth or Reality

Archive Report

New Permissiveness in Sexual Behavior

Americans, the mass media proclaim, are front-line troops in a sexual revolution. Evidence of the upheaval is everywhere to be seen—in displays of nudity and simulated intercourse on stage and screen, in the reported increase of pre- and extra-marital relations abetted by oral contraceptives, in sex education classes in public schools, in the increasing visibility and militance of homosexuals. The end product of the sexual revolution, its supporters say, will be n “new morality” freed of hypocrisy and fear and grounded in tolerance.

Some psychologists and sexual behaviorists take quite a different view. Rollo May, a professor of psychology at New York University, believes that the chaotic state of current sexual mores is indicative of “a new form of puritanism.” It ...

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