So You Say You Want a (Sexual) Revolution?

Bureau of Lost Culture

The pill, Profumo, pornography. Love, liberation and libido. Larkin, Lady Chatterley, Lolita,
*No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and more vilified than the 1960s.
*For some it was a time when music, fashion and drugs enabled young people to express their individuality and freedom and their hopes and dreams of a better world.
For others, it marked the advent of the permissive society, the undermining of authority, family values and common decency.
*And at the heart of this continuing controversy was ..sex.
*PETER DOGGET, journalist, cultural critic and writer, whose book 'Growing Up: Sex in the 60s' takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution, came into the Bureau to explain that while the orgiastic hedonism, ever-changing partners and polymorphous perversity of countercultural myth was enjoyed by a tiny minority, the vast majority of the British population could only gawp from the sidelines, still living in a world with a moral code that stretched back to the Victorian Age. We talk about the battle between two opposing forces: the urge to free the body from guilt, and the desire to control, cannibalise and exploit that liberation for profit or pleasure - plus VD, groupies, The Beatles miniskirts, Germaine Greer and Jane Birkin (RIP). *For more on Peter and his work *Get our Counterculture newsletter *The Bureau of Lost Culture Home #sex #counterculture #sexualrevolution #sexualliberation #libido #permissivesociety #thepill #miniskirt #hippie #commune #blowup #janebirkin #sergegainsbourg #nabokov #freelove #sohoradio