![]() In the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, recreational sex was morally unacceptable, while gays were openly persecuted. ![]() Male homosexuality, as Oscar Wilde discovered to his cost, was beyond the pale while for Queen Victoria lesbianism was inconceivable (as a consequence, ironically, it was never subject to the legal sanctions suffered by male homosexuals). The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, in the United States and western Europe, a period of sexual conservatism, founded on Victorian moral values which on the one hand denied female sexuality and on the other compelled men to keep their's hidden from public view. The sexual revolution is associated with that period following World War II when capitalist societies abandoned decades of proscriptive attitudes to sexual behaviour and identity, and accepted a new liberalism in such matters. This chapter examines those factors in more detail, beginning with 'the sexual revolution'. My introduction suggested that the contemporary sexualisation of western culture is the product of several factors which together have, on the one hand, had the effect of flooding the media with unprecedentedly explicit sexual representations and, on the other, provoked contentious debates around the meaning and significance of those images. A brief socio-sexual history of the late twentieth century.
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