Forget the Swinging Sixties: It was the Seventies that saw an explosion in promiscuity, abortion and pornography - says historian, Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail, 27 September, 2010 Sandbrook’s 2500 word article for the Daily Mail was adapted from his, State Of Emergency, Sandbrook claims, “The ‘Swinging Sixties’ was still quite conservative in attitude and behaviour. It was the Seventies that was permissive and self-indulgent. This was the “watershed era of freedom that changed society for ever.” In the Sixties “Most teenage boys not only expected their bride to be a virgin, but agreed that a boy should marry a girl if he got her pregnant.”
Surveys showed that the Sixties generation were more chaste than those in the 70s, “only one in ten people was even vaguely promiscuous.” It was the “Seventies that changed things, and the “key to all this,” says, Sandbrook, “is the Pill.” It was in 1970 that the pill became available to single women. Sandbrook, says, this was “the landmark moment.” By the end of the Eighties, 90 per cent of women are said to have been on the pill. “The Swinging Seventies, was the real revolution.” “The historic bond between sex and childbirth was broken. The Pill meant that ‘sex was not a big risk any more. . . From that point onwards, there was no going back.” Sex was available to anyone and everyone without apparent consequences. It was then “sex became the perfect vehicle for advertisers and marketing men.”
“Sensuality was readily turned to profit, from cosmetics that promised to make girls more alluring to magazines offering tips on getting and pleasing a man. All of this hammered home the simple message - sex was no longer serious, it was fun.” Sex-manuals hit the best seller’s lists.
“There is little doubt,” says Sandbrook, “that in the course of one generation, sexual behaviour and attitudes underwent a tremendous change. Sex was no longer a private expression of intimacy between husband and wife but the ultimate form of recreation.” Remaining celibate until the wedding day “seemed downright bizarre.” “In the late Eighties, fewer than one in 100 women was a virgin on her wedding day - an extraordinary transformation from the two-thirds of the late Sixties.”
But sexual liberation and self-indulgence has not come without a cost. There was a darker side. Sexual emancipation also meant sexual exploitation by liberated men as well as a growth in unrestrained sexual predators. ‘What did women get out of it? Lots of bad sex and lots of sexually transmitted diseases,’ says Sandbrook.
“Society’s freer attitude to sex was even more costly. Despite the Pill, there was an astonishing rise in illegitimacy.” “Single mothers still found life hard and society highly censorious, which perhaps explains why abortion clinics saw so much trade.” ”When abortion was legalised in 1967, it was generally seen as a long-overdue measure to regulate an appallingly dangerous backstreet business of rushed and bloody affairs in dingy flats and dirty bathrooms. Here was a humane and sensible measure to safeguard the lives of thousands of frightened women.
“Most experts predicted that after a brief flurry, the number of terminations would decline as better contraception and sex education made them unnecessary. What nobody expected was that the figures would go through the roof.”
Television joined in the sexual revolution with no apologies for depicting “female nudity and utter sexual debauchery.” “A sense developed that cultural change and sexual frankness had gone too far.” ”Campaigners for ‘decency’ worried about the ‘suffering and social damage which is the direct consequence of an increasingly irresponsible attitude to sex, encouraged by an unholy alliance of commercial sex-exploiters and “progressive” protagonists of sexual anarchy’.”
Sandbrook tells of film makers getting away with films which showed ‘sex in the nastiest, rawest fashion, bestial and perverted, without any question of love or tenderness’.” There were no longer any binding rules, no agreed moral consensus around which people could instinctively rally. That was the real legacy of the Seventies.
Apart from the cost of supporting the many dysfunctional teenage one parent families (the UK has the highest in Europe), just one example of the consequences of the Swinging Seventies comes readily to mind because it was only recently reported in the Daily Mail - one male and 10 mothers costing the tax-payer £1.5m! And that is just one illustration. There have been plenty of those kind of stories with children becoming the victims of our now promisuous society.
As Sandbrook rightly says, there is a cost. There is the human cost, the fragmentation of family, housing problems and the inevitable depravation for growing children -despite the enormous subsidies at the less liberated responsible taxpayer’s expense. And there is the health cost as well as lost human and social values that makes a society successful and civilised,
Read the full Mail article by Dominic Sandbrook here. His article is Adapted from his book, State Of Emergency, published by Allen Lane at £30. At the time of print the Mail was offering a copy for £23 (incl. p&p).
