1 gen 1969 anni - Midnight Cowboy movie

Descrizione:

The economic downturn was not the sole source of stress on American families in this era. Some people characterized changes in accepted norms about sex and love as a “sexual revolution.” But the shifting sexual mores of the 1970s were less revolutionary than an evolution of developments in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1910s, Americans increasingly viewed sex as a component of personal happiness, distinct from reproduction. Attitudes toward sex grew even more lenient in the postwar decades, a fact laid bare in the Kinsey studies of the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, sex before marriage had grown more acceptable — an especially profound change for women — and frank discussions of sex in the media and popular culture had grown more common.

Three additional developments cleared space for the sexual changes of the 1970s: the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control, the rise of a baby boomer–led counterculture, and the influence of feminism. First made available in the United States in 1960, birth control medication gave women unprecedented control over reproduction. By 1965, more than 6 million American women were using “the pill.” This medical advance also changed attitudes. Middle-class baby boomers embraced a sexual ethic of greater freedom and, in many cases, a more casual approach to sex outside marriage. “I just feel I am expressing myself the way I feel at that moment in the most natural way,” a female California college student, explaining her sex life, told a reporter in 1966. This stood in contrast to what a rebellious counterculture deemed the “puritanical” sexual outlook of older generations.

Many feminist critics felt that the sexual revolution was by and for men. The emphasis on casual sex seemed to perpetuate male privilege, and if anything a loosening of attitudes increased sexual harassment in the workplace. The proliferation of pornography continued to commercialize women as sex objects. But other feminists remained optimistic that the new sexual ethic could free women from those older moral constraints. They called for a revolution in sexual values, not simply behavior, that would end exploitation and let women enjoy the freedom to explore their sexuality on equal terms with men.

Whether sex was undergoing a revolution or an evolution in the 1970s, popular culture was eager to discuss every aspect. Mass-market books with titles such as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Human Sexual Response, and The Sensuous Man shot up the best-seller list. William Masters and Virginia Johnson became the most famous sex researchers since Alfred Kinsey by studying couples in the act of lovemaking. In 1972, English physician Alex Comfort published The Joy of Sex, a guidebook for couples that became one of the most popular books of the decade. Comfort made certain to distinguish his writing from pornographic exploitation: “Sex is the one place where we today can learn to treat people as people,” he wrote.

Hollywood took advantage of the new sexual ethic by making films with explicit erotic content that pushed the boundaries of middle-class tastes. Films such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Shampoo (1975), the latter starring Hollywood’s leading ladies’ man, Warren Beatty, led the way. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) scrambled to keep its rating system — which rated pictures G, PG, R, and X (and, after 1984, PG-13) — ahead of Hollywood’s advancing sexual revolution.

Couples attending a Marriage Encounter workshop near Boston in 1972. Traditional notions of marriage came under a variety of economic and psychological stresses in the 1970s. Many Americans turned to therapeutic solutions to preserve, or improve, their marriages. Marriage Encounter, founded by priests in the Catholic Church, was one organization that offered couples the opportunity to talk openly about marriage and to learn new skills for navigating the difficulties couples faced. Marriage Encounter was one among dozens of such organizations, both religious and secular, to rise to prominence in the 1970s.

On television, censorship and fears of losing advertising revenue throttled back the frankness of sexual content in the early 1970s. However, by the second half of the decade networks found ways to exploit, and criticize, the new sexual ethic. In frivolous, lighthearted shows such as the popular Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, and The Love Boat, heterosexual couples explored the often confusing, and usually comical, landscape of sexual morality. At the same time, between 1974 and 1981, the major networks produced more than a dozen made-for-TV movies about children in sexual danger — sensationalizing the potential risks of a looser sexual morality.

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