Initial Impact

BACKGROUND

Both the American Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation Movement beginning in the 1960s are largely a culmination of previous historical events. At the turn of the twentieth century, working class Americans became sexually liberated as both sexes mixed and mingled while enjoying new commercialized entertainment, such as movie theaters and amusement parks. Yet middle class Progressives, who largely retained Victorian concepts of female purity, looked down on this behavior and sought legal reform to control it. These reformers led a crusade against prostitution, among other “vices,” to control working class behavior. This deepened the division between the middle and working classes, but forced the consideration of proper gender roles to the forefront of American consciousness. This transitioned into World War II, in which the homefront relied on the labor of single and married women as men fought overseas. Working women became accepted and even valued as they worked outside of the home for their country, furthering consideration of sex roles. Maintenance of the resulting economic prosperity from the war during the 1950s fed into a heightened consumer culture, in which businesses needed to make frivolous spending a moral act. Capitalism, the enemy of communism, along with sex would do the job.

While large numbers of women returned to domesticity, middle class women settled in as homemakers and men reclaimed the role of breadwinners who spent their wages to combat communism during the 1950s. Businesses began heavily targeting young, single Americans who had extra money to spend by utilizing sex in advertisements and new products, such as the miniskirt. By the 1960s, capitalist values influenced a portion of the middle class to view sex in more liberal terms, while others rejected materialism and critiqued American culture. This, along with an increasing acceptance of singles culture, fed into the Sexual Revolution and the modern Women’s Liberation Movement. The Sexual Revolution is this turn of liberalized sexual behavior and ideas, largely dependent on women. The Women’s Liberation Movement of this time challenged patriarchy and fought for women’s political and social equality. The two were deeply intertwined, significantly due to the sexual behavior of men remaining relatively unchanged in relation to women’s sexual behavior.

INITIAL IMPACT

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when attitutes towards sex in mainstream media were still rather repressive. As capitalism increasingly claimed more consumers to support the economic prosperity of the 1950s by exploiting the Cold War, and to a lesser extent sex, the time was ripe for entrepreneur Hugh Hefner to take advantage of the latter. Before the 1950s ended, Hefner had already sold over a million copies of Playboy. As young, heterosexual, single men were the intended audience, this group made up almost half of Playboy's readers. In spite of the fact that Playboy contained significantly more text than female nudity at this time, the magazine was extremely controversial. This is because Playboy was more explicit than other contemporaneous magazines that embedded sex into commercialism. More importantly, Playboy and its philosophy of sexual freedom for heterosexual, single men was one of the first major threats to the middle class ideology that sex is only moral between married couples. Due to Playboy, liberalization of the single culture was becoming widely accepted by youthful Americans. By the mid-1960s, when our examination of the magazine beings, Hefner was estimated to be worth $100 million. So what was the obviously popular Philosophy advocating in regard to the Sexual Revolution and women's liberation by 1965? The third religious round table discussion explicitly demonstrates this...

The Philosophy
Initial Impact