Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...general, 70% subscribed to the statement that "there should be no laws either federal or state, regulating sexual practice." That majority included all categories, Catholic and Protestant alike old as well as young. Later in the survey when asked whether they favored eliminating maintaining "laws which regulate what kinds of sexual practices are acceptable and legal," a solid 49%-to-42% plurality wanted them eliminated...
Surveys of sexual manners and mores are contradictory and tend to reflect the views of the pollsters. Perhaps the most significant such survey, however, is one taken in 1970 by the Kinsey Institute (officially the Institute for Sex Research), which is being used as the basis of a book entitled American Sexual Standards, to be published next year. Like the Yankelovich survey, the Kinsey study of 3,000 people showed a substantial majority (72% to 87%) disapproving of adultery, homosexuality, prostitution and casual sex among adolescents. "What really surprised us," Colin J. Williams, coauthor of the study, told TIME...
Although nobody expects America to return to the days of the hoop skirt, a number of experts do see signs that the wildest expressions of sexual "liberation" may be ending. "I think there's a shift back not toward conservatism but toward an end of sexuality for sexuality's sake," says Jack S. Boozer, professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta. "What you had in the '60s was like being thrown into a forest and told there was no infallible reference point, everything was equal. The person in that forest is just as culturally deprived...
...opposition to hedonism is not limited to conservatives. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Chicago black-activist leader, says he used to think that sexual morality was a private affair, but then he began to wonder why he saw so few young people engaged in social action. "Were they marching for full employment?" he asks. "Were they marching to rebuild cities? No, the thrust was to lower the drinking age to 18, to legalize marijuana, to engage in sex and accept no responsibility for the baby. [But] one has to have an ethical base for a society. Where the prime force...
Jackson is exaggerating, to be sure. Even those experts who criticize the Jacobin era of the sexual revolution generally believe some good things have come to pass-greater frankness, greater tolerance, greater willingness to experiment. Many also point out that the time has come to stop equating morality with sexual morality, to separate it from cheating, betrayal and cruelty. Still, at a time when sex is being widely commercialized, when people's emotional needs are often manipulated and exploited, it is interesting simply to record that a substantial majority of Americans cling to a belief in many...