Sexual Revolution, Mobilization or Civil War: How to Understand the Soviet Transformation of Sexuality (The Case of Soviet Lithuania)

Evaluation of sexual behaviors is essential to better understand the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections and their sequelae. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) is an ongoing probability sample survey of the US population. Using NHANES sexual behavior data from 1999 to 2012, we performed the following: (1) trend analyses among adults aged 25 to 59 years by 10-year birth cohorts and (2) descriptive analyses among participants aged 14 to 24 years. Sex was defined as vaginal, anal, or oral sex. Among adults aged 25 to 59 years, median age at sexual initiation decreased between the 1940-1949 and 1980-1989 cohorts from 17.9 to 16.2 among females (P trend < 0.001) and from 17.1 to 16.1 among males (P trend < 0.001). Median lifetime partners increased between the 1940-1949 and 1970-1979 cohorts, from 2.6 to 5.3 among females (P trend < 0.001) and from 6.7 to 8.8 among males (P trend < 0.001). The percentage of females reporting ever having a same-sex partner increased from 5.2% to 9.3% between the 1940-1949 and 1970-1979 cohorts (P trend < 0.001). Among participants aged 14 to 24 years, the percentage having had sex increased with age, from 12.5% among females and 13.1% among males at age 14 years to more than 75% at age 19 years for both sexes. Among sexually experienced 14- to 19-year-olds, 45.2% of females and 55.0% of males had at least 3 lifetime partners; 39.4% of females and 48.6% of males had at least 2 partners in the past year. The proportion of females aged 20 to 24 years who reported ever having a same-sex partner was 14.9%. The proportion of participants aged 14-19 or 20-24 years reporting ever having sex did not differ by survey year from 1999 to 2012 for either males or females. Sexual behaviors changed with successive birth cohorts, with more pronounced changes among females. A substantial proportion of adolescents are sexually active and have multiple partners. These data reinforce existing recommendations for sexual health education and sexually transmitted infection prevention targeting adolescents before sexual debut.

Reviewed by: The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 Jennifer Tucker Hera Cook . The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv + 412 pp. Ill. $55.00, £35.00 (0-19-92539-4). This book is a fresh, important reexamination of contraception use in England, and of the impact of oral contraception in changing twentieth-century sexual behavior and attitudes. Hera Cook's thesis is that oral contraceptives, first developed in the 1960s, revolutionized sexual behaviors and practices for women of all classes in England. Drawing on an impressive range of sex manuals, sex surveys, parliamentary papers, newspapers, women's magazines, and demographic data, Cook seeks to show that, by removing the fear of pregnancy and its attendant economic and social risks, the advent of reliable, accessible, safe contraception culminated in widening sexual choices and lifestyles for women that were unacceptable before the late 1960s. She highlights the importance of the pill as a liberating force in sexual practice for women, ultimately concluding that it was the driving force behind the "transformation in sexual mores" (p. 7), including the liberalization of the sexual double standard and of social attitudes to homosexuality, divorce, unmarried couples, sexually active teenagers, and stepchildren (p. 339). While not denying that there have been negative consequences of birth control (e.g. population control, medical side effects, and rising male pressure on women to bear the sole responsibility for preventing pregnancy), Cook [End Page 842] generally downplays their significance, criticizing previous chroniclers of the birth control movement for laying what she considers to be too much stress on the connection of the movement with population control and racism. Her book does not consider the topic of race, and readers interested in the movement's impact on black women's procreative freedom in England will need to consult additional works. Although some of her central conclusions about the liberating social impacts of oral contraception for women, gays, and lesbians are overblown, The Long Sexual Revolution offers important new findings and hypotheses and reflects impressive research into the many different aspects of society that shape, regulate, and alter sexual behavior and norms. Cook calls into question some cherished ideas, such as the efficacy of nineteenth-century methods of birth control. She shows that unmarried pregnancy was a great social and economic risk for women in the rising absence of societal restraints on men during industrialization. In contrast to the picture of sexually knowledgeable and experienced people presented in other recent historical works, Cook finds that the period up through the early 1960s was, by and large, one of continuing limits on sexual expression and diminishment of sexual pleasure, due to widespread sexual ignorance and the lack of safe and effective contraception options. She calls important attention to working- and middle-class men's experiences with birth control. Her criticism of the idea of sexual practice as timeless is adroit and on the mark, and future work on the history of contraception must take her argument on this point into consideration. The book's depiction of contraception technology as the major driving force behind the liberalization of sexual behaviors and attitudes in England, especially those toward unmarried women, while suggestive, is far from conclusive, and readers will want to consult other works for a more complete understanding of the wider social, economic, and cultural forces that have operated to change (as well as to preserve) traditional sexual behavior and attitudes. Some of Cook's generalizations stand out as too broad, and these warrant further scrutiny; other topics (such as the history of contraceptive safety and effectiveness) require deeper analysis. More discussion of the methodologies used to draw conclusions from sex surveys and manuals would be helpful, while Cook's extensive criticism of others' scholarship in the main body of her text disrupts the narrative at many points. However, this does not diminish the importance of the book, which provides a fascinating and detailed look at the history of English sexuality as it was altered by pregnancy fears and changing contraception options. The Long Sexual Revolution serves as an important reminder of the risks and fears that sexual activity...

Objectives: For the first time in domestic historiography this study considers the complex problem associated with consistent formation of professional identity in Soviet society. Methods: The authors describe the quantitative variety of real models of identity genesis that were realized within separate social groups among which the industrial workers and the technical and liberal intellectuals are particularly distinguished. An image of a Soviet engineer personifying the romantic idea of Industrialization is studied as a representative example of changing professional identity. Findings: The authors of this study come to the principal conclusion that the identity characteristics of separate personalities and social groups were formed by the ruling elite who extensively applied the mental tools associated with ideological stigmatization, with purposeful search for the alien Other, with large-scale deconstruction of traditional values. Applications/Improvements: The results of the study will facilitate further investigations of the issues of consequential transition from labor to professional identity and of gender-related and social aspects of personal identification.

Two alternative explanations of the 'sexual revolution' are contrasted and explored by using two nation-wide surveys undertaken in 1986 and 1988 of high schools students in Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively. One argument suggests the revolution is mainly a result of changes among women; the other argument sees new sexual behaviours still reflect pre-existing values in which premarital sex occurs within a 'marital' context. To assess such changes in sexual attitudes and behaviours the most accessible subjects/group are people not in a marital situation. For this reason, high school students provide an appropriate sample for the study. The survey data show that in both countries (1) male students had more sexually permissive attitudes than female students; (2) this 'typical' gender difference on the attitude level was reflected at the behavior level among Taiwanese students, but it was not reflected in the behaviors among Hong Kong students; (3) the more permissive sexual attitudes among Chinese males were not accompanied by more sex knowledge; (4) Hong Kong students had conservative attitudes relative to their behaviors, whereas Taiwanese students had conservative behaviors ralative to their attitudes. The theoretical implication is that the first argument (of sexual revolution) appears to apply to Hong Kong while the other explanation applies with more force to Taiwan. Oher methodological and policy implications are also developed.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arguments. In 1963 and 1964, the existence of a rapid, widespread, inexorable, secular, and antinomian transformation of sexual mores was prominently proclaimed by Christian commentators, who thought it an inevitable consequence of ‘secularization’, whereas secular commentators usually objected that this narrative was insufficiently evidenced. After its initial discussion in the mainstream media in 1965, the ‘sexual revolution’ narrative was increasingly articulated without explicit reference to Christianity, but it usually retained theologically inspired structural features inherited from earlier religious discussions. In the late 1960s, elite perceptions of inexorable sexual liberalization decisively legitimated rapid decensorship, wider access to the pill, and the reimagination of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, thereby importantly shaping real popular change. In this way, Christian clergymen made a significant, early, unwitting, and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Britain's sexual revolution.

Sex and the Me Decade:Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s Anna E. Ward (bio) In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the “Me Decade,” arguing, “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it” (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this “new alchemical dream,” and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness. Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite’s The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); [End Page 120] and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics—the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications. If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people’s sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort’s is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms. In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-market literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature...

Introduction to the Special Issue on Men’s Role in the Heterosexual HIV Epidemic

The socio-cultural appearance of students in the system of state labor reserves has not been the subject of special study by specialists. At the same time, the creation in 1940 of the system of state labor reserves of the USSR was accompanied by the formation of a specific social group, the study of the socio-cultural characteristics of which will complement the already existing ideas about the working youth of the Soviet period. The subject of the study are documents as historical sources. The object is students of the system of state labor reserves as a separate social group. The purpose of the article is to present a corpus of official documents and documents of personal origin, which are historical sources for the reconstruction of stable, integral images of students, forming the basis of "ceremonial" and "non–parade" portraits as a set of characteristics (markers) aimed at highlighting socio-demographic features, cultural values and mental characteristics, behavioral practices and appearance of representatives of this social group. The methodological basis of the research is the methods of source analysis and synthesis, which allow to reveal the content component of documents for the study of the declared topic. The results of the study are: 1) the allocation of six types of historical sources from the official records of the central and regional labor reserves management bodies to fiction, allowing to reconstruct the "parade" and "non-parade" portraits of students of the state labor reserves system as a separate social group; 2) disclosure of the information potential of these six types of historical sources, taking into account their source-study features for the reconstruction of the socio-cultural appearance of students.

Theatre is one of the oldest forms of art due to its close nature to the life of people. Deriving from the point of epistemology, ontology and didactics, theatre poses its eternality... The most important concepts for the solution of social problems in education are individualization and socialization, individual activity of a personality and the interrelationship in a group, that has always been facilitated by culture, especially theatre performance. By analysing Latvian actors as a separate social group it is possible to trace its development process. The personality of actors in society opens up as its psychological and artistic activity. In order to carry out the analysis of social category, there is a need to analyse actor’s social relations. The activity of actors forms in its social group the cognitive image, that is socially relevant and which affects spectators. Theatre is the environment in which the actor lives and implements his/her social activity. Our theatre in the countryside is one of the strongest cognitive enlighteners, developers, and facilitators. The aim of the article is to provide the analysis of documents that give the insight into theatre companies and the formation of actors as a separate social group. The article also deals with the problems of modern theatre companies, and the ways how theatre companies have been developed. Research methods. Theoretical research methods include monographies, the analysis of research articles, the investigation of archive materials related to actors as a social group.

Close parallels in ancient Rome and present-day America suggest that the sexual revolutions in both societies were significantly influenced by the existential conditions that they confronted at the height of their powers. At the same time, each was constrained in its sociocultural responses by the nature of its social-class structure. In America we must examine the ethos of each of six broad strata to comprehend in detail the nature of the American sexual revolution. When we do, we see that many of the changes in our sexual mores and behav ior can be traced to recent changes in the social-class structure. The spread of higher education among the middle class has meant that a substantial portion of American adolescents are regularly exposed to a social setting in which their sexual behavior is governed essentially by the adolescents themselves. Such a situation could not help but be more permissive than that which prevailed before the modern period. Moreover, since a substantial portion of the population is now embraced by the middle classes, a growing portion of the population is exposed to this permissive sexual environment. The sexual revolution in America, therefore, is largely a blend of existential and structural pressures impinging upon only a segment of the total population.

ABSTRACTDemographic analyses provide valuable insights that can significantly enhance reintroduction planning and decision‐making, helping to improve the likelihood of reintroduction success. We developed a model to evaluate the chances of success for a reintroduction of the endangered Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus). The model incorporates age‐specific vital rates estimated from 11 years of demographic data on a wild population, reductions in survival and reproduction due to potential release costs, demographic and environmental stochasticity, reinforcement releases, and catastrophic events. Based on the available individuals considered as best candidates for reintroduction, we compared extinction risks under two release strategies. One strategy entails releasing all individuals as one large social group, while the other entails forming and releasing two smaller, separate groups. Our results suggest that the best strategy for Barbary macaques is to release two separate social groups, for which extinction risks remain low (&lt; 5% in the absence of catastrophic events) as long as survival suffers minimal release costs. Sensitivity testing showed that extinction risks are more sensitive to changes in release costs on survival than on reproduction, and that sensitivity to initial sex ratio depends on initial group size. Extinction risk is dramatically affected by catastrophic events, although it is not highly sensitive to variations in the probability of occurrence of such events. Reinforcement releases help counter the effects of high release costs on survival, thus considerably improving probabilities of population persistence. Our model presents highly promising prospects for the successful reintroduction of a Barbary macaque population, and for the conservation of this species, which is the only extant nonhuman primate in North Africa.

Two alternative explanations of the 'sexual revolution' are contrasted and explored by using two nation-wide surveys undertaken in 1986 and 1988 of high schools students in Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively. One argument suggests the revolution is mainly a result of changes among women; the other argument sees new sexual behaviours still reflect pre-existing values in which premarital sex occurs within a 'marital' context. To assess such changes in sexual attitudes and behaviours the most accessible subjects/group are people not in a marital situation. For this reason, high school students provide an appropriate sample for the study. The survey data show that in both countries (1) male students had more sexually permissive attitudes than female students; (2) this 'typical' gender difference on the attitude level was reflected at the behavior level among Taiwanese students, but it was not reflected in the behaviors among Hong Kong students; (3) the more permissive sexual attitudes among Chinese males were not accompanied by more sex knowledge; (4) Hong Kong students had conservative attitudes relative to their behaviors, whereas Taiwanese students had conservative behaviors ralative to their attitudes. The theoretical implication is that the first argument (of sexual revolution) appears to apply to Hong Kong while the other explanation applies with more force to Taiwan. Oher methodological and policy implications are also developed.

Sex in the Heartland. By Beth Bailey. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 265 pages. $27.00 (cloth). LOOSELY TOSSED AROUND BY POLITICIANS, DISCREDITED IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION, and flat-out violated by advertisers, the entire concept of "revolution" seems to be in crisis. Whereas the desire for revolution was evident in the 1960s in countless ways, most activists from this period look back upon the overblown rhetoric of the new left and counterculture with, at best, an impish sense of chagrin. "Be Realistic--Demand the Impossible," a world-wide rallying cry for young militants in 1968, today carries all of the sound and fury of a bumper sticker on an ailing Volkswagen. How very felicitous, then, is Beth Bailey's new book Sex in the Heartland--a lucid and complex look at the cultural and sexual politics that took shape in Lawrence, Kansas from World War II until the early 1970s. Although Bailey admits that the seismic changes in American sexual attitudes during this period can only be described as "revolutionary," she also believes that scholars who have tried to locate these changes in the upheavals, convulsions, and cataclysms of the "Radical Sixties" have been led astray. However real the "sexual revolution" may have been, Bailey argues that this is an inadequate way of describing the remaking of gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century, which actually came about in a tentative, halting fashion, often as a result of unintended consequences and with origins in mainstream sources. [End Page 349] Thankfully, no one who reads this book is likely to accept the murky historical vision of many of today's conservatives, who hold that a cabal of feminist extremists and free love radicals somehow sprung to life in the 1960s and single-handedly whipped the nation into a sexual frenzy from which it has yet to recover. But even as Bailey demonstrates that the sexual revolution unfolded gradually and in unexpected ways, her long-range perspective still slights the quantum leaps in American sexual codes that were spurred on by the youth revolt of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I In an effort to highlight the mainstream origins of the sexual revolution, Bailey grounds her story in the hinterland of Lawrence, Kansas--"the ultimate provincial place, the ultimate not-New York." 1 Home to the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence clearly experienced the sexual revolution differently than most other Kansas towns; it would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Lawrence was in any way shut off from the "geography, population, politics, economy, and culture" of Kansas or, for that matter, the rest of the Midwest (5). By examining the sexual revolution as it happened in (literally) the center of the country, Bailey makes a welcome contribution to a body of literature that has too often dwelled upon the happenings in New York, California, and a handful of cosmopolitan enclaves in between. Sex in the Heartland begins with the onset of World War II because it was then that many autonomous, local communities began to forge tighter connections with a burgeoning national culture. The expansion of federal authority, the G.I. Bill, the speedy construction of interstate highways, the unsettling of smaller towns, and nascent trends toward the inclusion of people from different backgrounds into the American mainstream may not have had anything to do with sex, but they all helped to lay the groundwork for subsequent challenges to established sexual norms. In the aftermath of the war, Lawrence's leaders saw their oversight of the community's social order steadily diminished as the town grew larger and more affluent, and as the community became more closely linked to an increasingly sexualized consumer culture. Meanwhile, campus life underwent drastic changes. As colleges and universities matriculated more students during the 1950s than ever before, administrators [End Page 350] came to rely upon the expertise and people-handling skills of military-trained...

Nineteenth-century sexual ideals in Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism differed: Adventism proscribed sexual expression, even in marriage, and Latter-day Saints encouraged marriage and sexual expression in addition to that sanctioned by the wider society, especially in polygamy. Nonetheless, each movement justified sexual norms by asserting that sexual expression lessened vital force, or physical well-being. In the face of changing societal sexual and gender norms—especially resulting from the sexual revolution, the modern feminist movement, and the gay rights movement—Adventism's and Mormonism's definitions of appropriate sexual expression converged to promote sex in heterosexual marriage. Concomitantly, homosexuality was explicitly and publicly defined as sinful and antithetical to, even threatening, heterosexual marriage and family. This paper explores the convergence of sexual ideals in Mormonism and Adventism, with attention to explicit proscription of homosexuality, responses to homosexuality and homosexuals in each movement, and implications of these for gay and lesbian adherents.

According to popular opinion, the ‘sexual revolution’ in West Germany occurred between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. This era saw a liberalisation of sexual behaviours and attitudes among many different parts of society.1 In just one decade, pre-marital sex, extra-marital affairs and homosexual relations were ‘liberated’, pornography was made readily available, rigid criminal legislation regarding sexual activity was softened and ideas typical of conservative morality were radically questioned. Although still controversial, ‘sex’ became a positively regarded part of life, appearing in literature, magazines, films and educational material in schools. Opinion remains divided on the effects this shift in attitude had for people experiencing these social changes. Those who support ideas of ‘liberalisation’ emphasise that the changes must be regarded as positive in the long run simply for the definitive triumph over the sexually conservative spirit of the recent past. However, critics of ‘sexual revolution’ claim that the goals were over-ambitious from the outset, causing negative aspects to overshadow positive ones, as seen in the excesses of commercial sex and the pornographisation of post-modern man.