Sexual Revolution Research Articles

Marie Pujmanovás Novelle Die Patientin von Doktor Hegel (1931) als Beitrag zur Geschlechterdebatte der Zwischenkriegszeit

Summary In the democratic society of interwar Czechoslovakia, there was a lively discussion about women’s emancipation and the accompanying changes in the gender order. The modernist romance Pacientka dra Hegla [Doctor Hegel’s patient] (1931) by the Czech journalist and writer Marie Pujmanová (1893‒1958) occupies a liberal position in the debate. In the story of a young woman who gives up her plans to marry in favour of a relationship outside wedlock, issues such as female sexual liberation, abortion and free motherhood are topicalised. The article highlights the connections between the romance and gender discourses of the time and examines the ideological stance of the text. Special attention is paid to the stereotyping of the four main characters, who all represent certain concepts of personal identity that were very popular in the 1920 s.

The quest for a partner in the past and today: exploring trends and drivers in partner preferences and selection through new sources and approaches

ABSTRACT Society - and the way it is organized - along with families, shapes who is available and suitable as a partner, who we encounter, what traits we seek in a partner, and who we form relationships with. In turn, our partner choices impact society at large. Given this bidirectional relationship, partner selection is expected to evolve alongside broader societal changes influenced by factors such as economic shifts, wars, migration, and sociocultural transformations like secularization, feminist movements, and sexual revolutions. The central question of this special issue is how societal transformations have influenced long-term trends in partner preferences and choices. This is being explored through new sources - online genealogies, matrimonial and contact advertisements, data from marriage agencies and dating apps – and approaches.

Marital Contracts on the Fault Lines: A Liberal Inquiry

Abstract The revolution in Western family law over the past 50 years—often described as ‘liberalization’—involves a decrease in the importance of fault-based factors alongside an increase in the significance of marital contracts. While these two trends generally complement each other, they may conflict when a couple seeks to assign economic consequences to sexual fault through a contract. Should such an agreement be legally enforceable? Which aligns more with a ‘true liberal’ perspective: advocating against fault or for the use of contracts? This paper suggests a new approach that goes beyond simply determining which trend should prevail. We illustrate how the perceived conflict between proponents of sexual liberalization and proponents of contractual liberalization could be resolved by identifying the underlying reasons that motivate each ‘camp’, proposing potential legal mechanisms and specific legal contexts in which broad agreement might be reached, and explicating the multidimensionality of family law liberalization.

"A way to liberate myself": A qualitative study of perceived benefits and risks of chemsex among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men in Almaty, Kazakhstan

BackgroundIn Kazakhstan, the HIV epidemic has a significant impact on marginalized groups such as gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM), exacerbated by homophobic attitudes (in society) and (resulting) minority stress. This stress often leads to coping behaviors such as chemsex - the use of synthetic stimulants to enhance sexual experiences. Our study explores the motivations and perceived risks associated with chemsex among GBMSM in Almaty. MethodsWe conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 chemsex participants self-identified as GBMSM in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Participants were recruited through community-based organizations to ensure a diverse sample in terms of age and ethnicity. Thematic analysis was used to identify key themes related to motivations and risks. ResultsParticipants practiced chemsex to seek liberation from societal norms and personal inhibitions, increase sexual pleasure, and escape daily stressors. Chemsex sessions provided intensified sexual experiences, emotional comfort, and social connections, challenging constraints on sexual behavior. Participants recognized significant risks, including mental and physical health issues, social stigma, and violence victimisation. Despite these risks, the desire for the perceived benefits of chemsex, particularly feelings of freedom and happiness, underscored its appeal. ConclusionsThe study reveals a complex dynamic in which chemsex serves as a coping mechanism for minority stress, a source of sexual liberation, and a social connector for GBMSM in Kazakhstan, while also posing significant health risks. These findings emphasize the need for targeted harm reduction strategies, mental health support, and community-building efforts that are responsive to the experiences and needs of GBMSM who engage in chemsex.

The Female Body and the Body Politic in Sex Scenes of Lou Ye’s Film: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of <i>Summer Palace</i>

This article discusses the body politic of Yu Hong in the postsocialist Chinese film–Summer Palace (2006). Director Lou Ye places Yu Hong’s body in the sex scenes that metaphorically expresses a traumatic and sensitive political event, the “June Fourth Incident.” The portrayal of sexual intercourse, nudity, and this historical event is the unspeakable “secret” in mainland Chinese media. Therefore, the authors raise the question that, when sexual intercourse and the female body enter political discourse, how do we deal with the complex and dynamic power structures behind bodily attributes and the “anachronistic” historical objects that do not fit into the mainstream narrative and epistemological spaces? Drawing on body politic theory, feminist film theory, and a semiotic framework, we adopt multimodal critical discourse analysis to assess power relations and ideologies behind Yu’s body attributes in the sex scenes. The findings indicate that Lou constructs a complex communication system, using her body as a carrier of communication to express self-consciousness, constructing female subjectivity through the writing of feminine discourse, with the political purpose of seeking the freedom of the written word. Sexual liberation is sought by establishing a transgressive body that is not accepted by the mainstream and opposes the inherent power of government. Yu’s bodily pleasure is set up as an expression of narcissistic individualism through love, producing a vision of political ecstasy. Her melancholy body metaphor for the discomfort and confusion that preceded the student movement and the post-traumatic ambivalence. Using the female body as a site of political discourse and sexual liberation offers a new reading strategy for analysing the representation of the female body in film and other forms of media. In making the argument, the study contributes valuable scholarship to the film studies focused on sexual, gender, and political marginalised discourse.

A Theory on the Nonlinear Relationship of Sexual Behavior and Aggression

Objective: Claims have been made that more sexual liberalism in society than what generally existed in human history is necessary to promote societal tranquility and reduce violence. This research was conducted to investigate the real relationship between sexual behavior and aggression based on scientific data especially from the perspective of physiological psychology. Method: This study was a narrative review and utilized evidence-based findings from neuropsychology, psychophysiology, laboratory research, and field studies. Databases were explored for related terms until sufficiency was reached. The findings were categorized and analyzed descriptively and interpretively to establish connections between the findings. Ultimately, a comprehensive conceptualization was developed to conclude a theory on the relationship between sexual behavior, sexual satiety, and aggression. Results: The study indicated that unrestrained sexual behavior leads to an escalation of the behavior, rather than satiation, and aggression rather than calmness. This may be due to positive feedback in the nervous and hormonal systems, specifically mediated by the medial preoptic area (MPA) and testosterone, leading to aggressive behavior. However, since sexual deprivation can potentially lead to aggression, it is advisable to view the relationship between sexual activity and violence as a non-linear one. Conclusion: This paper establishes that the intensification of sexual behaviors leads to increased violence and aggression in society, ultimately elevating levels of public insecurity. Therefore, limiting sexual behavior within the framework of the relationship of married couples may serve as a moderating factor for this phenomenon.

Erotic countermapping and queer urban publics: the hardcore cinema of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of hardcore films by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr, whose status as a pioneer of HIV/AIDS cinema has overshadowed his prolific work as a director of gay pornography. By focusing on the urban landscape of San Francisco as central to the dramaturgy of his early pornographic films, the article considers the documentary impulse evident in Bressan’s representation of urban queer topographies as inseparable from the films’ erotic charge. The article puts critical pressure on representations of cruising, the closet of sexual secrecy, and the prison as a site of sexual fantasy as erotic and spatial tropes central to Bressan’s queer countermapping of San Francisco. The urban landscape and its infrastructures are analyzed as central to Bressan’s cinematic mediation of San Francisco, and are reframed in this article as the scaffolding for the films’ thematic interest in queer pedagogy, gay visibility, and sexual liberation.

Abortion on Campus: Sexual Liberation and Reproductive Control at Southern Colleges and Universities before 1973

Abortion on Campus: Sexual Liberation and Reproductive Control at Southern Colleges and Universities before 1973

How Do Personal Opinions Relate to Online Expressions? An Experimental Study Among Muslim Minority Groups in The Netherlands

There has been much debate about how cultural differences between ethnic groups may affect the cohesion of multicultural societies. Still, we know little about the extent to which cultural differences between groups also materialize into behavioral differences, especially in online settings. To study this, we conducted an experiment in which second-generation Moroccan and Turkish Dutch participants first indicated their personal opinion on sexual liberalism, and then participated in discussions on this topic on an online platform. On the discussion platform, participants were randomly assigned to either a progressive, conservative or mixed online discussion. Overall, we found that the convergence between personal opinions and online expressions was stronger for progressive than for conservative participants. Additionally, conservatives (but not progressives) were less likely to express their personal opinions, and more likely to deviate from their personal opinions, when they were exposed to an incongruent versus congruent online environment.

Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide by Helen M. Alvaré (review)

Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide by Helen M. Alvaré (review)

“This Is Our Revolution Too”: LGBTQ Rights Activism and the National Question in Northern Ireland

Existing research frames ethnonationalism as homophobic, in which the queer is positioned outside of the boundaries of the ethnic nation. Less well understood is how LGBTQ activism engages with ethnonationalism, particularly in relation to questions of national self-determination. The limited research on this issue frames LGBTQ activist movements as groups that reject divisive ethnonationalisms by forging alternative cosmopolitan and transnational expressions of sexual identity. By exploring a single case-study, Northern Ireland, this article draws attention to how LGBTQ movements can be sites of conflict over questions of national self-determination, particularly when sexual liberation is wedded to anti-imperialist struggles. The paper concludes by reaffirming Horowitz’s model of ethnic seepage, in which the dominant ethnonational cleavages infuse all issues in divided societies. The article uses a wide range of primary data, including interviews and archival documents, to analyze LGBTQ activism in Northern Ireland during the period of ethnonationalist conflict in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sub-Saharan Irregular Migrant Women's Sexuality: A Qualitative Study in Humanitarian Reception Centers.

Irregular female migration to Europe is a growing phenomenon, as more and more women are fleeing their countries of origin due to gender inequality and violence. During the migration process, women experience physical, psychological and social problems that affect their sex lives. The aim of our study is to describe and understand how irregular migrant women living in humanitarian reception centers experience their sexuality at different stages of the migration process. This qualitative phenomenological study collected data through sixteen in-depth interviews with irregular migrant women between January and February 2023. Data analysis was carried out using ATLAS-ti 23.0 software, from which three themes were extracted: (1) The reality of sub-Saharan women's sexuality, (2) In search of a better life: the choice between taking the risk or surrendering, and (3) The sexual revolution among migrants. Sub-Saharan women's sexuality is subject to a complex normative order. The migratory process has severe consequences on migrant women's sex life. The sexual needs of irregular migrant women admitted to humanitarian reception centers undergo a process of change that must be understood by healthcare providers in order to make improvements to care provision.

Islam and the Transmission of Cultural Identity in Four European Countries

Abstract Studies exploring the integration of European immigrants tend to find cultural gaps between Muslim children and their peers. While some scholars argue that parent-to-child transmission is a key mechanism underlying this pattern, others privilege extrafamilial explanations by pointing to differences in cultural values within Muslim households. In the present study, I argue that these mixed results stem from a tendency in the literature to analyze distinct components of personal culture in isolation from cognate dimensions. To address this shortcoming, I use multigroup latent class models to explore how a wide range of attitudes (tapping ethnocultural identity, gender norms, sexual liberalism, and perspectives on integration) are clustered together in disparate regions of the belief space, marking distinct cultural identities. Then, I fit a series of logistic regressions to map how these cultural identities are distributed among immigrant-origin samples in four European countries and transmitted across generational lines. Ultimately, I arrive at the following conclusion: while Muslim youth stand out from their peers vis-à-vis their cultural identity profiles, there is little evidence to suggest that this pattern is decisively shaped by parent-to-child transmission.

“I Feel Like a Fraud Who Acts Like a Feminist”: The Discussion Themes and Sexual Scripts in the Porn Free Women Online Forum

Research on online pornography abstinence movements has predominantly focused on men’s perspectives, often within the context of the broader manosphere. This focus has overshadowed the unique experiences and viewpoints of women in these movements. Our study aimed to fill this gap by exploring women-centric perspectives in pornography abstinence forums, particularly Porn Free Women (r/pornfreewomen). Using a mixed methods approach, this study examined the sexual scripts presented in women-dominated pornography abstinence communities. Our structural topic modeling analysis delineated the interplay of therapeutic, heteronormative, and empowerment themes that were evident in women’s narratives and expressions. Further, our discourse analysis elucidated three specific scripts: the addiction script, the heterosexual script, and the liberation script. These interweaving narratives show that discussions of women’s pornography abstinence are multifaceted and include a variety of perspectives to negotiate. These results contribute to a nuanced understanding of the values of health and well-being, sexual liberation, and feminism within women’s pornography abstinence communities.

Banal Catastrophes and Catastrophic Banality in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme

ABSTRACT In the novels of Michel Houellebecq, innumerable catastrophes befall his characters, and sometimes humanity as a whole. Plateforme (2001) opens and closes with two such catastrophes, yet the catastrophe that preoccupies most its protagonist and other Houellebecq characters is one that, to their minds, has been unfolding since the moral, sexual, and economic revolution of the 1960s: the loss of Westerners’ capacity to establish and maintain human relationships outside of the logic of late capitalism. This protracted catastrophe has rendered contemporary life so isolating, passionless, and insipid that it has left us wishing for new kinds of acute catastrophe just to distract us momentarily from our baseline misery. Through a reading of Plateforme in particular, this article argues, however, that in Houellebecq’s world, banality and catastrophe are in fact two sides of the same, dismal coin: catastrophes, so very common there, always have an embarrassing touch of the banal, and banality is never anything short of catastrophic. Both, in the end, make human life unbearable, a message with which much of Houellebecq’s work at least appears to conclude.

From revolution to liberation. Feminist consciousness-raising and sexuality in the 1970s

This article examines the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy from the perspective of emotional history. Drawing mainly on unpublished oral sources and advice columns in women's magazines, it assesses the contribution of the feminist method of consciousness-raising to the reception of and reaction to the so-called sexual revolution. Focusing on the ‘long 1968' as it unfolded in Italy, I analyse how the new models of an apparently freer sexuality were appropriated and adapted to the emotional counter-community created by feminists practising consciousness-raising towards what would later be defined as sexual liberation, and I discuss the openings and limits that this approach has entailed.

My Debt to Slavery

Abstract This autobiographical essay sets up a white middle-class young woman’s emergence as a rights-bearing, choice-making exemplar of sexual freedom and as a holder of intimate racial capital in the 1970s. At the same time, elites and various professional authorities were re-stamping this young woman’s Black peers with slavery- and Jim Crow–era tropes, as sexual criminals, bad choice-makers, producers of worthless and expensive children, not citizens. The essay considers the roles played by Roe v. Wade, the availability of contraception, “modern” midwifery services, the “sexual revolution,” welfare policy, public rhetoric, and public policies in locking in new iterations of racism and racial difference in the post–civil rights era, and the importance of female sexuality, pregnancy, and maternity in constructing arenas for deploying these developments.

Demons in San Francisco Bay

In 1967, street minister Kent Philpott began outreach to lesbian, gay, and bisexual hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Over the next decade, he counseled those who purportedly wanted out of what he referred to as “the gay lifestyle,” combining charismatic religious beliefs in demons, divine healing, and glossolalia with psychological theories on gender and child development. This article examines Philpott’s efforts to provide the nascent “ex-gay movement” with cultural, social, and intellectual foundations. This article specifically documents how sexual liberation, hippie culture, and conservative religion converged in San Francisco and spawned the “ex-gay movement.” Philpott, swept up by the Jesus People Movement, incorporated religious and psychological beliefs prominent in the Bay Area and infused charismatic Christian influences and traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity into the “ex-gay movement.”

Self-knowledge, self-regulation and ambivalence: the production of female desire in the US-UK popular cultural imaginary

ABSTRACT This article examines how media texts are curbing and conditioning female desire in the contemporary US-UK cultural moment. It analyses eight popular cultural texts: fictional TV shows Sex/Life (2021-), Wanderlust (2018), Gypsy (2017), film Hello, My Name is Doris (2015); factual TV shows Sex, Love & Goop (2021) and The Principles of Pleasure (2022); short story Cat Person (2017); and non-fiction book Three Women (2019). These media call on women to identify and regulate their desires in ways that sustain patriarchal ideals of femininity. Celebrations of female sexuality as a vehicle for self-knowledge are tied up in psychological, physiological and medicalised discourses which pathologise female desire in a binary of low/excessive, or confused and complex. Such discourses mask sexual trauma and present female sexual liberation as a reparative solution to violence. However, transformative understandings of desire as unknowable, contextual and culturally conditioned, which allow for a reworking of gendered relations, also emerge. Bringing together philosophical, psychological and popular debates on female desire with cultural representation, the article concludes that representations largely ignore the relationality of desire as always located within the violence of gender, race and class power structures.

Koncesjonowana rewolucja seksualna? Przemiany obyczajowości w dyskursie medialnym późnego PRL

A constrained sexual revolution? The transformation of sexual mores in the media discourse in 1980s Poland The author of the article analyses the media discourse of late socialist Poland through the lens of eroticised images. By doing so, the author puts forward a framework for understanding the media discourse of that period as a form of a constrained sexual revolution. The source base consists of the contents of two men’s magazines published between 1987 and 1989 (Pan [Gentleman] and Playboy) as well as the TV show Sexcesses produced in 1985. Such sources allow us to critically analyse the key features of the discussions about sexuality in 1980s media. On the one hand, the article highlights the notable liberalisation of visual discourse that took place in the 1980s and the profound impact it had on Polish society. On the other — it points to several constraints of this project. While in 1980s Poland heterosexual men were increasingly able to perform and reaffirm their sexual identities, the sexual revolution abetted by the official media did little to question the patriarchal social norms and left no room for emancipation outside this heteronormative framework. Women were portrayed as passive objects of the male gaze, while any suggestions of homoeroticism were dismissed outright. The article contains a critical analysis of such approaches, with the author arguing that the Polish sexual revolution had an inherently heteronormative and gendered character.