Did a bunch of ’60s hippies get together one night and decide it was time for a change? Or were the ’50s so bad that no-one could stand it anymore? Given that human beings have always found sex alluring and attrac­tive, why was it in the ’60s (and the decades following) that Western society threw off the shackles and leapt into bed with each other?

This is a very important question. If we are to understand the current sexual landscape, and how we might navigate our way through it, we need to look back and consider the forces, people and events that gave rise to such a dramatic change in sexual attitudes and behaviour. Our journey begins around a century ago, with our much-maligned ancestors, the Victorians.

The naughtiness of piano legs: Strictly speaking, a Victorian is someone who lived during the long reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. The term has come to mean, however, far more than this. It now refers to an attitude or stance towards morality and convention, exemplified by the English in the latter half of the 19^th century.

To us, a “Victorian” set of values (or “virtues”, as they would have put it) is one that is hopelessly outdated, rigid, formal and hung-up. It refers to a repressed, stiff-upper lip form of moral rectitude, in which one must always behave “properly”, morally and with good manners, at least in public.

In particular, people believe that to be Victorian is to have a repressed and hypo­critical attitude towards sex — to make cov­ers for the legs of pianos because of the immoral connotations and suggestions that a bare, curvaceous leg might have on the minds of the easily corruptible; and yet at the same time, to keep a mistress to satisfy one’s sexual appetites. It denotes a facade of public respectability and sexual strict­ness, with a cauldron of suppressed sexual­ity and immorality lurking beneath.

There is a kernel of truth in this depic­tion. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has shown that morality was a big issue for the Victorians, not because of religious faith, but because of the loss of religious faith:

When (George) Eliot was asked how morality could subsist in the absence of religious faith, she replied that God was “inconceivable”, immortality “unbeliev­able” and duty nonetheless “peremptory and absolute”. This is the clue to the Victorian obsession with morality. “Feeling guilty about the loss of their religious faith, suspecting that that loss might expose them to the temptations of immorality and the perils of nihilism ... they were deter­mined to make of morality a substitute for religion — to make of it, indeed, a form of religion. And having forfeited the sanctions of religion, they were thrown back all the more on the sanctions of convention and law.

The causes of this loss of faith are com­plex, but its reality was undeniable. What the Victorians did not come to terms with was that, without God, morality could not be sustained for long by the forces of convention and law alone. They clung res­olutely to the content of Christian morality, for they feared the consequences of aban­doning it. In the generation that followed, however, there was no such fear.

The Bloomsbury set: As the new cen­tury dawned, the children of the Victorians had no qualms about throwing off what they saw as a set of stifling moral conven­tions. The name most immediately associ­ated with the new era of freedom was Bloomsbury, taken from the London district where Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) took up residence with her brother and sis­ter. They became the heart of a close-knit group of artists and intellectuals who sought moral and spiritual liberation from the strictures of Victorianism.

Their basic philosophy of life, which they drew from the philosopher G. E. Moore, was to pursue higher “states of con­sciousness”, through human relationships and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. It was a philosophy that deliberately rejected conventional morality, and lived for the good of present experience, repudiating duty, convention, law and programs of moral improvement or social action.

The Bloomsbury group were seen as rad­icals, but a more influential group of radi­cals could scarcely be found. Members and associates of Bloomsbury were prominent in the fields of art, literature and intellectual endeavour — people such as the biographer Lytton Strachey, the artists Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

It was following the trail blazed by Bloomsbury that the promiscuous “Bohemian” culture flourished in the 1920s, and likewise the Sydney Push of the 1950s and ’60s. As Himmelfarb points out, these movements were still at the radical margins of the society rather than at its everyday core, yet they were no less visible, and influential, for being so.

In the words of Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband), the Bloomsbury group saw themselves as “the builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilised”, and many since have praised their wit and fidelity, their pursuit of truth and good sense, their close-knit and affectionate relationships, free of the constraints of Victorian guilt and shame.

The logic of their position was certainly hard to shake. If God was dead, as Nietzsche had said, and as a growing num­ber of turn-of-the-century intellectuals believed, then what hold could morals and convention have over the liberated mind? What else should one pursue except the pleasures of love and sex and sensual beauty that the Victorians had so needlessly repressed?

Freud: The word “repressed” leads us naturally to another major player in the recent history of sex, the founder of psy­choanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In basic terms, Freud sought an explanation for human behaviour, and in particular neu­rotic illnesses and problems, in the func­tions of the human unconscious. Freud believed that the human mind was like a mechanical system into which energy flowed. This energy was largely sexual, and how the system dealt with this energy ­ whether it diverted it, blocked it, expressed it, repressed it, or whatever — determined to a large degree the mental health of the indi­vidual.

Freud saw sex as the basic determinant of who we are, and what we become. More than any intellectual before him, Freud talked openly and frankly about sex, in a way which startled his contemporaries. It was not so much that Freud advocated free love, or any vast social change in sexual mores. But in the matter of expression and speech his attitude was completely revolutionary. Thus he shocked both those who viewed sex as very sacred and those who viewed it as indecent.

After Freud, sex became not only a topic for discussion; it was now a potentially dan­gerous force in the human psyche, if it was not dealt with properly. In popular terms, Freud taught that if sexual instincts were somehow repressed they would lead to some form of neurotic illness. After Freud, the family was no longer seen as the place of protection, nurture and the teaching of good morals; it was a constricting, unhealthy place, in which crippling atti­tudes to sexuality led to various damaging psychological complexes.

Sex comes of age: Freud was not the only one to suggest that conventional morality may be unhealthy, or unnecessary. The idea that sexual values and morals were merely expressions of a particular culture, and were not innate or universal, was championed by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her best-selling book Coming of age in Samoa, published in 1928, was claimed to be based on extensive field research, and demonstrated that sexual conventions and experiences in Samoa were vastly different than in, for example, America.

In particular, Mead argued that the ado­lescents of Samoa engaged in free sexual experimentation and promiscuity, without guilt or other harmful effects, and that their society was a model of contentment and happiness.

Samoans, Mead argued,

laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to a long-absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that one love will cure another ...

Adultery does not necessarily mean a bro­ken marriage ... Divorce is a simple infor­mal matter ... It is a very brittle monogamy often trespassed and more often broken entirely, but many adulteries occur ... which hardly threaten the continuity of estab­lished relationships ... and so there are no marriages of any duration in which either person is actively unhappy.

In short, Mead portrayed Samoa as a paradise of uninhibited sexual free love. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Mead’s ideas met an enthusiastic reception. She became a media and academic superstar, roles Mead herself did not resist. She was vigorous in popularising her research, and the lessons that it contained for Western culture. Her basic contention — that nurture not nature accounts for taboos and restrictions on sex­uality — has been enormously influential throughout the latter half of our century.

The pursuit of tolerance and kindness: If Margaret Mead argued for sexual liberation from the viewpoint of anthropology, another leading intellectual argued for it on the basis of philosophy. Bertrand Russell was one of our century’s most famous philosophers and atheists, and argued that the superstition of religion did great harm when it came to sex. In fact, Russell regarded Christianity’s “morbid and unnat­ural” attitude towards sex as its worst fea­ture.

He argued that monogamy as an institu­tion was on its last legs in the Western world. The forces that held it together were all on the wane — the social narrowness of village life, the superstitions of religion, sin and eternal punishment, and the sanction of public opinion. For Russell, there was no higher or divine law of good and bad, only actions which do or do not promote human happiness.

It was upon this basis (which philosoph­ically is called “utilitarianism”) that a sexual ethic should be worked out, although as to what this would mean in practice Russell was a little less clear. He certainly wished there to be a greater degree of sexual free­dom to individuals, especially for young people, before the advent of children com­plicated the termination of the relationship. But Russell also acknowledged that the contradictory impulses of jealousy and polygamy — which he regarded as basic to human experience — made the formulation of a satisfactory moderns code of sexual behaviour far from simple.

Everybody’s doing it: Our final stop on this brief historical journey is in America in the late 1940s. It was there that a respectable 53-year-old former entomolo­gist (his specialty was the gall wasp) pub­lished a fat scientific study that Life maga­zine declared to be the most sensational and popular scientific work published since Darwin’s Origin of the Species. The work was entitled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, and its author was Dr Alfred Kinsey.

The Kinsey Report lifted the lid on sex­ual taboos and behaviour that Americans had previously been reluctant to discuss. Kinsey surveyed a massive sample of Americans and reported that 90 per cent of males masturbated, 85 per cent had engaged in premarital intercourse, 30 to 45 per cent had conducted extra-marital sexual relationships, and around 70 per cent had visited prostitutes.

Furthermore, Kinsey contended that 37 per cent of males had experienced homo­sexual orgasm post-puberty, that 10 per cent of the population were predominantly homosexual and 4 per cent exclusively so.

The implications of Kin’s research were not lost on the American public. If, for example, 10 per cent of the population were homosexual (which was how the figures were popularly represented), then homo­sexuality was no longer a deviant criminal act only practised by a very small number of social outcasts. It ought now to be rec­ognized as the fairly common behaviour of a large minority. Many homosexual activists cite Kinsey as the man who made the modem gay movement possible.

After Kinsey, the conversation about sex was on a new level. As a step towards the overthrowing of conventional moral norms, it was a defining moment.

A slow burning fuse: As this brief his­tory has tried to demonstrate, the sexual revolution of the last 30 years has been a long time in the making. The abandonment of conventional or “Victorian” sexual morality that occurred among the Bloomsbury group prefigured what was to happen on a mass scale later in the century. It was there, perhaps, that the fuse was lit. Freud, Mead, Russell and Kinsey all played their part (and, of course, they were not the only ones). They kept it burning, as it were, and laid the explosive. It was in the mid-’60s, when the conditions were right, that the bomb went off.

What must be remembered, however, is that lying behind the whole process was a previous generation’s rejection of God. The late-Victorians lived on the moral capital of their forefathers. Their loss of faith may have rendered their morals formal, sterile and ultimately hypocritical, but the sense of duty and morality remained, such was the residual power of the religion of the par­ents’ generation. But by the next genera­tion, there was no such constraining force. When Bloomsbury looked at the late Victorians, all they could see was morality and good manners being kept for the sake of convention. They could see no logical barrier to the moral and sexual liberation they eagerly sought.

It took much of the rest of the century for this logic to filter down through society as a whole. Society’s “gatekeepers” — the intel­lectuals, university teachers, commenta­tors, journalists, filmmakers — played an important role in this percolation process

Nevertheless, the sexual attitudes and behaviour that are now common and accepted in our society can only be under­stood in light of the historical background we have been outlining in this chapter — or, should we say, the theological background. The sexual revolution was not simply a rebellion against traditional morality; it was the consequence of a rebellion against God, who defined the terms of that morality.