ABSTRACT
The permissive moment, in its contradictory course, revealed all the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal approach to sexuality. Between the 1960s and the millennium, Britain went through a historic transition in sexual beliefs and behaviours, a transition that transformed the possibilities of erotic and intimate life for millions of people. Widespread anxieties aroused by the nature of the social changes, especially expressed in the growing autonomous styles of the various youth cultures, were being displaced on to the terrain of sexuality. Abortion and divorce reform, family-planning legislation, even reform of the obscenity law, had as their points of reference the changing social and sexual position of women. But a medical moralism suffused many official statements from the medical profession itself, particularly with regard to homosexuality, which received ever-growing attention. As religious ideologies declined there was scope for the vacuum to be filled by more secular ideologies, of which perhaps the most potent were medical.
