ABSTRACT
In 1962 journalist Helen Gurley Brown advised ‘nice single girls’ to say yes to sex. Men, she declared, were ‘a lot more fun by the dozen’. Similarly Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, attacked the ‘ferocious antisexuality’ and ‘dark antieroticism’ in America, trumpeting the ‘end of Puritanism’.1 One of the most popular cultural narratives of the latetwentieth century has been the 1960s and 1970s as an age of ‘sexual revolution’. In the 1960s sexual liberalism may have became a very public discourse, but as historians such as David Allyn have argued the nature and forms of this revolution were contested.
