ABSTRACT
Consumer capitalism was the most profound influence on the sexual culture of twentieth-century Europe. By the 1960s, growing wages for young people helped create a popular culture in which they could use consumption to express their sexual selves – whether dancing to the Rolling Stones or wearing a miniskirt. Sixties radicals then rejected consumerism and resurrected the revolutionary idea of sexual desire as a key to the imagination. But feminists critiqued the vision of untrammeled sex, and consumerism won out over revolution. A new concept of sexual citizenship and sexual rights emerged, but it excluded migrants, public sex workers, and many trans people.
