By Sam Kemp
The sexual revolution of the 1960s was founded upon a simple but radical idea: women had the same sexual appetites as men. Following the publication of Alfred C. Kinsey’s landmark study, Sexual Behaviour In The Human Female, feminist thinkers began arguing that single women should have the same sexual freedoms as men, opening the doors to the possibility that homosexuals and transexuals should be afforded the same sexual rights as everyone else in society.
By the end of the 1960s, the frequency of premarital sex in America had doubled by over 20% since World War I. By the 1970s, less than half of people were virgins by the time they were married. Indeed, conventions like marriage became increasingly unpopular and were looked upon as anachronisms. On both the college campus and in the community, alternatives to marriage like cohabitation were becoming normalised. For feminists, these were the first steps in the fight for sexual empowerment. For the establishment, this increase in promiscuity represented the destruction of long-held values, sparking much moral panic. The Pill, which had been introduced in 1950 and allowed women greater contraceptive control, quickly became a go-to scapegoat. But there was another important influence on the change in sexual attitudes following the Second World War: pop music.
In the 1950s, the dancefloor became one of the few places where sexual desire could be expressed freely. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ was originally a slang term for sex, after all. In the early years of the ’50s, dances were still fairly straight-laced affairs. Elvis helped change all that by making his sexual theatricality an essential part of his act. It’s possible that he was building on something he’d learnt from watching Gospel music performances. According to Jon Stratton, Gospel had long been founded on expressions of divine ecstasy. In Coming to the fore, he suggests that artists like Elvis, who grew up listening to gospel, may have picked up on this and simply reinterpreted these vocal and physical representations of religious ecstasy (the groaning, the chaotic dancing) to convey carnal ecstasy instead.
The King’s hip-thrusting caused quite the stir when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. While the young woman in the audience couldn’t have been more pleased, critics for The New York Herald Tribune saw fit to label his performance “untalented and vulgar”. Indeed, CBS found Elvis’ dancing so controversial that they ordered he be filmed from the waist up should he be invited back. Frank Sinatra, the embodiment of middle American taste at the time, was also worried about the influence rock ‘n’ roll music was having on the young and innocent. “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac,” Sinatra said of Elvis’ performance. “It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.”
But the revolution was already underway. By 1964, Beatlemania was in full swing. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs observe in Beatlemania: Girls Just Want To Have Fun, “Beatlemania was the first mass outburst of the ’60s to feature girls, who would not reach adulthood until the ’70s. In its intensity, as well as its scale, Beatlemania surpassed all previous outbreaks of star-centred hysteria. For those who participated in Beatlemania, sex was an obvious part of the excitement. The Beatles were sexy; the girls were the ones who received them as sexy.” In other words, Beatlemania reversed the traditional gender roles, allowing women to take on the role of the pursuer.
This change is reflected in the music – and especially the lyrics – of the countercultural era. In a study of 13 rock hits released between 1968 and 1972, nine were initiated by men and four were initiated by women. However, in the period 1973-1977, the report finds that “females became more aggressive, 26 times compared to the male 22.” Like The Beatles, whose tracks were often devoid of gender specifications (“Help, I need somebody“), these songs seem to have offered a vision of sexuality as opposed to the idea that women were disinterested in sex. That’s not to say that male musicians always viewed female sexuality in a positive light. Indeed, a paradox of the sexual revolution is that women were simultaneously encouraged and punished for engaging in sexual activity. But they did normalise the idea of women having the same sexual appetites as men.
One of the most controversial celebrations of female sexuality is Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’. Released in 1969, the Gainsbourg-penned track was originally recorded with Brigitte Bardot, who later ordered the masters be destroyed out of fear for her reputation. When the French press managed to get hold of the original tape, they reported that it was an “audio vérité”, a recording of Gainsbourg and his amour on the cusp of orgasm. “The groans, sighs, and Bardot’s little cries of pleasure [give] the impression you’re listening to two people making love,” France Dimanche wrote.
This is where the relationship between music and the sexual revolution becomes a little bit more complicated. In the case of Je t’aime … moi non plus’, it’s hard to tell if it’s music fuelling the sexual revolution or the other way around. The controversy surrounding the track saw it banned in numerous countries throughout Europe, although it still became a hit in the UK. Gainsbourg was a notorious button-pusher, but one wonders if his attempt to set the female orgasm to music was also an attempt to boost his profile. Similarly, there’s nothing to say that Elvis’s sexually-charged moves weren’t simply a response to the prevailing mood of the day. Sex sells, as they say, and Presley may have understood this very well. Either way, one thing remains clear: music provided space for the sexual evolution to play out.
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