A recent television series on Channel 4 featured the sexual revolution, beginning in the Sixties and bringing the story up to the present day. Two members of The Tablet?s editorial staff watched the programmes. They did not share the confidence of the programme makers that here was a sure path to personal liberation. AT one time I was having sex five or six times a day, reminisced a nurse on Channel 4?s series Sex Bomb, which finished last week. I had friends for golf, friends for bridge and friends for sex, she revealed. For her the Sixties had really swung: she was one of the victors of a sexual revolution which had transformed society from a repressed, monochrome world of damp nappies and abusive husbands into a non-stop festival of personal gratification. Or so Sex Bomb would have had us believe.

This trawl through the television archives of the past 35 years was determined to show that, like a rollercoaster (an image repeated throughout the series), the sexual revolution swept all other issues to one side in a headlong rush towards a utopia of sexual free choice and made-to-measure morality.

Except that the overwhelming impression of the revolutionaries interviewed was that they seemed pretty miserable. From a pragmatic prostitute to a reawakened miner?s wife or a video porn star, they mouthed platitudes about personal liberation and self-discovery as they went through their memories of four-in-a-bed suburban romps, wife-swapping parties, fetish clubs and home-made movies.

Exhibitionists like these are hardly representative, however: when they weren?t exercising their new-found right to group sex, life seemed to go on much as before for most people in the Sixties and Seventies. As the programme?s banal voice-over opined: Marriage had never been so popular as at the start of the Seventies. But the programme makers clearly did not want to introduce the notion that the revolution may have been less exciting than they thought it was: they immediately stepped in to insist that in 1966, schoolgirls all over England were working out ways to lose their virtue. What a thought ? and like most thoughts in Sex Bomb, borne out by a single piece of anecdotal evidence.

To remind viewers of the dark days of repression and heterosexual monogamy, there was footage of bri-nylon brides, 1950s couples in their Ideal Homes, with tea promptly on the table. Cut then to scenes of swinging London, which, they constantly reminded us, was the capital of the sexual revolution. Then came the Pill, the most far-reaching pharmaceutical development of the century and available only for married women when it first came out: one woman (then married with children) described how her doctor had refused to prescribe it for her and you always listened to your doctor; when she found herself pregnant shortly afterwards, she gave herself a home-made abortion which nearly killed her. After this she demanded the Pill: almost immediately she left her husband and embarked on a stream of casual sexual encounters.

It was the first of many accounts of sexual deliverance which had uncomfortable question marks hanging over them. One Catholic woman spoke movingly of her sense of betrayal when Pope Paul VI?s encyclical Humanae Vitae prohibited the use of artificial contraception; one felt the agony of her dilemma. I took control of my own morality, she said. I was forced to choose between my faith and my freedom. To Sex Bomb the Catholic dilemma was merely about shaking off the shackles of the past, like everyone else. The series simply replaced analysis with glib visual juxtapositions and so, to represent these unliberated outposts, there was film of Salvation Army bands or men going down the pit.

The programme was most concerned to show how the Sixties and Seventies were one long orgy, a real-life enactment of Confessions of a Window Cleaner or Last Tango in Paris. You would think that for two decades there was no serious engagement of any kind that would unite the themes of sexual and political liberation. Serious types were campaigning against Vietnam, intoned the narrator, but this was no reason to stop the party. The implications of major legislation were comically glossed over: In 1967, a law was passed which gave abortion on demand; In 1971, there was a new law which made divorce easier.

A few dissented from the view that the sexual revolution (a term never analysed) was unalloyed joy for everyone at the barricades: one woman, who had come to London and joined in the frolics, said it had meant that men ducked out of commitment to any relationships; it was a time when phrases such as give me space and don?t get heavy on me entered the language. Possessiveness was uncool because it didn?t fit into this liberation theory, she said. Nevertheless, everyone still seemed to want to get married: the programme appeared to find this perplexing and hurried over it with film of Mick Jagger marrying Bianca.

One woman from Cockermouth, Cumbria, remembered buying the prototype women?s issues magazine, Spare Rib, and how it changed her life. Like many Seventies women, becoming free meant recognising her sexual needs and re-educating her husband to recognise them too. Women?s groups now discussed the nature of the female orgasm.

A depressed-looking woman recalled having her first orgasm quite late into her sexual career; she had already been on screen telling about her energetic sex sessions in back rooms of 1970s discos ? she said it had all been brilliant ? but in the light of this revelation it must have been rather unsatisfying.

Reaching the Eighties, the tone of the programme changed, but only slightly; people had been alerted to the threat of a new disease called AIDS and Margaret Thatcher hovered over the revolution like a disapproving chaperone. The time of the counter-attack was long overdue, warned the narrator. But then a cabinet minister, Cecil Parkinson, let the family values side down by fathering a love child. There was footage of his wife being questioned about her husband's infidelities as she fed a London parking meter. She remained tight-lipped but there were plenty of penny-in-the-slot responses about sex in the Eighties from other contributors.

A woman who ran sophisticated sex parties complained: In the past, sex was a carefree pleasure. Now it was something you had to think about very seriously. For a while it looked as if the programme makers would take her advice. In one of the few moving parts of the series, two gay men talked about their experiences; one had lost his long-term partner to AIDS and another, Peter, was HIV positive. He candidly recalled his part in the sexual revolution before anyone knew what AIDS was, but tellingly revealed, in one of the programme?s few insights: If I could go back to the day when I got my results, I wouldn't change anything. Despite the fact that it will kill me, having HIV has made me a better person.

MEANWHILE, in 1980s Britain, with its cult of individualism and materialism, the revolutionaries played out their parts. They told us of their drug use, their sexual excesses, both gay and straight, their visits to fetish clubs and how liberating it all felt. But just a minute, didn't this all happen in the Sixties, and not forgetting the Seventies, too? This revolution was not so much a rollercoaster as a merry-go-round. But Sex Bomb did not see it like this. As the Eighties closed, there would be no turning back from the sexual revolution, it portentously announced.

Simon and Jo, who met at a Pension Fund conference, got married on film in Brighton Pavilion. Jo might have been one of those 1950s bri-nylon brides except that the couple already share a home, a mortgage and a child and Simon has a son by a one-night stand. They de decided to marry, they said, because it was embarrassing to keep referring to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend.

The final programme brought the story up to the present day. Here were young people grandly described as second-generation sexual revolutionaries. The bad news was that this meant we had to be introduced to 18-year-old Sarah. By 14 I knew everything, Sarah said. What she meant was that she knew everything about sex, information passed on by her mother ? an original 1960s swinger. At 16 Sarah was married and by 17 divorced. But her mum had one more bright idea. She said: ?Do you want a baby??, and I said: ?That's funny, I was just thinking the same thing?. So Sarah got pregnant through meaningless sex with a man she met in a nightclub. Now she is 18 and, terrifyingly, gives sex-education classes to embarrassed boys at her old school. She gets them to brainstorm obscene words on to a flip chart and finishes them off with the question: What do you think women want from sex?

Somewhere in this madness was Colin, who became a Christian when he was 15. Asked how he avoided temptation with his fianc?e, he advised: Don?t lie down together. For him, there was one advantage in the all-embracing, self-indulgent toleration of the Nineties. There is more leeway to express a preference that is controversial or counter-cultural, he said. He wasn?t talking about wife-swapping parties, starring in porn movies or being a lesbian single parent, but the novel idea that a couple should refrain from sex before the lifelong commitment of marriage. Now there?s a revolutionary thought.

Back to homepage