Pleasure and Patriarchy

Tracing Changes in Women’s Sexual and Romantic Relationships during the Sexual Liberation Movement

Abstract

The sexual liberation movement revealed that women were being controlled and subordinated within their intimate relationships. The movement exposed this mechanism of social control by attaching women’s deep sexual dissatisfaction to their subordinate social and political statuses. With an influx of information during the second wave about women’s health, anatomy and sexual pleasure, this study aims to address how the movement impacted women’s sexual relationships and, therefore, answers this research question: “How have women’s sexual displays of love changed according to the sexual liberation movement of the second wave of feminism?” Through a content analysis of twelve articles from six different magazines written during the second wave of feminism, this research paper finds two main conclusions. First, the sexual liberation movement changed older women’s romantic relationships and sexual displays of love as these new social norms revolutionarily encouraged women to advocate for themselves within sexual relationships. Second, for younger women, the movement triggered profound ideological struggles and moral discomfort while normalizing premarital casual sex. Paying attention to the humanistic dynamics of a political movement, this study elucidates where women felt a positive and negative change at the height of the sexual liberation movement.