[9] During this time, the philosophy of liberalism developed and was popularized, and migration to cities increased opportunities for sex and made enforcement of rules more difficult than in small villages.

Sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church undermined the credibility of religious authorities, and the rise of urban police forces helped distinguish crime from sin.

At the same time the women's suffrage movement obtained voting rights, the subculture of the flapper girl included pre-marital sex and "petting parties".

[citation needed] The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of traditional American values.

[16] The sexual revolution sprung from a conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life, dodging religion, family, industrialized moral codes, and the state.

A third, more indirect cause was the large number of children born in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s all over the Western world, as the "Baby Boom Generation", many of whom would grow up in relatively prosperous and safe conditions, within a middle class on the rise and with better access to education and entertainment than ever before.

Two anarchist and Marxist proponents of Freud, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution"), developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s through the 1930s in which the animal-like competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per the Freudian interpretation.

Kinsey's books became bestsellers when published, and laid the groundwork for researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson to study the nature and scope of sexual practices among young Americans.

In Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383  U.S. 413, the court ruled that sex was "a great and mysterious motive force in human life", and that its expression in literature was protected by the First Amendment.

By permitting the publication of Fanny Hill, the U.S.  Supreme Court set the bar for any ban so high that Rembar himself called the 1966  decision "the end of obscenity".

The image of "hot love and cold people" emerged, with sexual liberalism seen as part of the modernization process that, by breaking down traditional borders, would lead to the emancipation of natural forces and desires.

The films eventually progressed the public's attitude toward sex, especially in Sweden and other northern European countries, which today tend to be more sexually liberal than others.

[35][36] Gernreich's revolutionary and controversial design included a bottom that "extended from the midriff to the upper thigh"[37] and was "held up by shoestring laces that make a halter around the neck.

Though not an erotic treatise or sex manual, the book included frank descriptions of sexuality, and contained illustrations that could have caused legal problems just a few years earlier.

[45][46] Featuring cartoons, interviews, short fiction, Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy" and unclothed female "Playmates" posing provocatively, the magazine became immensely successful.

[47] In 1969, Blue Movie, directed by Andy Warhol, was the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States.

The third, Deep Throat, despite being rudimentary by the standards of mainstream filmmaking,[citation needed] achieved major box office success, following mentions by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and Bob Hope on television as well.

[53] In 1976, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw) was released theatrically and is considered by Toni Bentley the "crown jewel" of "the golden age of porn.

"[54][55] By the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, newly won sexual freedoms were being exploited by big businesses looking to capitalize on an increasingly permissive society, with the advent of public and hardcore pornography.

Old values such as the biblical notion of "be fruitful and multiply" were cast aside as people continued to feel alienated from the past and adopted the lifestyles of progressive modernizing cultures.

Another contribution that helped bring about this modern revolution of sexual freedom were the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, who took the philosophy of Karl Marx and similar philosophers.

Feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique in 1963, concerning the many frustrations women had with their lives and with separate spheres which established a pattern of inequality.

The feminist movement has helped create a social climate in which LGBT people and women are increasingly able to be open and free with their sexuality,[63] which enabled a spiritual liberation of sorts with regards to sex.

The Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI (1968) published Humanae vitae (Of Human Life), which was a declaration that banned the use of artificial contraception.

The 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut ruled that the prohibition of contraception was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples' rights to marital privacy.

[65] Free love continued in different forms throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, but its more assertive manifestations faced increased pushback in the mid-1980s, when the public first became aware of AIDS, a deadly sexually-transmitted disease.

The increased availability of birth control (and the legalization of abortion in some places) helped reduce the chance that pre-marital sex would result in unwanted children.

In New York City in 1977, Larry Levenson opened Plato's Retreat, which eventually shut down in 1985 under regular close scrutiny by public health authorities.

[21] Fraenkel (1992) believes that the "sexual revolution", which the West supposedly experienced in the late 1960s, is a misconception/misnomer, and that sex is never actually enjoyed freely as such, being rather observed in all fields of culture: a stance adopted toward human behavior referable to the concept of "repressive desublimation".

[77][page needed] Teenagers assumed their right to a sexual life with whomever they pleased, and bathers fought to be topless or nude at beaches.