Fractelle,

It's a non question. Of course the sexual revolution was positive for women. For men too.

I'm all for casual sex and friends with benefits. I'm all for women being able to control how many babies they have.

What is B&Ts?

Fractelle/severin

Goodness, another mental oldie who is a product of her times and gets her 'updates' from ACA and women's magazines.

The Pill is just a synthetic mimicing a natural hormone. It took a caning in the late Sixties and early Seventies when it was wrongly accused of causing blood clots, strokes and heart attacks. Use of the pill halved in the Seventies and early Eighties as a (delayed) result.

There are efforts in the UK to make the contraceptive pill available over the counter as a way to improve the access of women to birth control. The requirement for a prescription is a barrier to contraceptive use for some women.

As for developing countries what other way is there to reduce the rates of unplanned pregnancies and maternal deaths other than to provide access to safe oral contraceptives for all women at low or no cost?

Just think, had there been dinosaurs like you in charge of the sexual revolution it would never have happened, the Pill would have been locked away in a cupboard somewhere with "DANGER" written over it in red felt pen.

Cornflower, don't forget that you're speaking to a woman who's barren. The pill for her is like children: something other people have to deal with.

Severin, noone has claimed that women are more violent than men towards men, that's one of your more lurid fantasies, probably down to being one of the "women with testosterone" that cotter speaks so highly about.

What has been shown is that women are more dangerous to children, even after adjusting for time in care.

The most reliable indicator of childhood abuse is being born Aboriginal and the next is being given to a single mother with no father in the picture.

I have no idea on the correlation of testosterone levels in women with abuse of children. I suspect it may be high.

Cumon people this is not about us and the secondary issues of the pill and disease. Distractions .
The idea of casual sex being a liberating thing has never had a long life in its revivals through history - what is the intellectual energy of OLO doing to be critical of the limits of Greer and Mead's now tired old rhetoric? Perhaps more importantly, how can we say we're alert when the struggles of thinking women to limit the damage now so evident in TV dressing down of young females and the sense of emotional damage just under the surface --but not often said (the ABC lecture series is an exception - referred to earlier used on Sundays
I say NO TALK is the mood here too - all very well for the men to say they like the idea.

Interestingly though many of you accent to the idea of more causal sex being for you a positive - noone is realling selling the idea . My point is that the idea of casual sex in not working for a generation who didn't promote it but now have to live with as an idea thats supposed to work.
In a technological society , what doesn't work will be thrown out - be ahead of the reactionaries and revisionists and join the revolution before it happens.
Give young people some choice by respecting choice.

I think that Cornflower is on the money when she raises the Pill as a defining factor in the "sexual revolution". I'm surprised nobody else has, because it's been well discussed in the popular and academic literature. Further, while I'm not so sure about its lack of physiological side-effects as she is, they are apparently not as extreme nowadays as they were thought to be in the 70s and 80s.

Certainly, in my experience as a man the Pill has been a feature of most of the sexual relationships I've had with women, either in its use or otherwise. I've never known a woman who's had health problems caused by using the contraceptive Pill.

On balance, I think I was fortunate to grow up in an area and time where the whole trendy/counterculture thing was embraced early, such that when I was 15 most of the girls I knew well had been 'put on the Pill' by their mums. Including my girlfriend's, which I thought was brilliant at the time :D

I recall well that we all read the newly-published "Joy of Sex" avidly and openly, since our parents bought it and left it out for us to read. I've never had a serious relationship with a woman since who didn't benefit from the "sexual revolution".

I can't decipher what it is that Hanrahan is trying to say beyond a call for a return to sexual prudery and subordination of women, with which I would obviously disagree.

It would be far preferable for to do as Cornflower suggests, i.e. to extend the "sexual revolution" to the Third World where birthrates are highest and women's status is lowest. I can't think of anything much more likely to improving health and sustainability in the Third World than making the contraceptive Pill freely available to women who want it.

Antiwomen: << don't forget that you're speaking to a woman who's barren >>

That is a truly horrible comment. Little wonder that you're so evidently lonely, bitter and twisted.

Where do you get off being so nasty to people?