I don't know why you would mention pornography and not obscenity because both called for bitter fights against church and state as part of the sexual revolution. Basically the demand was for some honesty, authenticity and reality in art and literature - classics by writers like D H Lawrence being forbidden by the censor or only available in expurgated versions, even for academic study (have a look in old book shops).

What about nailing down some dates first though, because it was the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and by any stretch of the imagination that time of liberalism was over with the coming of Thatcher (UK) and Reagan (US). So you are talking about the Sixties mainly with maybe five, at a stretch eight years of the Seventies.

The sexual revolution was very conservative in outlook compared with today although it was a great leap forward for the time. The pornography was very tame arty stuff with some of the erotic works and vulgarity that had been previously banned in classics. Have a look at art books of the time and you will see the coyly covered up naughty bits. Even photos from Egyptian pyramids were banned if there was a bit of bare midriff.

So YES, the battles against the very restrictive obscenity and pornography laws and censorship of the time were well worth it to women and men. There is a hell of a lot of art and literature that would not have been available otherwise.

What happened thereafter mid-Seventies or Eighties on is another argument for another thread. Unless of course you can point to specific examples of pornography from the Sixties and Seventies that you object to. Ever seen the 'risque' Playboys from that time? What a giggle they are now.

Sorry but all this talk of the pill defining some point of liberation is offline as far as I am concerned . Sure the pill is great for giving women more choice about children and power in a family setting and associated dilemmas. A genuinely positive thing .
But my question is about what I think is a natural progression: If you teach children to think like whores, they will start acting like them - and aren't they ? Mead and Greer did so teach and they were no more than reactionaries ! Where are the women who speak for the future?
Are you saying women need more opportunities to express themselves sexually , and more is better for them. If so , Spell it out . I don't think the evidence for that is there !
Tell me why young women all around you still want to wear white? Are they confused or brainwashed or what ?
If you think some bit of technology somehow changes their genetic disposition, you need to start a new Lemarkian school of genetic imperatives .
Get back to the topic . Are women made for sex or for love: What is the paradigm to integrate them ? To pretend that we can discuss them seperately is to live in the valley of the blind and blinkered schools of mere description that are all around us.
I'm with Tina Turner on this . What HAS all this talk got to do with love .

Pynchme:"What has pornography ever done for women?"

Made a few quite wealthy. It's a bit like asking what has fashion ever done for men?

I think a better quaetion is: what has wowserism ever done for anybody?

Hanrahan seems a bit confused about what constituted the "sexual revolution" in Western societies in the mid-20th century. According to him (?) it was something that happened to women rather than men, but the advent of the contraceptive Pill had nothing to do with it.

Further, it was all the fault of those dreadful women, Germaine Greer writing in the 1970s and Margaret Mead, writing half a century before

<< Get back to the topic . Are women made for sex or for love >>

Hanrahan wants us to "spell out" the benefits of the "sexual revolution" for women - which I thought that some of us had been doing quite admirably - but seems a little coy about 'spelling out' where s/he stands. I think the above quotation is quite revealing on that score.

Women aren't "made" for anything - rather they are adult female humans who latterly have considerable choice in their attitudes and behaviour. Sex and love are two aspects of social life where women in Western societies have achieved much greater autonomy and freedom than prior to the 1960s, but they are not the only advances for women since that time. Women now have much greater access to education and meaningful careers, not to mention being free of the expectation that they need to be controlled and protected by men.

<< Tell me why young women all around you still want to wear white? Are they confused or brainwashed or what ? >>

Probably both, I reckon. I presume you mean "white" as in wedding dresses, in which case they are brainwashed by tradition and confused by mixed messages derived from reactionary wowserish parents and from the obscene wedding industry that seems to have exploded lately.

Pynchme - I think it depends what you classify as 'pornography'. Certainly, I don't see much benefit for women in the hardcore stuff, beyond the relatively small amount of money they are paid to objectify themselves. However, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban or censor it any more than it is already.

I apologize for not being clearer Cornflower. The thing that led me to the question was this article by Robert Jensen, which he wrote apparently in 2003.

http://www.zcommunications.org/sexuality-masculinity-and-mens-choices-by-robert-jensen

Antiseptic I agree I think, though any performer's take is modest compared to the amount made by the people who produce and market it. The industry is worth billions just in the US alone I think. The thing is, Jensen talks about the way that pornography impacts on men and masculinity. As Cornflower points out, some earlier playboy pics seem almost quaint - therefore pornography reflects something of the sexual revolution.

CJ Morgan - Censorship is not my choice either. So raising the issue isn't about restricing it, but about the socio-cultural values that exist in a symbiotic relationship with a massive industry.

There must be a lot of blokes who use it because it's a big money industry with lots of political clout. Is it just another case of wealthy men and some women shaping and exploiting other men's lives ?

If, as Jensen says, masculinity is in crisis then values have changed for them too. Does that change the way men approach relationships or what they expect of them ?

Really, what do women get out of it?

Dear Pynch,

You raise a good question.

According to Ian Robertson, in his book,
"Sociology," :

The link between pornography and behaviour
is still undetermined, the link between pornography
and attitudes however is not. There is now ample evidence
that men who are exposed to pornography tend, at
least temporarily, to have more callous attitudes
towards women.

There can be little question that, pornography
creates a climate
in which women come to be seen as mere sex objects,
existing solely to satisfy men's desires.

According to Robertson -
public opinion is divided along sex lines. It seems
that half of all women in recent polls were "very concerned"
about pornography, but only a quarter of men.

Perhaps this could be due to the fact that most users of
pornography are men; about a quarter of the male population
uses it frequently, either for entertainment or as an
aid to masturbation.