Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In fact, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike. So far as we can know, the sexual interests and practices of most young Europeans did not change nearly as rapidly or as radically as contemporaries liked to claim. On the evidence of contemporary surveys, even the sex lives of students were not very different from those of earlier generations. The liberated sexual style of the Sixties was typically contrasted with the Fifties, depicted (somewhat unfairly) as an age of moral rectitude and constipated emotional restraint. But when compared with the 1920s, or the European fin-de-siècle, or the demi-monde of 1860s Paris, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were quite tame.