The sexual revolution (also known as a time of “sexual liberation”) was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage).

Contraception and the pill, public nudity, the normalization of premarital sex, homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.

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.

Historian David Allyn argues that the sexual revolution was a time of “coming-out”: about premarital sex, masturbation, erotic fantasies, pornography use, and sexuality.