Sexual Liberation

The moms and dads of 1950s nuclear suburban families were part of a sexual revolution that was in many ways just as significant as that of their children’s generation.

My parents were creating a new, independent life, away from their parents, hometowns, and depression-era mentalities. They were (lowbrow) readers, and their personal libraries included a cornucopia (which I also found and read) of fifties-sixties paperbacks and magazines exploring the new thinking about sex and imaginative renderings of such. For my dad, it included Playboy magazine. My parents seemed to share some genres, such as psychology/sociology/fiction popular texts like the Kinsey reports, Masters and Johnson and maybe the Ian Fleming series. And then there were my mom’s romance thrillers such as Peyton Place, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Valley of the Dolls, The Carpetbaggers, The Godfather and hundreds of more. For my dad, likely, Fanny Hill and Pornography and the Law. For me, the good parts, all.




From wikipedia:
Reviews
Murray Schumach's review in The New York Times on June 25, 1961 opens: "It was not quite proper to have printed The Carpetbaggers between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory." He complains that the plot is merely "an excuse for a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex—and violence ranging from simple battery to gruesome varieties of murder." A recent anonymous Amazon reader review observed that the book "seemed to be the same thing over and over again—business deal, gratuitous sex scene, business deal, gratuitous sex scene."
On the day the review was published, The Carpetbaggers was already at number 9 on the Times bestseller list.
The most successful of Robbins's many successful books, it was eventually to sell, as of 2004, over eight million copies. The profile of Robbins in Gale's Contemporary Authors Online makes the startling claim that The Carpetbaggers is estimated to be the fourth most-read book in history."

Memories of others:

http://www.romantictimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1545&start=0&sid=55c66987b0f57761f67fd7f6e621557f

http://www.accessromance.com/blog/2007/02/27/forbidden-fruit/

From Betty Friedan, “The Sex Seekers’” The Feminine Mystique

The image of the aggressive sex-seeker also comes across in novels like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report—which consciously cater to the female hunger for sexual phantasy. Whether or not this fictional picture of the over-lusting female means that American women have come avid sex-seekers in real life, at least they have an insatiable need for books dealing with the sexual act—an appetite that, in fiction and in real life, does not always seem to be shared by the men. This discrepancy between the sexual preoccupation of American men and women—in fiction and in reality—may have a simple explanation. Suburban housewives, in particular, are more often sex-seekers, not only because of problems posed by children, coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways, and gossiping servants, but because, quite simply, men are not all that available. Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available [See also Chapter 10, “Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available.”] So, from teen age to late middle age, American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy. Even when the sexual affair—or the “extramarital petting” which Kinsey found on the increase—is real, it is never as real as the mystique has led the women to believe.