Were the Sixties really so liberated?

Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial — sex, even more than usual, was on people’s minds in the 1960s, that semi-mythical decade which, to stretch a point, lasted from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

That, anyway, is the plausible contention of Peter Doggett, whose Growing Up is a refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable survey of some of the emblematic episodes and controversies surrounding the subject during these years. More detailed sociology would have been helpful — how, if at all, did everyday/everynight sexual practices and attitudes change in Barnsley, in Dunfermline, in Ashby-de-la-Zouch? — but the considerable compensation is Doggett’s ability to stand back and enable the potentially overheated reader to see a bigger picture. Specifically, he argues that the era’s famed sexual revolution (largely in the UK, though he also deals with the US) comprised three main aspects: the counter-culture; liberalisation; and commercial exploitation.

How long ago that counter-culture now feels: the Festival of Underground Movies in autumn 1966; Jim Dine’s candid depictions of sexual organs provoking a raid by the Met on Robert (‘Groovy Bob’) Fraser’s gallery; the underground mags International Times (IT) and Oz (an abundance of gratuitous female nudes); above all, John and Yoko, those two virgins looking naked and unflinching at the camera. ‘We tried to show we were very beautiful,’ said Yoko five years later. ‘But the people said we were very ugly. We were very surprised.’

The cardinal non-meeting of minds was between Mary Whitehouse, untiring advocate of Christian teaching on pre-marital sex, and Oz magazine’s Richard Neville, celebrant in his Playpower manifesto of meeting a ‘moderately attractive, intelligent, cherubic 14-year-old girl’ on her way from school, sharing a couple of joints, molesting her and leaving her to head home and finish her homework.