The Sexual Revolution and Youth Culture
in the early 1960's:
What Can We Learn from Holly Golightly?
What’s More Important?
- Holly’s Sexual Independence and Assertiveness, OR
- Her Return, at Movie’s End, to the ideal of Romantic Love with the Right Man
Is the Popularity of Breakfast at Tiffany’s Evidence of Prefeminist Stirrings among Young Women of the Baby Boom Generation?
Key Moments in the Usual Narrative of the Women’s Liberation Movement
1) The Feminine Mystique (1963)
2) The Founding of NOW (1964)
3) The Hayden/King Memo (1965)
4) The 1968 Miss America Protest
Most important to what Douglas calls the revolution in girl culture were the ways that young women challenged the Sexual Double Standard.
Douglas’ Evidence
1) The contradictory messages young women received as members of the postwar generation
2) The Size of the Baby Boom Generation
3) The Introduction of the Birth Control Pill
4) Voices promoting Women's Careers and Sexual Lives outside of Marriage
1) The contradictory messages young women received as members of the postwar generation.
To Be American or To Be a Girl
Searching for a Middle Ground: Can One Be High Achieving and Sexually Assertive within a Traditional Heterosexual Relationship?
2) The Size of the Baby Boom Generation.
11.7 Million Teenage Girls in 1960
A Growing Youth Market for Popular Culture
An Audience "Demands" New Kinds of Female Characters/Voices
3) The Introduction of the Birth Control Pill
A Media-Induced Sexual Revolution
Creating A Sexual Middle Ground Between "Nice Girls" and "Bad Girls."
4) Voices promoting Women's Careers and Sexual Lives outside of Marriage
Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl
Like Hefner, Gurley Brown Depicts Marriage as a Trap that Keeps Women from Fulfilling Jobs and Sex Lives
Target Audience was Young Women, Not Disaffected Housewives
Did the Shirrelles Matter?
Voicing Young Women’s Sexual Ambivalences and Uncertainties
Fantasies of a Different Sexual Order
Trying Out New Roles and Identities
Men and the Sexual Revolution
Contested Images of Male Sexuality
The Impact of 60’s Images of Male Sexual Assertiveness Was Evident in Social Movement and Countercultural Artistic Production
James Bond: The Hero and Male Libido
Beatlemania and Contested Sexualities
Sublimating Male Sexuality in Androgyny and Playful Humor
Creating A Sexual Middle Ground for Young Women
A Reaction to the Kennedy Assassination and the Loss of Camelot
Brian Epstein and the Marketing of the Beatles
Creating a Middle-Class Image
The First American Tour
"A Hard Day’s Night"--celebrating pop celebrity, while criticizing pop marketing
The Beatles’ Appeal
1) their androgynous style offered the possibility of a new kind of heterosexual relationship;
2) their humor made rebellion playful, safe and irrelevant.
3) their music was authentic and thus created a model of pop-music as art rather than commercial entertainment.
4) their sound was original, not over-produced
The Beatles Influence
Beatlemania and the British Invasion
The Rolling Stones Antithesis
The Next Generation of American Rock Bands.