I have seen some writing lately on the question of whether the sexual revolution can be reversed. Sort of a counter revolution.
The answer is not obvious. There were two groups in the United States that pushed the sexual envelope. The hippies and the male gay community.
While we no longer have good sexual behavior surveys as we did from the 1950s era of Kinsey until Playboy magazine died, the existing survey data suggests that outside of dense urban areas the sexual revolution never went very far. Except for the adoption of oral sex on a fairly widespread basis I see the era of 2000 to 2010 having many of the same sexual behavior characteristics of the 1950s.
The reason that a revolution can pretty much disappear is (1) the unfortunate lessons of the revolution can be quickly learned and (2) the revolution can be constrained to an age or demographic cohort.
The lessons that were learned in the 1960s sexual revolution is that open marriage is an oxymoron and free sex is not free. Either emotionally or micro organism-ly.
It also appears that the sexual revolution was not transmitted to people older or younger than the hippies and the gay community was a closed circle of sexual experimentation.
In the late 1880s and 1890s there was a similar hippie flowering of sexual freedom in the U.S. easily visible in the underclothing that has survived from that period. Colorful and sexy.
That revolution was not communicated to the general population except in left-wing ideological circles where freelove remained a catchphrase.... but it was of little significance in behavior.
While the genie cannot be put back in the bottle we could have a phrase that: ‘genies seldom wander far from their bottle’.
