Feeling Like a Child: Dreams and Practices of Sexuality in the West German Alternative Left during the Long 1970s

"1 Scholars have often depicted these years as an era of sexual liberalization or even, especially in the context of the student revolts around 1968, as a time of sexual revolution.2 In West Germany, the focus of this article, premarital sexual relations became a new norm, as a 1971 study by th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the history of sexuality 2016-05, Vol.25 (2), p.219-245
Main Author: Haberlen, Joachim C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Behavior
Children
Genitalia
Left wing politics
Lesbianism
Liberalization
Men
Norms
Orgasm
Pedophilia
Political activists
Political aspects
Psychological aspects
Reformers
Scholars
Sex (Psychology)
Sexual intercourse
Sexuality
Social aspects
Social reformers
Studies
Women
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Summary:"1 Scholars have often depicted these years as an era of sexual liberalization or even, especially in the context of the student revolts around 1968, as a time of sexual revolution.2 In West Germany, the focus of this article, premarital sexual relations became a new norm, as a 1971 study by the Hamburg sexologists Hans Giese and Volkmar Sigusch noted.3 Behavior sur veys of this period found that the number of male students between the age of twenty and twenty-two without coital experience decreased from 49 percent in 1966 to 28 percent in 1981; among female students, the change was even more dramatic, as the numbers fell from 54 percent to 18 percent.4 The introduction of the pill in 1961 untied heterosexual sexuality and reproduction to a hitherto unknown degree. [...]Lilly Schuh-Gadmann, pedagogue and psychologist at the University of Zurich, argued in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel that "the pre-school child has the same sexuality as an adult human being," and even the youngest children have "sexual impulses" that society simply dismissed.8 In 1970 members of the German parliament charged with reforming criminal law even listened to radical education scholar Helmut Kentler, sexologist Volkmar Sigusch, and other sociologists and psychologists, who declared that children would not suffer from sexual relations with adults and that those relations should not be punished, because they are a "crime without a victim.
ISSN:1043-4070
1535-3605
DOI:10.7560/JHS25201