"FREE LOVE"

Beat poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs lived unusually free, sexually expressive lives.  Their writings embraced sensuality and sexual experimentation as an essential ingredient to living life to its fullest. Rock 'n Roll music likewise began to express the adolescent yearnings and forbidden desires that were previously repressed. So the whole generation growing up in the 1960s, developed a radically different attitude toward sex than their parents.

The concept of Free Love as expressed by hippies meant you were free to love whomever you pleased, whenever you pleased, however you pleased. "Free love" meant you could love anyone, anywhere, anytime, without guilt. This encouraged spontaneous sexual activity and experimentation: group sex, public sex, sex with minors, homosexuality... The open relationship became an accepted part of the hippy lifestyle.

The biggest single event to liberate women from their designated roles as housewife and mother, was the contraceptive pill. This along with the popularization of other forms of birth control, like the IUD and spermicidal creams, allowed women to have sex, without concern about unintended consequences.

Venereal disease was a common problem among the sexually active. Teenage pregnancy became so prevalent that the social stigma faded somewhat. Fortunately, the sexual openness that created these problems was soon to be addressed in public, resulting in the opening of free clinics, sex education in schools, the liberalization of abortion laws, and sexual product advertising. 

All this resulted in the free flow of information about sex, an expansion of women's and gay rights, and society's keen interest in the health issues surrounding sex. Hippies brought sex out into the open and this breaking down of society's sexual mores by hippies led directly to the Gay and Women's Liberation movements.