CAUSES OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: LITERARY DEVELOPMENTS - SEXUAL THEMES IN LITERARY
With the major breakthrough the literary floodgates opened, and during the next thirty years every facet of sexuality was dealt with in a printed form that was available to anyone with the purchase price. Moreover, many of the classic works of erotica that had been reserved in libraries for research purposes now began to appear in bookstores.
By the 1950s, respectable authors were writing about sexual themes previously considered taboo. There was, for example, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which described an erotic relationship between a teen-age girl and a middle-aged man. By the 1960s, there were literally no limits to sexual accounts available in popular novels. In Valley of the Dolls Jacqueline Susann described variations in group sex, and in Portnoy's Complaint the last barriers were broken by Philip Roth's explicit descriptions of male masturbation an^ scenes of fellatio and cunnilingus. And, for those readers who were still not satisfied, a vast supply of hard-core pornography previously relegated to underground and illegal sources now became freely available, either through mail-order houses Qf through bookstores that operated in every major urban center of the country. Now commonplace in almost every popular novel are explicit sexual descriptions, including portrayals of female masturbation and homosexuality (for example, in Kinflicks). Moreover, sex manuals (The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, The Sensuous Couple, Joy of Sex, More Joy qf Sex) offer a host of suggestions for enhancing sexual pleasure and are freely available in most bookstores.
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