Did the sexual revolution "take a wrong turn"?

The Swarthmore alumni magazine published a letter from me in its latest issue, in which I try to clarify some points made in a story on college students' dating habits that, I believed, was based on a misunderstanding of the history of sexuality. Here's the opening of my letter; you can read the rest here.

“The Swattie Dating Game” (March 2004 Bulletin) is astute and thorough but would have benefited from a more accurate version of the history of sexuality. Author Elizabeth Redden ’05 cites popular journalism and recent surveys by the Independent Woman’s Forum (IWF) to demonstrate that a “hookup culture” is widely accepted among college students. The fact that casual sex has become tolerated leads her to imply that such sexual behavior is a “millennial” development; she even quotes an IWF spokesperson who describes it as “where the sexual revolution took a wrong turn.”

Popular media images in the 1940s and 1950s showed tidy marriages and squeaky-clean young people, but the history of sexual morals is not the same as the history of sexual practice. The fact that casual sex was stigmatized and frequently kept hidden does not mean it didn’t happen—or even that it wasn’t discussed. As early as World War II, the sexual culture of American servicemen attracted considerable attention from journalists, public health officials, and both religious and secular moralists.