History of Sex and Sexuality from 1952 to 1967

About the history of sex and sexuality from 1952 to 1967 A.D. including trivia about sex-changes, Playboy, and peeping toms.

UNCENSORED HIGHLIGHTS IN THE HISTORY OF SEX

1952 Sex-change surgery was performed in Denmark on ex-GI George Jorgensen, later to win fame and stardom--of sorts--as entertainer Christine Jorgensen. Surgeon Christian Hamburger was subsequently so swamped with applications for the operation that the Danish government restricted it to Danish patients only.

1953 Playboy magazine first appeared on American newsstands. The first issue was undated, because publisher Hugh Hefner didn't know whether there would be a second. The first playmate was Marilyn Monroe in a Tom Kelley photograph supposedly taken in the same session that the famous nude calendar pinup was taken. According to the first anniversary issue, Playboy was aimed at "that select group of urbane fellows who were less concerned with hunting, fishing, and climbing mountains than with good food, drink, proper dress, and the pleasure of female company."

1954 Pauline Reage's novel of sexual abuse and enslavement, The Story of O, was published in Paris by the Olympia Press.

1955 An English newspaper asked mothers to come forward who had been virgins at the time they gave birth to their children. Nineteen women sent details. On investigation 11 of the women were immediately dismissed, because although their hymens were still intact, the women had all conceived through sexual intercourse. But after a six-month detailed medical study, the Sunday Pictorial announced that Mrs. E. Jones had been delivered of a baby daughter while still a virgin.

1957 In Roth v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that purveyors of obscene materials were not protected by the First Amendment and might legally be arrested and prosecuted--but only if the materials were utterly without redeeming social value. This and other Roth restrictions soon led to the end of prosecutions and literary works and "soft-core pornography."

1958 The Mississippi state legislature categorized voyeurism as an exclusively male crime, thereby exempting women from prosecution as Peeping Toms, A Peeping Tom, the lawmakers decreed, was "any male person who enters upon real property. . . and thereafter pries or peeps through a window. . . for the lewd, licentious, and indecent purpose of spying upon the occupants thereof."

1961 On a visit to the U.S., Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev expressed his outrage at the "indecencies" of the film Can Can.

1964 Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich introduced the topless look.

1965 A nursing mother in Sweden was producing an astonishing 3 1/2 pints of milk daily. Unable to feed her infant more than two pints, she marketed the surplus at a local maternity hospital.

1965 Penthouse magazine was introduced in London. An American Penthouse--the first U.S. magazine to show pubic hair--would not be published until 1969.

1966 The International Modern Kissing School, in Schagen, Holland, was closed by orders of the tutor's new bride. Tom Zwagg, alias Johnnie van der Laan, had been offering 10-minute lessons for $1, including kissing from three angles--vertical, 45deg., and horizontal.

1966 William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson published Human Sexual Response, the first detailed description and analysis of the physiological aspects of sexual excitation and orgasm.

1967 I Am Curious (Yellow), one of the first popularly distributed movies in the U.S. to portray sex explicitly, was produced in Sweden. A sequel--I Am Curious (Blue)--was filmed the following year.

1967 A Swedish legislator urged the legalization of marriages between siblings.

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