Revolutions, Political and Social

I'm looking forward to miracles, including washday.

It's kind of weird to me that you think I didn't even think of that. I brought it up in my comment. How is me mentioning it specifically mean that I didn't even think of it?

But, as I said, "revolutionary" as the control issue may have been in that one small aspect, there were still many, many other factors in play. Just look up the Wikipedia page on the subject it's far too much to even get into here. Feminism, pornography, abortion, the drug culture and hippy/free love movement, Kinsey, changing demographics after WW2, effective antibiotics against syphilis, Freud, Sanger, Reed, de Beauvoir, Steinem, Plath, Hefner, Joplin, etc etc etc Pinning the entire movement on one development that took place 40 years after it started seems to me to be missing the big picture. Plus the large majority of the strong, independent, sexually open women I know do not even use oral contraceptives, and might still take offense if someone stated they weren't in control of their own bodies.

and it's not like it was just women having this revolution, either. The prevailing culture was changing.

Much of that may be true, but I was a teenager when the pill became mainstream and it made an immediate impact. Illegal abortions put women's lives at risk, condoms weren't as effective and required proper use, something teenage boys didn't always do.The pullout method had to be done correctly to be as effective, and again, there could be no allowance for mistakes made in the "heat of the moment". Girls had the burden to bear (literally) if a pregnancy occurred, and their future hopes were usually over since many careers were difficult for women to achieve and nearly impossible if one was married or had dependents. Once the pill was made available, girls and women had much less fear of unplanned pregnancies. Women had already proved they could work at many jobs during WWII, the pill gave them a better opportunity to continue to do so. That was years before the free love movement, though it may have helped it. There are several non-oral contraceptives available now your friends can use.

I'm not arguing that it didn't have an impact. I'm saying that to credit it with being the catalyst of the "Sexual Revolution"- which started 40 years prior and had many different important cultural, technological, and social changes driving it- is wrong.

Note the winking face....

If it helps, don't even think of fabric when I hear "velvet." I think of cake. Num num.