It took the women's movement in the 1970s to free us from this imposed sexual freedom. And, oddly, the liberationists' message was at once freeing and restraining. "No means No!" they proclaimed. And although they meant the phrase as empowering for women, it was ironic that it was almost exactly the same one as used by the modest girls in the 1950s, who would push men away when they'd gone "too far".
Despite this, people went on having sex like there was no tomorrow. Homosexuality was legalised. And in the 1970s, my agony-aunt postbag at Woman magazine was packed with enquiries like: "If I don't have an orgasm will I get cancer?" "Where is my G-spot?" "Do women ejaculate and if they do, why don't I?" (A far cry from the letters of the 1950s that were more likely to ask whether a reader should take her gloves off before shaking hands with a bishop.)
The next brake on the sexual revolution came, of course, from the outbreak of Aids in the 1980s. Doom-laden ads featuring mammoth gravestones warned us not to "die of ignorance". Condoms were handed out like sweets in clubs and condoms meant sex wasn't quite as fun as it used to be. If it didn't stop the sexual revolution, it at least limited the spread of the one-night stand. Temporarily.
Because it soon turned out that we weren't going to "die of ignorance". So people went on bonking. And bonking. And by now, women's liberation had meant that women were able to gets jobs, and become self-sufficient. They didn't have to use sex as some kind of lever to find a husband, as they used to. They could look at sex now in a more dispassionate way. It was more up to them whether they had sex or not. And, perhaps, some did finally find they could look at sex in the same way as men.
And some men, too, freed of the ties that made them feel they were weird or different unless they said "Phwoarr!" every time a pair of boobs on stilts passed by, found that they could be a bit more relaxed about sex, too.
No question, these days most people have many more sexual partners than they did before 1963. So where are we?
As sex becomes more part of our normal lives than something special (like the Saturday-night shag of married couples or the brief anxious-making slip-ups of the 1950s) and as we take it more for granted, isn't it becoming less important?
Love and sex are no longer inextricably combined, as they used to be. The art of seduction, which took a lot of time and energy, has all but disappeared except in countries where sex is still more repressed. There's even a website called Friends With Benefits, which, if you want to have sex, allows you to log in and find someone in your area who's also ready and willing.
There are hardly any tut-tutting noises to be heard at all. True, there are mutterings about whether gays can marry in church or not - but not whether they should be legally united at all. And, of course, there's the over-hysterical witch-hunt-like wave of anti-paedophilia that seems to have erupted from nowhere. But will these voices, too, eventually die down?
Could Philip Larkin actually have been right?
