The Decade that Gave Birth to Sexual Promiscuity: The 1920s

Recently a study was released that stunned repressed conservatives who have long believed that the best way to deal with unpleasant realities is by pretending they don't exist. The study indicated that people were regularly engaging in pre-marital sex longer ago than was previously thought. For decades now it has been assumed that it was all those long-haired hippies hopped upon goofballs and the music of the Beatles that began the long slow descent into hedonistic promiscuity that has witnessed its apex in the middle school kids of today sending nude photos of themselves over their cell phone cameras. Alas, that theory has little support. The infamous study indicates that millions were having sex before marriage long before John Lennon was pleading with his girlfriend to please please him the way he pleased her.

In fact, the decade that witnessed a wholesale movement toward early sexual experimentation was not the swinging sixties but the roaring twenties. And it wasn't rock and roll-originally a term for the sexual act-but jazz that got the young people all worked up and in need of erotic release. (Yes, jazz was also originally a term for intercourse.) There is yet another similarity between the decade that has been blamed for lowering the moral standards of America and the decade that actually deserves the blame. Just as the radicalization of morals and mores in the sixties exploded off college campuses and into the towns and cities of America, so was the college campus the locus classicus of encroaching promiscuity during the 1920s.