Growing Up

Growing Up

Sex in the Sixties

Summary

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Was the 1960s really that great time of liberation, joyful experimentation and celebration of youth? Growing Up takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution.

No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and vilified than the 1960s. For some it was a time when music, fashion and drugs enabled young people to express their individuality and freedom, their hopes and dreams of a different, perhaps better, world. For others, the decade marked the advent of the permissive society, with its undermining of authority, family values and common decency. At the heart of this continuing controversy is sex.

For this wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the sexual landscape of the 1960s Peter Doggett has assembled a dozen little-known stories that reveal how the sexual revolution transformed people's lives. Growing Up provides an honest, often disturbing portrait of a constant battle between two forces: the urge to free the body from guilt and restraint; and the desire to control, cannibalise and exploit that liberation for profit or pleasure. It is a battle that divides opinion to this day.

© Peter Doggett 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Reviews

  • The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book
    David Aaronovitch, The Times, *Book of the Week*

About the author

Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett first wrote about feminism and gay liberation in There's a Riot Going On, his 2005 history of the collision between rock music and revolutionary politics. Since then, he has published a series of books about the death of 1960s idealism, and its aftermath, as viewed through the life and work of the Beatles in You Never Give Me Your Money, David Bowie in The Man Who Sold the World and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in his 2019 biography of the same name. His other books include a panoramic cultural history of popular music, Electric Shock. He lives in Sussex with the feminist artist and film-maker Rachel Baylis.
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