REVIEWING VH1’s SERIES, Sex: The Revolution. “What if documentary-makers aimed the camera at fewer celebrity has-beens – instead giving scholars a chance to talk? The result would be a very counterintuitive picture of life before the sexual revolution.”

I haven’t seen the VH1 show, but I highly recommend Gay Talese’s history of the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, which we read in my “Law and Sexuality” seminar, taught by Harlon Dalton. I often draw on it when teaching in Constitutional Law, because today’s students don’t really have any grasp of what life was like in an era without freely available porn and socially-approved consensual sex. That said, the review above is certainly right in suggesting that the conventional narrative (bad, repressed Puritans) is highly misleading.