What and when was the sexual revolution?

Harvey, the man who launched a thousand philosophical contemplations:

First, here is Harvey himself, who early on in this on-going debacle said this:

“I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.”

Stop the presses. Harvey has in fact put his finger on one serious cultural truth.

That's from an interesting piece in the American Spectator. The claim there is that the "sexual revolution" , by throwing away all the old rules, left a generation lost and confused. The next step, not explicitly made in the piece, is that poor Harv was one of these.

There are (at least) two ways we might think about the sexual revolution. One way, the American Spectator way, is to speak of a system of sexual morality that was working and then along came chaos and now we all reap disaster. We can nuanced in this view. We don't have to pretend that the sexual morality of the early twentieth century was perfect. We can admit lots of problems but argue that throwing all the rules out was crazy. And it was crazy. All that said, I still think there is another way of looking at things. This other way says that the sexual morality of the first half of the twentieth century was doomed no matter what happened; that if a twelve-year-old Hugh Hefner had ridden his bicycle into traffic without looking and had been killed by a passing truck the history of the 1960s and 1970s would not have been substantially different.

What happened in the 1970s was crazy. That said, Harvey Weinstein is a monster and the only person to blame for that is Harvey Weinstein. Even without rules, some people managed pretty well. We can't keep going that way so we won't. That said, if feminists and/or social conservatives get their way, we'll be plunged into a new puritanism that will make the 19th century look like a glorious age of freedom.