by Niall Gooch, First Things (Photo: Unsplash)
Philip Larkin joked in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”—an ironical reflection on the sexual revolution—that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three . . . / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”
The Chatterley in question is of course D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1960, a prosecution brought under the new Obscene Publications Act against Penguin Books, the publisher of the first unexpurgated British edition of the novel, resulted in a unanimous acquittal. The trial is sometimes regarded as marking the dawn of the permissive society, and the rather halfhearted prosecution certainly demonstrated the fading moral authority and self-confidence of the old establishment; Anglican bishop John Robinson, later notorious for writing the crypto-atheist Honest to God, appeared as a defense witness, alongside liberal academics.
Those who favored continuing restrictions on sex, violence, and bad language in media were constantly on the back foot thereafter. In 1968, the Theatres Act removed the longstanding power of the Lord Chamberlain to censor or prevent the performance of plays. The musical Hair, featuring full-frontal nudity, opened in London the day after the law came into effect. Another notorious obscenity trial in 1971, involving the short-lived satirical magazine Oz, did end in convictions, but these were overturned on appeal. Several well-known figures from the powerful, ascendant counterculture appeared for the defense, including Ronald Dworkin. The occasional wins scored by campaigners like Mary Whitehouse were shouts in a hurricane, given the changes occurring simultaneously all over the developed world. Blasphemy and decency laws remained on the books but were quietly ignored. The rise of the internet from the 1990s on cemented the victory of the sexual revolution by offering near-instant access to explicit material and to identity-based online groups, making it much easier to distance oneself, intellectually and morally, from the bonds of family, church, and community.