Feeling like a child : dreams and practices of sexuality in the West German Alternative Left during the long 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s are popularly known as a “time of sexual challenge to the prudery, hypocrisy and stolid family conservatism dominating the post-war Fifties’ world.”1 Scholars have often depicted these years as an era of sexual liberalization or even, especially in the context of the student revolts around 1968, as a time of sexual revolution.2 In West Germany, the focus of this article, premarital sexual relations became a new norm, as a 1971 study by the Hamburg sexologists Hans Giese and Volkmar Sigusch noted.3 Behavior surveys of this period found that the number of male students between the age of twenty and twenty-two without coital experience decreased from 49 percent in 1966 to 28 percent in 1981; among female students, the change was even more dramatic, as the numbers fell from 54 percent to 18 percent.4 The introduction of the pill in 1961 untied heterosexual sexuality and reproduction to a hitherto unknown degree. Though this did not cause a sexual revolution, it made [End Page 219] talking about both sexual pleasures and contraception easier.5 More generally, sexuality became more visible in the public sphere, not least through an increase in the availability of pornography.6 At the same time, people were encouraged to talk openly about their sexuality and sexual problems in therapeutic contexts