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The effect of Kinsey was seismic; comparisons were made with Newton and Darwin. He was seen as the architect of the sexual revolution. His statistics encouraged people of both sexes to realise that practically whatever they enjoyed was OK, at least in the sense that a lot of other folks were doing the same. A new liberation theology, as it practically was, was unleashed among the educated classes. The British critic Kenneth Tynan's review of John Osborne's
Look Back In Anger
singled out Jimmy Porter's ‘casual promiscuity' as one of the ways he was typical of Britain's youth post-war. Among the less educated, too, there was a sea change in sexual morality; a sharp rise in the illegitimacy rate was seen, especially amongst teenagers.

The group most profoundly affected for the better by Kinsey's findings was the thirty-plus woman, who discovered what she'd privately suspected but dared not admit was in fact true – far from being a de-sexed wife and mother destined to gossip over the garden fence for the rest of her with a mouth full of clothes pegs, she was, in fact, an elegant, sensuous sexual creature in her prime. The Mrs Robinsons of the world had reason to thank Kinsey for generations to come.

As seems to be par for the course with the sexual pioneers of the last century, however, all was not quite normal in the private life in Bloomington, Indiana, of Dr Alfred and Mrs Clara Kinsey. The publicity version of the bow-tied Kinsey
was of a regular family guy, a Republican voter, partial, according to Clara, a former student of Kinsey's, to a helping of ‘persimmon pudding, highly spiced and topped with whipped cream', when he got home from the lab.

The Kinseys, however, according to a highly controversial 1997 biography of Alfred by James Howard Jones, an historian at the University of Houston, were quietly involved in a long-term
ménage a trois
with one of the guys from the lab. Kinsey, says Jones, was bisexual but with a preference for men. He had once planned to marry another woman but was unsure at the time how to consummate the relationship. He had a taste dating from adolescence for masochistic practices including insertion of objects into his urethra. He was also subject to depression and once, in such a state, circumcised himself with a penknife, in the bath and without anaesthetic. And he was also a voyeur, once paying a black interviewee a dollar for a peep at her clitoris, which she had claimed measured two inches.

None of this, as Jones is keen to emphasise, is to devalue Kinsey's extraordinary legacy to the second half of the twentieth century. Other, flashier sexual pioneers of the period have left us with nothing but dross sillier even than that of the Victorian quacks. One such is the (still) much-trumpeted Wilhelm Reich, a Freudian analyst born in Austria in 1897, whose life's mission was to try to prove that ‘libido', the expression Freud coined for sexual desire, was a substance, sexual energy. The orgasm, he argued, was more than a sugar coating to lure humans to procreate. Its real function was to release sexual tension that literally built up in the atmosphere.

According to Reich, only a very few individuals (himself naturally included) had the requisite ‘orgiastic potency' to dispel the dangerous clouds of sexual energy in the air by liberating rival clouds of ‘orgone'. Society's anti-sex attitudes, monogamy, conservative sexual morality and pre-marital chastity were therefore endangering the planet by filling the air with undispelled sexual energy. What was needed, then,
was more orgasms being fired off into the biosphere by orgiastic individuals such as him. The good orgone sexual energy could then be harnessed to cure a number of medical conditions: the cold, cancer, frigidity and impotence.

At his base in rural Maine, where he moved in 1939, Reich built special zinc-lined accumulators where orgone could be ‘stored'. Patients would sit pointing a collector at their genitals as they experienced orgasm. As these experiments were proceeding, the cultists came to believe that menacing clouds of sexual tension were forming above Reich's institute. Trees were reported to have blackened. Reich decided that he had started inadvertently to produce a sort of orgasmic antimatter that he called DOR – Deadly Orgone Radiation. More beneficial OR – Orgone Radiation – was urgently needed to cancel out the DOR. Reich duly built what he called his ‘Cloud Buster', a set of skywards-facing aluminium pipes on a revolving platform from which he fired orgone from the accumulators into the atmosphere.

The amusing thing is that this silliness was taking place simultaneously with Kinsey's dogged research, and was taken just as seriously by some. Reich's book
The Oranur Experiment
, covering his work from 1947-51, was published in 1951. Many of his other books are still available. Orgone accumulators can still be bought today from Internet vendors and are reputedly in use in Germany, Austria, Mexico and Brazil. Reich died of a heart attack in jail in 1957 while serving a sentence for contempt of court. His institute is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum, or ‘Orgonon'. Holiday cottages can be rented where he worked, and his tomb viewed.

There was a growth of unrestrained, often pretentious, thinking on the orgasm in the post-war liberation period, too. Here is Simone de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex
(1949): ‘We have seen that the act of love requires of woman profound self-abandonment. She bathes in a passive languor; with closed eyes anonymous, lost, she feels as if borne by waves, swept away in a storm, shrouded in darkness: darkness of the flesh,
of the womb, of the grave. Annihilated, she becomes one with the Whole, her ego is abolished. But when the man moves from her, she finds herself back on earth, on a bed, in the light; she again has a name, a face.'

Thankfully, a strand of more grounded progressive thought on sex than Reich's or de Beauvoir's was coming to light as well. Concerning masturbation, for instance, the radical psychiatrist Thomas Szasz remarked astutely in 1946, ‘Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease: in the twentieth century, it's a cure.' And in 1955, Dr Abram Kardiner, an internationally respected psychoanalyst at Columbia University, commented how times had changed to the extent that, ‘… Today, there are parents who are alarmed when they discover that their adolescent boy is
not
masturbating. Several parents who have consulted me about such adolescents are quite concerned that the young person's sexual development is not proceeding normally.'

The ground was also prepared by the Kinsey reports for the most important advance towards increasing what Lionel Tiger's ‘gross national pleasure', or what Hugh Hefner described as the change in the status of sex ‘from procreation to recreation'. This was the invention of the contraceptive pill, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in May 1960. This open-Sesame for the most unrestrained multilateral orgasmic pleasure potential in human history came so hot on the heels of the first mass-market contraception that it is likely future historians will fail to distinguish between the initial motivation for birth control, public health and social responsibility, and the subsequent liberation of private sexual gratification on an unprecedented scale.

Sexual pleasure, as we have seen, was not entirely missing from the agenda of the likes of Marie Stopes, and although she declared herself against women putting in their vagina anything they would not care to put in their mouth (she was thinking of chemical pessaries at the time), she would have been a great advocate of oral contraception. But before 1960 no
such near-ideal solution existed. At the turn of the nineteenth-century, the most common form of contraception was the dually unsatisfactory
coitus interruptus
. An anonymous woman of 1920, quoted in Elizabeth Roberts's 1986 book,
A Woman's Place
, gave an idea of just how primitive contraception was within the majority of marriages: ‘We were on the bus and Harold knew the conductor and he asked Harold if we were married. He said, “Don't forget, always get off the bus at South Shore, don't go all the way to Blackpool.” That was how they kept the family down. It was just that the men had to be careful.'

Between 1910-30 in Britain use of mechanical and chemical methods (the new latex sheath, the Dutch cap and pessaries) rose from 9 per cent of middle-class couples to 40 per cent, and from 1 per cent to 28 for the working class. Even though as late as 1938 the Birth Control Advisory Bureau in London needed to remind clients, ‘Many people imagine that birth control is practised only by those who don't like children. This is not so', by 1935, two hundred types of contraceptives were available in the Western world. These were used in addition to the rhythm method, which the Pope approved for Catholics in 1930. The Anglican Church had meanwhile approved birth control if further pregnancy was judged to be potentially detrimental to the mother's health.

The other, even less satisfactory, contraceptive method that was growing apace was abortion – either of the effective but dangerous back-street kind, or the safe but ineffectual patent remedy variety. A 1940 American study of the subject in Britain revealed that a hundred newspaper advertisements a week were appearing for ‘abortions thinly disguised'. One such, in the
Newcastle Evening News
, purported to offer ‘a secret Remedy for the Prevention of Large Families. Guaranteed Infallible'.

With women in an ever more sexual age attempting a rearguard action against their own fertility by dint of a mixture of enforced criminality and quackery, the need for up-to-date advice on birth control was never greater. The Family Planning
Association was founded in 1950 by, among others, Lady Helen Brook, later founder of the Brook Advisory Centres. The FPA's prim name was part of its strategy for getting help to the maximum number of women without attracting unhelpful interference from moralist busybodies. Theoretically, then, the FPA dealt only with married women, but in practice saw ‘premaritals' – girls who had a wedding date fixed, or at least, as Helen Brook used to urge them, were prepared to give the doctor a date – any would do. Other contraception clinics at the time demanded a wedding-dress receipt before issuing contraception. (Helen Brook, a wealthy banker's wife from an arty, bohemian family, was a contemporary of Stopes and Sanger and rumoured to hold similar racist and eugenicist views. She had always been a passionate believer in women having equal sexual rights to men. ‘When I was a girl,' she once said, ‘being brought up as a pure young virgin and hearing about men sowing their wild oats and having experience before marriage, I thought, but what is the difference?')

It was Margaret Sanger, in her eighties, who was the godmother of the Pill. There had been various futuristic dreams in her early days as a contraception campaigner to regulate women's endocrine systems artificially. It had been discovered in the 1930s that hormones could prevent ovulation in rabbits, but it was considered unethical to conduct such experiments on humans. In the 1940s, research in organic chemistry led to cheap methods of synthesising hormones. Accordingly, in a 1945 essay, Fuller Albright, an endocrinologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, proposed a concept he called ‘birth control by hormone therapy'. His idea was later dubbed ‘Albright's Prophecy'.

In 1950 Sanger met Dr Gregory Pincus, a reproductive biologist and endocrinologist from Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Through wealthy libertarian contacts, Sanger raised $150,000 to start Pincus's research into a universal contraceptive. Pincus was already interested in studying the mode of action of female steriod hormones and had done tests on animals to
see if the new synthetic steroids could suppress ovulation. He joined forces with John Rock, a clinical Professor of Gynaecology at Harvard Medical School – and also, surprisingly, a strong but dissident Catholic who, in a double irony, had previously dedicated himself to searching for a solution to infertility. Rock later left Harvard to found the Rock Reproductive Clinic, a free drop-in centre for women in the city of Boston where disseminating birth control advice was still technically illegal.

Pincus and Rock's first clinical trial took place in 1954 on a hundred volunteer women. The results were excellent: not one of the women ovulated, there were few side effects, and when the women came off the experimental drug, they swiftly regained fertility and had children. For a larger trial, Rock and Pincus went to Puerto Rico and Haiti, where again the results were positive.

As the new decade began, the Pincus/Rock pill came on to the market under the brand name Enovid. It was welcomed as a miracle, proved 99 per cent effective and caused fewer side effects than those of a normal pregnancy. It soon emerged tragically, though, that the inventors had overestimated the necessary dosage by a factor of ten. Of the 2.3 million early adopters of Enovid, 11 died and over a hundred developed blood clots. With dosages adjusted and various ‘mini-pills' on the market, by 1974 fifty million women worldwide were on the Pill.

Part of the history of progress is that every step forward has unexpected reverse spinoffs. Although the Pope did not directly allude to this when he condemned the Pill in 1968, there was an unexpected cultural change wrought by the drug. The Pill was seen as a lifeline by women already struggling under the burden of large families and desperate not to have more babies; it also enabled single women to explore their sexuality free from the fear of pregnancy. But whereas previously men had the responsibility of ‘not going all the way to Blackpool', now it was entirely up to women to organise contraception. They
did not even have to go through a routine in bed to remind their men of the precautions they were taking; it was done privately in the bathroom at a different time from intercourse.

Paradoxically, then, in a variety of Western social milieux, from the student campus to the urban working class, it became harder, not easier, for young women to choose not to have sex. Instead of empowering women and easing their path to unalloyed sexual pleasure, the Pill had the effect of liberating men. So while feminist campaigners for sexual equality like the American Clare Booth Luce could correctly declare: ‘Modern woman is at last free as a man is free to dispose of her own body, to earn her living, to pursue the improvement of her mind, to try a successful career', men were free simply to assume that most women were on the Pill. As the Australian critic Clive James said jokily: ‘Of course I'm in favour of the Pill: it puts more crumpet on the market.'