Sex: What’s Changed Since the ‘80s?

Thirty years ago, the average man thought the clitoris was a Greek hotel and the average woman didn’t know how to enlighten him. A man’s sex education consisted of what his misinformed friends told him. As an editor on British national newspapers, I received letters from confused and timid women, which made it clear that sex, from a woman’s point of view, needed to be explicitly addressed.

During this period, despite the Swinging Sixties, the perception of sex was that everybody did it. You could sunbathe topless, wear see-through dresses and fornicate more than previously, but nobody actually talked about sex: it was considered embarrassing.