re oral sex:
That's interesting, I'm not old enough o remember that far, but I do know when I was a young women and would read things like Cosmo, it talked about oral sex as something that had at one time been seen as icky, but that research revealed it had actually been common. The sense in my generation was that oral sex was normal and vanilla and not being interested was very odd and prudish.
Goosefoot: It might depend on where you lived? I was in the UK in the late 60s. I lost my virginity in London (Notting Hill Gate, with a shy Spaniard called Miguel, if you want to know!
) and I wasn't at all sexual experimental. But my closest friend, whom I was visiting (she was 19, it was 1967-8) lived in London and was quite promiscuous and fun-loving and she talked about EVERYTHING -- loved boys, picked them up at clubs, brought them home for one-night stands, etc. She never once mentioned os, and she would have, because she liked embarrassing me and being outrageous. She'd have been up for it immediately.
Later, I lived in a slightly backward country, but after that I lived in hippie communes with Americans who were certainly not prudish and nobody ever mentioned it. Not once. Or tried it with me.
But it certainly seems as if the barriers fall one after the other; the barriers of ickiness and thrill-seeking; as if once one barrier falls, the last taboo becomes vanilla and people seek the next barrier to break.
I remember a time when girls "waited" for marriage. I was going to, before the Sixties came in full swing. Boys knew, back then, that they probably couldn't get sex not even from their steady girlfriend.
Here's proof: a very popular song in my culture at the time had the lyrics: "Ring ting ting, everybody hear this thing, my girlfriend promise to give me some ting, and the bells gon' ring, and the birds gon' sing, cause she promise to give me some ting ting ting".
It's a lovely little song, so innocent!