For the puritan tradition, the sexual represented an oppressive presence by the self-consciousness with which its presence was excluded from public life and most of private life as well. In contrast, in less than three decades we have moved to practices that allow for images of the sexual to permeate our entire culture. The current freedom given to the visual, literary, and dramatic representations of the sexual could not have been described by the most prescient of mid-twentieth — century commentators.
The acceptance of premarital sex, the major issue of scandal attending publication of the second of the famous Kinsey publications, has become virtually normative in both terms of statistics and attitudes (Miller and Simon 1980). This ranges from adolescent engagement in coital behavior at ages that suggest sexual acts that are truly pre-premarital, early sexual activity that only in a minority of cases can be described as being motivated by family-forming commitments, to the acceptance of premarital and postmarital cohabitation at virtually all social levels. And, despite a backlash from fundamentalist religious revivals and concerns with AIDS, there have been shifts in the perceptions and conduct of homosexuality of a most profound and equally unanticipated character (Levine 1986, 1992). Homosexuality has become a presence in the everyday order of things.