Sex and rock

Essay by spyder227High School, 11th gradeA-, April 2006

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Through the 20th century, music has influenced the sexual views/tendencies of

the American youth. Simon Frith's essay, 'Rock and Sexuality' depicts the changes

between the early 1920's, where women began too free themselves from the

suppressed views held by the generation prior to them concerning marriage and

sexuality, right till the mid 1970's where after going through a rock and punk phase

American youth now entered an era where disco and dance became the focus of

youth culture, turning everything, even sex, into a product who's only purpose is to

be consumed for pleasure.

It was during the early 1920's that young women began to become more

liberated, they moved away from the ideal which was that they should stay at home,

in essence skip their entire childhood and wait until a man came searching for

marriage. Only when free marital choice became a norm did young women

experience their childhood or more specifically their teenage years.

This movement

towards "liberation" was founded in colleges, it was college girls who decided the

standards, which acts where acceptable and which acts where considered too be

vulgar. These actions "liberated" women from the ideology of the generations

previous to them but it did not "liberate" them from the double standard which the

world would uphold within the years to come.

All this seemed to be personified by the industrial revolution. Where young

women from middle class families would work in the newly created factories along

side young men. This new type of interaction without the interference of a parent

lead to the creation of a more passionate environment, 'The bourgeoisie themselves

were slowly adopting the ideology of romantic love as a way of regulating adolescent

sexuality' this allowing the children to integrate easily or more importantly

respectably into adulthood.

As the...