Hadn't heard this theory before:
It may have been penicillin, not the Pill, that triggered the sexual revolution, a new study indicates. Hypothesizing that “a decrease in the cost of syphilis due to penicillin [which, in 1943, was found to treat syphilis effectively] spurred an increase in risky non-traditional sex,” the Emory University economist Andrew Francis discovered evidence that “the era of modern sexuality originated in the mid to late 1950s,” prior to the debut of oral contraceptive pills in 1960. (Full PDF here.)How much do we really know with any accuracy about sexual behaviour on the big scale in previous centuries, though? I mean, we know there were a heap of prostitutes in Victorian London, but who was their typical customer, and what was happening in the rural areas in the meantime? You can say the same about any similar period, really: we may know from both fiction and non fiction written at the time that certain societies may have been more libertine about certain things for certain periods, but without modern methods of crunching numbers, it's surely always very hard to be certain about population wide behaviours.
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