For a criticism of the sexual revolution: from the liberation of mores to pornocracy (1968–1975)

ABSTRACT

The article reconstructs the debate on the sexual revolution. Since 1968, the modernization and liberalization of the sexual mores bring out all the contradictions resulting from this rapid change. In particularly three authors are placed at center stage: Renata Pisu and her attempt to educate people on sexual liberation; Augusto Del Noce and his denunciation the progressively pornograficizing of society; Pier Paolo Pasolini and his analysis of the link between hedonism and erotomania, and between commodification and reducing women to objects of the sexual appetite.

RIASSUNTO

Il saggio ricostruisce il dibattito sulla rivoluzione sessuale a partire dalla cesura del 1968, mettendo in luce le contraddizioni dovute a questa rapida modernizzazione e liberazione dei costumi. Al centro dell’attenzione vi sono in particolar modo Renata Pisu, con la sua rubrica su ABC dove cerca di demistificare i tanti pregiudizi e tabù sul sesso; Augusto Del Noce con la sua ‘profetica’ condanna di una secolarizzazione sempre più incline a trasformarsi in ‘pornocrazia’; ed infine Pier Paolo Pasolini con la sua analisi del legame ‘perverso’ tra edonismo ed erotomania, tra consumismo e riduzione della donna a mero oggetto sessuale.

KEYWORDS:

• sexuality
• secularization
• modernity
• commodification
• violence
• pornography

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Sessualità
• secolarizzazione
• medernità
• mercificazione
• violenza
• pornografia

Notes

1. For example, Anna Tonelli stated: ‘with no hesitation in emphasizing the magnitude, nor falling into the sterile triumphalism of the “formidable years”, it may be said that ‘68 represented the beginning of a new way of looking at the world that radically changed people’s mentality, values and behaviour’ (Tonelli 2007, p.48; cf. also Zancarfini-Fournel 2002).

2. For a comparative analysis of this dual push, on the one hand, towards liberation and modernization, and on the other, towards sexual conservatism, cf. Herzog 2009.

3. Short story by Bianciardi (1963), cited in Bianciardi 2005, vol. I, pp. 1643–1659.

4. Del Noce’s comment of 1 February 1975, quoted in Borghesi 2011, p.153. Del Noce then acknowledged Pasolini as being one of the few to have grasped the true ‘nature of the protest and its aftermath’: ‘the distinction between the young fascists and the young communists is totally secondary, as he has clearly seen. But that is not all. He has also grasped how this “new totalitarianism” that is emerging resembles, not so much communism or Nazism, but a fascism that has become totalitarian, or violently totalised beneath the mask of permissiveness, as he prefers to call it’.

5. For Pasolini ‘the Powers have decided to be permissive because only a permissive society can be a consumer society’ (Pasolini 1974, now in Pasolini 1999, p.1711).

6. On the crime committed at Circeo as a moment when sexuality began ‘to coagulate, to darken’, to become violent and cease to be experienced as a ‘party where everyone makes love with everyone’, cf. Albinati 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorenzo Benadusi

Lorenzo Benadusi is professor of Contemporary History and History of European Culture (Roma Tre University). His research has focused particularly on gender and sexuality, masculinity and respectability. His most recent publications include: Ufficiale e gentiluomo. Virtù civili e valori militari in Italia, 1896-1918 (Feltrinelli 2015); The Enemy of the New Man. Homosexuality in Fascist Italy (Wisconsin University Press, 2012); and with Giorgio Caravale George L. Mosse’s Italy. Interpretation, Reception, and Intellectual Heritage (Palgrave 2014).

Lorenzo Benadusi, Piazza Rocciamelone 11, 00141 Rome, Italy: [email protected]