Coop’s Childhood Part 4 - Boys, Bushes, Baseball & Beyond

The brooding and mostly repressed sexuality of America in the 1950s that I was born into, was being transformed by a sexual revolution that was taking form in the early 1960s.  The seeds of this insurrection included Zoologist Alfred Kinsey’s reports on his research on human sexuality in males (1948) and females (1953), along with French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex (1949), starting to rekindle the feminist movement including the right of women to have the same freedom to express and act on their sexual desires as men.  

Many of my huge Baby-Boom generation born starting in 1946 into a burgeoning middle class after World War II were beginning to come of age in a relatively prosperous America.  We had better access to education, and through the growing electronic media of radio and television, access to a popular culture that included championing the expression of sexuality and other forms of human liberation.  Facilitated by the development of a reliable birth control pill in 1960, elements of American culture were moving away from traditional values and social strictures towards more permissive and informalized attitudes.  Rock-and-roll music, emerging in the 1950s borrowing from black R&B roots and becoming mainstream in the 60s was a huge cultural aphrodisiac, urging its listeners to “rock”, its thinly-veiled code word for sexual activity.