From The Scientist:
David John Frank, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, reported a few years ago that such social changes can be traced back to at least the 1940s, when laws against nonmarital or nonprocreative sex began to contract, and laws punishing sex crimes expanded. These legislative changes reflect a modern view of sex whose origins perhaps lie as far back as the French Revolution, when France started retiring laws prohibiting nonprocreative sexual behaviors. “I think it’s the French Revolution that begins to break apart the monopoly of family thinking and begins to assert the primacy of individual thinking, and a shift [in perspective] from baby-making sex to individual-pleasure sex,” Frank says.

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