/ 30 July 1999

Sexual century: Seven key events

Tom Hickman

Body Language

This century, like no other, has made sex its central cultural force. We use sex to sell everything. And what was once the most private of human acts has become a public obsession.

Our sexual experience has been transformed by factors as diverse as war, cinema, disease and revolution. Though some events are familiar – the Christine Keeler affair, the invention of the pill or the advent of Playboy – other, less noticeable moments have had as profound an effect.Here,we highlight the hidden landmarks of the sexual century.

First screen kiss

“For the first time in the history of the world it is possible to see what a kiss looks like,” proclaimed the New York Evening World, when in 1895, movie audiences witnessed their first screen kiss.

The Kiss, adapted from a Broadway play, was a box-office smash. “Scientists say kisses are dangerous, but the idea has unlimited possibilities,” the paper continued.

Women’s clothes

At the end of the 19th century, the clothes women wore in public weighed 16,65kg. But at the start of the 20th century the figure fell dramatically to 3,15kg, and by the Twenties it was only a few grams.

Skirts became shorter, hair was shorn. The first bra was patented in 1913 by a New Yorker (though the French claimed to have been using a version since 1889).

The pin-up

The notion of the “pin-up” girl was created in World War II by the Americans, and adopted by the British. It soon appeared everywhere, on barrack-room walls, inside tanks and planes. Alberto Vargas drawings of girls that appeared in Esquire were as prized as the Hollywood stars.

Later, American aircrews painted women on the noses of their B17s. The bomb dropped on the island of Bikini during World War IIwas called Gilda, after Rita Hayworth’s screen character.

The Kinsey Report

The most intimate sexual activities were transported from the bedroom to the laboratory to be subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Biologist Alfred Kinsey and associates at the Institute of Sex Research started a trend of gathering large numbers of sexual histories. He aimed to collect 100 000. One critic said Kinsey gave a man little to choose “between a woman and a sheep”.

The telephone

ES Turner noted in his History of Courting: “A girl lying in bed could hear the voice of her boyfriend on her pillow, a voluptuous thrill which would have been regarded as wildly improper in days of prudery. “

Gossip magazines

The trend of making the lives of the famous public property was begun by the Hollywood scandal magazines. Their undercover methods included using telephoto lenses and the services of models and call girls who made themselves available to the Hollywood stars – with miniature tape-recorders in their purses.

Espresso bars

In between rock’n’rolling, teenagers in the Fifties flocked to the newly opened espresso coffee bars, where they could play the juke box, hang out and flirt with freedom.

A Sexual Century by Tom Hickman is published by Carlton Books