There’s a Bret Weinstein speech going around on Twitter where he makes a comment about how birth control and abortion changed the game around sex, commonly known as the sexual revolution that occurred in the 1950s-1970s. I have not listened to his speech so I have no comment on what he was saying specifically, but in reading some of the comments I was interested that when people discuss “what changed” during the 1950s through the 1970s, they seem to focus on just abortion and birth control on repeat. Even the Wikipedia page for the sexual revolution only mentions these two. Those things absolutely changed behavior, but I think there’s two more things that need to be a bigger part of the discussion:

1. Paternity testing
2. Antibiotics

Paternity testing started out with blood testing in the 1920s, but hit it’s stride in the 1960s with HLA testing. Prior to that, you had to use social rules and general vibes to determine paternity. It largely relied on people’s own truthfulness. Prior to paternity testing, marriage was the most surefire way to ensure no one questioned whose kids were whose, but after we got a better method the number of kids born to single moms went from 5% to 40%. You can see that as good/bad/neutral, but that almost certainly doesn’t happen without the ability to identify a father accurately.

As for antibiotics Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but WWII sped up the perfection of antibiotics for treatment of bacterial infections, and widespread for the public use came in during the 1950s. From 1935 to 1968, 12 new classes of antibiotics were launched. Prior to this, basic STDs like syphilis were actually killing people at a rate similar to suicide today:

And that’s just deaths from syphilis, not cases. That figure comes from this analysis, which notes that prior treatment methods may have been as effective, but they were expensive and time consuming, and penicillin just made everything easier. Of course, syphilis is just one of the diseases people were dodging, chlamydia and gonorrhea also would have been issues. Antibiotics changed the game here.

I bring these up not to take any particular stance on any issue, but to point out that the past was very different in ways we don’t often think about. Even if somehow birth control and abortion were wiped off the face of the planet today, antibiotics and paternity testing would still ensure our population level practices around sex were different than they were 100 years ago. Sexual mores were never just about pregnancy, they were also about ensuring you could establish paternity and avoid STDs.

I think this is important for both cultural conservatives and cultural liberals to remember, as at times we can look at the past as either a golden era of morality or a deep pit of oppression. But in prior “moral” eras, a lot of sexual behavior was kept in check by people lying or threatening to lie about true things, and paternity testing stopped that. Conversely, things like religion may never have had quite the level of influence we attribute to them, they were often coping with very real issues around STD control in an era when the medical community couldn’t help much. When those things changed, behavior changed. It’s a good reminder that most social changes have several causes, and are not just related to one thing.

To note: the things I mention above are those I believe had a direct impact on sexual issues in the 1950s-1970s specifically. There’s a few other advances that probably changed sexual behavior in a slightly less direct fashion: cars (teenagers could go see each other more easily), at home pregnancy tests (earlier identification of pregnancy, no doctor needed), mass distribution of porn (TBD), dating apps (thank God I missed that era).

Anything else I missed?