The sexual revolution was the culmination of growing consumerism in Western societies, which in turn stemmed from the unprecedented prosperity an security that these societies had managed to achieve. Until the 1960s, the growing number of easily available goods did not include sex: this was regulated by existing social practices as well as by the old moral precepts going back to classical ethics. This growing consumerism tended to weaken both social practices and moral precepts, and replaced them with far less demanding and seemingly more natural criteria of a utilitarian kind, pleasure being the principal yardstick to measure the value of human goals. The impressive efficiency of modern civilization accustomed people to expect that their actions would be instantly gratified. Whatever delayed or hindered this gratification was considered unnatural, repressive, incomprehensible, and in the long run unacceptable.
When we look at this mental change from the perspective of the history of philosophy, we can see in it the final—though, thank God, not yet closed—phase of a long process. From the beginning, pleasure was considered by philosophers to be and important part of the human experience, also having a complicated but powerful relation to morality. For twenty-five centuries the nature of this relationship had been the subject of an engaging and often illuminating debate. This debate unavoidably occasioned the use of other concepts, not identical to that of pleasure but somehow related to it: happiness, fulfillment, flourishing, and a few others. At the end of the day pleasure finally outclassed its rivals.
Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.108.
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