Orgasm without limits

May 68 and the history of sex education in modern France

Tamara Chaplin

pp. 376-397

in: Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne, James Williams (eds), May 68, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

According to popular memory,¹ the French events of May 1968 that culminated in the only ""general" insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II" were triggered "because boys wanted "into" the girls dorms".² Whether what Kristin Ross has since dubbed "the panty-raid theory of history" is accurate, when the student protestors left the Nanterre campus, took to the streets of Paris and plastered the city with posters and graffiti calling for such freedoms as "Orgasm without limits", they saturated politics with sex and politicized sexuality. Joining forces with workers who also sought to overthrow the old moral order, the student revolutionaries of 1968 rejected bureaucratic consumer society, technocracy and authoritarian rationalism while calling for direct democracy, autogestion, educational reform and sexual emancipation.

Cited authors

Ross Kristin