The sexual revolution refers to the well documented changes in sexual behavior throughout the Western world that continues to evolve.

In general use, the sexual revolution is attributed to the changing trends in social thought, witnessed from the 1960s into the early 1970s. However, the term has been used at least since the late 1920s.

During the 1960s and 1970s fundamental changes were made on how society viewed its sexuality, heralding a period of de-conditioning away from old world antecedents, and developing new codes of sexual behavior many of which are now integrated into the mainstream. The 1960s and 1970s heralded a new culture of "free love” with millions of young people embracing the hippie ethos and preaching the power of love and the beauty of sex as a natural part of ordinary life. Hippies believed that sex was a natural biological phenomenon which should not be denied or repressed. Changes in attitudes reflected a perception that traditional views on sexuality were both hypocritical and chauvinistic. Sexual liberalization heralded a new ethos in; experimenting with open sex in and outside of marriage, contraception and the pill, public nudity, gay Liberation, liberalization of abortion, interracial marriage, a return to natural birth control and childbirth, women's rights and feminism. The perception that all hippies were excessively promiscuous and the sexual revolutionary era was an uncontrolled orgy of group sex is a myth without basis. Many of the era’s countercultural people were celibate due to personal preferences. These choices had nothing to do with issues of morality, but were ones of personal deliberation due in part to spiritual conviction . The consideration that relationships and sex could become distractions upon the path of personal spiritual deliverance, ensured that many hippies refraned from all sexual activity. Celibate hippies were not critical of others who chose the paths of “free love” and “sexual liberalization”. . Timothy Miller notes that the counterculture was a "movement of seekers of meaning and value...the historic quest of any religion." Miller quotes Harvey Cox, William C. Shepard, Jefferson Poland, and Ralph J. Gleason in support of the view of the hippie movement as a new religion. See also Wes Nisker's The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom: "At its core, however, hippie was a spiritual phenomenon, a big, unfocused, revival meeting." Nisker cites the San Francisco Oracle, which described the Human Be-In as a "spiritual revolution". In the late seventies and eighties new won sexual freedoms were exploited by big business looking to capitalise on a more open society, with the advent of public pornography and hardcore.

Counter forces such as Fraenkel (1992) say that the "sexual revolution", that the West supposedly experienced in the late 60s, is indeed a misconception and that sex is not actually enjoyed freely, it is just observed in all the fields of culture; that's a kind of taboo behavior technically called "repressive desublimation". In his writing Marcuse explores the concept that Establishment sanctioned forms of sensual release, what he calls "repressive desublimation", complete our enslavement on the instinctual level. In order to move from that to an actual sexual liberation, it is necessary a change in our mental structures and our moral inhibitions; instead the Judeo-Christian morals still basically hold, and the small social changes are exaggerated because they are seen in that light. Even most of the self-claimed atheists, have just secularized and internalized the same old morals. Fraenkel 92, p.19

While the extent to which the sexual revolution involved major changes in sexual behavior is debated, many observers suggest that the main change was not that people had more sex or different types of sex, it was simply that they talked about it more openly than previous generations had done - which in itself can be described as revolutionary by supportive historians.

Historian David Allyn argues it was a time of "coming-out": about premarital sex, masturbation, erotic fantasies, pornography use, and sexuality. Although this may be true, some historians have doubts on this due to the lack of contraceptives en masse before the common era. This would have made it extremely difficult to cover up pre-marital relations due to extremely high risk of pregnancy.

It is clear that sexual behavior did change radically for the vast majority of women, but only a generation after the "revolution" had begun. Women reaching sexual maturity after about 1984 have behaviors much more in common with the men of a generation earlier. Some had more partners (two to three times), starting at an earlier age (by three to five years), . than women of the 1970s. Nevertheless this rather radical change in actual behavior is rarely reported on, being regarded as no longer newsworthy.