Whatever happened to free love?

AS Philip Larkin memorably noted, sexual intercourse began in 1963. His poem Annus Mirabilis dates its birth to a period "between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles' first LP" after which time, he adds, "every life became/A brilliant breaking of the bank".

True or not, half a century on, Larkin's "wonderful year" is being remembered by a handful of anniversaries, each one a landmark event and each one dealing in its own way with the subject of his poem – sex: what it means to us, and what we think it should or shouldn't mean to other people.

In February, we marked 50 years since the release of that ground-breaking first album from the Fab Four, the ambiguously-titled Please Please Me. Was the chart-topping title track a sugary pop song in the Cliff Richard mode or a subversive hymn to sticky teenage fumblings on the last bus home? Few who bought it were in any doubt.

In the same month, in the United States, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, challenging the notion that female fulfilment came only through marriage and children and helping to kick-start the feminist movement. Three years later, a court ruled that the recently approved oral contraceptive drug be made available to all married women in all US states. The times really were a-changing.

In the UK, in March 1963, more sex: the Duke of Argyll began divorce proceedings in Edinburgh against his wife, Margaret, claiming that during their marriage she had taken 88 lovers. He was able to be so exact because he'd read her sexually-explicit diaries.

As his star "witness", the duke presented a Polaroid photograph showing an unknown paramour – dubbed "the headless man" as his face isn't shown – being given oral sex by a kneeling duchess who is naked apart from a pearl necklace. Please please me, indeed.

Then, on June 5, came the event which really gave 1963 its seismic feel: John Profumo, the married Cabinet minister who had denied having a sexual relationship with showgirl Christine Keeler, finally resigned.

The Profumo affair led one Old Etonian prime minister to cede power to another – Harold Macmillan handing over to Alec Douglas-Home – but the wind had changed and it was Labour who sailed into power a year later at the 1964 General Election, albeit by a narrow margin. Their leader, Harold Wilson, 48, spoke about forging a new Britain in the "white heat" of an economic and social "revolution".

So it is not just in Philip Larkin's book that 1963 is a momentous year. For historians it marks the end of the age of deference, shows a popular press ready to highlight the hypocrisy of the ruling classes who say one thing and do another, and reveals a generation starting to challenge the sexual and moral orthodoxies of previous decades. In short, it's the moment Britain finally starts daubing its walls with the gloss of modernity – shiny stuff reflecting a sexually-liberated country which sees no shame in its carnal tastes.

Or is it? Was the redecoration simply a paint job, all surface and no depth? Progress has certainly been made in the decades since. The legalisation of abortion, changes to the divorce laws, the decriminalisation of gay sex, the advent of widely-available contraception and the acceptance of homosexuality in most walks of life have significantly altered the cultural landscape.

But substitute that grainy Polaroid of the Duchess of Argyll for a smartphone clip of an heiress or a pop star in a similar situation and you see that on another level, little has changed. Whether it is Tommy Sheridan's liking for swingers' clubs, the bedroom antics of Russell Brand or Lindsay Lohan's lesbian fling, we still clamour for every salacious detail, still moralise and condemn. We are still not at peace with sex, it seems.

"When people are condemnatory about the lifestyles of celebs, a lot of that is actually about enjoying it," says Dr Lesley Hall, senior archivist at the Wellcome Library and sometime contributor to BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. "Going back to the 19th century, it's like people reading divorce law cases among the aristocracy and going, 'Isn't it shocking? Tell me the next bit!'."

To Hall's eye, then, many of the old feelings around sex and sexual behaviour persist. "They may have a new and modern gloss – they're expressed differently – but I think there's a lot of continuity to these attitudes," she says. She points to the continued demonisation of single mothers as a case in point. "There are shifts in the way it's perceived – in the early 1960s it was regarded as such a shameful thing that you had a huge rise in adoption – but there's still stigmatisation."

Another constant is the panic over the sexualisation of adolescent girls. Many commentators see technology as a new and particularly damaging threat to teenagers given the apparent rise of so-called "sexting" and the proliferation and ready availability of pornography. Diane Abbott MP is one who is concerned. Earlier this year she attacked what she called a "striptease culture in British schools", the result of a "pornified" and "hyper-sexualised" world in which "women are objectified, objectify one another and are encouraged to objectify themselves".

In fact, says Hall, some of these same concerns were raised in the 19th century when young women started reading the popular print media. They surfaced again in the 1920s when their daughters and granddaughters began disappearing into cinemas to watch films like The Sheik – or The Shriek as it was quickly dubbed, due to the common female reaction to its stark eroticism.

In the early 1960s, meanwhile, there was uproar when a newspaper published an article about a girls' school clique which had taken to wearing golliwog lapel badges from Robertson's jam to indicate that they had lost their virginity. The case even inspired a 1963 film, The Yellow Teddy Bears, in which The Beatles were offered a cameo role (wisely, they turned it down).

"There was huge media frothing about it," says Hall, who has studied the case. "It was mentioned in Parliament and in the British Medical Journal. All the great and good were talking about this thing that was happening to modern girls – and it turned out to be a total fabrication."

Even where there is evidence that something like sexting is happening, she thinks the numbers tend to be statistically small and believes that the average teenage girl is, and always has been, a lot more level-headed and far less persuadable than the rhetoric suggests.

"People have always been looking at the modern girl and saying she's terrible," she says. "So I think the anxiety about technology is generational: each generation thinks the technology it didn't grow up with is particularly pernicious."

Richard Davenport-Hines, author of An English Affair: Sex, Class And Power In The Age Of Profumo, agrees that in many respects little has changed over the last 50 years. His book begins with a quote from an opinion piece written in The People newspaper in 1951 by anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer in which Gorer notes that, while the British aren't good at letting go of their own inhibitions, they love to read about other people doing so through sex – "provided they are punished".

Today, the punishment may be meted out via social media websites rather than gossip over the back fence. Nonetheless, Britons retain what Davenport-Hines calls "a great belief in guilt-ridden retribution". If anything, we're even more condemnatory than we used to be.

"It is different now because it's much more hysterical," he says. "Before it was more sombre and disapproving. It was the Elders of the Kirk crossing their arms and frowning whereas now you have incredibly emotional disapproval. It's a much more popular excitement."

This popular excitement is led as often as not by the popular press. When the News Of The World ran a story about Formula 1 boss Max Mosley taking part in a sado-masochistic orgy in 2008, a court case ensued. Mosley won because the claim that this had been an orgy involving Nazi uniforms was found to have no basis.

Essentially, Mosley was asserting his right to take part in such activities and on the face of it Modern Britain shrugged and said: "Yes, why not? Consenting adults and all that." Only it didn't, really: Nazi uniforms or not, here was a married 68-year-old man frolicking with five prostitutes in a basement flat in London. So as Modern Britain shrugged acceptance, Not-So-Modern Britain tut-tutted and hissed - and made sure it read right down to the bottom of the page.

So what has changed? "The thing that's changed is the attitude towards young women having sex lives," says Davenport-Hines. What Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were castigated for – having consensual sexual relations with several partners – is par for the course among young women in Britain today, he notes.

Issues of sex and race have moved on too. Davenport-Hines says: "One of the reasons Christine Keeler was so shocking and controversial is that she was attracted to and had affairs with black men. That was thought so shocking and so revolting and such very bad behaviour."

So today it's a given that any young woman over the age of consent will have a sex life. Likewise, there are now a million Britons with mixed parentage according to a recent study by the think tank British Future. It proclaimed that "mixed Britain" is "fast becoming the new normal" and compared a 1986 British Social Attitudes survey showing 50% of the public were against mixed marriage, with today's figure of 15%.

In other areas of sex and sexuality, however, the battleground has simply shifted and it's here that Abbott may have a point. Now, there is moralising over issues which weren't issues 50 years ago – such as body image.

"There has been a shift to policing women about body image rather than behaviour and there's this constant focus on women's weight," says Lesley Hall. "There are also other issues around young people, the age of consent, issues around sexual assault and rape and the fact that these continue to have very low conviction rates."

And even those things which have changed for the better haven't always changed in the ways the early campaigners imagined. "When they were talking about gay liberation in the 1970s they didn't have in mind the gay wedding industry," says Hall. Likewise, those analysing heterosexual relations were ambitious enough to look at what she calls "different possibilities". These, though, "seem to have gone out of the picture in the early 21st century. They may come back again, and maybe there will be some new paradigm."

Or maybe not. Perhaps we're stuck with a view of sex and sexuality which remains shackled to the old moralities, the ones set down in religious texts and promoted by church, politicians and, increasingly, the media. Laws can change in response to societal pressures but for every two steps forward, there's one Clause 28 back. Progress is not a simple linear process that can be taken for granted.

One thing is certain, though. However modern our view of sex, we will never stop obsessing about it. Or thinking about it. Or doing it.

"The trouble is, sex is so enjoyable to talk about," says Davenport-Hines. "It's a really good subject and so it's something that people are drawn to discussing and debating because they want an excuse - in Britain, deep down, sex is still thought to be a bit naughty."

And we do so like a bit of naughty.