Status Updates From Sexual Liberation, Socialis...

From a 1986 government document outlining the gender roles to be pursued in schooling: "Characteristics to be achieved in girls: kindness, tenderness, warmth, naturalness, shyness. Characteristics to be achieved in boys: perseverance, self-control, sense of duty and responsibility, reliability, willingness to take up more demanding work."

From the late 1970s, "a new [legal] phenomenon emerged: a careless attitide towards marriage. Counter intuitively, this constituted a reason not to grant a divorce. The negative rulings cited 'paragraph 23, section 2' of the 1963 Act on Family Law, which read: 'A careless attitude towards marriage is contrary to the interest of society. That is why a marriage can be divorced only in socially justified cases.'"

"The role of women shifted in marriage. In marriage manuals published during Normalization, sexologists prescribed the nuclear family with hierarchically organized gender roles – women minding the children and housework. ... Sexologists no longer perceived the family as woven into the fabric of society, but instead talked about it as an island or haven which shielded its members from the dangers of the public world."

"The practice of cool [=casual] sex [in the 1980s] certainly stands as proof of looser sexual mores, but its existence in and of itself says nothing of gender. Cool sex might be either egalitarian or hierarchical ... What many know from the West as a twin gender-and-sexual liberation, developed rather differently in a socialist country where sexually liberal attitudes could coexist with traditional views on gender."

"As early as 1963, experts recommended practicing sex therapy, years before such approaches were made famous by the US sexologists Masters and Johnson."

"The demographers who advised the state on population issues were unambiguously for liberalizing access to abortion, and their discourse was more rights driven than scholars usually acknowledge. (...) Abortion might have been publicly introduced as a measure for improving women's health but in expert circles it was hailed as a tool for equality and reproductive freedom."

In divorce court rulings, "'marital contact', 'living as husband and wife' or 'living together' were synonyms for sex: if present, judges were reluctant to grant a divorce. If sex was absent though, even marriages with children could end in divorce. Sexual matters trumped violence, especially in cases where the wife left a husband who beat her; wife battering was seen as compatible with marriage, adultery was not."

"Historian Josie McLellan uncovered evidence that the censors of Mann und Frau Intim [a GDR sex manual] suggested revisions to its author. Surprisingly, the recommended modifications were more progressive than the original. For example, the author was 'chided for presenting female sexuality as a male object, lecherously describing "charming" women, "beautiful breasts", "delightful figures" and their effect on men.'"

In the 1950s, "a zoophile man who abused cows was not prosecuted for offending sexual propriety, but instead, because he damaged collectivized farms"