Sex, relationships and ‘everyday psychology’ on British magazine problem pages, c. 1960–1990

The later decades of the 20th century saw dramatic changes in sexual attitudes and behaviour in Britain: rates of divorce and remarriage increased; premarital sex and illegitimacy became more common, even as the pill and legal abortion opened up new reproductive choices; and following on from the decriminalisation of homosex, liberation movements began to celebrate gay lives. These shifts generated new possibilities, but often entailed much inner turmoil. The same period witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of professional and popular psychological expertise. Influential social and cultural theorists have argued that the intertwined rise of “permissiveness” and therapeutic culture caused an important shift in the ethical dimensions of modern life, in which citizens and subjects came to idolise self-realisation over the public good. This article uses women’s magazine problem pages, exploring the role of advice columnists on and off the page, to examine the intersections of “permissiveness” and the psychologisation of everyday life. Millions looked to agony aunts in mass-market women’s magazines to help them negotiate new emotional and sexual worlds. As purveyors of counsel, but not (usually) formally trained counsellors, magazine advisors worked with the new languages and concepts of psychological expertise and disseminated them to avid readers. Across this period, problem pages demonstrated greater openness towards sex and displacement of morality from external standards to the individual. However, advisors also continued to emphasise self-control and responsibility, and to provide practical guidance that took at best a superficially psychological veneer. These trends were underpinned by a model of sex as an essential part of loving, stable relationships, and the (largely unexpressed) notion that such relationships were essential to social functioning. In the woman’s world of the magazine, before and beyond the 1980s, the problem page does not show the rise of individualism or the pursuit of pleasure above all else.