Senior "Playboy" editor James Petersen's well-researched account of sexual attitudes and behaviour throughout the past century was filled with a plethora of interesting tidbits that obviously couldn't all be included in an eight-minute segment. Here's just a few highlights that didn't make the cut:

Petersen maintains that in the mid-to-late-60s, when college dorms became co-ed, that impacted sexual behaviour more than the advent of the pill and the counterculture which advocated chemically enhanced sensual exploration. "You had a room of your own and a sound system and four years (of college) to explore sex. It was a marvellous time…Sex in the 50s and early 60s was a wrestling match outside the dorm to get whatever you were going to get, cop a feel, whatever, before curfew. Changing that rule meant you got to wake up next to the girl you went to bed with, you got to see her in class, you got to see her with her hair messed up. (Co-ed dorms) that changed sex, it gave us a lab in which we could experiment with sex and it changed sex forever and it still changes sex."

He discovered there was hardcore porn at the turn of the century, such as the publication, "The Modern Eveline: The Adventures of a Lady of Quality Who Was Never Found Out." Petersen describes these books as paragraph by paragraph accounts devoted to clothes, her gloves, her chemise, etc. "I realized the porn of the time reflected the fashion of the time."

Petersen points out that while everyone thinks Freud changed people's attitudes to sex in America, the psychoanalyst only visited America once at the beginning of the last century, basically gave a lecture, saw Niagara Falls, saw his first film and returned to Vienna. "In the 20s, there were nine practising psychoanalysts in America, so the idea had already gotten through that repression was bad and you had to shed your inhibitions." He came across a Life Magazine cover from the 20s, headlined: "She's Sweet Sex-Teen." "All the controversy today about Brandy and Britney Spears, and Cristine Aguilera, go back. In the 20s, 16 was considered the age of sexual discovery."

World War II had a feminine face, according to Petersen. Men painted Vargas Girls - sexual pinups created by artist Alberto Vargas -- on their bombers and there are tragic stories of pilots flying off on missions with unfinished female images on their plane that were never completed because the pilots never returned. "America put pinups on its bombers. No other nation in the history of war has done that. The Germans didn't. The Russians named their tanks after cities. The Japanese worshipped the emperor. They actually dropped pinups as psychological warfare against American soldiers, there would be a beautiful woman on the cover and directions on how to surrender on the back and the Japanese would just put these up on palm trees."

Sexual pioneer Margaret Sanger - who advocated sexual education and access to birth control -was forced to leave the U.S. to escape being arrested. Her crime? Distribution of a birth control pamphlet, "Family Limitation." Her husband stayed behind and was thrown in jail for 30 days for "distributing obscene material." She returned to the U.S. and continued her fight, resorting to smuggling in diaphragms from Holland in shipments of gin, and from Canada, in shipments of 3-in-one oil. "I love that," quipped Petersen. They (the diaphragms) must have been very easy to insert (after being packed in oil)."

The main sex manual through the 30s and 40s was something called "Ideal Marriage" by Theodoor van De Velde. "He said you can kiss your partner's genitals, but not to the point of orgasm, because if you get carried away, you open the gates of hell!" Petersen quipped: "I'm good, but I'm not that good."

Karen Murray
Associate Producer, SEXTV