What made sexual conservatism popularly appealing after the continent-wide carnage of World War II? Many factors converged. Guilt, fear, exhaustion, immeasurable loss, an elemental longing for stability and security in the wake of deprivation and disaster: all were contributory. So was sincere pleasure in daily calm ordinariness. But so too were the elaborate stratagems employed by postwar political and religious leaders to reinterpret the meaning of the recent apocalyptically horrendous past. The Cold War era would be one of great contradiction in the West: rising prosperity, but also ongoing ambivalence about pleasure as an end in itself. Skepticism about women's rights and the rights of sexual minorities was pervasive. Activists seeking to transform popular attitudes and to change laws were few; it would take many years before both the social context and the ways of thinking about sexuality changed enough for a framework based on the principles of privacy and consent to be in the ascendant.