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> [Julia] was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the

> [Julia] was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. > Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. 1984, George Orwell, 1949

aksss 6y ago
That guy knew what was up. Does all of this just flow out of the technology that turns high population societies into behaving like low population communities? The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Is that the dynamic that Orwell was able to see?
- pjc50 6y ago
  > The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Remember that Orwell was writing quite close parodies of Stalinism, based on his encounters with actual Stalinists while fighting for the socialist side in the Spanish civil war. In Animal Farm, Snowball is Trotsky, and so on. So he undoubtedly had something specific in mind when inventing the "anti-sex league", although I'm not quite sure what. But lack of privacy, moralizing, and remote unaccountable central authority? He means Stalinism. Remember also that it's a front, in which Julia participates cynically for her own safety: ( https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 ) > " ‘Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.’" > In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. And later on Orwell tells us directly what the Anti-Sex league was intended to achieve: > She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: > ‘When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ > That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. (The red sash business reminds me of the "silver ring thing"; US evangelist Christians replicating similar systems of control and moralizing among their young people)
- lstamour 6y ago
  It’s worth pointing out that Orwell wasn’t so much predicting a future as commenting on current trends. For instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412199/ or https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673024 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673024 My point is not that the above articles are definitive but to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, etc.
  - aasasd 6y ago
    Now that's some specialized knowledge. How do the stars even line up so that someone with the insight on British sex practices of the fourties, lands precisely in a random thread mentioning Orwell's writing on the matter?
    - FrojoS 6y ago
      Welcome to HackerNews
    - pjc50 6y ago
      I should have elaborated on this in my other flagged comment, but: the poster has linked two papers, the relevance of which is not obvious, and not explained it at all. (Also, I feel we've gone somewhat offtopic here; it's not a Party matter, the depiction of sex in American films - unless we're counting the targeting of films at the global market resulting in films being made compliant with Chinese censorship? Could OP and/or the upvoters explain why they think 1984 is relevant?)
      - throway98752343 6y ago
        The linked papers provide context for the quoted passages by describing British sexual culture during which Orwell wrote 1984. The party, or rather the government, does influence what's in TV shows and movies. See Carlin's "7 words you can't say on TV" https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0 https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0 and Family Guy's FCC song: https://youtu.be/Eeg4J8yNk4g https://youtu.be/Eeg4J8yNk4g.
  - 6y ago
smusamashah 6y ago
How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person? I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it? Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it? Yes, that's what several generations had to discover.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Either that or you learn to love everyone equally. I still think polyamory is O(n!) though.
    - ggggtez 6y ago
      I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous. I think you can be sexually open and loving to one partner at a time, but accept that each individual partner may have an unknown time limit. This understanding that your relationships won't necessarily last forever doesn't require you to give up on emotions, nor to cheapen sex.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        > I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous. Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting.
        coldtea 6y ago
        >Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting. If they were that loving, they would have sufficed with less-amorous... It's because they're not that loving to any single person (but instead all about the quick gratification) that they look to expand their variety...

aksss 6y ago

That guy knew what was up. Does all of this just flow out of the technology that turns high population societies into behaving like low population communities? The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Is that the dynamic that Orwell was able to see?

pjc50 6y ago
> The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Remember that Orwell was writing quite close parodies of Stalinism, based on his encounters with actual Stalinists while fighting for the socialist side in the Spanish civil war. In Animal Farm, Snowball is Trotsky, and so on. So he undoubtedly had something specific in mind when inventing the "anti-sex league", although I'm not quite sure what. But lack of privacy, moralizing, and remote unaccountable central authority? He means Stalinism. Remember also that it's a front, in which Julia participates cynically for her own safety: ( https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 ) > " ‘Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.’" > In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. And later on Orwell tells us directly what the Anti-Sex league was intended to achieve: > She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: > ‘When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ > That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. (The red sash business reminds me of the "silver ring thing"; US evangelist Christians replicating similar systems of control and moralizing among their young people)
lstamour 6y ago
It’s worth pointing out that Orwell wasn’t so much predicting a future as commenting on current trends. For instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412199/ or https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673024 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673024 My point is not that the above articles are definitive but to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, etc.
- aasasd 6y ago
  Now that's some specialized knowledge. How do the stars even line up so that someone with the insight on British sex practices of the fourties, lands precisely in a random thread mentioning Orwell's writing on the matter?
  - FrojoS 6y ago
    Welcome to HackerNews
  - pjc50 6y ago
    I should have elaborated on this in my other flagged comment, but: the poster has linked two papers, the relevance of which is not obvious, and not explained it at all. (Also, I feel we've gone somewhat offtopic here; it's not a Party matter, the depiction of sex in American films - unless we're counting the targeting of films at the global market resulting in films being made compliant with Chinese censorship? Could OP and/or the upvoters explain why they think 1984 is relevant?)
    - throway98752343 6y ago
      The linked papers provide context for the quoted passages by describing British sexual culture during which Orwell wrote 1984. The party, or rather the government, does influence what's in TV shows and movies. See Carlin's "7 words you can't say on TV" https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0 https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0 and Family Guy's FCC song: https://youtu.be/Eeg4J8yNk4g https://youtu.be/Eeg4J8yNk4g.
- 6y ago

smusamashah 6y ago

How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person? I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it? Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

coldtea 6y ago
>Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it? Yes, that's what several generations had to discover.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Either that or you learn to love everyone equally. I still think polyamory is O(n!) though.
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous. I think you can be sexually open and loving to one partner at a time, but accept that each individual partner may have an unknown time limit. This understanding that your relationships won't necessarily last forever doesn't require you to give up on emotions, nor to cheapen sex.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      > I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous. Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting. If they were that loving, they would have sufficed with less-amorous... It's because they're not that loving to any single person (but instead all about the quick gratification) that they look to expand their variety...