7 ms·

Regency Sex Ed

112 points by crescit_eundo 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ggm 2y ago
Absolutely fascinating. The deep history of obvious knowledge of reproduction side by side with astounding ignorance is palpable. Joseph Heller wrote about it in catch-22 and a parade of modern day unexpected pregnancy stories are testament to it's continuance. What's equally fascinating is the equally dichotomous side by side knowledge of STDs and their effect on pregnancy. You get a lot of it in "who do you think you are" ancestry type shows, when there is the massive family lots of children dead quickly story. I do love a good bodice ripper. Dorothy Dunnett was my stand out historian author, maybe I have a (-substantially more fruity) alternative to explore. (Bridgerton was fun but I find Georgette Heyer just as fun, and you can't beat her on the peninsular wars or Waterloo alongside the heaving bosoms)
dvh 2y ago
A mother of a teenage son is talking to her husband about introducing an important topic to their son. To make it less shocking, she suggests using an analogy like butterflies. So, the father goes to the son's room. - "Son, do you remember last year when we went camping?" - "Yeah, I remember that." - "And do you remember when we set up the tent by the river?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "And do you remember when those two women set up their tent next to ours?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "And do you remember that one night when they visited our tent and what we were doing with them?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "Well, you see, butterflies do it in a very similar way."
- technothrasher 2y ago
  "It's actually not that similar, since butterflies are oviparous, and have ZW sexual determination" - my nerdy high school self completely missing the joke.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    I assume it's a relief for parents when their offspring realise a few sentences in that this is The Conversation and they cut to the chase. "Yes mother/ father, I do understand roughly how human sexual reproduction works, and I have been taught about consent, so we're all good right?"
    - dfxm12 2y ago
      Kids sometimes think they know something, but really don't. You get different stories from a friend's older brother, a coming of age movie, porn, etc. You can't make any assumptions or leave room for interpretation here, so you should still have "The Talk™".
    - dvh 2y ago
      The best I've seen is "Son, do not create future obligations!"
      - kridsdale1 2y ago
        This is about how I was told. “Do what you want but don’t make me raise another baby while you’re a teen!”
    - technothrasher 2y ago
      When my son was in preschool, I went to pick him up one day and the teacher took me aside and said, "we were reading a story about a mom and how she had a baby in her tummy, and your son raised his hand and said, 'That's not true. It's in her uterus!'" I've never had "the talk" with him, I talked to him continuously through his childhood. As he asked questions, I gave him answers.
ziotom78 2y ago
This reminds me of the difficulties Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette had in conceiving an heir: > In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced—then still only 22-year-old—Louis XVI had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_changes_at_court_and_intervention_in_politics_(1778%E2%80%931781) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_c...
- whycome 2y ago
  I believe that’s called “soaking” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soaking_(sexual_practice) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soaking_(sexual_practice)
  - d1sxeyes 2y ago
    Someone decided that that article needed an illustration. Astounding the breadth and depth of things you can find on the internet.
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      Oh, Wikipedia is in the constant change of what do need an illustration and what does not or what type it should be. Back in 2009 the most pics in the sex and genital articles had a self-made pics, which even prompted this: Internet access - $25 A digital camera - $250 Making the whole world see your vagina - priceless For everything else there is MasterCard And somewhere in 2018 I discovered what almost all photos in these articles (on the English Wikipedia, other languages didn't changed much) were replaced by the most basic pictures or the illustrations from 19th century anatomical atlases.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  This is such a bizarre thing to do from a young man/evolutionary instinct standpoint. I wonder if his hormones were awry. I see speculation that he had hypogonadism or phimosis.
tgv 2y ago
The article is --per usual-- not warranting the scope of the title. A more accurate title would be: Some literature possibly used in educating aristocratic English women about sex. The subtitle then would be: while simultaneously plugging my own book.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  A lot of nonfiction writers only do interviews/podcasts when they have a book to plug. I don’t mind it, even though it’s kind of an ad, because the content is still interesting. I think the authors want to sell their books, but they’re typically very interested in the topics and like talking about them for the sake of conversation.
miniwark 2y ago
This is a nice text, but it's heavenly oriented to the very upper class society. The author talk a lot about "sexual books" of the times, but you will certainly not find the "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (Fanny Hill) in the hand of a proper young woman. (this stuff where costly rarities for men too). It was far more simpler than this, no need for books. Every rural girls and boys, and women and men living in a city did know, without any books, what there is to know simply by looking at the animals in the farms or the horses and dogs in the streets. There was also the "education" at the wash-houses... The hubs to know everything there is to now at the time.
- Amezarak 2y ago
  Yeah. If anything, the 20th century was sort of a nadir for this sort of thing, as increasingly large portions of the population became more alienated from the natural world. That made it possible for young kids and teenagers to have no clear idea. Sex and reproduction was no mystery to almost anyone historically. No doubt people, then as now, maintained various superstitions that coincidentally involved rationalizations for what they wanted to do anyway, but that's not really a matter of ignorance, so to speak. ("Come on, it's your first time, it will be OK, nothing will happen...whoops!" is not a matter of ignorance generally, but willful ignorance.)
- shellback3 2y ago
  As for books in the 1700's over 60% of women were not literate so if one happened on one of the books it couldn't be read - but the illustrations would have been interesting to them. I think that many of the poor lived in habitations where they all slept in one, unlit, room where they would get hints about sex from childhood.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- btilly 2y ago
  It also covers a long time period. The period of extreme prudishness was fairly short, and happened during the Victorian era. I have a book from the 1850s that was meant to (mis)inform on this topic. The whole masturbation makes people go blind nonsense. For people raised on this kind of book, I can believe that they would not understand sex. For people a few decades earlier, it would be a different story.
littlestymaar 2y ago
Aicha Limbada in La nuit de noces. Une histoire de l'intimité conjugale (in French only) talks about the fact that this “education” was sometime done during the night after the wedding, when the bride was raped by her new husband.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Well that’s one step less bad than the German city states with Prima Nocte with the mayor.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Isn't that an urban legend? (We have the same kind of stories with lords and peasants in France, and here it's definitely an urban legend).
velcrovan 2y ago
For any society where breeding domesticated animals is a familiar aspect of life for most people, I would guess this isn’t obscure knowledge.
- xattt 2y ago
  The subtleties of human courtship that enable bilateral pleasure and the principles of animal husbandry are quite orthogonal.
  - bckr 2y ago
    Yes, but TFA starts with questioning whether women knew about insertion.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    I think that is false, but struggle to explain my point without being excessively graphic. People get a lot of bad advice, that results in people being anxiously stuck in their head during sex, trying to "do a good job" and "pleasure their partner." The reality is mammals have instincts that make sex pleasurable both both parties, and it is usually shockingly aggressive, even violent seeming. If people could get out of their head and into their body and primal desires- and quite literally act more like an animal, they'd have much better sex.
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      Given that most animals get it done in under a minute for fear of predation or other violence, I'm guessing the author is male. Chimps and bonobos, our nearest cousins, do have a pretty spectacular sexual toolbox of course that acts as a kind of social lubricant. But it's not all about reproduction, or even pleasure, and quite a lot of what they get up to will get you jailed in most countries.
      - _yb2s 2y ago
        I am a straight man, but talking from the perspective of what women partners have told me they enjoyed, and were interested in doing repeatedly- and it has consistently involved acting 'dominant/primal,' physically aggressive, and getting deeply into my body and out of my head. Not everyone likes the same thing of course, unlike animals consent, communication, and mutual understanding are key- and much more so than usual when trying things like this. Counter-intuitively, getting into this headspace makes sex last much longer, not shorter- I suspect human bodies and minds are different from a lot of other mammals in this regard. It is more often that anxiety, tension, and over intellectualizing causes issues with men not lasting long enough.
hoseja 2y ago
When you mistake Bridgerton for anything but a funny dress-up for unrooted americans and attempt to legitimize printed porn addictions at the same time.
amelius 2y ago
How do they learn it today? Hopefully not from the internet ...
eadmund 2y ago
Basing one’s knowledge of history on Bridgerton is much like basing one’s knowledge of New York City on Metropolis in Superman comics. Bridgerton is completely and totally ahistorical. It’s cosplay.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
The puritan moral codex we laugh about today, were actually- sex ed. In a time with unhealable venereal diseases, not going astray, was vital for survival. Stay true or die with syphilis. So- ironic as it sounds, most of the preacher preaching - was the sexed which was the style at the times.
- kergonath 2y ago
  That’s post hoc rationalisation. Other cultures had basically the same outcomes without the oppression and obscurantism.
  - sombragris 2y ago
    Just arguing for GP. It may be post hoc; but other cultures did not have such trouble with STDs. England, as a naval power, was expected to have such a problem and thus the puritan's advice also had practical benefit.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    Which other cultures were sexually liberated, and did not have trouble with STDs? Large cultures that is, as larger populations are more at risk of disease.
waltercool 2y ago
Starting an historical article with Netflix. No way I'm reading this.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  You short-change yourself. The article mostly consists of how false the Netflix depiction is. Though the author doesn't word it that way, it's a good reminder of how libelous films are of our history.
sombragris 2y ago
The writing was somewhat interesting until this: > I found myself confronting the rise of bans on books that discuss gender identity and sexuality. Today, sexual education in public schools grows increasingly under threat in places like Florida Please. There are no bans on books discussing such matters. You can purchase them from Amazon and other booksellers, while in 19th century England there were civil and criminal penalties for book publishers for the mere act of publishing. That's quite different. Public schools may ban books only for their own institutions, never for the general public. Any "school ban" does not prevent any parent righteously concerned with censorship to provide their child a copy of such banned book.
- 333c 2y ago
  > There are no bans on books discussing such matters. contradicts > Public schools may ban books
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Not the same. Public schools (and private schools, and any library) choose which books are on their library shelves. They have no control over what is published elsewhere.
  - sombragris 2y ago
    You are right. Edited in order to better express myself. Apologies; English is not my first language...
- bobxmax 2y ago
  There are large groups of Americans who believe The Handmaidens Tale is a real potential future. The lack of perspective and melodramatic discord in political theater is exhausting.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Did you see that absurd display yesterday?
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
What prior ages had the sense to do was to confine the subject of sex to private discussion instead of flouting it in public. It also shows a greater reverence and respect for sexual intercourse and sexuality; it is not like having a glass of water, to cite Kollontai. Our unjust mockery and even caricature of previous ages reflects poorly on us. Public indecency, both in speech and behavior, is a disaster. It has a horrible effect on human relations. 1. It causes scandal in the traditional meaning of that word. That is, is creates precedent that people will copy, lowering moral standards and causing the spread of bad behavior. 2. It titillates and exploits the effect sex has on human beings in order to manipulate and evade reason. Why do you think sex appeal is such a big part of marketing? 3. It stands behind the rise in sexual abuse we say in the 20th century. When decency is normal, the fear of social consequences of being indecent keeps would-be abusers in check. It gives potential victims an easy way to defend themselves. When indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to sexual mistreatment. Protestations are viewed as unreasonable or prudish, and sexual misconduct is even viewed as funny. These accusations have been used to pressure victims into sex. That being said, not everything was well in the past. I would also not exaggerate how common or popular some of the literature mentioned in the article was (assuming the interpretations are correct; we tend to read our own presuppositions into history, producing anachronism). Pornography also existed back then, but it was not something most people ever came across. It was mostly the product and province of seedy segments of society.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  > it is not like having a glass of water Sometimes I wish it was. Putting it on too high of a pedestal also has negative effects, including introducing unwarranted guilt and getting into irreversible bad relationships simply because you want sex. I would say has more negative effects thnan being open and honest about it. 1. Scandals are bad due to dishonesty and violated trust in authority, not necessarily talking about sex in public. Societies that repress sexual expression will always treat sexual scandals with more intrigue simply due to repression. 2. People who are easily manipulated will at some point succumb to some type of manipulation including easier-to-do ones like fear-based manipulation. 3. Was it a rise in sexual abuse or a rise in talking about sexual abuse? > When indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to sexual mistreatment. When "decency" as you describe is normalized, we simply don't hear about sexual mistreatment. The social consequences can work both against and for an abuser.
jhanschoo 2y ago
I think the article fails to wonder sufficiently about gender differences in sexual education. In the milieu where my parents were brought up in, as well as presently in traditionally patriarchal cultures, a good deal of women weren't educated about periods and sex, not even by relatives. The men, on the other hand, received more "education"
fbfactchecker 2y ago
Tech Circles Sex Ed is done on Tiktok. Prove me wrong.

112 points by crescit_eundo 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ggm 2y ago

Absolutely fascinating. The deep history of obvious knowledge of reproduction side by side with astounding ignorance is palpable. Joseph Heller wrote about it in catch-22 and a parade of modern day unexpected pregnancy stories are testament to it's continuance. What's equally fascinating is the equally dichotomous side by side knowledge of STDs and their effect on pregnancy. You get a lot of it in "who do you think you are" ancestry type shows, when there is the massive family lots of children dead quickly story. I do love a good bodice ripper. Dorothy Dunnett was my stand out historian author, maybe I have a (-substantially more fruity) alternative to explore. (Bridgerton was fun but I find Georgette Heyer just as fun, and you can't beat her on the peninsular wars or Waterloo alongside the heaving bosoms)

dvh 2y ago

A mother of a teenage son is talking to her husband about introducing an important topic to their son. To make it less shocking, she suggests using an analogy like butterflies. So, the father goes to the son's room. - "Son, do you remember last year when we went camping?" - "Yeah, I remember that." - "And do you remember when we set up the tent by the river?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "And do you remember when those two women set up their tent next to ours?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "And do you remember that one night when they visited our tent and what we were doing with them?" - "Yeah, I remember." - "Well, you see, butterflies do it in a very similar way."

technothrasher 2y ago
"It's actually not that similar, since butterflies are oviparous, and have ZW sexual determination" - my nerdy high school self completely missing the joke.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  I assume it's a relief for parents when their offspring realise a few sentences in that this is The Conversation and they cut to the chase. "Yes mother/ father, I do understand roughly how human sexual reproduction works, and I have been taught about consent, so we're all good right?"
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    Kids sometimes think they know something, but really don't. You get different stories from a friend's older brother, a coming of age movie, porn, etc. You can't make any assumptions or leave room for interpretation here, so you should still have "The Talk™".
  - dvh 2y ago
    The best I've seen is "Son, do not create future obligations!"
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      This is about how I was told. “Do what you want but don’t make me raise another baby while you’re a teen!”
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    When my son was in preschool, I went to pick him up one day and the teacher took me aside and said, "we were reading a story about a mom and how she had a baby in her tummy, and your son raised his hand and said, 'That's not true. It's in her uterus!'" I've never had "the talk" with him, I talked to him continuously through his childhood. As he asked questions, I gave him answers.

ziotom78 2y ago

This reminds me of the difficulties Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette had in conceiving an heir: > In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced—then still only 22-year-old—Louis XVI had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_changes_at_court_and_intervention_in_politics_(1778%E2%80%931781) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_c...

whycome 2y ago
I believe that’s called “soaking” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soaking_(sexual_practice) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soaking_(sexual_practice)
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  Someone decided that that article needed an illustration. Astounding the breadth and depth of things you can find on the internet.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    Oh, Wikipedia is in the constant change of what do need an illustration and what does not or what type it should be. Back in 2009 the most pics in the sex and genital articles had a self-made pics, which even prompted this: Internet access - $25 A digital camera - $250 Making the whole world see your vagina - priceless For everything else there is MasterCard And somewhere in 2018 I discovered what almost all photos in these articles (on the English Wikipedia, other languages didn't changed much) were replaced by the most basic pictures or the illustrations from 19th century anatomical atlases.
Mistletoe 2y ago
This is such a bizarre thing to do from a young man/evolutionary instinct standpoint. I wonder if his hormones were awry. I see speculation that he had hypogonadism or phimosis.

tgv 2y ago

The article is --per usual-- not warranting the scope of the title. A more accurate title would be: Some literature possibly used in educating aristocratic English women about sex. The subtitle then would be: while simultaneously plugging my own book.

janalsncm 2y ago
A lot of nonfiction writers only do interviews/podcasts when they have a book to plug. I don’t mind it, even though it’s kind of an ad, because the content is still interesting. I think the authors want to sell their books, but they’re typically very interested in the topics and like talking about them for the sake of conversation.

miniwark 2y ago

This is a nice text, but it's heavenly oriented to the very upper class society. The author talk a lot about "sexual books" of the times, but you will certainly not find the "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (Fanny Hill) in the hand of a proper young woman. (this stuff where costly rarities for men too). It was far more simpler than this, no need for books. Every rural girls and boys, and women and men living in a city did know, without any books, what there is to know simply by looking at the animals in the farms or the horses and dogs in the streets. There was also the "education" at the wash-houses... The hubs to know everything there is to now at the time.

Amezarak 2y ago
Yeah. If anything, the 20th century was sort of a nadir for this sort of thing, as increasingly large portions of the population became more alienated from the natural world. That made it possible for young kids and teenagers to have no clear idea. Sex and reproduction was no mystery to almost anyone historically. No doubt people, then as now, maintained various superstitions that coincidentally involved rationalizations for what they wanted to do anyway, but that's not really a matter of ignorance, so to speak. ("Come on, it's your first time, it will be OK, nothing will happen...whoops!" is not a matter of ignorance generally, but willful ignorance.)
shellback3 2y ago
As for books in the 1700's over 60% of women were not literate so if one happened on one of the books it couldn't be read - but the illustrations would have been interesting to them. I think that many of the poor lived in habitations where they all slept in one, unlit, room where they would get hints about sex from childhood.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
btilly 2y ago
It also covers a long time period. The period of extreme prudishness was fairly short, and happened during the Victorian era. I have a book from the 1850s that was meant to (mis)inform on this topic. The whole masturbation makes people go blind nonsense. For people raised on this kind of book, I can believe that they would not understand sex. For people a few decades earlier, it would be a different story.

littlestymaar 2y ago

Aicha Limbada in La nuit de noces. Une histoire de l'intimité conjugale (in French only) talks about the fact that this “education” was sometime done during the night after the wedding, when the bride was raped by her new husband.

kridsdale1 2y ago
Well that’s one step less bad than the German city states with Prima Nocte with the mayor.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Isn't that an urban legend? (We have the same kind of stories with lords and peasants in France, and here it's definitely an urban legend).

velcrovan 2y ago

For any society where breeding domesticated animals is a familiar aspect of life for most people, I would guess this isn’t obscure knowledge.

xattt 2y ago
The subtleties of human courtship that enable bilateral pleasure and the principles of animal husbandry are quite orthogonal.
- bckr 2y ago
  Yes, but TFA starts with questioning whether women knew about insertion.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I think that is false, but struggle to explain my point without being excessively graphic. People get a lot of bad advice, that results in people being anxiously stuck in their head during sex, trying to "do a good job" and "pleasure their partner." The reality is mammals have instincts that make sex pleasurable both both parties, and it is usually shockingly aggressive, even violent seeming. If people could get out of their head and into their body and primal desires- and quite literally act more like an animal, they'd have much better sex.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    Given that most animals get it done in under a minute for fear of predation or other violence, I'm guessing the author is male. Chimps and bonobos, our nearest cousins, do have a pretty spectacular sexual toolbox of course that acts as a kind of social lubricant. But it's not all about reproduction, or even pleasure, and quite a lot of what they get up to will get you jailed in most countries.
    - _yb2s 2y ago
      I am a straight man, but talking from the perspective of what women partners have told me they enjoyed, and were interested in doing repeatedly- and it has consistently involved acting 'dominant/primal,' physically aggressive, and getting deeply into my body and out of my head. Not everyone likes the same thing of course, unlike animals consent, communication, and mutual understanding are key- and much more so than usual when trying things like this. Counter-intuitively, getting into this headspace makes sex last much longer, not shorter- I suspect human bodies and minds are different from a lot of other mammals in this regard. It is more often that anxiety, tension, and over intellectualizing causes issues with men not lasting long enough.

hoseja 2y ago

When you mistake Bridgerton for anything but a funny dress-up for unrooted americans and attempt to legitimize printed porn addictions at the same time.

amelius 2y ago

How do they learn it today? Hopefully not from the internet ...

eadmund 2y ago

Basing one’s knowledge of history on Bridgerton is much like basing one’s knowledge of New York City on Metropolis in Superman comics. Bridgerton is completely and totally ahistorical. It’s cosplay.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

The puritan moral codex we laugh about today, were actually- sex ed. In a time with unhealable venereal diseases, not going astray, was vital for survival. Stay true or die with syphilis. So- ironic as it sounds, most of the preacher preaching - was the sexed which was the style at the times.

kergonath 2y ago
That’s post hoc rationalisation. Other cultures had basically the same outcomes without the oppression and obscurantism.
- sombragris 2y ago
  Just arguing for GP. It may be post hoc; but other cultures did not have such trouble with STDs. England, as a naval power, was expected to have such a problem and thus the puritan's advice also had practical benefit.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  Which other cultures were sexually liberated, and did not have trouble with STDs? Large cultures that is, as larger populations are more at risk of disease.

waltercool 2y ago

Starting an historical article with Netflix. No way I'm reading this.

like_any_other 2y ago
You short-change yourself. The article mostly consists of how false the Netflix depiction is. Though the author doesn't word it that way, it's a good reminder of how libelous films are of our history.

sombragris 2y ago

The writing was somewhat interesting until this: > I found myself confronting the rise of bans on books that discuss gender identity and sexuality. Today, sexual education in public schools grows increasingly under threat in places like Florida Please. There are no bans on books discussing such matters. You can purchase them from Amazon and other booksellers, while in 19th century England there were civil and criminal penalties for book publishers for the mere act of publishing. That's quite different. Public schools may ban books only for their own institutions, never for the general public. Any "school ban" does not prevent any parent righteously concerned with censorship to provide their child a copy of such banned book.

333c 2y ago
> There are no bans on books discussing such matters. contradicts > Public schools may ban books
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Not the same. Public schools (and private schools, and any library) choose which books are on their library shelves. They have no control over what is published elsewhere.
- sombragris 2y ago
  You are right. Edited in order to better express myself. Apologies; English is not my first language...
bobxmax 2y ago
There are large groups of Americans who believe The Handmaidens Tale is a real potential future. The lack of perspective and melodramatic discord in political theater is exhausting.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Did you see that absurd display yesterday?

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

What prior ages had the sense to do was to confine the subject of sex to private discussion instead of flouting it in public. It also shows a greater reverence and respect for sexual intercourse and sexuality; it is not like having a glass of water, to cite Kollontai. Our unjust mockery and even caricature of previous ages reflects poorly on us. Public indecency, both in speech and behavior, is a disaster. It has a horrible effect on human relations. 1. It causes scandal in the traditional meaning of that word. That is, is creates precedent that people will copy, lowering moral standards and causing the spread of bad behavior. 2. It titillates and exploits the effect sex has on human beings in order to manipulate and evade reason. Why do you think sex appeal is such a big part of marketing? 3. It stands behind the rise in sexual abuse we say in the 20th century. When decency is normal, the fear of social consequences of being indecent keeps would-be abusers in check. It gives potential victims an easy way to defend themselves. When indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to sexual mistreatment. Protestations are viewed as unreasonable or prudish, and sexual misconduct is even viewed as funny. These accusations have been used to pressure victims into sex. That being said, not everything was well in the past. I would also not exaggerate how common or popular some of the literature mentioned in the article was (assuming the interpretations are correct; we tend to read our own presuppositions into history, producing anachronism). Pornography also existed back then, but it was not something most people ever came across. It was mostly the product and province of seedy segments of society.

RiverCrochet 2y ago
> it is not like having a glass of water Sometimes I wish it was. Putting it on too high of a pedestal also has negative effects, including introducing unwarranted guilt and getting into irreversible bad relationships simply because you want sex. I would say has more negative effects thnan being open and honest about it. 1. Scandals are bad due to dishonesty and violated trust in authority, not necessarily talking about sex in public. Societies that repress sexual expression will always treat sexual scandals with more intrigue simply due to repression. 2. People who are easily manipulated will at some point succumb to some type of manipulation including easier-to-do ones like fear-based manipulation. 3. Was it a rise in sexual abuse or a rise in talking about sexual abuse? > When indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to sexual mistreatment. When "decency" as you describe is normalized, we simply don't hear about sexual mistreatment. The social consequences can work both against and for an abuser.

jhanschoo 2y ago

I think the article fails to wonder sufficiently about gender differences in sexual education. In the milieu where my parents were brought up in, as well as presently in traditionally patriarchal cultures, a good deal of women weren't educated about periods and sex, not even by relatives. The men, on the other hand, received more "education"

fbfactchecker 2y ago

Tech Circles Sex Ed is done on Tiktok. Prove me wrong.