Tradition 1, Gene 0

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I was a participant in the "sexual revolution." I don't want to bore you with the gross details, but suffice it to say that I took advantage of many of the new "liberties" declared by sexual revolutionaries, starting... well, there have been waves of such revolutionaries, dating back at least to some Medieval heresies (e.g, the Taborites and the Picards), and continuing to arise in 19th-century anarchist and feminist thought, in utopian socialism, in the early 20th-century free love movements, and reaching a recent crest in the 1960s hippie movement.

In every single case I can recall, exercizing my new "liberty" had bad, and sometimes very bad, effects, and in every case it turned out that following traditional sexual morality would have been better.

Well, well, what do you know? One hundred thousand years of accumulated human wisdom are smarter than me? Shocking!


Comments

  1. Thomas L. Knapp2:08 PM

    Which tradition? There are lots of them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:54 PM

      Yes there are... and they are all pretty similar on sexual morality. (Yes, you will be able to list some significant differences between Buddhists and Muslims and Confucians, etc., but if we want to do a bifurcation, they will al clearly be together on side A, while modern sexuality will be across a couple of mile wide gulf on side B.

      Delete
    2. Thomas L. Knapp3:11 PM

      Apart from some fringe stuff, e.g. polyamory movement, post-sexual-revolution sexual morality seems to me to be pretty similar to pre-sexual-revolution sexual morality, at least out here in flyover country.

      The monogamy may be more serial, but monogamy still seems to be the prevailing paradigm, and part of the serial thing may be longer lifespans (for some time there, it's not like you had that many years together before someone croaked).

      Marriage seems to have moved back to the pre-1830s standard (move in together with whatever ceremonies your religion calls for -- license? Wazzat?), but I'm not sure that's a necessarily a bad thing.

      Delete
    3. gcallah4:19 PM

      Yes, I suspect Brooklyn is a little different!

      Delete
    4. Thomas L. Knapp4:27 PM

      Maybe I need to visit again :D

      Delete

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