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Reader Feedback on "History of Single Life"
Very interesting article. I do have one quibble...
You mention Germaine Greer and describe her as an American.
She is actually an Australian!
Yours, Rick Pratchett, Sydney, Australia.
pratch@tpg.com.au
--rp
06/06 |
An awful lot of this is only technically true: a good number of even middling-income households had multiple bedrooms and beds in the pre-modern era, and the Calvinists can probably be held responsible for a lot of the closed doors/private lives movement you ascribe to the Victorians. In 1540's Geneva (or London) attempts to prosecute people for adultery was almost always based on innuendo rather than anything like a witness.
--JT
06/05 |
This whole essay is riddled with unsubstantiated assertions, with the worse being its main thesis: "... the idea that sex is a 'private' act is only a couple of centuries old." This is absolutely ridiculous.
From the point in evolution when humankind first gained enough cognitive wherewithal both to care and to make educated guesses about what others were thinking, sex has been chiefly a private act.
First, let's deal with the academically antiquated idea that the nuclear family is somehow an "invention" of the Victorian era, that it is merely some sort of cultural construct. Pair bonding is as old as the species. The "nuclear family" is merely what pair-bonding naturally leads to with enough wealth to wall you and your significant other off from your extended kin and your neighbors. The Industrial Age created the prosperity for the average person to do this. People did not have sex in the open ("... everyone else in the household bunked and fucked where they could") in front of kin and neighbors before the Industrial Age because they didn't care or because they thought it to be "natural"; it's because their lack of wealth gave them little option. Give them a little wealth, like the king had, and they build themselves a bedroom.
Pair-bonding became necessary when the evolving bigger brains of infants began to require more and more calories than a gathering mother could provide alone. Having daddy stick around and invest by gathering and providing was essential. However, daddy's genes would not long last if he blithely invested in another man's baby; the sexually jealous type invested in his own genes more successfully (and thereby permeated the gene pool) by keeping an eye on the wife. Creating cultures that inhibited wonton sexuality (mainly of the wife-figure in patriarchal societies) outside of pair-bonds acted as a safeguard against ramped cuckoldry. "Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery." "Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbors Wife." These are old ideas. Far from wanting to take the Mrs. to the community orgy, history says that many men thought it better to make the wife dress and act asexually outside of the marriage bed. Sexual women are regarded often as culturally dangerous. Sexuality here is very much a private act; it's carried out away from the observation of other tribe members.
Of course the Mrs. does get her groove on occasionally with Grog in the neighboring tribe, but she does it furtively -- lest her husband or, just as badly, her own tribe finds out. Again, sexuality is carried out privately.
Women who develop a reputation for "getting around" became an object of mistrust among potential cuckolds, so women try to avoid that perception, because potential husbands will avoid them in turn. A woman who has trouble finding a single pair-bond mate with which to mate must instead extract bits resources by trading sex with many men as oppose to extracting a lot of resources from one. This unconscious reproductive strategy is what contemptuous men culturally label whoring. Once women get this tribal label they might as well make it a lifestyle because they seldom can go back to wife material status. Promiscuous women excite men in the short term because they unconsciously see a low-cost genetic-spreading opportunity, but for the long term they have contempt for promiscuous women because of the cuckold issue. In other words, many men may want to fuck Paris Hilton, but they don't want to marry her.
Public sex has almost always involved men with women of two categories: prostitutes and women who are financially self-sufficient enough to be beyond negative economic repercussions -- the latter being historically rare.
Men are attracted to public sex because merely spreading one's seed costs little in investment but can reap genetic payoff -- orgies offer a lot of opportunity for a man to spread his seed. The more powerful men can withstand social scrutiny and don't have to participate in the social contract of "let's insist that our women be asexual outside of the marriage bed so we men don't needlessly cuckold each other." Most historical examples of orgies involve relatively powerful men and their prostitutes (or "courtesans").
Sexual privacy is not an expression of Victorian era "repression." People not inclined to do it in front of others do not have "hang ups." Does free love ever work? It seldom did in the experimental utopian societies of the 19th century; people kept pair-bonding even when the charter of those societies forbade it. Mormon polygamists do not have orgies with their many wives; they usually engage in one-on-one sex (and the wives often carry resentment over intimacy toward the other wives).
In short, the tendency for sexually to be expressed privately is the norm of human societies, not some historical aberration as the author of the essay tries to suggest.
--WL
06/04 |
What are you on about, DP? Of course there was porn before the '80s; the revolution there was that VCRs (and then the Internet) made it umbiquitous. And modern organized swinging did start in the ´50s.
--KenM
06/04 |
This guy seems to be implying that swinging is a product of the 1950s and that pornography is a product of the 1980s! I wish he would get his facts straight. He also needs to do quite a bit more research into sex among multiple partners in this country (I write from personal experience). If this is an example of the quality of work expected from PhD candidates at Fordham, I'm never sending my children there!
--DP
06/03 |
Funny, I visit Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) to, you know, check the weather! I wonder if they knew about the free love revolutionary group when they named their site....
--JCF
05/31 |
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