The sex thread

[_harmony]

Harmony, I find myself quite puzzled by some of what you say above. On one leval I can understand you to be saying that there are a lot of various patterns in the past and many have not been good enough to support a picture of the good old days lost in 1968. As Roger notes sex outside of marriage was not invented in the 1960s.

I am really puzzled about your marriage comments. I think you seriously underestimate, or appear to underestimate, the pervasive place of marriage in human society. Your observation about marriage c 1000 in Europe I think is misleading. The fact many people without funds or social standing did not have official church wedding hardly means that they did not form marriage relationships. People married in history long before there was a church or a central government. It was something done by local community or family. The Catholic church tried to take over the role. 1000 ad that takeover was not complete and would have been applicable to higher classes primarily. Other poeple would have made other arrangements.

You're talking common law, Huck. I'm talking legal marriage. Two different things. Common law was the most common, but Loran would have us believe everyone had a legal marriage. And they simply didn't. It was too expensive except for the rich.

Am I speculating? To an extent yes but it fits history I have read. History of that time did not focus on family arrangements of oridinary people. If one looks about the world explored in the past few centuries all kinds of cultures have been described. I cannot remember one in which marriage for ordinary people was not the ususal situation. Yes there would be people for which it did not apply such as slaves, but common people commonly have married everywhere. Similarly I cannot think of any ancient record in which people are shown to be living without marriage being normally present. There are some people who remain single such slaves soldiers sailors prostitues but that leaves a lot of common farmers artisans etc who to my awarness have married all about the world in recored time.

Historical records generally contain marriages only if the couple was important.. a king or someone of similiar stature. If you have access to records of the commoners, the peasants, the slaves, the serfs... please link them. Otherwise, we're talking about common law marriages, and those are exactly what Loran calls "cohabitation". Living together without a legally binding marriage (kinda like most of Joseph Smith's).

Thanks.

I might add the observation that Europe in 1000 is a point late in a period of social disruption. The old patterns of village and town were disrupted by war, invasion, plague and collapse central government.. Instead instead of tradtional village order there was a patchwork of barbaric warlords. This is hardly a point of time making a good example of what human society usually looks like.

It was an arbitrary number chosen at random, Huck. And if you think marriage wasn't disrupted by war, invasion, plague, etc, then you don't know much about marriage.

[_Bond...James Bond]

Bond and Nehor, isn't it just ironic that the best lovers (that would be us 3) are the ones without women to please???

Totally!

(Returned from vacation...bikinis in winter...A+)

[_The Nehor]

Bond and Nehor, isn't it just ironic that the best lovers (that would be us 3) are the ones without women to please???

Totally!

(Returned from vacation...bikinis in winter...A+)

Yeah, just went through an amicable breakup. Go figure. God has a sense of humor wasting me for so long.

[_huckelberry]

Harmony, I think I was asking questions because I did not quite understand why you were making the distintion between a church wedding and the kind of community wedding that most all of humanity has engaged in. You chose to call them common law, which though a possible description, may be a bit anachronistic.

As far as the effect of war etc on conditions in the dark ages I brought them up because I thought they would have an effect on marriage making that period more chaotic compared to a more typical time period.

[_harmony]

Harmony, I think I was asking questions because I did not quite understand why you were making the distintion between a church wedding and the kind of community wedding that most all of humanity has engaged in. You chose to call them common law, which though a possible description, may be a bit anachronistic.

It wasn't a "church" wedding. The church was a bit of a latecomer. It was legal, registered, recorded.

What I referred to as "common law" is descriptive.

As far as the effect of war etc on conditions in the dark ages I brought them up because I thought they would have an effect on marriage making that period more chaotic compared to a more typical time period.

What's a "typical time period"? The Dark Ages was simply one of many different periods of time in one section of the world. It made little difference to the peasant living in China.

[_huckelberry]

Harmony, its a bit confusig to drift into a conversation with somebody where it seems serious disagreement is asumend yet no actual disagreement can be located. I was think of just saying well perhaps some other time.

Perhaps in all the pages on this tread I missed some crucial point that you are focusing on. I thought you had asked Coggins for some clarification on his sweeping cartoon about the 60s. My picture of that time and its effects is one of a kalidiscope of different things happening with a variety of results. Some results were bad some dubious and some good. A whole history of race relationships hit a fundamental turning point and our whole society was shaken by waves of reassing convention. The reassessment of race relations opened doors to reassessing relationships between the sexs. Opportunities for women started to be opened. One could characterize the sixties as these changes but their opposite also found new ways to come out. Some sexual attitudes in the sixties were a sort of male focused expectation of service from women. Some fuel for the femisnist movement came from reaction against male versions of the sexual revolution.

If a person wants to try and tie the change of the sixties up into amusing oversimplifications such as Coggins enjoys I suggest an alternative. The 1960 could be seen as the point our society escaped the traditional sexual structure of keeping large numbers of women in the prostitution business and as a result defining male sexuality as predatory and mercenary and womens role as either fallen or unfallen, sexual or pure. With an escape from the structure of social expectation created by widespread prostitution considered normal in society women could understand themselves as sexual with out always being sure they were not being confused with that other group of fallen ladies. Men were reminded that relations worked upon respect for women instead of power of purchase.

I rereflect that in my small western town the official downtown whorehouses closed their doors in the 1960. I think my town is cleaner and fundamentally better as a result. Perhaps my town was a bit slow in this change from the situation some decades earlier where any and all small medium or large towns had established houses of prostitution. They were closed more and more about the country. The last I know of along the Coer de lane river in Idaho closeed in the 1980s.

Thinking of Coggins comments he seems to understand the 60 through Hefner. That influence was one of many.A lot of people have noticed that Hefners views are limited even they do notice a couple of true things such as people can enjoy sex and women can be pretty. A couple true pieces do not create a workable version of the whole picture. I think there are people both left or right who have noticed those limitations. Coggins is interested in picking out pieces of the 1960 which fit his polemic. Hefner is easy to see why. I was a bit puzzled by his bringing up German philosophy, Hegel and Nietsche, yah right. Tiny influences in a huge stew of multiple influences. I was thinking that the two Hegel Nietsche are an odd couple to make genaralizations from. Well in the versions of the movement that I was familiar with neither of these influences were considered important. E E Cummiings or Camus would have quicker come to mind. But there were many versions of the movement. Maybe Coggins got a bad dose from a bad batch.

[_harmony]

I guess my main objection to Loran's characterization of the 60's as "the" pivotal decade for change for the worse is that every decade, we get this "the good ol' days" nonsense. When women finally got the vote, many men thought the world was coming to an end. When it was no longer possible to discriminate because of color, many people thought the world was coming to an end. Etc. Etc. Etc. The world has been coming to an end since civilization started!

My point is, much of what we take for granted today came about in the 60's (computers, birth control pills, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, etc.) To label the whole decade as decadent, free wheeling abortions, premarital cohabitation, pornographic, etc is just incorrect. That's why I wanted him to show documentation (which he never did), a study that linked the 60's with the factors he listed as the downfall of society as we know it. Pornography has been around for thousands of years; so has abortion; so has unmarried cohabitation. He wasn't willing to see the bigger picture. No surprise there.

[_Coggins7]

Consider that a thousand years ago, the only people who got married were the rich because they were the only people who could afford it, then 90% of the people on earth were engaging in premarital cohabitation.

Pure hokum. In ancient Rome, the source for many of our own marriage traditions, all classes of Romans married freely, from the elites to peasants, soldiers, and slaves. Unlike modern Jedeo/Christian concepts, most marriages were "common law" in that all that was required was the consent of the two parties. There were still formalities involved, however, and "free" marriages were still considered marriages in a legal sense.

Its quite true that when two people essentially said they were married, they became legally wed in the eyes of the law, but Harmony's claim that they were living in "premarital cohabitation" is incontextual. Indeed, they were considered to be married based upon a public pronouncement of the relationship. Harmony also fails to differentiate between different cultures, eras, and peoples. Marriage has existed among all classes, including the peasant classes, from time immemorial. That it was different in many cases is true. That it was equivalent to modern conceptions of cohabitation is ahistorical. Harmony also conveniently leaves out ancient Israel, where all social classes married and marriage was controlled by legal and theological norms. Even with the concept of "free' or "conscience" marriage in the ancient Mediterranean, these were considered contractual in nature and involved the parents and families of both.

It apparently wasn't the free and casual "shacking up", to use a modern term, that Harmony wants us to think it was. But Harmony has an agenda, as with everything else, in emphasizing and inflating the differences in ancient marriage from the model of more recent centuries.

If you're talking about "in our lifetime" or some other truncated timeline, that's a different deal than Loran's contention that the 60's somehow marks the lowest point in human history for unmarried sexual activity and our society now is deteriorating to the point of no return (whatever that is).

Nice if I had anywhere made that claim, but I never have.

And put ancient erotica into Google, and see what you come up with, if you don't think porn has been a central part of human life since time began.

Irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant. The planet earth is saturated with it at the moment, and this never was, and never could be, even a remote possibility in the ancient world. You're having an argument with someone harmony, but it isn't me.

[_Moniker]

What's the problem with porn saturating the earth?

[_Jersey Girl]

What's the problem with porn saturating the earth?

LMAO!