Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?