“A man who is unchaste loses stamina and becomes emasculated and cowardly. If his mind is given over to animal passions, he is not capable of any great effort.”
If you make this statement about masturbation, you will find many people who agree even today. So I wonder whether the negative attitude towards sex simply found a new target.
Feminists identified traditional sexual mores as having been part of the mechanism of the subjugation of women, and exposed chastity to critique on those grounds.
And pick-up artists have noticed that intrasexual inequality of access to sex is much greater among men than among women. Making chastity a social norm could have been historically a strategic coordination of envious “beta” men against “alpha” men. (“I don’t have lots of sex, so you shouldn’t either! Gods will punish you!”)
Arguably, “alpha” men benefit from the liberated norms most. For women, it seems a bit more ambiguous: on one hand, yes, more freedom and more orgasms; on the other hand, greater pressure on the dating market to have sex soon… or be replaced by someone more willing.
Most likely, it was a social norm that benefited different people for different reasons. Both men and women could use it against their more attractive competitors. There were fewer pregnancies, and fewer children starved to death. Society could channel the repressed energy into religion and war; or politics and shopping.
By contrast, if you indulge in sex whenever and with whomever the fancy strikes, in a “(merely) natural” way, a part of your life that could have been extraordinary risks becoming no more remarkable than yawning or getting a haircut.
I wonder if it made sex overall less stressful. Like, there are now fewer worries about being judged for having or wanting to have sex. On the other hand, now we have an open debate about our preferences and differences, which can lead to worries: what if my partner is unsatisfied with my performance? the size or shape of my genitals? what if my partner has a fetish for X that I find repulsive? (The response that perhaps your partner could simply try living without X is no longer acceptable, precisely because chastity is not a virtue anymore.)
And, yeah, a possible answer to this is “free love” or polyamory: if one partner does not fully satisfy you, build your own harem, duh. It remains yet to be seen how successful this new norm would be with e.g. raising kids. Also, whether it is a realistic option for most people… or maybe it requires some level of intelligence / emotional intelligence / wealth, and would be disastrous for large parts of population. (What will be the new norm for them, then? How it will be enforced, if they see that other people openly make fun of it?)
If you make this statement about masturbation, you will find many people who agree even today. So I wonder whether the negative attitude towards sex simply found a new target.
And pick-up artists have noticed that intrasexual inequality of access to sex is much greater among men than among women. Making chastity a social norm could have been historically a strategic coordination of envious “beta” men against “alpha” men. (“I don’t have lots of sex, so you shouldn’t either! Gods will punish you!”)
Arguably, “alpha” men benefit from the liberated norms most. For women, it seems a bit more ambiguous: on one hand, yes, more freedom and more orgasms; on the other hand, greater pressure on the dating market to have sex soon… or be replaced by someone more willing.
Most likely, it was a social norm that benefited different people for different reasons. Both men and women could use it against their more attractive competitors. There were fewer pregnancies, and fewer children starved to death. Society could channel the repressed energy into religion and war; or politics and shopping.
I wonder if it made sex overall less stressful. Like, there are now fewer worries about being judged for having or wanting to have sex. On the other hand, now we have an open debate about our preferences and differences, which can lead to worries: what if my partner is unsatisfied with my performance? the size or shape of my genitals? what if my partner has a fetish for X that I find repulsive? (The response that perhaps your partner could simply try living without X is no longer acceptable, precisely because chastity is not a virtue anymore.)
And, yeah, a possible answer to this is “free love” or polyamory: if one partner does not fully satisfy you, build your own harem, duh. It remains yet to be seen how successful this new norm would be with e.g. raising kids. Also, whether it is a realistic option for most people… or maybe it requires some level of intelligence / emotional intelligence / wealth, and would be disastrous for large parts of population. (What will be the new norm for them, then? How it will be enforced, if they see that other people openly make fun of it?)