April 24, 2006

• How Sex Got So Perverted

  All right — confession time:  one of my persistent character
  flaws is this tendency to ask what my sensei calls, “unevolved ‘why’
  questions.”  Before I was even out of bed today, I was asking
  myself why the world has to be so sick and twisted that some people think the
  naked human body is ugly and obscene, and that they must, “for their
  own good,” shelter children from knowledge about the sex act, the very
  procreative act by which those very children came to be.

  
  That thought about procreation reminded me of Thomas Robert Malthus (b. 1766 [in Dorking,
  Surrey, England], d. 1834; he was never called “Thomas”, preferred
  “Robert”, and his family called him, “Bob”, so knowledgeable writers
  and speakers always say “Robert Malthus” or use all three names. 
  Never respect a source that refers to “Thomas Malthus.”). 
  Suddenly, remembering Malthus, I recalled Queen Victoria’s role in the
  conspiracy, and part of the puzzle came together for me.  I had
  known about this since college, but like some other unpleasant
  memories, I let it slip my mind.

  Of course, the fact that the U. S. of Amerika was largely founded on
  Puritanical principles has to figure into the picture somewhere. 
  Puritans believe that anything that feels good or is fun is evil
  (except for acquiring money and property, which are seen as signs of
  God’s favor).  The fad of Anglophilia that had overtaken the
  former Colonies during the Industrial Revolution had some influence,
  too, or the Victorian nonsense that Malthus instigated might not have
  taken hold in the Western Hemisphere.

  Malthus’s legacy isn’t entirely negative.  Charles Darwin was
  reading Malthus, “for amusement,” when he came up with the theory of
  natural selection.  Also, I suppose that in fairness Malthus should be
  credited with slowing (or at least trying to slow) the rate of
  population growth in that part of the developed world where his
  adherents, chiefly Queen Victoria, had influence.  He was an
  economist and historian.  Overpopulation was his concern, and he
  expressed it in An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798.

  That principle stated that “an unrestrained population increased at a ‘geometric’ rate while the means of subsistence could only be increased
  at an ‘arithmetic’ rate. That is, population had the potential to grow
  in a proportional series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, … but food supplies could
  only increase at the lower rate of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ….  ‘Positive
  checks’, which raised the death rate, and ‘preventive checks’, which
  lowered the birth rate, worked jointly to keep the population within
  bounds.”   I suppose he derived that arithmetic rate of
  increase for food supplies from the assumption that we would be
  steadily transforming wilderness into farmland, improving agricultural
  practices, etc.  He was looking at the future through past-colored
  glasses, but aren’t we all?

  I
  don’t suppose it has ever been politically correct to advocate
  increasing the death rate, except by killing off one’s enemies. 
  Malthus turned his efforts to lowering the birth rate.  It would
  have been simple for Malthus and, later, for Queen Victoria, to have advocated the use of contraceptives,
  which had been around in one form or another since prehistoric times,
  but that simple course was not open to Robert Malthus or his Victorian
  followers. 

  First and foremost, before he was a historian and economist, Robert
  Malthus was a clergyman.  In his reality, contraceptives were only
  used by prostitutes, and condoms to prevent infection were used by the
  libertine men who consorted with prostitutes.  Good Christian
  people confined their sex lives to the marriage bed and didn’t do it
  for fun.  They did it to make babies, even in a world already
  overpopulated and rapidly becoming critically so.  Malthus believed that birth control would lead to “vice”.

  For Malthus, the way to lower the birth rate was “moral
  restraint.”  One vital part of that plan was to delay
  marriage.  Couples who married later in life would have fewer
  children.  Sex (for women) outside of marriage was already taboo, and had been
  since the end of the Neolithic period when power shifted away from being
  matriarchal and Goddess-centered.  When women began to be thought of as the property
  of their fathers until they were bought or stolen by their husbands, it
  became taboo for them to bear children for anyone but their respective
  husbands.  Now something had to be done to discourage or prevent
  people from breaking that taboo, and to induce them to put off marrying until they were older.

  Enter: the Victorian Malthusians.   Confronted with the
  problem of preventing early marriage and teen pregnancy, they decided
  that the solution was to keep young people ignorant of the sexual
  nature of the species.  In the Industrial Revolution, this was
  actually possible for the first time in history.  Instead of
  living in the countryside where the animals were all procreating right out in the open like… well, like animals, most people were living in towns and cities away from blatant bucolic procreation.

  The Victorians tacked on a few more taboos:  men did not speak of
  the sex act or of the associated body parts (neither the genitalia nor the
  secondary sexual characteristics) in  the presence of women, and
  nobody mentioned them, except in whispers, in the presence of
  children.  For good measure (through guilt by association, I
  suppose), one did not speak of “legs”.  The things that held up
  tables and pianos were referred to as “limbs,” and were decently
  covered by little skirts.  Classical paintings were defaced with
  fig leaves, and Greek and Roman sculptures began wearing clothes. 

  Fashion
  responded with corsets for men and women to alter the natural shape and
  prevent any offensive jiggle or wiggle.  Nice ladies didn’t show
  their ankles or wrists, so that a little flash of ankle became highly
  erotic and fetishes grew up around shoes, hankies and underwear. 
  Women developed spinal abnormalities from the constricting
  corsets.  They were dropping like flies, fainting and getting “the
  vapors” because they couldn’t get a decently deep breath in those
  things.  They couldn’t dress or undress themselves, either, but
  had to help each other tighten or loosen the laces that held them
  prisoner in their own clothes.

  There were all the predictable repercussions from that repression of
  the natural instincts.  Many women who already had good cause to
  try to avoid pregnancy because of its deleterious effects on their
  bodies, frequently including death, were influenced by the secrecy and
  taboos and became averse to or phobic about sex.  Men with
  “frigid” wives satisfied their natural urges with each other and/or
  with prostitutes.  Syphilis became a multi-generational
  epidemic.  As is the usual case when a hard-wired instinctive
  drive is thwarted or repressed, psychopathologies such as
  sado-masochism became associated with sex.

  Society became divided, with the proper, sexually repressed Victorians
  on one side and the libertines on the other, and somewhere in the
  middle lived a large population whose guilt-laden sex lives were
  carried on
  in secret.  Pornography flourished, bent and twisted by the shame
  born of repression.  Future generations of psychiatrists and
  psychotherapists would gain fame and fortune through their efforts to
  straighten out the kinks.  The therapists’ job is not done yet,
  because a large institutionalized
  strain of sick, irrational Victorian Malthusian repression remains to
  this day, and a brand new generation of children is being taught to
  feel shame over their genetically-programmed natural drive to
  perpetuate the species.  There IS a better way.

  

  • 12:03 am
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