Czechanada wrote:North American society acknowledges that sexuality exists and happens in private, but we refuse any infiltrations of the notion of sexuality in the public sphere.
...which is an absolutely normal thing for any human society to do.
Do you honestly not realize just how much your complaints about continued sexual restrictions in Western society place you far beyond the scope of anything that happened in recorded human history? By any objective historical standards, your views are extremist. Let's go over your complaints...
Czechanada wrote:For example:
Nudity is still taboo (even in the harmless terms of female toplessness)
Every recorded human society that has existed in temperate climates (or colder) has had this.
Czechanada wrote:The stigma of watching pornography (especially in public)
That has existed in every society that ever had pornography.
Czechanada wrote:Public displays of affection like making out cause discomfort
Fair enough. That's one thing where you have a point.
Czechanada wrote:The taboo of discussing sex in public
The taboo of having sex in public
The stigma of masturbation (especially in public)
Every society that had agriculture had such taboos, as far as we know. Although the one about discussing sex in public is impossible to determine when it comes to societies that existed more than a few centuries ago, of course.
I can't think of any society in recorded history where having sex or masturbating in public was considered acceptable.
There have been some societies that had public religious rituals involving sex, but that's not what you're talking about (unless you mean to suggest that what our society really lacks is public devotion to Bacchus).
Czechanada wrote:Stigmatization of non-heterosexuals
With the exception of a few small and isolated examples, the vast majority of human societies that exist in the world right now stigmatize non-heterosexuals far more than Western culture does. The same is true for the past, going back many centuries.
When it comes to European and Near Eastern civilizations, you have to go all the way back to antiquity to find societies which may possibly count as stigmatizing non-heterosexuals less than present-day Western culture does, although the details are fuzzy and it's hard to make a clear comparison (for example, ancient Greek society did not stigmatize men who penetrated other men, but it did very much stigmatize men on the receiving end of homosexual intercourse).
Czechanada wrote:The phenomenon of slut-shaming of promiscuous women or those who are simply perceived to be promiscuous
...you've got to be kidding me.
For most of recorded human history, promiscuous women were assumed to be prostitutes. And practically all of them were prostitutes, whether they wanted to be or not, because if you were a woman and you were discovered to be promiscuous, you would be cast out from mainstream society and prostitution pretty much became the only kind of life available to you.
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In any case, the bottom line is: By any kind of historical standards, modern Western culture is hyper-sexualized and unbelievably permissive in sexual matters. If it's not hyper-sexualized and extremely permissive by your standards, then your standards are completely out of line with historical social reality. Most human beings, most of the time (at least since the advent of agriculture) have lived in societies where sexuality was far more tightly regulated than in Western society today.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those past sexual standards were always a good thing that we should go back to. No, not at all. There are many downright vile and evil things that were widespread in most human societies throughout history. For instance, there was always a double standard between men and women, and often that double standard grew to outrageous proportions. There have been many societies in which it was considered permissible for married men to have sex with as many women as they pleased, but if a woman had sex with someone other than her husband the penalty was death. There have been many societies where certain forms of rape were allowed. There have been many societies which had forms of sexual slavery. The past is a dark place. We should absolutely not go back to it.
But we should learn from it, and try to emulate the good things about it while discarding the rest. With regard to sexuality, what we can learn from the past is that "restrictive" or "repressive" sexual mores are the normal state of human society, from which present-day Western society has considerably deviated. That doesn't mean we should ever try to bring back the sexual mores of the distant past, but it does mean that we can and should try to build a NEW, more egalitarian set of "restrictive" sexual mores, one which keeps all the good things about the progress of recent decades (equality between men and women, the importance of consent, opposition to coercion) while opposing promiscuity and promoting chastity.
That is what I support: a fusion between new and old, that is both egalitarian and moralistic.
