Is aversion to discussion of sex a part of traditional Chinese culture? Seems odd given I'm not aware of any puritanical religions taking hold there.
replies(8):
> I don't think there are any sensible "defaults" for human cultures.
But, you seem to think a lack of aversion to talking about sex to be a default? To your question, I've known many people whom are not practicing any religion and yet have an aversion to sexual discussion, within a population that has a lack thereof. There are many such topics that some feel are not keeping with decorum to be discussed openly and widely - and without religion being involved. Let's say in China there is a general aversion to sexual discussion. What will be your explanation given lack of puritanical religion?
> But I wouldn't expect aversion to talking any sex to arise spontaneously among a population
I don't see spontaneity to be relevant here.
Because it promotes social stability ? As much as I dislike defending religion - those values produced the most stable societies through history
I genuinely don't know, that's why I asked. Presumably it's served some sort of purpose at some point. Or maybe, as another poster suggested, it was an trait borrowed from other cultures where puritanical religion did have an influence.
(The early Soviet Union moved from abolishing marriage in favour of cohabitation to actively promoting it; the official stance on abortion, IIRC, flipped several times; and while the equilibrium was extremely prudish—“there is no sex in the USSR”—the adult literacy campaign of the first decade was not above commissioning and printing a literal porn ABC if it got the job done.)
I mean, they are totalitarian governments, they are defined by asserting control over the totality of people’s lives. But the fixation on sex, in particular, seems to go beyond that, and yet it’s fairly universal among them.
(If you have read Orwell and Zamjatin [which, let’s be honest, are nearly the same book] but not Moscow 2042, I highly recommend picking that up as well—the bizarre sexual Zeitgeist of the ripe Soviet state is much more vivid there than in the “serious” dystopian works. Though I don’t really know if it’s readable without at least an extensive set of footnotes, and given that it’s supposed to be bitterly funny that might be missing the point.)
Men, in general, really like having their genes carried on. Men, in general, really hate wondering if a child is theirs or not.
Societies of n>100s. By tabooing sex you reduce promiscuous behaviour - which stabilises society. I don't really see how this would be controversial. Modern social values have unambiguously shown that they lead to a population decline. Huge difference being that technology makes us less reliant on population count for stability (hopefully).
I don’t actually think the answers to these questions disprove your statement, because I have a painful lack of knowledge as to what those answers actually are. But I do feel that those answers need to be given before an argument such as yours can make sense.
(Granted, a trait that promotes societal stability can become common even if stability isn’t actually good, so the last question is not as important as the others. A dystopian equilibrium is still an equilibrium.)
I can totally see why that’d be the default, simply because sex is such a charged act in any culture. Purely biologically: it’s a very vulnerable act and has tons of “political/social implications” in a social species. Who you have sex with and be that vulnerable with signals your “allegiance” in a sense.
Even chimps have taboos and social rules around sex for this reason. Who you have sex (or don’t have sex) with decides who’s in charge, who you support, what your clique is, and so on. A chimp caught having sex with the wrong chimp might be attacked.
I don't see one being necessarily linked to the other. Murder and violence are "taboos" yet adults talk about them all the time. Especially in TV shows.
> Having sex is taboo because if women have sex with more than one man
I don't see the link. If having sex with multiple men was taboo, then discussing or having sex with a single man would not necessarily be taboo.
Your argument also seems to be about unprotected sex, the kind which can lead to kids. So is protected sex not taboo, then?
(not just human) Males need to be sure of paternity. Males who don't mind whose children they are raising aren't well selected for. This should be apparent to anyone who has ever watched a nature documentary. Humans are simply not that different.
There are loads of sensible "defaults" for human cultures. Aversion and disgust at the practices of unfamiliar out-groups is one - keeps us from getting their diseases. Practices assuring paternity are another - males that are indifferent to who's children they raise aren't very well selected for. Risk aversion in, and preference for protection of, child-bearing females by the group is a third - harm to these females disproportionately affects the ability of the group to reproduce and pass its genes. There are many, many others, and we have many of them in common with our animal relatives.
1. Physically isolating females from males.
2. Conditioning females so they won't seek these opportunities.
In combination, these factors seem to taboo any discussion of sex at all in mixed male/female company. It seems our standards for what is "family friendly" grows out of these taboos. You'll notice that in exclusively male company discussing sex is generally much less taboo.
With the obviously problematic morality aside, this does seem like the most effective approach to assuring paternity, particularly in small, low-tech, tribal groups.
Edit: There's also the need to limit sexual violence, which also seems to be a factor in tabooing discussion of sex in mixed company.
My guess is that it is a result of valuing austerity and stoicism and resisting temptations, which I suspect are quite important in confucianism.
Beyond that though, Chimps have social hierarchies around sex. It’s hard to imagine why something you believe to be so counterproductive would exist so persistently across cultures and times unless it had serious value.
Sex is how workers create workers, a means of production. So of course they try to seize control of it.
Sex by its nature completely shatters any notion we have of being civilized, rational actors made of pure white spiritual light. Alas, it shows us as sweaty, ape-like animals needing, nay, wanting to exchange fluids to produce our offspring. Nothing about it is pure and orderly and it is completely at odds with common mental strategies handling our issues with mortality. Being made of divine spiritual energy is quite at odds with the actual reality of it all.
Oh yeah, that and it being a means of production: it makes workers. Which is to be controlled at all times. But that alone does not explain why this taboo is also common in other type of societies.
I would love to see someone explain the link between taboos about sex and male paternity claims, but so far I see not a single (even dubious) reference from subject matter experts, so I will continue being skeptical about this claim.
"It's obvious!" doesn't convince me.
Sure, you’re supposed to read the foundational documents, think the old state was evil, say the dictatorship of the proletariat is coming, etc., but more often than not you’re paying lip service to the person who is apathetically droning out a butchered retelling of the whole thing. Occasionally they are actual starry-eyed devotees of the idea, but just what that idea is is somehow less important than uttering The Idea in hushed and reverent tones. (I promise I was not going for this Arendtian twist, it just came out.) More often than not, though, a position of ideological enforcer is more indicative of skill in navigating a slime pit of backstabbing bureaucrats than anything else. (There’s a reason why career man is one of the vilest late-Soviet curses—now extinct, funnily enough.) Hell, the very name of the state is a sad joke—the eponymous sovjets (literally, councils [of workers and farmers], but supposed to be local governments rather than advisory councils) were all but neutered by the end of the first decade if not earlier.
So, no. I don’t expect that the proclaimed ideology has much to do with it.
(None of this is to be taken as a defense of 19th-century German political philosophy as a viable economic strategy, mind you.)
Basically, the kind of people who rose to the top of a system like the Soviet Union are control freaks, and they acted accordingly.
It seems like it should be a topic covered by Diamond's "Why is sex fun" but I can't remember an exact section devoted to taboos (nothing in the index etc.).
> What I sometimes call Marx’s Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what “optimize” means.
I was only saying that the surface implications of the “means of production” rhetoric don’t really matter once you have Lenin in power, because that rhetoric is not what drives his actions. I took your previous comment to mean that they did. (That is not to say that the whole Russian anti-autocracy movement since 1815 was a power grab, even if a pie-in-the-sky gentleman anarchist introducing and promoting terrorism in European polite society[2] sounds a bit bizarre to modern sensibilities. Recall the Russian Empire had a serfdom system essentially equivalent to domestic slavery up until 1861.)
Still, though, my original puzzlement in this thread is that sex, specifically, seems to have even more importance to control freak governments than would generically be expected given their control freak nature. Little importance is given to the citizens’ diet, for example, or clothing, and even art is hit and miss, but sex is somehow always at the forefront (even if nobody says the word). Maybe it’s human passions in general?.. I don’t know, I don’t see it.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...