By Selwyn Duke
Was society always as promiscuous as today? The answer to this question should be obvious, yet there are people who would say yes. One of them responded to my piece "Does Pro-life Now Mean Pro-libertinism?" saying that the idea of traditional values before the time of the sexual revolution is a myth. The name he posted under (I assume it’s his real name) is Robert Berger, and he wrote:
It would avoid a lot of problems if every one were sexually responsible and no one had sex before marriage.
However, this is a totally unrealistic goal. What you call "traditional
values" before the alleged sexual revolution is a chimera. It never
existed.Sexual promiscuity has been around from the very beginning, and
illegitimacy has been very common for many centuries. While SOME people
have been chaste and still are, the image of the 1950s as a wholesome
era when everything was so orderly and moral is an illusion.I’m not saying that promiscuity is a good thing, but you can’t stop
human nature. And the notion that pornography, sexually alluring
advertisements and mildly bawdy television programs and films are to
blame for our problems today is specious.Pornography has existed for at least 2,000 years, and young people have always felt their urges as [sic] acted on them. Censorship today won’t make any one more virtuous.
Dear Mr. Berger,
C.S. Lewis once wrote a brilliant and captivating little book titled The Screwtape Letters, which is written from the point of view of a demon who was counseling an underling on how to destroy civilization. One strategy he offered is the following (I’m paraphrasing): We must separate one generation from another [e.g., render later ones ignorant of the true history of earlier ones], so that the characteristic strengths of one generation cannot be used to correct the characteristic faults of the next.
Thus, while I don’t know how old you are, if you’re relatively young, I can well understand why you’d believe the incredible proposition you put forth. However, what you’ve come to believe is so wrong and so destructive that I couldn’t let it slide.
First, let me point out the grain of Truth in your post. Sexual promiscuity and illegitimacy certainly are nothing new; they have existed not for centuries but millennia. But there should be a qualifier here: They have existed in certain times and places for millennia.
As to this, you claim that widespread chastity before marriage is an unrealistic goal, but history belies this claim. In many times and places — I would in fact guess that in most — the norm has been to refrain from sexual activity before marriage. In these societies, there were strong social controls that encouraged this; meaning, traditions that governed behavior and often punishment for misbehavior. Of course, in many of these cases people married very young, perhaps at ages 14 or 15. But the point is that in these multitude of societies, it simply was not the case that people were running around en masse engaging in fornication. It simply was not possible.
It’s important to understand something about this. In every society I know of, and I’ll allow that there might be an exception of which I’m unaware (it would have been a short-lived one, I’m sure), sexuality has been governed by some standard. It might not have been a Christian one; it might have been a Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, or some Pagan standard, but it was not a laissez-faire atmosphere. Even in civilizations infamous for having descended into true perversion, there were identifiable rules. And many societies, recognizing the powerful force that is sexuality, saw fit to
control it tightly and succeeded in doing so.
If you still doubt this, consider the following. I used to know a WWII veteran who on more than one occasion spoke of his days as a wannabe Casanova. Here is what he said about the
prospects for being a swinger in “his day” (1940s to early 50s). He said, and this is close to verbatim, “Back
then, a girl would only go so far. She
might kiss you a bit or sleep with you [clothed – he actually meant sleep!], but that was it.” Now, bear in mind that he wasn’t some fellow
living in a Podunk town; rather, he was a good-looking, secular young man
living in the cosmopolitan cities of New York and Miami.
Then, consider an email sent to me
by a different reader. It is a woman who
wrote:
I graduated from high school in
1965. At that time we did not have
government school sex classes. Hard core porno was not easy to obtain. Hugh
Heffner’s Playboy magazine had not yet sunk to the level of Hustler . Actors on
television still weren’t shown in bed together. Girls who got pregnant were kicked out of school. "Nice"
girls, even if they were fornicating, didn’t let anyone know . . . .
In the same vein, a woman close to
me once put it very well (she said this about five years back): “Thirty-five
years ago you knew who the bad girls were; now you know who the good girls are.”
I should also mention something often overlooked: The impact of venereal diseases and the absence of birth control measures like the pill. For most of history, these diseases couldn’t be cured and there was no form of birth control even as reliable as what we have today. And if you don’t think that the advanced symptoms of horrible afflictions such as syphilis and gonorrhea and the high probability of pregnancy were enough to scare many people straight (especially women), please see me. I can offer you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.
As for pornography, it is
unbelievable that you would imply there is some kind of equivalence
between today’s climate and that of the rest of history. First, pornography has existed for thousands
of years; however, it had been extremely uncommon. Did it elude you that the printing press didn’t
exist for most of that time and that without it not much of anything could be
disseminated to the general population? Moreover, even after the press’ advent, such materials were not viewed very
widely.
Even when I was growing up, things
were different. Video cassette recorders
weren’t common yet, which means that people couldn’t run to a video store and
pick up an “adult film”; there was no cable TV with porn channels; and a boy couldn’t
exactly have a girlie magazine sent to his house. Do you still want to equate this atmosphere
with one in which children can access thousands of porn websites at the touch
of a mouse? Let’s not be silly.
Yet, again, many believe what
you do. It’s a tribute to the success of
revisionist historians, people who, for example, disgorge one documentary after
another about sex during the civil war, during the American Revolution, during medieval
times, during this and during that. They
have caused individuals such as you to become detached from the past, and it’s an
ominous development. As George Orwell
said, “He who controls the past, controls the present; he who controls the
present, controls the future.”
After all, no matter how effective a remedy
is, people won’t try it if they think it has never worked before or couldn’t
even be attempted, will they? So,
echoing George Santayana, he who forgets the remedies of the past is damned to
be sick.
Thus do we have revisionist history, peddled by those who prefer illness masquerading as liberation to health mischaracterized as repression.
Think about it.
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