luvluv

Well, word on the street is that Mead got the wool pulled over her eyes. I guess you're talking about Growing up in Samoa? I've read faqs that tend to indict her research practices and which have lead folks to believe she was duped. (Somebody on this forum actually gave that to me, I think it was either Pomp or Vorkosagian.)

I am familiar with African sexual practices on a literary level (I've read a few books on the issue from the perspective of memoirs and novels) but not on a sociological level. Native Americans, I have little information. No I can't back this up with serious documentation, but I think it passes the common sense test. My actual point vis a vis these societies, was that no SOCIETY had a view of sex as a "meaningless act" and I think we can establish that as societies in Africa and the Americas went, this was generally true.

That really doesn't tell me much. Can you give a general description of how Victorian attitudes made it to America and how they got passed on to the present day?

[ November 07, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Jagged

*Leave the scientists out of it.* Everyone experiences sex on a *personal* level as unique and pleasurable. It's the friggin inherant, intrinsic, essential, defining nature of sex! (Love that thesaurus feature) The only legitimacy we need is our own personal experience.

Talulah

Not 'meaningless', but certianly very, very far removed from this countries background of Christian morality.

Vorkosigan

Luvluv, this question is endless. At the beginning you started out properly by noting that all societies put controls on the sex act or regulate it in certain ways, but you have stopped there, without contemplating why they have done. so. In fact, you have actually demanded that we talk about the sex act without discussing the relations between the sexes, which is rather like discussing the fine art of baking bread without reference to the structure of the oven.

Aas we have seen many times before, "all societies do it" does not translate into "therefore it should be done." Nor does noting that all societies regulate sex excuse you from noticing that it is regulated differently in each society, and that the interaction between formal and informal strictures, religious demands, rural and urban areas, class structures, ideals and reality is fantastically complex. There is no place you can point to in any relatively complex society like the US, and say "Oh, that is sex in America, so that is what we should think of as sex in America." Sex in American is celibate priests who fuck young boys, people picking up people in bars; elderly couples have pleasant slow sex on a lazy saturday afternoon; getting a hand job from the wife before going off to work; prostitutes giving blowjobs in the back seat of cars, teenagers groping in the park; harried married couples taking a moment from busy lives; masturbating in the shower while the wife and kids are eating breakfast; polyamory, lesbianism, bi-sexuality, homosexuality, bestiality, copraphagy....there's no way to characterize what it is. It's just sex.

Luv, I defy you to point to ANY activity that is not regulated by society either informally or formally, and usually both. Sometimes regulation is obvious, sometimes it is subtle. Sex is merely one activity among many that society deems important enough to cover with a thicket of regulations. So the issue isn't "does society regulate sex" but rather "Since it does regulate sex like it does all other activities, how should sex be regulated?"

As for the whole "meaning" issue, that is so non-relevant it need not be bothered with. All activities are meaningful in some way for those who perform them and those who percieve them. It's nonsense to write as if the question of whether sex has meaning is something that should concern us. The real questions should be something like "Since sex has a different meaning for all who engage in it, should it therefore be regulated in exactly the same way for everyone?" "What combination of formal and informal regulatory mechanisms are correct? "What aspects of sex should be regulated?" What is the proper role of State and community?" and the like. The idea that sex has some "meaning" that is endowed from the outside of humans is both empirically absurd and philosophically fallacious.

No, casual sex is not the equivalnent of jumping off of a bridge, but it is an act that is potentially harmful and so a person has a right to express an opinion (or in the case of this thread, ask a question) about sex on purely humanitarian grounds.

There's nothing "harmful" about casual sex. Casual sex is two people rubbing themselves together because they are fulfilling some need that each has. There isn't any such thing as "casual sex" as opposed to some other kind of sex. It's just "sex." "Casual sex" is a term invented by the puritanical as a form of rhetorical aggrandizement to make certain acts seem somehow less acceptable than others. Your language is so infected with the forms of power, authority, judgment and control, Luv, that it can no longer form the basis of rational discourse. If you want to really discuss this issue, you'll have to find a way of communicating that is less implicitly judgmental.

Vorkosigan

The Other Michael

It might also be worth considering the chattel nature of women through much of history, and how that impacts on societal sexual norms.

cheers,
Michael

livius drusus

You clearly have never seen Tom Jones.

galiel

I was going to ROFLOL, but then realized that the mere fact that I got the reference dates me more effectively than my birth certificate <img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

Clutch

luvluv, you started with the claim that it "was said" on this board that sex is meaningless. When challenged to back this up, you claim that such a view of sex was "implied".

Why should anyone doubt that this is a product and projection of your own false dichotomy? Ie, that since people here don't share your views about sex, they must hold some utterly nihilistic view of it.

While I tremble to conjecture on what you mean by the sex act, my suspicion is that most people here, like me, would find it absurd to attach any single meaning or type of significance to each and every occurance of that act. Why on earth would anyone suppose that something as variegated and rich as sexual behaviour has just one recurrent meaning attached to it? Surely it has a vast range of types and degrees of meaning, depending upon the context.

A human practice like sport has only a pittance of sexuality's subtlety and breadth, but presumably anyone -- because lacking religious dogmatism about it -- would recognize the foolishness of a question like: What is the meaning that you attach to the sport act? Your question rests on presuppositions that can hardly be seriously entertained.

Ms. Siv

A couple of points ...

1. Meaningless is a contextual term. Is sex meaningless for gene propogation ? Certainly not !! Is it meaningless for finding out more about black holes ? Certainly.

2. The is-ought fallacy. We're here today because of sex. Because our genes programmed us in such a way as to enjoy it .... they got themselves propogated down the generations. A gene which made a populace less interested in sex would rapidly be selected out. Thats the reason that human populations have, over the centuries obsessed over sex. That does not however, mean that we "ought to" obsess over it.

- Sivakami.

livius drusus

There, there, hon.... Hey, wait! Are you calling me old?