Forced abstinence is also horrible abuse.
While coerced sexual activity is almost always inappropriate and can be criminal, coercing someone to never engage in sexual activity is just as horrible.
I had a lot of sex before I was 18.
It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
My grades went up. I became less angry. I gained loads of confidence. I developed sufficient strength to endure the many unpleasant situations that followed.
But that was illegal. Why?
To me, most of our societal prescriptions about sex are, at best, abusive.
Why do so many people not only follow, but agree with and violently defend these abuses? It is likely that many people alive today are thoroughly trained1 to believe that they are “protecting” children. It is the sort of training that goes so deep that they believe it is a natural state. I am quite certain that it is not, generally, natural.
I always found convents, monasteries, vestal virgins, and the like puzzling and disturbing.
Before we go further, I have two reasons for feeling that I am putting my life slightly less in danger than others who might say similar things:
- I don’t find children attractive. My lower-age soft-limit is 30, with an absolute cutoff at 25. I have had the latter since I was about 24. While I would never hold virginity against someone, it definitely does not fall into the ‘positive’ category.
- It is very unlikely that I will have children, so I no longer need the protection of silence.
It is also the case that my normal behaviors rarely bring me in contact with children, and I never have cause – or desire – to be alone with them. I know that some folks would hate me so deeply for making these statements that they would engineer or invent situations for the purpose of tormenting me. I feel better being able to avoid giving those folks ammunition.
If I manage not to get so much as a death threat from writing this, it probably means that no one has read it. 🙄
I am pretty certain that I am not the only one with these opinions. I am probably one of the few who is in a circumstance that allows me to speak of them publicly. And, given my near complete lack of socializing, I would hardly notice if I were to be ‘cancelled’.
Even as a young child I never understood society’s relationship with sex. I have spent most of my life trying to make sense of what I think of as cruelty being enshrined as obligatory law. I never truly made sense of it. This cognitive dissonance is one of the reasons why I rejected Christianity. I found my religious path appealing, in large part, because it did not require me to reject what I felt was right or to hate myself for feeling it. I always found convents, monasteries, vestal virgins, and the like puzzling and disturbing.
I think the mechanisms described in my previous post (see footnote 1) easily explain how these beliefs have been propagated. But I also wanted to understand how they started in the first place.
I did come up with some hypotheses regarding origin.
No one seemed to recognize this as insanity:
Forced marriage under 18? Draw and quarter. Over 18? Dance at wedding.
The most flattering one I can come up with is that early societies responded to outbreaks of sexually transmitted disease by enforcing strict limits on sexual partnership. In effect, a quarantine was introduced. But, somehow, it never went away. Given the ubiquitous displeasure at the recent lockdowns – even those of us who agreed that they were needed did not find them to be pleasant2 – combined with the strength of the human sex drive, I find it hard to believe that this, alone, explains such a lasting prohibition.
So, there was something else. Given the strong correlation of heavy restrictions in sexual conduct with the oppression of women, I suspect it was related to that. Women were regarded as property.
Sometime in the last decades, there was an uproar about a teenage female being forced into a marriage. I was furious about that, but equally furious at the charges levied. No one, at all, mentioned that she was being made a slave3 for life. They only worried that she might have sex with someone too early, or with someone she didn’t choose. It would have been ok with me to say that she was being forced to be a sex slave. But, for some reason, no one at all seemed to realize this. Their only concern was that she was under 18 at the time of being forced to be a sex slave for life. So… it’s ok as soon as she’s 18? Age discrimination? People get away with the most dreadful behaviors so long as they claim that they’re doing it “for the children.” I was horrified that no one seemed to recognize this as insanity: Forced marriage under 18? Draw and quarter. Over 18? Dance at wedding.
This sort of perversion of priorities is another reason why I think that our culture’s relationship to sex is pathological. Here is another example of the perversion of priorities. For some reason, it is ok to say the following to a group of seven and eight year olds:
There would have been no skin left on Jesus’s back. His ribs would have been exposed because once it takes your skin off, when they keep going it’s digging into your organs.
But, if a man stuck in traffic pulls out his penis to urinate into a bottle, and heaven forbid the wrong person, in a taller car, sees him, he might – and yeah, this happened4 – be accused of a sexual offense merely because some child might have seen him and there is a possibility that he might have known about that and that he might have enjoyed it.
Based on that, teaching children details regarding effective methods of torture is fine. The speaker above is paid to do it. That children might see a person pee in public? That can get the person put in jail and entered onto the list of sex offenders.
I’m sorry, folks, but that is not a “morality” I want my children to suffer.
It is this relationship between health and sex that makes me view the restrictive laws as especially cruel and immoral.
I worried a lot about what I would do if I had children. I would feel obligated to tell them that I fully disapprove of certain laws, but that they should follow them nonetheless. For that alone, I would likely have gotten a visit from DFACS. I would probably have bought sex toys and educational books for them. They would have had access to birth control starting at the onset of sexual maturity. Most importantly, I would have implored them not to have sex with adults, however interesting that might seem, because it would only get the adults in trouble.
When I was 17 or so, I learned of the existence of AIDS. Because of this, I began to constrain my behavior. At the time, the current wisdom was that a person could be infected, and contagious, for six months before they could be tested. Taking risks affecting my own life was fine. I did not want to risk the lives of others. Before that time, and occasionally after, I would have sex for no reason more weighty than to be polite. But, before long, I began to restrict sexual behavior, with very few exceptions, to only having sex in the context of pursuing a stable relationship.
I did not like that because it meant that I could only have sex when there was a possibility of a stable partner. Whenever that was absent, my health suffered. It is this relationship between health and sex that makes me view the restrictive laws as especially cruel and immoral. I eventually got over the cultural conditioning against masturbation, and that helped a lot. So, I am very sure that requiring abstinence is cruel and immoral.
I’m also pretty sure that our laws about sex increase violence. People who have been starved or forced to live on the street are not expected to be model citizens. I do not understand why people who are forced into abstinence are expected to.
- See the section “Unhealthy and Abusive Fixation on Sex” at this link. ↩︎
- Though I absolutely loved how much cooler the weather was. I am not a fan of hot weather. ↩︎
- Marriage is not always necessarily slavery. But in this case, it is. ↩︎
- The lawyer for the case told me about it. Per customs of privacy, I know neither name nor date. Because of the lawyer’s intervention, the judge allowed the defendant to continue to live in the same house as his teenage stepdaughter. Normally, that would not be allowed. Congratulations! The law just taught a handful more kids that basic bodily processes are criminal acts. The lawyer also says there are many on the list who were targeted for race or other non-sexual-behavior reasons. This is a disgrace. ↩︎