Feminisn and it’s supporters do NOT wish to assume responsibility for any of the changes they have instigated…

That’s for sure.

Continuing to invent things out of whole cloth will still not help your argument any.

No I never said anybody put the same restrictions on men and women regarding sex.

Then your point kind of falls through, doesn’t it? If men are not restricted to sex within marriage, then “marry me if you want sex” does not maintain a marriage–he can get it elsewhere, she can’t. As for lower divorce rates, you drag that one out any time you wish to claim that the way it used to be was superior to how we do things now. Never mind that divorce laws, economic dependency, social sanctions for marriage, and so on were different. And never mind that many people did not get divorced because they simply abandoned their spouses (or worse).

I don’t dispute that there’s more acceptance of women engaging in casual sex than there was several decades ago. I’m simply saying that it’s slightly more complicated than to say that sex outside of marriage was never accepted for women and that feminism bears chief responsibility for the change.

1) Sex leading to marriage has often been tolerated (as I see you’ve now agreed).

2) There may have been some cultures which tolerated relatively casual premarital sex for both sexes, but the extent of this is disputed (e.g. Margaret Mead’s anthropological work in Polynesia, where she reported young women having sex relatively freely, but others later said that the young women had been pulling her leg). There are also a few cultures which accept polyandry, though not nearly as many as accept polygyny.

3) There have been, of course, plenty of times and places where men could get away with casual sex, so long as the women involved were properly stigmatized.

4) The relationship between feminism and the sexual revolution is complicated. Feminists generally oppose a double standard, and to that extent feminism has been one of the forces supporting the sexual revolution. But feminists vary in attitudes toward casual sex, porn, BDSM, and all sorts of other sexual matters. If you take Andrea Dworkin, and Susie Bright, and a Christian feminist, you’ll get three different views.

As for whether “it’s a better world where women can engage in casual sex and not have to worry about any consequences,” I’m not going to make that argument, because: a) I don’t believe it’s true that I could engage in casual sex and not worry about any consequences (even if I were still single), and b) greater acceptance of casual sex often goes with the assumption that people who don’t want to engage in more casual sex are repressed, particularly because c) some men feel entitled to have sex with whomever they are attracted to (something feminists would object to, of course). So if you don’t want men’s traditional role of being expected to want no strings attached sex - and I don’t - the sexual revolution doesn’t improve your position. On the other hand, the old system was flawed as well; socially punishing to a greater extent the sex that already bears the greater physical consequences for sex may be the more convenient way of exercising social control, but it sure isn’t just.

NYMOM said: No…I didn’t change the subject in my very first post about it I clearly said:

First Post on issue: For instance, when sex was ‘defined’ as being pretty much limited to contact between a husband and wife (or a future spouse, you’re engaged or something) pretty much every man accepted that he would have to be married at some point to a woman he was having sex with regularly…

So I never changed the subject…

No I never said anybody put the same restrictions on men and women regarding sex. It simply isn’t necessary so why do more when you can get the same result with less? As I think placing the restrictions on women (as I said already) has the same impact as placing them on men. Since women will just refuse to go along with sex outside of marriage (if the stakes are high enough) and that will effectively end it…as you know what they say it takes two to tango.

Thus effectively neutralizing one has the desired impact on both and women being the ones at risk of pregnancy and disgrace (still in many societies) has more to lose by engaging in it…

Frustrated horniness is a rather shaky foundation for a lifetime.”

NYMOM said: Every society I know of has based their public policies on marriage around this scenario and they have been very successful with it until our own changed the equation in the 60s/70s. Are you telling me western civilization has others beat with our ‘lifetime’ retention rates for marriages?

Where men and women just freely engage in sex before marriage???

Changing the subject again? You said “Every other society, as well as our own, used this as the social carrot and stick approach to getting men to marry”, with ‘this’ meaning access to sex with women. (Since women in your world apparently don’t like sex much, so doing without is no hardship.) How do you get from the cow-and-milk analogy to free love? Do you really think that every society in the world has placed the same restrictions on men having premarital sex as it does on women?

And, again, I really don’t get the idea that anyone would want to marry a man who agrees to the wedding out of sexual desperation. Frustrated horniness is a rather shaky foundation for a lifetime.

But, of course, that was the caveat…

I think if you got pregnant however and/or the engagement fell through (or worse yet BOTH) that was another whole different scenario.

So women then took a chance doing it since if you weren’t careful it could end badly. I think that was the thinking behind chaperoning engaged couples (since a woman’s guard was down once she became officially engaged)…

I mean if something went amiss maybe they didn’t stone you like they might in Iran or Saudi Arabia but you might be ‘labeled’ in your community and never get asked by anyone else respectable to get married again.

Or worse, be forced into giving up a child for adoption if you had already gotten pregnant and then for some reason the marriage didn’t go through. This happened quite a bit when I was young, as it was either marriage or adoption for unwed girls who got pregnant. AND there were even homes around then for girls to go into until after they delivered their child. I think they no longer exist and probably went out of business in the 60s/70s.

As since the 60s/70s none of this is relevant anymore, at least in western civilization. Everywhere else this continues however and you still face severe penalties.

For instance in Nigeria recently, a woman was recently condemned to stoning for getting pregnant outside of marriage, but they decided to wait until she had the child. She claimed she was engaged to the father, but he said they weren’t…I’m not sure if it would have made a difference anyway and I never followed up as the story kind of died out in the media.

However even if not stoned (which is the most drastic penalty) a woman might just never get asked by anybody else in her community to be married again.
So for most women this would be serious sanction enough to discourage premarital sex.

The consequences are too severe for most women, as most women still do wish to get married. Although I’m sure I’ll now hear 1001 reasons why women really don’t wish to get married now and requests for statistics showing someone did a study showing that most women still wish to be married.

But back to the main point which is that it is not so easy in other societies for men to get casual sex outside of marriage; as most women will not take a chance like this for a casual encounter. Thus these sorts of sanctions for women act indirectly as an encouragement for men to marry and have operated in in this manner in every society, including our own, forever.

I think the secondary point is that feminism has to take responsibility for this changing here and the subsequent consequences of it. Most of this thread appears to be devoted to attacks on me by feminists who are trying to disavow any knowledge of this or acceptance of responsibility for it.

I mean you can make the point (if you wish) that it’s a better world where women can engage in casual sex and not have to worry about any consequences. But if that’s what you think, then make the point. Don’t keep attacking me by denying the fact that a change has occurred.

Especially please stop denying feminism’s role in this change in social mores and behaviors in our society vis-a-vis casual sex…

But then again, i am not a historian.

Western civilization, seventeenth century: I was doing genealogy, and found a court case involving two of my ancestors, of the Putnam family of Salem, Massachusetts (it turns out that you can find out a whole lot of information about your ancestors if they lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century), in which they were charged with having sex after their engagement, but before their marriage.

They got fined. Evidently the penalties for getting caught, before the last two decades, in western civilization anyway, weren’t all that severe.

They married and went on to become respected members of their local church.

This is flatly untrue. I can’t believe you would even try to pretend otherwise.”

Huh…

Well name one that operated differently…

Where men and women just freely engage in sex before marriage???

Actually in every other place I know about besides western civilization and this only over the last several decades, men and women who have sex before marriage and get caught suffer rather drastic penalties.