Reminds me of a discussion on another forum regarding the topic of how female honor was treated back then: http://tinyurl.com/ozamh

[This message has been edited by CoriSCapnSkip (edited September 01, 2006).]

To the extent that Unitarianism began to distinguish itself from identifiably Christian beliefs, they gained an increasingly "bad rep" on morality. But it would be inaccurate to say that they regarded sexual immorality as being acceptable. Associating with persons of low social standing for any other purpose than "uplift" would be out of character for the Unitarians of that period. They would probably be more uptight about "social" morality and class distinctions than members of most other denominations. At that time, Unitarianism was still very close to its roots as an "intellectual" religion (not that it is no longer an "intellectual" religion, but in that era the concept didn't embrace association with prostitutes).

Anyone with an agenda will be able to provide "evidence" that any time period was full of, say, promiscuous transvestite pedophiles. Ignore them. The time period you're writing about was probably much more sexually restrained than we are now.

It occurs to me that if you need more evidence, maybe you could do some research on crime at that time, to see what types of sexual offenses were prosecuted, and how heinous they were seen at the time. Some things that get alluded to on prime time TV today were criminal not that long ago.

Having said that, vigilante justice may have made criminal prosecution unlikely if someone defiled a man's sister/daughter/niece/whatever.

I don't know the era well enough to say; but some criminal investigation might turn up some good information on attitudes.

(This might be the longest it has ever taken me to say, "I don't know what the heck I'm talking about." )

quote:

---

the virginal MC is no longer considered plausible

---

quote:

---

so no matter what you write someone will always "know better."

---

In Renaissance Florence, for example, homosexuality was sufficiently rife that laws were passed against sodomy in 1415.

And again in 1418.

And then in 1432, 1494, and 1542. Clearly people weren't paying attention. At one stage, Florence even had state-run, subsidised brothels, with the explicit purpose of trying to ensure that young men turned their minds to heterosexuality.

Fornication used to be against the law in nearly all of the contiguous states. I didn't know it was possible to not know that. It's kinda like not knowing that abortion used to be against the law in a lot of states. And soliciting prostitution is still against the law most places. Those laws weren't very well enforced, because that would require the police to do things that would be considered immoral, like pretending to be prostitutes or perhaps observing the act of fornication

Protestantism in America took a more extreme form where, even now, streaks of Puritanism keep emerging--that is, heavy and presumably non-enjoyable guilt. Many Americans from different religious traditions can't unburden/share/brag about their sins as someone in their circle is sure to condemn them. It's a matter of pondering for me, and I'm sure an issue for my main character, how much of appearance of abstinence was real, true abstinence, and how much was the moral code to not "kiss and tell"--that a gentleman should always protect a lady's reputation, and it was not class to talk about certain things no matter what went on. Remember that Paul wrote it was also important to have the appearance of doing right, which to a lot of people has to be more important than actually doing right.

So Catholics see "sin" as "something some guy in a funny hat says is wrong", while Protestants see "sin" as "something that I prayerfully considered and feel to be wrong."

Which relates to your story only in the sense that fornication was against the law because most people personally believed that it was wrong, rather than because some guy in a funny hat said it was wrong. Whether or not they actually abstained...I've observed that many humans have difficulty believing something to be really wrong if they do it themselves. I'd guess that even if it were usual for young men to have had an extra-marital affair, it would generally be remembered with genuine regret and very few would take it up as a life-style.

quote:

---

just shocking considering the amount of people in America professing to be religious

---

Keep in mind not all religious denominations consider pre-marital sex to be a "sin." By the way, the Greek word hamartia that was translated into the New Testament as "sin" is a term that means "missed the mark," not "you are going to burn in hell."

Author Elaine Pagels explores this concept in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent."

Publisher's Weekly had this to say about Pagel's book:
The disgust felt by early Christians for the flesh was a radical departure from both pagan and Jewish sexual attitudes. In fact, as Princeton professor Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) demonstrates, the ascetic movement in Christianity met with great resistance in the first four centuries A.D. Sex became fully tainted, inextricably linked to sin under the teachings of Augustine. This troubled sinner invoked Adam and Eve to justify his idiosyncratic view of humanity as permanently scarred by the Fall. Instead of being dismissed as marginal, Augustine's grim outlook took hold, according to Pagels, because it was politically expedient. Now that Christianity had become the imperial religion, Rome wanted its imperfect subjects to obey a strong Christian state. This highly provocative history links the religious roots of Western sexual attitudes to women's inferior status through the centuries.

The horrified attitude of puritan cultures regarding sex is considered perverse, if not perverted, by other cultures who accept it as a natural and enjoyable bodily function.

Christians probably should be horrified by the way that other cultures claim that if everyone does something, that means it's okay. But generally, being human, they're subject to the same kind of fallacious reasoning employed by pagans on this topic.

I'm not sure that I've ever met or read any serious Christian thinker who was horrified by sex per se. Marriage is a Christian sacrament, after all, and enjoyment of intimate sexual relations within marriage is a commandment reiterated multiple times in the scriptures and occasionally discussed from the pulpit where you have a widespread problem of husbands and wives who aren't having sex anymore. Anyone that characterizes the Christian attitude towards sex as "horrified" has either made no real effort to look at Christian society and thought or has an axe to grind.

Most Christians probably have experienced sex outside of marriage, and those who report this honestly generally also admit that it caused them lasting grief, sorrow, regret, and was generally not won them a lot of self-respect. A lot of non-Christians refuse to admit that sex outside of marriage caused them to suffer, but a look at how screwed up their personal lives usually are kind of tells you all you need to know.

quote:

---

A lot of non-Christians refuse to admit that sex outside of marriage caused them to suffer, but a look at how screwed up their personal lives usually are kind of tells you all you need to know.

---

And yet the homocidal impulse is there, a fundamental part of human psychological make-up. Everybody feels like killing somebody now and then. Yet we are horrified at the idea of "repressing" other impulses because of how "damaging" that could be.

A little hint here, you don't absolutely have to outlaw all private homocide the way we do here in America. Many societies have functioned reasonably well despite allowing otherwise up-standing citizens the right to occasionally kill somebody. In fact, it could be argued that the consenting adults rule should make dueling legal, certainly I believe that our society would be far better off if dueling were reinstituted as a serious option. Do you think that celebrities would be half so obnoxious, or corperations even a tenth so rapacious? And imagine what it would do for the level of discourse in politics!

quote:

---

Everybody feels like killing somebody now and then.

---

quote:

---

I can honestly say that I've never felt a desire to kill someone.

---

quote:

---

I can honestly say that I've never felt a desire to kill someone.

---

Talk about repressed.

Anyway, who says that winners are supposed to like "sex". What particular acts, and under what circumstances, can we include in this rather broad statement. Does that mean that winners are supposed to like, say, having sex with animals? How about dead bodies? How about children? How about dead, immature, animals?

As I was just saying, the prohibition of certain sex acts doesn't imply any general prohibition against enjoying sexual activities within the bounds of "common" decency. At the time in which you are setting the story, "common" decency would imply within marriage to a respectable woman. There would be nothing wrong with enjoying sex in that context, though you would still be expected to keep your mouth shut about it (back then they had this rule about kissing and telling, even when the woman in question wasn't exactly respectable, nobody in his right mind would encourage other men to think such things about his wife or the woman he intended to marry).

Sexual intercourse is not that difficult, there aren't a lot of special things that you need to know. Yes, in an age where most sexual partners have only the most superficial feelings for each other, we make much of techniques that enhance stimulation of erogenous zones. But the secret to making sex a joy has always been to feel like you really, really want to make babies with your sex partner.

This much should be obvious. How it is possible for anyone to not know this is a sad, long story, and it isn't the point of the current discussion. But think about it without all your modern prejudices. For several billion years, organisms which were really bad at choosing good mates either didn't pass on their genes at all or passed them on to basically defective off-spring. Sexual attraction is the mechanism by which humans choose their mates, partners in reproduction. Sexual pleasure is the biological reward for choosing a sexual partner whom you instinctively feel will make a wonderful parent for your children. This biological reward can be tricked to some extent, just like you can fool your tongue with imitation sweetners and so forth, but it really does respond best to the stimulus for which generations of natural selection have best suited it, a sexual partner who seems like excellent parent material.

Now, exactly what an individual will deeply believe to be an excellent parent is highly personal and significantlly affected by culture and upbringing. There are some biological constraints. Men will always want women to have noticible hips and breasts. They will also always find women near the beginning of their child-bearing years more sexually attractive than women past menopause. These features obviously dramatically impact a woman's ability to bear and nurse a healthy infant in the first place, and the millions of years of selection working in that direction aren't going to be undone overnight even if medical science makes it irrelevant tomorrow.

But mental and social characteristics are just as important once it comes time to start raising and protecting the children. The exact social characteristics that will provide the best for a child vary from culture to culture and even within a given culture depending on things like social class and level of wealth. And the idea of what is "best" for children varies too. But a sexual partner chosen with an unconscious assessment of being a great potential parent will reward the instinctive drives of any organism at a very fundamental level. In other words, the sex will always feel wonderful. Unfortunately, we all have days when having children with a particular partner doesn't seem like a wonderful idea. That feeling makes sex considerably less enjoyable if you're relying on your instincts.

My point is that a society where sex and child-bearing are fundamentally assumed to be connected at every level isn't unheathy or repressed in any meaningful way when it comes to sexual expression. And almost all organisms instinctively "know" everything they need to know about how to enjoy reproductive sex. You just have to find someone you'd like to reproduce with.

Survivor said:

quote:

---

More to the point, in a society where a woman's chastity was genuinely believed to be of significant value, men who ever settled for cheap sex simply weren't "cool".

---

Calling a promiscuous female a "slut" is still an insult, and men who focus on maximizing the number of sexual partners they have still aren't considered "cool".

Earlier, CoriSCapnSkip said:

quote:

---

The story could be a lot about the nature of temptation, I guess the big question being: why do some people give in to it, KNOWING the risks? ... It's been well-documented that they do.

---

The Sexual Revolution got its name because people overthrew the social order with respect to sex. If you want to talk to people who lived through those "repressed" times, you don't have to go back much more than 50 or 60 years. Did they feel repressed? Not from what I've heard. Did men think about women all the time, and vice versa? No doubt. But did they think about sex with them all the time? Not from what I've heard.

This might help you get in the right mindset: "it" means "drug use" in the following paragraph.

In the right place and time, it's a godsend. In the wrong contexts, it can be disastrous. The person who obsesses over it in the wrong context is dangerous to himself and to society; the person who engages in it inappropriately is (or should be) a criminal. Sometimes people consider these ideas about it outmoded, and people who _don't_ engage in it were seen as square or repressed, but we recognize now the dangers those people faced, and wise people choose not to abuse it.

Now back up and have "it" mean "sex", and you'll get the sense of people before the Sexual Revolution -- and of a growing number of people now.

To be clear: sex itself wasn't bad (that idea's actually a heresy in the Catholic Church), as shown by the fact that people often had larger families then, but it had its place.

Survivor's discourse on sex and family, and how those things relate, was spot on.

Sex becomes dysfunctional when disconnected from childrearing. This took me a long time to understand, but I think it's true. My attitudes were much different when I was younger, on premarital sex, contraception, "open" marriage, and gay marriage. (I even called it "marriage" instead of "civil union".) But I discovered that I was wrong. And these things aren't bad because the Pope says so; the Pope says they're bad because they are.

The point is, I don't dislike sex (I have six children and a seventh on the way), but I think it has its place, and that's in a marriage that's open to having children.

A century ago, the majority of the population thought this way: Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, American, European... There were some circles that did not, but the vast majority of the population did.

_You_ don't need to think that way; but until you understand that people did, I don't think you'll understand why "sex=cool and liberated / no-sex=uncool and repressed" equations don't work. You'll continue to project your own biases onto the time you're writing about.

Which doesn't mean it won't sell -- Lord knows we've seen some travesties of historical misunderstanding out there -- but it won't be right.

-----

Setting all that aside, most things said about Catholic attitudes and positions in this thread so far has been wrong. If you're trying to create a Catholic character, you can make them whatever you want; but I want to state for the record what the orthodox (lowercase "o") Catholic position is, so you know where you're deviating from it.

The worst statements were these:

quote:

---

Sex became fully tainted, inextricably linked to sin under the teachings of Augustine.

---

The Gnostics and Manichees (and their variants) believed that the world was created by the Bad God of the Old Testament, and that everything made of matter was inherently evil; sex, being linked to procreation, was also evil. Only the Christ of the New Testament was good, and wholly spiritual; his body was an illusion.

Gnosticism and Manicheism were heresies. Augustine fought specifically against them. He certainly also fights against lust and intemperence, and when he argues against someone he often makes his case so strongly in one direction that you have to review more than one book to see what his real opinion is, but to say that "sex was inextricably linked to sin" is just false.

Here are Augustine's own word on the subject, from Of the Good of Marriage (found here):

quote:

---

Marriages have this good also, that carnal or youthful incontinence, although it be faulty, is brought unto an honest use in the begetting of children, in order that out of the evil of lust the marriage union may bring to pass some good. Next, in that the lust of the flesh is repressed, and rages in a way more modestly, being tempered by parental affection. For there is interposed a certain gravity of glowing pleasure, when in that wherein husband and wife cleave to one another, they have in mind that they be father and mother.

There is this further, that in that very debt which married persons pay one to another, even if they demand it with somewhat too great intemperance and incontinence, yet they owe faith alike one to another. Unto which faith the Apostle allows so great right, as to call it "power," saying, "The woman has not power of her own body, but the man; again in like manner also the man has not power of his own body, but the woman."

---

He also points out that "be fruitful and multiply" implies that we would have had sex even if Adam and Eve had never fallen.

Now remember that this is a theologian's position, not a Church dogma; but he's such a well-known theologian and this is such a common topic that you would hope Pagels would know better.

Elan's point -- that some religions don't see extramarital sex as benign or even worthy of celebration -- still stands, but don't take Pagel's word for what Christianity is or does or has been.

CoriSCapnSkip said:

quote:

---

[Catholicism] is so EXTREMELY elaborate as to be confusing to lay people, so it is left to religious people and the lay people don't have to, and often don't, bother with a lot of stuff.

---

(There's also some irony in that post, in that Catholics are stereotypically known for their guilt, and Protestants tend not to be.)

Survivor said:

quote:

---

So Catholics see "sin" as "something some guy in a funny hat says is wrong",

---

See above. Sin is sin because it's wrong, and the guys in funny hats just point out that it's wrong. A more accurate distinction between Protestants and Catholics would be to say that Catholics believe that there are definitively wrong and right ways of interpreting the Scriptures and Traditional teachings, and they don't depend on who's reading them; while Protestants believe that their job is to understand Scripture. Among Protestants, the issue of who has final say over which interpretations are right or wrong either never comes up, is abdicated to historical authorities (e.g., Martin Luthur), or is not definitively resolvable.

Some of the historical perspective in Survivor's post was out of whack, too.

Why yes, I _am_ a blast at parties. How did you know?

Regards,
Oliver