Not what Rand said

[bartl]

I believe Mr. Destiny is pointing out that we live in a retarded society that likes to keep us infantilized. The state of perpetual adolescence that lasts long up into people's 50s in the Northern world is far from the norm for people less protected from reality.

OK, now I'm confused. I thought that the whole point of socialism is to keep people infantilized.

[Paradox]

Paul McEnery explains the already explained:

I believe Mr. Destiny is pointing out that we live in a retarded society that likes to keep us infantilized. The state of perpetual adolescence that lasts long up into people's 50s in the Northern world is far from the norm for people less protected from reality.

And those who would insist upon telling teenagers nothing about sexual experience except "have nothing to do with it" are clearly part of that retardation. And whatever the hell it is those people think sexuality is, it certainly has nothing at all to do with either what I've experienced or what I've learned through other people's experience.

They're scared of life, and they want to contain it. That's who they are, and I don't see why they should be allowed to ruin anybody's life but their own.

I'm aware of this. But regardless of whose fault it is or how it "should be", the fact remains that many American teens are simply not mature enough to handle it. Hell, many American adults aren't.

And being biologically able does not make one "ready" in any way but biologically.

[Dennis]

I believe Mr. Destiny is pointing out that we live in a retarded society that likes to keep us infantilized. The state of perpetual adolescence that lasts long up into people's 50s in the Northern world is far from the norm for people less protected from reality.

And those who would insist upon telling teenagers nothing about sexual experience except "have nothing to do with it" are clearly part of that retardation. And whatever the hell it is those people think sexuality is, it certainly has nothing at all to do with either what I've experienced or what I've learned through other people's experience.

They're scared of life, and they want to contain it. That's who they are, and I don't see why they should be allowed to ruin anybody's life but their own.

I have sexual desire, but I recognize it as an infantile desire. All sexual desire is kinda demented. Sucking on a woman's breast for example...what am I, a baby? Why does an adult need to engage in sucking behavior? Isn't the need to be inside someone an attempt to feel the comfort of being back in the womb?

I saw the Eliot Spitzer hooker interview with Diane Sawyer. She talks and acts just like a 14 year old (the hooker, not Diane). She even admitted that she has Daddy Issues. How much sex is about needing a Daddy, or Mommy, or Daughter & Son? How much is incest inspired?

Most of use would rather be with someone of our own race. What is race? Race is family. We need to have sex within the family in other words. A form of incest in a way. Why does a woman need to be with a man who is taller?

I see sex as any other kind of stupid addiction. Like the need to sit down and eat a gallon of ice cream. Glorifying it is silly. Slurp slurp SlurP!!

[Michael P]

OK, now I'm confused. I thought that the whole point of socialism is to keep people infantilized.

I wouldn't really call that a "thought."

[Michael P]

I have sexual desire, but I recognize it as an infantile desire. All sexual desire is kinda demented. Sucking on a woman's breast for example...what am I, a baby? Why does an adult need to engage in sucking behavior? Isn't the need to be inside someone an attempt to feel the comfort of being back in the womb?

I saw the Eliot Spitzer hooker interview with Diane Sawyer. She talks and acts just like a 14 year old (the hooker, not Diane). She even admitted that she has Daddy Issues. How much sex is about needing a Daddy, or Mommy, or Daughter & Son? How much is incest inspired?

Most of use would rather be with someone of our own race. What is race? Race is family. We need to have sex within the family in other words. A form of incest in a way. Why does a woman need to be with a man who is taller?

I see sex as any other kind of stupid addiction. Like the need to sit down and eat a gallon of ice cream. Glorifying it is silly. Slurp slurp SlurP!!

Holy great Moses, is this post full of stupid.

[Paul McEnery]

I'm aware of this. But regardless of whose fault it is or how it "should be", the fact remains that many American teens are simply not mature enough to handle it. Hell, many American adults aren't.

And being biologically able does not make one "ready" in any way but biologically.

Then the question we should be asking ourselves is: why are we further infantilizing our kids this way, and exacerbating the problem?

[NatGertler]

Then the question we should be asking ourselves is: why are we further infantilizing our kids this way, and exacerbating the problem?

Heh heh.

You said "exacerbating."

Heh!

[Paul McEnery]

Holy great Moses, is this post full of stupid.

It's what you get when people get their sex ed from Haagen-Dazs commercials.

[Dennis]

hmmm

http://www.isteve.com/cousin_marriage_conundrum.htm

In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or second cousins to each other. A 1986 study of 4,500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46% were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53% were "consanguineously" married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is that of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.

[Dennis]

alan moore interview - he acknowledges the weirdness of sex, but stops at that thought

http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/alan_moore/2

The thing about the underage characters… It all gets a bit silly when you're talking about characters that are made up. Alice In Wonderland is like 150, well past the age of consent. And we have a culture over here—and I'm sure in America as well—where we go in for an awful lot of pedophilic titillation, in magazines like Barely Legal, where we're told that these women are over 18, but just look young. But then we were told that about Traci Lords, weren't we? And anyway, it doesn't really matter that much, does it? The intent is still the same. Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!"

It's an obvious, weird part of our sexual makeup, but one that we'd rather do anything than talk about. We have to put our hands up and admit to our complicity in the sexual problems we have. As for incest, yes, in real life, incest is very, very, very seldom an idyllic thing. It's much more often a monstrous thing that destroys people's lives. However, we're not talking about real life. We are talking about the human sexual imagination. Sigmund Freud, frankly, I've not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest. But his is still the prevalent paradigm in our attitude to sexuality. And Freud said that all sexual desire was sublimated incest. I don't agree with that for a moment, but it does suggest that incest is one of the big players in the theater of our desires. So that has to be referred to.

[Dennis]

quite informative

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html

[Steven Grant]

I'm aware of this. But regardless of whose fault it is or how it "should be", the fact remains that many American teens are simply not mature enough to handle it. Hell, many American adults aren't.

And being biologically able does not make one "ready" in any way but biologically.

Well, that's mighty condescending of you. Who's going to decide when someone's "ready" for sex? You? The government? The Catholic Church? What constitutes "mature enough"?

Fact is that kids used to get married off as soon as they hit puberty. Of course, the average lifespan was only about 30 then, so they didn't have time to waste. But "adolescence" is pretty much a social construct of the 20th century; what you're suggesting as a universal measure didn't exist for most of the existence of humanity.

There's no way to be "ready" for sex, no matter how old you get. It's like war. Nobody really knows what war is like on the front lines until they go through it. Nonetheless, we like to train soldiers before they go to war because we've learned the survival rate among soldiers tends to run a little higher if they've been decently trained.

So why not decently train for sex? The more you know, the better and better informed decisions you can make, even when hormones are raging. Because hormones aren't the be-all and end-all of our existence; we can overcome any behavior with conscious thought.

In church terms, "ready" for sex means married and at a socially acceptable age for pumping out children; most Christian sects denounce sex outside of matrimony, at least for women, because most Christian sects believe the purpose of sex is the creation of offspring, and some Christian sects denounce sex for any other purpose as a sin. So if you go by their standards, nobody's "ready" for sex.

But there's no measure of when anybody's "ready" for sex, and the first time is always a little scary: "She thought that I knew and I thought that she knew / so both of us were willin' but we didn't know to do it! Why don't you tell me 'bout the mystery dance? I wanna know about the mystery dance!..." I'm not saying everyone should rush off and have sex at the first opportunity, and, yeah, there can be big psychological damage for people who are forced, whether by rape, coercion or overpowering, into having sex when they're not physically or psychologically prepared for it, and that's worth protecting them against, and it's worth educating teenagers to think about consequences before engaging in sex, but "ready" means something different for everyone. I'd liken it to driver's education, though; people who haven't been through a driver's education course shouldn't get behind the wheel.

If you bring "mature" into it... well, look, most people aren't very "mature" because culturally it's frowned on. When I was in college, and this was right when the so-called "sexual revolution" was in full swing (and I lived in a hotbed of the "sexual revolution," no pun intended) it was still common behavior to think of women unmarried by age 21 as "old maids." Which was and is just ridiculous. Nobody needs to be married before their late '20s, and I suspect we'd have a hell of a lot fewer divorces, "mid-life crises" (another stupid concept) and the like if we promoted a sense of adventurism that encouraged the sampling of wide experience, not just sexual but of a wide variety like career and travel, prior to "settling down." People who rush into marriage out of high school or in their early 20s and quickly get saddled with jobs they didn't want to support families they hadn't really figured on almost inevitably end up wondering what other doors were open to them and what they "missed" in life by not walking through them - and how much they love their families has nothing to do with it.

People who have lots of experience before they get married know what they no longer miss. But it only works if both partners have sampled experience. It provides a basis for comparison, and they can take pride in knowing they've made an educated choice. But way too many people end up marrying the first person they have sex with because they don't know the difference between lust and love and conflate the two because there's still a strong social stigma against the former so morphing it into the latter becomes a justification. But it's not a distinction that's difficult to make, and a lot of people would be spared a lot of misery if they were "allowed" to understand that we're all occasionally given to the former and if it's mututal consent and various precautions are taken, that's fine, but it's not something to invest much emotion in. The fact is that sex is fun, and that in itself is a perfectly valid reason for it, but love is something else entirely. That distinction is maturity, but we almost never give anyone the tools for making or understanding the distinction and commonly demand they confuse them, for reasons that have their roots in ancient tribalism but are no longer applicable.

That's infantilism.

While at the same time we put heavy emphasis on an apparent ubiquitousness of sexual activity and how if you're not taking part there's something wrong with you, and that has to change as well.

The obvious solution to all this is:

Everybody relax.

Sex education - practical experience - family planning. The keys to a fun and rewarding sex life, without destroying the rest of your life.

People might not want teenagers to drive, but telling them not to until they're 21 then throwing them behind the wheel isn't a good idea.

- Grant

[Steven Grant]

quite informative

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html

Not that these articles aren't fascinating and all, Dennis, but how about at least trying to tie them into some pertinent point about the discussion at hand instead of just filling space with them and leaving it to others to try to puzzle out what the hell they have to do with anything? So what if Saddam Hussein married his cousin or they do vile and stupid things to girls in China?

- Grant

[Dennis]

Not that these articles aren't fascinating and all, Dennis, but how about at least trying to tie them into some pertinent point about the discussion at hand instead of just filling space with them and leaving it to others to try to puzzle out what the hell they have to do with anything? So what if Saddam Hussein married his cousin or they do vile and stupid things to girls in China?

- Grant

Well, you guys are talking about what is natural. So I'm thinking, what about cultures where Christianity didn't dominate. Do they have healthier attitudes about sex? What about the ideal culture where a backwards religion has no influence. What would it be like? What would their attitudes be about marriage, polygamy, pedophilia. Would they throw Mary Kay Letourneau behind bars?

Is it wrong for a 19 year old to have sex with a 16 year old? Is it natural for a 50 year old man to have sexual desire for an 18 year old? How about if she was 17,16,15,14. What about older women having sex with teen boys. Exactly how is that damaging to the mind of a 15 year old.

I used to think that a 40 year old man was a grown adult - someone completely different than a teenager. Now that I'm older my view has completely changed. I know 50 year old men who don't seem much different than 13 year olds. On the other hand, haven't met many 50 year old women who still act like young teens. For many guys, 40 years of aging may equal 2 years of actual emotional growth. So the thought of an old man having sex with a young woman is disgusting because it's visually disgusting. Chances are the young woman is just as mature as the man. I can't say the guys I grew up with are any different than they were in high school.

If anyone would like to describe the ideal culture, please go ahead.

[Steven Grant]

Well, you guys are talking about what is natural.

Okay, good, now you've given us a context to work with.

I guess everything depends on what's a healthy attitude toward sex.

- Grant