Who here can explain briefly why sexual promiscuity and sex without marriage is associated with the downfall of civilizations that were once the opposite?
The historian Livy comes to mind I believe when he wrote about how Rome slowly degraded over time in terms of individual morals, values and how near the end the per-occupation of most people was greed and pleasure over anything else.
If society tomorrow reversed itself and everyone was expected to get married before sex that's not the kind of society I'd want to be in. I love casual sex and casual relationships.
Problem is you will want to settle down eventually. Suddenly barfly #748 you decide you want to keep around a bit longer is not looking so hot as a long term partner and mother.
Casual sex is kind of a meme though. Most people I've met outside of frats and their soroistutes vie for monogamous relations.
Lincoln Hall
Because most people want to just have a loving partner, and when you create an environment that does the opposite you end up with bad results
Joshua Cox
>I love casual sex and casual relationships. >Asking Veeky Forums, so you could justify that you're part of problem, rather than correcting the issue itself. How about you grow up, learn from the past and stop your mental illness. youtube.com/watch?v=-RkZXZx6HCI
Cooper Green
>I love casual sex and casual relationships.
Just go to a brothel like everyone else back then.
William Jenkins
I'm here for perspectives on promiscuity and downfall of societies, not to be proselytized to by an user. Good day.
Kayden Gomez
The reason promiscuity and sex before marriage was taboo is simple, before paternity tests the only real way to know if a child was yours was to marry a virgin, if she were permiscious then you never knew how many of the kids are yours, thus wasting resources on someone elses genetic offspring.
Kevin Cooper
That makes no sense though. Even if you marry a virgin there's nothing to stop someone else impregnating her after you deflower her, and there would be no way to tell.. It only safeguards against the possibility of marrying someone who is already pregnant.
Carter Bailey
its against our nature now darwinists will tell you how we are monkeys and we subdue our inner animal but evolution already done that
we populated the planet this much because of couples taking care of their babies, 2 ppl, not chimp tier orgies and having little human monkey orphanages
this is why we feel love too, to make a bond, and that makes us want to take care of our offsprings
however it is changing since we are a bit too successfull at this population thing and women can raise their children alone too
you love casual sex and casual relationships because you are deathly afraid of responsibility another wonderful invention of modernity
Evan Lewis
Children raised by a mother and father are statistically more likely to be successful in life
There is a direct correlation between number of sexual partners and failure of marriage later in life.
Thus it can be said that those with more sexual partners have a higher chance of producing less successful offspring
Joshua Jenkins
Back in the days if the milkman would enter the home for a long time. All your neighbors would know and gossip about it. The chance of getting caught would be incredibly high in a small community and the repercussions would be immense.
Charles Torres
...
Leo Brown
Just FYI, all that talk about Roman degeneracy of morality and the breakdown of marriage is basically just a massive meme and trope that carries through in Roman literature for a thousand years with little basis in reality. People weren't going around fucking strangers even at the height of the Late Republic/Early Empire when authors were complaining about slutty women and Augustus was legislating against senators being unmarried. During the so-called degenerate years of the 4th and 5th centuries AD Roman morality became even more Victorian in character as Christian values placing what had previously been man-given laws on women became god given, themselves became the mainstream. Societies for basically thousands of years have always been traditionally monogamous and where marriage is highly valued, it is quite literally only in the last half a century where things have massively changed.
Wyatt Collins
I think that it's all just a big blowout of Caligula's rule more than anything. For whatever reason people seem to think the Empire operated like that for centuries after his death rather than it being isolated. Men did enjoy whores though I don't think it was any different than today.
Zachary Jenkins
That makes perfect sense, being cucked is another reason promiscuity was frowned upon.
Carson Rodriguez
Civilized society is based in the repression of our natural instincts, in inhibition and self-control against the background of our primitive desires. That's why every religion restricts sexual behavior. It's not only the question of illegitimacy in childbirth, or sexually transmitted diseases, it's also the fact that a person who becomes addicted to promiscuity and degeneracy becomes unable to delay gratification and starts seeing other human beings as mere vessels for their will, receptacles of their desires. This leds to increase in violence and anti-social behavior.
Ultimately, a sexually promiscuous country will end up like Brazil, where everyone is just trying to take advantage of everyone else because they are unable to control their instincts, since they fuck since they are 12 years old, and civilization is rendered impossible.
Now, I have to admit that this is less of a problem in modern society, but in ancient society where so much depended on individual valour, having the entire Roman ruling class abandoning civic duty to engage in orgies led to societal decay very fast.
Justin Ross
all young people fuck like crazy no matter the religion having to be a virgin at the altar is a romantic idea not a reality in the west probably a little different in muslim land
Isaiah Williams
Sexual promiscuity isn't the downfall of civilizations.
The birth control pill is.
Samuel Morris
Actually, the Muslim world was promiscuous and degenerate compared to the West until a century ago. Victorian travellers in Islamic countries were always shocked by their lax morality, while Western degenerates like Richard Francis Burton engaged in sex tourism in Muslim countries the same way people do in Thailand or Brazil nowadays.
Landon Cook
fair enough i actually don't know much about middle eastern history i shouldn't have said anything
i just hate the degenerate downfall arguments
Jace Brooks
>Who here can explain briefly why sexual promiscuity and sex without marriage is associated with the downfall of civilizations that were once the opposite?
Because moralists need something to blame
Benjamin Richardson
Because muh monogomous, nuclear family is the only reference point that autistic spergs have when it comes to relationships (despite this being far from the norm historically and in nature).
Gabriel Jones
>and in nature Go live in a tree then ape.
Samuel Cooper
>this post
Like an ape throwing shit, how ironic
Cooper Cruz
Good arguement.
Sebastian Garcia
More stable family units usually mean more stable societies. But usually muh promiscuity was just a scapegoat. The thing is, people always liked to bitch about law sexual morals. When things were going fine, the narrative was "this is going to destroy our great society" and when they got bad they could say "it's because of our weak sexual standards".
For example there are reports from the 14-15th century Ottoman empire about how promiscous all of their women were, yet the empire didn't begin to decline for centuries. For the Romans, the worst reports about their sexual deviancy were from the pagan imperial period, before their decline, which happened during the supposedly more moral Christian period.
Btw I doubt that sexual attitudes change much over time, maybe we are just more open about them sometimes.
Thomas Reyes
Next time leave your naturalistic fallacy where you keep the rest of your phalluses, up your ass.
Jayden Nelson
Except too much repression leads to people having fucked up views of sexuality. It also leads to people becoming socially retarded around the opposite sex, which further leads to this "breakdown" of monogamy due to women not wanting to date a stuttering autist, much less have kids with him. This leads to the "Chad" effect, where it's perceived that a small minority of males get the vast majority of women.
>it's also the fact that a person who becomes addicted to promiscuity and degeneracy becomes unable to delay gratification and starts seeing other human beings as mere vessels for their will,
Except most sexual predators/rapists grew up with their sexuality being repressed, not the other way around. Using Brazil, a country which is very religious and moralistic compared to other "Western" countries, is a poor example.
Landon Ward
>Except most sexual predators/rapists grew up with their sexuality being repressed, not the other way around. [citation needed]
look up r selection vs K selection. Civilization is a K selection thing, because it involves planning for tomorrow, r selection lives in the moment. People get families, which means they get a house, they get a job, there's more division of labor. If you're just out to fuck and move on, it doesn't necessarily mean you don't care about anyone else, but you've just lost one possible incentive
Aaron Nguyen
Inheritance. That's pretty much all there is to it. Laws governing inheritance are some of the first that any society creates, and many taboos are derived directly from them.
In most societies inheritance is paternal, which means that property passes from father to son, not mother to daughter, and this form of inheritance also makes it very important to be able to tell exactly who the father to any child is.
Xavier Gray
Societies are composed out of smaller organizational units. The first unit above the mere individual is the family. The core of a family from the animal point of view is the mother. Around her are the children, and in the outer rings are the males and other non-dominant auxiliary females, and old people. If women behave promiscuously then they cannot form stable unions with males and raise children properly. Single mothers will have a rough time working to earn money so their children will be unattended, and they will carry those gaps into adulthood, making things worse. Today single mothers might be successful by divorce-raping the father, but this is a double-edged sword that the more it is used, the less marriages there are.
A family is a network, but the central node is the mother. Destroy the mother and you destroy families, and by extension the whole society. Because individuals that are alone cannot benefit from social networks and struggle to survive. In such societies there cannot exist a surplus of resources to invest in progress. What you get is usually an involution process.
Michael Barnes
Qur'an 4:34—Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.
Chase Edwards
Marriage is just a social construct to detirimine inheritance and "property rights"
Jacob Walker
Ur mums just a social construct
Levi Reyes
Friends are a social construct.
Josiah Flores
Mankind is a social construct.
Carson Young
That's not true.
Leo Gonzalez
>truth Social construct.
Christian Scott
But it works. Communism doesn't.
Andrew Jackson
>Marriage is just a social construct to detirimine inheritance and "property rights"
No it's not. But I can see how it appears that way when you're a Marxist.
I mean, you guys could literally reduce the moon to the class struggle between two South-African tribes.
Aaron Cruz
>For example there are reports from the 14-15th century Ottoman empire about how promiscous all of their women were Go on...
Aaron Diaz
Isn't there a study that concluded that once casual or premarital sex becomes the norm in a society that society collapses sooner or later, without exceptions?
Joseph Sullivan
>sooner or later that's a stupid study. Obviously if you wait long enough, without setting any actual time limits, you could always say it will collapse sooner or later. All societies will collapse sooner or later.
Jonathan Allen
I think he meant sooner or later AS A RESULT of that
Michael Brooks
Given that some of the longest lasting empires of all time have gone with that as the norm for hundreds of years, seems it'd be a hard argument to make. Particularly if you consider the height of Rome's promiscuity would have been presumably under its pagan religion, and not under the Christian religion under which it fell.
The nuclear family itself is a modern industrial concept, where throughout history, it was almost always the norm for multiple generations, and even multiple branches of families, to be all living under one roof. Despite that radical change in the nature of the family unit, common throughout the western world, said culture remains by far the most dominant force within it. Even the USA, for all its self accusations of decay and rampant out of wedlock marriage, is more powerful and wider reaching than it has ever been in its history.
David Baker
>muh degeneracy
/pol/ meme
Jackson Cruz
Roman writers loved to moralize and we wuz all the time. They're a lot like your average /pol/ poster.
>Golden Age - Peace and harmony prevailed during this age. Humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age but with a youthful appearance and eventually died peacefully. Their spirits live on as "guardians".
>Iron Age (our times) - During this age humans live an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother and the social contract between guest and host (xenia) is forgotten. During this age might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing Obviously.
>In Sex and Culture (1934), Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 known civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe.[1] "Sex and Culture is a work of the highest importance," Aldous Huxley wrote: Unwin's conclusions, which are based upon an enormous wealth of carefully sifted evidence, may be summed up as follows. All human societies are in one or another of six cultural conditions: zoistic, manistic, deistic, rationalistic, expansive, productive. Of these societies the zoistic displays the least amount of mental and social energy, the productive the most. Investigation shows that the societies exhibiting the least amount of energy are those where pre-nuptial continence is not imposed and where the opportunities for sexual indulgence after marriage are greatest. The cultural condition of a society rises in exact proportion as it imposes pre-nuptial and post-nuptial restraints upon sexual opportunity.[2]
>According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses its cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. The effect, says the author, is irrevocable: The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.[3]
Kevin Wright
>1934 science Yup, I'm sure it's very reliable.
Luis Torres
>The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous The whole of human history does not consist of a culture that has been absolutely monogamous.
As for correlating cultural achievement with sexual restraint, may I remind you that we landed on the fucking moon in 1969, right after the "Summer of Love".