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You're just parroting the progressive line that more choices equal more freedom. When those choices lead to societal decay, it’s not freedom, it’s chaos. Your 'objective' view is just moral relativism dressed up as enlightenment.
Or literally 1984: “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.
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No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".
Sexual freedom is not a real thing in the individualistic sense, because sex isn't really an individualistic activity. We should judge sexual freedom by whether society's norms more easily feed into what makes people happy in the long run, not by the theoretical freedom of activity.
It's unclear by that standard that western societies are sexually freer today or in 1875 or 1950 or whenever.
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When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer? It seems they had fewer options as they were slaves to their addiction. They possibly have an additional choice, homeless addict living in a tent (this was an option before too), but far more choices are now unavailable to them, as we see how challenging it is to move on from homeless and drug abuse.
Did it make the larger society around them freer or do they too now have fewer places to be free of homesless addicts living in tents.
Individuals have alway had the 'freedom' to be lustful degenerates if they were willing to face the opprobrium that went with it.
Yes. Some of them just used this extra freedom to make decisions that made them less free. But the decriminalization itself made them freer. They just didn't necessarily make good choices with that freedom. Part of what freedom is, is that it sometimes allows people to make decisions that make them less free in the long run. That does not mean that it is not freedom, though.
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