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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33062 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Right. You made a comment specifically about the flag, and I asked a comment about the flag, but you chose to respond about something else.

There is a huge difference between having sexual experiences during childhood, or even having sexuality being reinforced, and seeing displays of gay pride flags.

Five years ago, before this topic was as heavily discussed in the culture, I took my then-14yo daughter to a concert. Each of the two opening acts and the main act did a "gay" song that involved the waving of rainbow flags, and the 25,000 14 year olds in the arena went apeshit each time. The energy in that place during the rainbow parades was off the chart.

Kids are very susceptible to fads (I myself wore a "Frankie Say Relax" t-shirt in junior high having no idea of its connotations...) and peer pressure. Whether or not the Rainbow flag actually turns kids gay is separate from the idea that this kind of mass celebration reinforces ideas of what is "good," and there probably isn't a wide distance between a kid feeling encouraged to try gay over their innate disgust tendencies, and then forming intimate bonds following experimental gay contact, especially if it's a first sexual experience. If you close your eyes and try real hard to think about how rainbow flags make you special, a mouth is just a mouth, as David Rabe wrote. And maybe there's no looking back after that point.

Whether or not the Rainbow flag actually turns kids gay is separate from the idea that this kind of mass celebration reinforces ideas of what is "good,"

Exactly

a kid feeling encouraged to try gay over their innate disgust tendencies,

I am curious what percentage of kids who have those innate disgust tendencies (aka, straight kids, as opposed to "curious" kids, who by definition are not disgusted) you think "try gay," flags or no.

kids who have those innate disgust tendencies

Kids have very robust disgust tendencies. Kids find pretty much all foods disgusting unless they are introduced early. Broccoli is famous for this. Kids find all romance icky and disgusting at about age 6. This lasts until some time in the teens. I imagine this is a biological remnant to separate boys and girls to prevent the incest taboo from kicking in. Either that, or girls have cooties (This is a weird Americanism which I did not know the etymology of until I looked it up just now.)

As a more relevant example, 92% of women now claim to enjoy fellatio, whereas it showed up as cruelty in courtrooms in the 1950s. Did women change, or did they just get habituated to it?

whereas it showed up as cruelty in courtrooms in the 1950s.

The legalisation of no-fault divorce might be a confounding factor....

Did the campaign for no-fault divorce argue that it would lead to oral sex being commonplace? If so, it was prescient.

a mouth is just a mouth,

Oral sex used to be rarer and more special than vaginal sex, but along came AIDS, and people's attitudes changed. From 1997

"It is incredible how casual oral sex has become for some adolescents," said Dr. Carol Perry, who was a psychologist for 15 years at Riverdale Country School and Trinity School, two private schools in New York City, and who is now in private practice. "With older people, it was something that usually came further along in a relationship, when two people had been comfortable with each other and intimate for a while. But many of the adolescents see it as safer than intercourse, and not as intimate."

Many of those interviewed -- teen-agers and sex educators alike -- say that the casual acceptance of oral sex comes in good part from the media, especially movies like "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts portrayed a prostitute who would perform oral sex with clients, but would not kiss them, because kissing was too intimate.

For girls, 'Do you spit or do you swallow?' is a typical seventh-grade question.

I think this is a good example of how cultural norms about sex can change. In the early 70s, oral sex was very taboo and rarely mentioned outside an example of cruelty justifying divorce. Twenty years later, it was normalized for middle schoolers (in New York, according to the New York Times, YMMV).

Even the Kama Sutra disapproved of it: "this Auparishtaka is the work of a dog and not of a man, because it is a low practice"

Perhaps gay sex will follow the same path.

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