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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West.

I was actually less precise/nuanced than could be desirable in the response you're pointing at. That is, to an extent, unavoidable when discussing such an enormous country.

In a sense, the Sexual Revolution is here/ongoing in India. If you average over the entire place, then of course it's going to be very conservative compared to the West.

If you average over major cities, it's going to be significantly more liberal. Dating and casual sex is hardly unheard of, and in more liberal places like college or uni, entirely unremarkable. I speak VERY broadly, there are colleges, down in the south, where you can get expelled for holding hands with the opposite sex, even off campus.

It might be slightly frowned upon, but for the average middle/UMC Indian, be it a boy or girl, your parents won't disown you for bringing a new partner home, and as an independent young professional living in a city, you're largely immune from any negative consequences of sleeping around.

Quite recently, my ex of many years unblocked me, and I discovered she's going through what could be described as a belated hoe-phase, and I had to treat her for STDs (no judgment, I broke her heart, I'm more miffed at her terrible taste in new partners and what that might say about her dating me), and she's experienced some of the downsides of the SR as might be entirely unremarkable from examples in the CWR thread. Such as a fling with a 35 yo dude who asked her if she was amenable to poly/an open relationship.

Another point of pushback is that India has liberalized, especially since women began entering higher education, and were enabled to work independently in most of the same jobs as men. We simply began from a nadir in terms of gender equality, but going from Victorian norms to 1950s America in the same period America went from the 50s to uh, whatever the date is now, is still an enormous change, and smaller exclaves have achieved total parity.

The directional trend is robustly liberal, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So if you ask whether the empowerment/employment of women lead to loosening of sexual norms, then India should not be taken as a counter-example, we started from a more conservative position and we still moved left.

*Illustrative observations:

Tiny village in bumfuck nowhere? If you get caught dating, you're getting yelled at, or punished, or potentially beaten up (or very rarely honor-killed).

Middle class or UMC in a major city? Dating is frowned upon before college, because it distracts from your studies, once you're there it's no big deal, at most you are discouraged from sleeping around too much as a girl, for reputational concerns. Not even that big a deal, my slag of an ex from med school won't face any real issues when she's looking to settle down. Her mom didn't, and she was infamous as the class pony if the muttered complaints from my parents are factual, and she ended up marrying a judge. (Different exes)

Rich? Do whatever the fuck you want, and unless your family is hidebound, it doesn't matter.