> A lot of people don't (and in my opinion, shouldn't) conflate such a primal activity as "sacred". Is it really a good idea to put sex up on a pedestal?

It's one of the best ideas people have ever come up with.

> Do you know how many people out there resent the amount of control that society tries to maintain over sexual expression and activity?

A small but increasingly loud minority. The vast majority of people benefit from social strictures and taboos surrounding sex.

No, it's not. There's so many sexual things out there that are off the table if you restrict "sex" to heteronormative monogamy. So many people could live richer, more sexual fulfilling lives if only they felt it was OK.

Society benefits from family structure and family planning. And we have a deep desire to reproduce based on living in a world where there wasn't enough of us and too many died too easily. Unfortuntely there are now too many people and nobody likes it when someone dies arbitrarily, so we don't need to reproduce nearly as much.

Now that we have the technology, there is no reason why a rich family life and a rich sex life can't coexist.

edit, one other thing --

> A small but increasingly loud minority.

I suspect this is actually a majority but, sadly, religion and taboos have beaten this out of folks. The reason it is "increasing" is because more people are speaking up. Sexual unfulfilment is, I believe, one of the largest driving factors behind a lot of cheating and divorce

> Sexual unfulfillment is, I believe, one of the largest driving factors behind a lot of cheating and divorce.

Maybe, but I don't think it's a root cause in most cases. Like, even if you had a social framework in place for the high libido partner to receive fulfillment outside the relationship, the issues (misaligned expectations, boundary issues, money stress, contempt, etc) that led to the breakdown in intimacy would still remain and and end manifesting in other ways.

I think probably a more helpful direction is to provide more guidance to couples for how to communicate around intimacy, how respond effective to a coalmine canary issue like "the sex isn't very good any more" in a way that uncovers the root causes rather than blaming one person for the symptom ("it's the LLP's fault for not doing the thing") or trying to fix it with band-aids ("just have more date nights lol").

You make a lot of assumptions here. Sometimes the answer is simple and people are not sexually compatible, were never good at having sex together and rushed into a long term relationship. I've seen this more in people who were further along the 'sexual repression' spectrum (i.e. following religious advice about relationships and marriage).

Sometimes I think cheating and divorce is as much the norm as mating for life. I was reading a study recently that found that sexual intimacy steadily decreases over time in a long term relationship, and only seemed to go back up again if divorce/new partner happened. I will dig it out if anyone is interested.

There is a taboo around non-monogamy which I think is detrimental to many people, and certainly a lot of people make multiple partners work, despite all the barriers to doing this in most societies. It isn't a sticking plaster for other issues, that I agree though. If anything it needs the participants to understand well what they want and to be excellent communicators - something we can probably all work on.

The opposite could easily be argued, that holding onto taboo is what makes it difficult for victims to seek help and what allows predators to act unabated.

The most sexually repressive societies have some of the worst sexual sociopathic behaviour, I don't think I need to give examples.

Those preaching sexual liberation were the ones who fought and won the battle to incorporate homosexuality into our social norms.

No. In fact it turned out that gay people wanted to be like straight people. They wanted weddings, marriage, the ability to hold hands in public, to adopt children and so on. They didn't want "sexual liberation," they wanted their relationships to be accepted the same way hetereosexual relationships are.

Being gay or accepting such was a part of being "sexually liberated" back then. Just as being into kinks is a part of being "sexually liberated" now. I don't understand why you insist on conflating it all to marriage and children (or lack thereof).

> A lot of people don't (and in my opinion, shouldn't) conflate such a primal activity as "sacred". Is it really a good idea to put sex up on a pedestal?

I think people should have a realistic view of what sex is. It certainly is not a mechanical & purely physical act (perhaps thats what you mean by "primal"). Sex represented in porn tends be unrealistic and treats women as objects purely for male gratification, to use as some sort of sexual punching bag and evacuate feelings. Essentially it teaches viewers to dehumanise women and dissassociate from real life.

Stats are showing that women are consuming lots of porn now too.

And I always find the 'dehumanizing' argument amusing, it's like saying that Nine Inch Nails represents all industrial music, or that all 90s rock is represented by Nickelback. If you go out seeking examples of dehumanization the systems are such that that is all you will find. If you seek out homemade videos by real couples happily posting them to Pornhub or Onlyfans, that is also what you will mostly find. If you seek out wild fetish stuff, then that is also what you will mostly find.

This is not the 90s, porn is quite diverse. For every headline out there manufactured to bring outrage to moralists, there are a hundred other stories which are much more benign.

Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.

> Stats are showing that women are consuming lots of porn now too.

And that somehow makes porn nice and healthy does it?

> Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.

I'm not sure I understand your argument, nor confident you understand mine. Just because a couple make homemade videos together and post them up, it doesn't mean the viewer who is getting sexual gratification has any sort of real connection to the performers. It's complete fantasy, dependant on the human body as solely as means of sexual gratification rather than any wholistic context. Now take that mindset to to the real world as see how maladapted it leaves you. Here in the UK there's an epidemic of highscool aged girls being pressured into sending nude images by boys. Of course porn can't be to blame for all of this, but I'm sure it plays a big part.

I'd also like to point out nothing I'm talking about is related to morality (since you mentioned it). Whatever people want to spend their time doing is up to them. I'm simply making the argument that porn can be harmful and lots of mainstream porn is really focused around turning women into sex objects and outlets for dealing with displaced emotions. I've no doubt that there's something deeper that drives your voyeurism too, maybe inquiring about that might make you pursue something more fulfilling than images on the internet.

Let's stop pretending there are no consequences to porn.

IMO all porn will be illegal in less than 50 years.

We just happen to live in this small blip in time that an almost libertine view of sex is normalized but this will not last forever.

The only way that will ever happen is if the moralist fascists vying for power in conservative parties win, because getting rid of porn is going to piss off a lot of people.

Popular attitudes will eventually swing to favor piety and austerity. Likely accelerated by material decline which historically has changed social behavior. When the elderly, possibly seen as contributing to the next generations’ problems, are complaining about young people not making enough porn, not many will be quick to oblige them. Change in moral standards doesn’t require legislation or revolution.

There will probably be less porn in 50 years than now just because moral fashions change, and it would be difficult for there to be more of it. I see the challenge to it coming more from the left than from the right, though.

It's a bit like a minimum entropy point :)

I'm not doing it consciously, this is how I feel.

How you were programmed to feel, by a society with a vested interest in maintaining a status quo.

Personally I wonder what raw human sexuality looks like before society tamed it into what it is today. From an anatomical perspective, there are clues suggesting that humans mated with group sex far more often than they do today (like the shape of the glans on a penis being as such because it is good at scraping out another partner's semen), and anthropologically, where other primates mate in (sometimes coercive) groups.

In fact the anthropological case for monogamy is incredibly mixed, as the animal kingdom practices a wide variety of relationship styles.

Stop, you have no idea about my personal life. I can assure you nothing of what remains in my brain was shaped by society[0]. Also I don't agree that using biology is an argument, or then I have more penguin genes than average :)

There are some human bonds that I consider emotionally harmful, fruitless, subpar, sad.. and most of free fun sexuality ends up there. I don't hear the words I care about when people talk about sex these days. Now as others said, people do what they want and if it's not harmful to any parties involved so be it.

[0] I lack the words to stress how much this is intimate and personal. Now to each his own brain, some people might have very few emotional attachment, I'm not like this.

> I can assure you nothing of what remains in my brain was shaped by society

> I lack the words to stress how much this is intimate and personal. Now to each his own brain, some people might have very few emotional attachment, I'm not like this

So are you a robot then? Wherever you are from, your mind is a product of your influences and local culture and customs, just as much as it is also a product of your schooling and your family life. Given that we humans just absolutely love to meddle in the love lives of others, I can promise you that some of that cultural training includes guidance on how to structure your romantic relationships, and it almost certainly proscribes one man and one woman.

Unless you have spent a considerable amount of time examining these beliefs and have specifically chosen to reject the ones that your society has given you, I would argue that your brain is very much not your own in that sense.

If the opposite were true then things like propaganda would have a much harder time existing. We would have a perfect, rational world society that I dearly wish existed. Appeals to emotion would fall on deaf ears! How amazing that would be!

Instead we have entire countries full of people that live or die because of "cultural differences" aka the shit that society pollutes your mind with. One might argue that we are watching that play out with Ukraine vs Russia right now.

> Stop, you have no idea about my personal life.

You told me how you feel, so I do in fact have a small tidbit of information on your personal life

One of the most prominent customs of Americans is that we pretend to have no culture or customs on a national level. Of course, we actually do project a culture, and whenever that becomes apparent, many Americans are unhappy, because that culture isn't aligned well with their personal values.

Do people really believe that? Like, every fourth AskReddit thread seems to ask questions specifically of Americans. Which means someone thinks we're different enough to make a thread about it (over and over again...), ergo we have our own culture.

Maybe I've just traveled to much, and I have certainly rolled my eyes at some of my less informed countrymen, but I have a hard time believing people could think that our culture is somehow a baseline.

I agree that we project our culture a ton, and I really wish we wouldn't. It's so annoying to try and share something cultural with a foreign friend only to find out they already know and have opinions about it because they saw it on Friends

My take is that a lot of USians will vociferously defend the differences in regional cultures within the US - East vs. West, coastal vs. flyover, state vs. state and so on - as both a conscious and an unconscious response to questions of national cultures and norms. When someone claims the US is "too big" or "too diverse" (and isn't using the latter as a dog whistle) you see some of this implicit balkanisation of the US into incompatible units.

Of course the consistent reaction of Americans to the use of terms like "USians" is a big giveaway to the fact that there's a national identity and thus culture. As, I guess, is the habit of down-playing of any such thing lol.

Unfortunately the few I wrote before is a minuscule amount of my experience with emotional and physical intimacy.

I'm sorry to insist, I had the displeasure to be off rail from the norm on extreme levels. Even deep introspection about norms and cultures would not register on a graph compared to the event that I had to go through.

I fail to describe more in details, but you're looking at the wrong layer, I'm talking about psychiatry/neurology levels, not social constructs.