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>Because why else would such an aversion arise?

Because it promotes social stability ? As much as I dislike defending religion - those values produced the most stable societies through history



I’m not really sure we have a large enough corpus of (known) societies, but even ignoring that, were any pre-Middle Ages or non-Western European societies nearly as tight-lipped about sex? And just how tight-lipped actually was medieval Europe, when even Sleeping Beauty was awoken by being fucked? Finally, to which degree is stability of the social order desirable? Medieval Europe, sakoku Japan and zastoj USSR were all (meta)stable to some degree, but they were also hellholes of varying depth.

I don’t actually think the answers to these questions disprove your statement, because I have a painful lack of knowledge as to what those answers actually are. But I do feel that those answers need to be given before an argument such as yours can make sense.

(Granted, a trait that promotes societal stability can become common even if stability isn’t actually good, so the last question is not as important as the others. A dystopian equilibrium is still an equilibrium.)


Why would not even talking about sex promote social stability? Arguably the most stable societies are those that existed for 10s of 1000s of years before the agricultural revolution etc. Did they generally have taboos around discussion of sex?


>Arguably the most stable societies are those that existed for 10s of 1000s of years before the agricultural revolution etc.

Societies of n>100s. By tabooing sex you reduce promiscuous behaviour - which stabilises society. I don't really see how this would be controversial. Modern social values have unambiguously shown that they lead to a population decline. Huge difference being that technology makes us less reliant on population count for stability (hopefully).


Is there evidence at all that tabooing discussion of sex reduces promiscuity? I'd expect the exact opposite is just as likely.


I wouldn't think it surprising if they had at least customs around sex (whatever about taboos). Without contraception sex can cause a lot of trouble. People, even animals, will kill for mating rights.


Exactly - which you'd think would it make it all the more important to talk about it!




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