Where do sexual taboos come from

Great Debates
41

Truthpizza: As far as I’m concerned, the question of appropriateness and the question or origins can’t be separated. If a certain set of sexual behaviors helps establish a stable, just, and happy society, then logically people will uphold, promote, and teach that set of sexual behaviors. The appropriateness explains the origins.

Besides that, your explanation fails in two respects. First, as has been mentioned already, the facts about sexual ethics across space and time don’t support you. There has been a tremendous variety of sexual systems through history. There is no uniform set of rules that “older women” have tried to enforce–not even close.

Second, if we want to know why women (or men) prefer a traditional sexual ethic, we only have to ask. Now can you show me evidence that older women prefer such an ethic because they are protecting personal interests in the form of keeping their husbands/partners to themselves, as opposed to doing so because they think it’s morally right? Failing that, can you name any woman who reasons in the way that you claim they all do? In my experience, most women and men choose their moral outlook based on a firm belief in moral rights, rather than selfish interests.

(As for the claim that “People tend to believe that the way they were brought up is what is naturally best,” it’s untrue. Many people believe the exact opposite. Many go to extremes in their fervent attacks on the society that birthed them and raised them. Youthful rebellion has been viewed as a given for ages. There’s a standard life history that people have gone since ancient Greece and Rome. Around age 12, the kid decides that his parents are completely stupid and evil. He spends a decade or two or three devoted to hating his parents and everything associated with them. Then, in adulthood, logic comes to dominate emotion and he ends up agreeing that his parents were pretty smart and kind after all.)

42

Sure, stuff that clearly works is likely to get passed down. What set of sexual customs is so clearly ideal that you think they were chosen for their effectiveness? Somehow I’m thinking the 1950’s Midwestern whitebread Ward and June Cleaver culture. If that (or whatever you choose) was picked for it’s success, why haven’t we haven’t stayed there? Why were things so restrictive in the middle ages, Victorian era, and and other periods? Why do most Islamic cultures have such extreme taboos? You said in an earlier post:

But doesn’t answer the question. Why do they have these practices?

It seems like people in every culture think their traditions would be optimal if only people followed the rules. Are you different?

Older mothers aren’t trying to “enforce” anything. They are transmitting their attitudes to their children. I’m fully aware of the variety in cultures. If all communities supported the tradition that gets the most stable, just and happy society, I’d think they’d all be much more alike. As much as they vary, almost all, outside of a few villages in isolated areas perhaps, seem to have concerns about female modesty and restricting sexuality of unattached women. Like you say, across space and time. If you know of important examples otherwise, bring them up.

If the actual reason is “I believe what everybody tells me”, they’re not likely to say “Because I believe what everybody tells me.” They will give you a rationalization that sounds good, like “Because it works so well”, and they’ll probably believe that rationalization themselves.

Of course they think it’s morally right. After all, 98% of what they’re passing on they got from other people (which in my opinion is where morality comes from in practice). They tend to add a little of their own prejudice to what they pass on, so the effect increases over the generations. I’m sure they aren’t even aware they’re doing this. This isn’t a deliberate tactic.

My impression is that rebellion is pretty typical following puberty. I read someplace that this occurs even in chimpanzees. But most people revert to their parent’s values when they become parents. Not the values from another culture - the values from their own culture. Apparently Amish teens often go out and break all the traditions, buying cars and so on, but after a few years they come back to the fold and follow the Amish traditions. That’s what seems right to them. This is true for the vast majority of people. If it weren’t, cultures wouldn’t maintain their identities over long periods of time. Individuals may challenge their cultural traditions, and occasionally they can get a following and make some changes in the culture (like Martin Luther King) but this is the exception. Exceptions are probably more common in modern times now that far better transportation and communication make us more aware of alternate possibilities.

Long ago it occurred to me that believing the people around me could have terrible consequences. The good people of Salem, Mass. understandably wanted to protect their children from evil spells but weren’t careful enough about what they believed. So I try to question popular beliefs and traditions whenever possible. The SDMB community is probably much better than average at doing this, but in the world as a whole it seems like this is all too rare.

43

Not to downplay the motivations that have been suggested thus far, but I think religion and economics have also played a large role in sexual taboos.

The vast majority of established religion has been about controlling people’s behavior. Sex is a strong drive, and because humans tend to seek privacy, a somewhat mysterious one. It’s a ripe area for control, and for creating shibboleths that distinguish “us” from “them.” It’s similar to dietary restrictions, which usually lack mystery, but are more frequent than sex.

Limitations on sex allow sex to become a commodity. A family may have had little wealth, but if they have a beautiful daughter, they might acquire wealth via marriage. A poor young woman may havehad no source of power whatsoever, except what she could command by virtue of her desirability. Things become valuable when their availability is restricted; that’s how drug cartels get rich.

But I agree that there is a huge amount of cultural innertia. Most customs are passed from one generation to the next with little or no challenge; youthful rebellion is lost in the general struggle to survive and thrive in a society with whatever its current customs are. There’s very little thought or evaluation of cost/benefit to an individual that goes on, except when you have someone deliberately trying to control people in general, such as hierarchs or kings.

44

Incest, pedophilia and bestiality are just about the only taboos I can think of which are still almost universally held in western culture.

Nowadays, a significant minority, if not majority, consider homosexuality, masturbation, multiple sexual partners (including group sex), adultery, etc…etc… valid lifestyle options.

At the very least, they no longer have the shock value and widespread opposition defining a taboo. A big no-no, perhaps, as with adultery, and homosexuality in some circles, but taboo? Nah.

To get taboo nowadays, to get that viceral, violently offended reaction from virtually everyone in the group to something considered SO vile, SO depraved, SO unforgivable, you have to resort to incest, pedophilia or bestiality, as demonstrated so well in the documentary “The Aristocrats”, which examined the old joke where the teller ad-libs the details of a stage act being presented to a promoter, including the grossest, most taboo elements possible. Even 40 yrs ago, public nudity and sex were shocking enough…today, all tellings must include familial, underage relations and some sort of animal. (and all sorts of bodily fluids/solids, but that is a different sort of taboo ;))

I would argue that these remaining sexual taboos are the most, if not ONLY, rational ones in a developed civilization. (and there are some who would argue even they aren’t rational, that fucking kids and animals is perfectly fine and should be a protected right, but they are in the definite minority, so they shouldn’t waste their breath. They will need it to run away from the outraged, torch-wielding mob.)

As for how sexual taboos originated and were/are perpetuated, most were, imo, devised to discourage anything but marital sex for the purpose of procreation, and were promoted largely by religious authorities. (someone once said that the church gains its power by taking things everyone does and classifying them as sins, then claiming the sole power to absolve them, often for a fee :rolleyes:)

The general idea that sex in itself was a “necessary sin” and inherently filthy has a long tradition in western culture (and some others, of course).

And of course mothers pass on their ideas regarding such things to their offspring…the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and all that tripe…but never underestimate the effect of generations of inculcation with said ideas and its power to cause mothers (or fathers) to pass on poison to their beloveds, convinced it is for their own good. :smack:

Finally, considering some of the more extreme sexual taboos and mores existing today in some cultures and/or practiced in the not too distant past in others, a few here have offered their view that such things were/are mainly for the benefit of women (we women ARE very clever creatures…so clever, in fact, that we have managed to perpetrate the illusion that WE were the ones being oppressed and slaughtered for thousands of years when, in fact, it was WE who had all the power and were oppressing MEN! BHWWWAAAA-HAAAA!!! :p:dubious:)

I call bullshit on that.

IF such practices as genital mutilation, chastity belts, burkas, restrictions on activities and travel, honor killings and other brutal punishments for sexual activities outside of marriage (including rape, which is OBVIOUSLY the woman’s fault) were for the primary benefit of WOMEN, it would be the MEN who had to wear burkas, have their genitals mutilated to prevent sexual pleasure or practice, be restricted to the home unless accompanied by a female family member, and be executed for “bringing shame onto the family” with their sexual misbehaviors.

Yes, many mothers and other women living under such systems DO apply pressure to their daughters and young women to conform…not only is it what they themselves were raised with, but to NOT conform can be a death sentence, or at least mean being ostracized.

It is obvious where the power rests in such systems.

45

Oy!

Economics as a factor is a good point I don’t remember seeing before and it’s a good thing to include in the mix of influences.

I don’t know what taboos were started by religions, but religions have certainly been heavily involved in propagating and adding to them. While the idea of showing loyalty to deities by sacrifices and fasting and so on seem to benefit religions, some suggest that religious leaders want to mess with people’s sex lives just as a form of control, which seems doubtful to me. The idea that this somehow benefits the priesthood seems more like pop psychology to me than a sensible strategy, so I suspect that the religions may have grabbed on to existing stereotypes.

**InterestedObserver
**
You have a good point about the remaining serious taboos. It still amazes me that there could be a national furor about Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Superbowl or that there are significant numbers of people wearing rings to promise they’ll be virgins until marriage. But as you indicate, thankfully views like this are no longer so prevalent.

The forcible nature of female genital mutilation does seem more like something males would come up with than females. Chastity belts even more so. I think they were used when men were away on Crusades, so limiting your husband’s access to younger women would be less of an issue than normal, while there would be an obvious advantage to the men who were gone. Burkas, on the other hand, serve the interests of married women very well. These wouldn’t have been seen as instruments of oppression, but as instruments of virtue. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine males finding these as serving their own interests except to the extent that they had been brainwashed by their culture.

46

There’s also a possibility that chastity belts were a protection against casual rape if an enemy attacked while the Lord of the Manor was away. Clothing like the burqa is (originally) a symbol of social superiority. Mark Tully in a series of stories set in India (he was BBC correspondant there for years) has the matriarch of a Muslim clan come down in the world remeniscing how in the Good Old Days before Independence when they were still Somebodies, the Grand Old Lady not only wore a burqa covered in rich embroidery and jewels but had her own rail carriage that she boarded through a corridor of screens protecting her from the gaze of lowly Hindu ‘stone-worshippers’.

Poor women have to work, in the family shop or fields or for pay in somebody else’s . Wearing that sort of clothing shows that any work she does is at home. It is only in very recent times that working for a living has become respectable and even more recently for women. Only in the last 20 years really has extreme wealth come from ‘working’ at financial dealings and not from owning something where other people do the work. One can say something of the same about traditional aristocratic men’s clothes. You are not going to dig the fields dressed like an Arab sheikh or a Samurai or even like Charles II.

47

Not to mention evolutionary psychology, which offers theories explaining the different treatments of male vs. female infidelity, and other interesting solutions to seeming contradictions. Spent and The Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller, are good introductions.

48

I don’t think much of evolutionary psychology. There is a fact though that females of any species are less promiscuously inclined, or at least a lot more selective about it, than males because they are the ones expecting to get pregnant. That’s not something to take on lightly. Then you add the financial effects of developing from a tribal primitive socialism to families having to support themselves and you have to be careful about producing children everywhere.

A lot more sexual repression probably comes from women on their daughters than from the men it does not have to affect - because it does not have to affect them! Then there is the ‘repression’ of age restrictions. Girls are sexually active long before they are mature enough to handle it and there is the physical danger of getting themselves raped.

Leastwise, until quite a modern level of social development there is that kind of danger and the other side of it is control of boys’ sexual freedom until they are mature enough to look for more than just a good time. Some tribal societies worked this kind of thing by encouraging homosexual relationships in the early teens, often with people between ten and twenty years older moving on to bisexuality later. This might have something to be said for it.

49

Make no mistake; many, if not most, religions have been propogated with the distinct purpose of achieving and maintaining power over others. This is not to say that there haven’t been individuals who were sincere in their beliefs. And people are able to rationalize the most amazing things in order to reconcile what they want to do and their own self-image, so they can simulataneously be sincere believers and raw power grabbers.

Don’t mistake primitive technology for pastoral innocence. Freud may have coined the id and the superego, but you don’t need those terms to realize that sexual desire is a powerful motivator.

50

There’s scant evidence to suggest that anyone wore chastity belts in western Europe until the 18th century or so. For one thing any woman wearing one for any length of time would be subject to some serious hygienic issues and would likely develop some serious infections. Most of the chastity belts were designed to prevent male masturbation not to prevent extramarital affairs or rape.

Odesio

51

Slut shaming has always fascinated me. Several different gender and evolutionarily related issues tied up in one visceral phenomenon. How long do you think women have been waking up after a one night stand and saying “wow, I’ve never done that before!” to their quietly amused partner who they’ll never see again?

I think a lot of this stuff is ingrained. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the vast majority of human cultures over time have this stuff. Maybe helped by post orgasmic crashes, depression, guilt, weakness, and so on. It’s easy to see why some societies saw orgasm as physically harmful when you’re sitting there feeling like a newborn kitten.

Perhaps another angle of this is that most societies I am aware of view sex as something that women have that men want. It can be taken, bought, or bargained for. And that good girls should hide their precious reward until marriage. Ingrained? As a result of basic biology? (cheap sperm vs. valuable eggs) It seems too easy. Why the virulent slut shaming? Especially among men. It’s understandable why women would do it.

As an aside, using chimp or bonobo societies as support (as opposed to idle chit chat) for an argument regarding human nature is misguided. Both are very different from all known human societies, have been split from humans for six million years, and there are enough primate species in the spectrum between these two extremes (chimps as violent assholes, bonobos as orgiastic hippies) that one can support nearly any position by picking and choosing. The way to make an argument about human nature is to talk about people.

This may be appropriate for a new thread since whether one gender is hornier than the other wouldn’t seem to have obvious connections to the origin of taboos, but I disagree. Have you seen this (PDF) before? It’s a great summary. I can’t think of a single metric where women could be said to desire sex or orgasms more than men. Capacity, sure, but that’s a lot different, as the linked authors detail.

I don’t think women should be resentful of this, either, except the ones who can’t orgasm at all or who have extreme difficulty reaching orgasm (anorgasmia). The very fact there are such huge numbers of those pretty much means men have to be hornier, statistically speaking. Excluding those, I think society would be much better if men’s sex drives were much lower, like women’s.

52

I think it very significant that the overall response that still uses the word ‘feminist’ to the sexual equality of the 60s is to posit a degree of female sexual fear of and submission to men that even my grandmother would have found repressive. So they both perpetuate their own female-inferior indoctrination and ‘denounce’ women who do accept men as equals as sluts giving themselves for exploitation just as ‘tradition’ always did, and perpetuate ideas that either everything men traditionally do is superior to everything women do, so women must do it too, or women have different values that men can never learn. Either way supports the superior value of ‘traditional’ demands on men.

Not many women will want to reject men as equal human beings because they feel they must be inferior to meet on an equal level, so this kind of ‘feminism’ only serves what conservative forces want it to, to remove women with ‘dissident’ ideas from influence and to tell women that whatever men are told is superior, neither they nor men must ever question. There’s no point men questioning it anyway since feminists reject men as equal human beings simply because they are men.

53

AMEN!!!
There was some guy acting all shocked b/c people were a little more …sexually conservative, and yapping about how those sexual barricades “NEEDED” to be torn down by the Sexual Revolution. Give me a break…Just b/c our past history has been bowlderized by Focus On Your Own Damn Family, doesn’t mean that everyone was an uptight Mid-Western Blah type. Heck guys went to whores and girls and guys touched themselves. Heck…did you know that back when the Seven Sisters were founded they were as famous as they are today for lesbianism? The ONLY thing that the Sexual Revolution did was to bring sex out into the open…nothing wrong with that. Sex is wonderful an glorious and all that. …but the purtain attitue about sex never really existed pre -1967. It was the result of someone whitewashing the past.

54

Just to pick up on this, I’ve been thinking for some time that there’s a flaw in this reasoning. If it’s true that married men have longer life expectancies than single men, does it necessarily follow that marriage is the cause of the longer life expectancy? No, of course not. You can argue a mechanism of the sort exists, but you can also argue that “loser” males are not only less successful at attracting a mate, but also less adept at taking care of themselves. IOW, the same qualities that are harming their marriage prospects are also harming their life expectancies - and so the figures are skewed because the single men are inherently shorter-lived, not as a consequence of remaining single.

55

Uh, no. Now you’re whitewashing the past. Just for starters, I was around pre-1967, and believe me, that ‘puritan attitude about sex’ didn’t just get created out of whole cloth then. You think 1967 and after was bad? Try 1957. Or 1917. Or 1817, for that matter.

The fact is, western cultures have placed a high premium on feminine virginity throughout modern times. As for general repression in culture, well, there was plenty of Victorian pornography, but for Heaven’s sake, this was the time when legs were referred to as 'limbs’out of so-called decency, and women wore huge hooped skirts as a conscious symbol of their purity. Freud didn’t operate in a vacuum, and there are reasons why he blamed almost everything on sexual repression.

That doesn’t mean no one got laid. It doesn’t mean that women never demonstrated desire. But there are plenty of examples just in our immediate past of repression that far exceed anything we saw post-1967. The big difference then was that fairly painless and fairly inexpensive birth-control became widely available, and those who wanted to control sexual behavior in women could no longer rely on eventual, inevitable pregnancy to aid them.

56

I guess I shouldn’t believe everything I read in wax museums :slight_smile:

Probably because it’s part of the culture. Both men and women are taught pretty much the same thing about who’s naughty and who’s nice.

Funny, I was thinking society would be much better if women’s sex drives were much higher, like men’s :slight_smile:

AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet:

To add to what Oy! said – the oldest example I know of is Genesis 3:10: "And he said, ‘I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ " Here Adam is so uptight about sex he doesn’t want God to see him naked. This goes back pretty far in history (I’m talking about when it was written. I don’t think the story is true). Taboos against nudity are nearly universal. There are few cities in the world you can walk around naked without fear of being arrested for “indecent” exposure. Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Superbowl halftime show had people in fits. Even atheistic China is puritanical:

Chinese porn crackdown

57

Which culture? Of course the answer is “every culture!” which points to evolutionary arguments. (Truth is discovered, error invented. Fiction spreads locally, like a virus. Reality is universally available.)

58

It’s always tough to know what’s nature and what’s nurture, but I have some reasons for thinking this (contempt for “sluts”) is cultural. First, if we agree that it is at least as universal (as slut shaming) for mothers to raise the children and for them to have men they expect to help them, then the data we observe are explained regardless of whether the cause is genetic or cultural.

Here’s why I don’t think genetic explains the situation very well.

First, there’s personal experience. I never had any problem with sexually active women, so if there is a gene, I apparently don’t have it. I have heard people mock sluts, but they generally weren’t the sort of people who’s opinion I respected so I didn’t buy it. But it obviously was being propagated culturally.

Then there’s the variety of attitudes among cultures and times. Our own culture has become much more tolerant of women who are known to have sex outside of marriage than it was 50 years ago. Our genetics haven’t changed, but our culture has. People in Saudi Arabia are far, far less tolerant of sexual freedom than Americans, and their genetics are essentially indistinguishable from the liberal West. But their culture is a lot different. Culture explains this, genetics doesn’t.

Finally I would think that if there were a survival advantage to discouraging sluttiness, it would be a lot more probable that genes that reduced the desire for non-monogamous sex would prevail (they apparently occur in some apes) than that some complex pattern of genes for recognizing and ostracizing the appropriate people would turn up and become prevalent.

59

Truthpizza and Oy. Yes it was around then. I’m not saying it wasn’t. I’ve learned a lot about the Hayes Commission (that’s the one that was resposible for censorship) in my Comm classes.
I’m saying that there was a PUBLIC face of how we looked at sex back then (you know… the prudish Middle American face) and then there was the PRIVATE face of sex.
And yes…there was prudish-ness about sex back then. I’m not denying that. However a lot of the stuff that is now public was still around. It was simply VERY underground. Heck…a lot of men back then kept playboys and went to prosistutes…there were gay bars and all sorts of things back then.

60

I believe that most sexual taboos are based on inheritance.

In most agricultural societies, inheritance is a big issue. How much land you have determines how prosperous you are. So agricultural societies are very concerned with paternity (maternity, of course, is not usually up for question), and have developed cultural controls to ensure that women do not have offspring by other men.

Virginity, extra-marital sex taboos, child marriage, seclusion etc. are all about making sure that a man’s kid is really his. We can see this rather explicitly spelled out in some cultures. For example, in some Islamic cultures there is a waiting period on divorce to make sure the woman is not pregnant.

The reason why we see these same sets of taboos so often is that most societies are agricultural, not because they represent some innate natural order. All it takes is a short examination of cultures with other material circumstances to see that. Few nomadic, pastoral or hunter-gather cultures practice “traditional” sexual taboos. They have their own taboos based on their own material circumstances.

Among some Tibetans, it used to be common for a woman to marry a man and his brothers. This makes sense when you see that Tibet has almost no arable land, and that to break up a landholding among sons would be devastating.

Among the Woodabe pastoralists in West Africa, young women choose their marriage partners from contestants in a male beauty contest. Then they have a trial marriage of one year, after which they are free to break it.

But of course, the biggest and most obvious answer is our own modern society. Almost the moment we stopped being an agricultural society, our sexual taboos changed. And these changes have happened like clockwork around the world. It seems unlikely that we are suddenly magically capable to overcome our genetic code. Much more likely is that the sexual taboos that served farmers well don’t really serve city folks the same way.