Why are conservatives so interested in controlling other people's sexuality?

Great Debates
1

[N.B. I posed this question in the “Ask A Conservative Asshole” thread several months ago, and it went unanswered and un-noticed; since I really am curious about this issue, I’m floating it as a new topic.]

Why are conservatives so interested in controlling other people’s sexual behaviour?

One frquently runs into this aspect of the conservative mindset (intensely held religious belief, social conservatism as opposed to economic, “the good old-fashioned way” and such ilks). Conservatives are just about always attached to a stern, limited and controlling sexual morality, not just for themselves, but extended to and enforced on other people.

Some examples:
Until fairly recently (when the Puritan wing of feminists got involved), it was the right-leaning who were involved in censorship of sexually explicit materials–from the rankest smut to the highest art and literature. It was so-called conservatives who legally persected publishers for disseminating such literary eminences as “Howl”, Naked Lunch, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover"*, while self-styled liberals and progressives have supported those works and their makers’ rights to express themselves. It’s been just the same more recently–for instance it was Jesse Helms who got so offended by [among other things] the sexually explicit photgraphs of Robert Mapplethorpe that he set off the latest round of public indignation about so-called obscenity. When a censorship kerfluffle arises, eight times out of ten you’ll find that it’s the right which supports suppression.

*The concept of “chastity is virtue and our moral strength”. Now, as in past days, it is overwhelmingly social conservatives who promote the “no-sex-until-marriage, one-partner-after” model of erotic relationships. In areas where the right has the power, chastity and monogamy tend to be strongly enforced socially and generally given the benefit of law.

*The stigmatization, prohibition, pathologizing and general poor tratment of sexual dissent. Look at US history, and the history of Sexology as a field of study, for examples ad nauseum. Male and female homosexuals, so-called perverts and deviants, and the sexually adventurous heterosexual community have no worse enemy than social conservatism, usually cloaked in religious stricture and “common decency”. It is only when a more progressive mindset is empowered that you will find acceptance and defense of non-standard sexual behaviour promoted and sanctioned.

*Conservatives led and nurtured the masses against accepting lesbians and gay men having the benefits of legal marriage.

*It’s in places where the right is empowered that one encounters the most legal restrictions on consenting adult sexual activity, such as anti-prostitution, anti-birth-control laws.

I’m not all that interested in justifications of the conservative stances on sexual activity and the State’s control thereof (heard them all before; find them circular, self-serving and generally bullshit), but in ***why ***conservatives – as opposed to progressives, who have plenty of their own oppressive controls and restrictions they’d love to enforce on me and you and everyone else – appear so intensely concerned with limiting other adults’ sexual activities.

2

Probably because they can’t control their own sexualities. So they take a wide stance against people with non-conflicted sexual identities.

3

Conservatism is linked with believing in a big guy in the sky who tells you where to put your penis.

4

But the only ones who they believe that applies to is their political opponents.

5

I hear where you are coming from, and I appreciate the wide stance :stuck_out_tongue: , but I think they believe the religious rules apply to all people regardless of political leanings, but they will still break those rules because they think they are smart enough to get away with it. They’ll make a bargain with God. For example, I’ll make abortion illegal and you let me do that. Or, after all you made me, that means you made me like this, so I can’t help doing this.

6

If religious people believe in these religious dictates, if they truly believed them, they wouldn’t feel like they could violate them as long as they didnt get caught. That violates what they supposedly live by. Its even more ridiculous when they hypocritically judge their non-religious counterparts for doing the very same thing. Ironically, without twisting their morality into pretzels in order to live with themselves.

7

Rigidity and fear is my guess.

An interesting article. Have a boo at p. 662. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Jost(2006)The-End-of-the-End-of-Ideology.pdf

8

Well played sir.

I’ve said this in other threads: many allegedly-“religious” conservatives hung up on sexuality have a worldview in which there is normal, healthy heaven-approved sexual expression (marital, cis-het, private, exclusive) on one side, and on the other side not only is everything else perversion/deviance, but furthermore, everyone is tempted by one form or another of perversion/deviance and it is nigh irresistible save by special grace but still must be struggled against. The conclusion is it should be society’s policy to NOT facilitate but rather hinder “wrong” sexual expression.

This goes along nicely with a posture often heard from authoritarian-conservatives of both the religious and nonreligious type which goes along the lines that humans are inherently vile and save for prohibition enforced under draconian punishments, or damnation in hellfire, then what would keep everyone from just going wild to rob, rape and kill. A lenient society is seen as taking away from them and their children the external tools to keep themselves straight and to keep society ordered and structured.

The religious puritan, if s/he really is one (as opposed to affecting it opportunistically for social advantage) actualy feels it is shameful and terrible that they have succumbed to temptation, but they have the hope that Grace will save them because they have Faith and are doing God’s work, while the secular “libertine” claiming this is No Big Deal is dismissing all of that and liberalization is a way of unwittingly damning future generations (or in the case of secular authoritarians, liberalization is just the slippery slope to law-of-the-jungle anarchy). To them, paradoxically enough, even if they were transgressing privately, it is more valuable to sustain a society in which that is frowned upon than one in which it is tolerated. Being able to do it as long as you don’t get caught yourself, and then having to repent, beg forgiveness, and undergo your moment of public shame, is just the toll you pay for preserving the order and structure.

9

You are asking why are conservatives conservative. If you go back 60 years or so, the current conservative views on sexuality were the norm. Sex outside marriage was bad, gay sex was not only bad but a sign of a mental disorder, and abortion was generally condemned. During the 60s and 70s, many of those traditional sexual mores went out the window. But if you were a conservative, i.e., you resit change, that didn’t happen for you.

10

I hear this quite often. In other words, if you don’t believe in GOD, why prevents you from raping, pillage, murder etc. This is very, very telling, and gives us some incite to the so called morals of these people.

11

Pretty much this. Not sure why people feel the need to overly complicate things and bring in all sorts of their own baggage and assumptions when the simplest reason is that they are conservative, and this was the ideal of their youth, even if the reality was always more complicated than those rose colored glasses of the 50’s. IOW, this is how (they assumed) their daddies thought about it, and their daddies, and their daddies daddies, and if it were good enough for dem, is good enough for us’n today.

12

I think John Mace and XT have the main reason: The way things used to be are the way things are supposed to be.

But I’ve also noticed that, it seems to me, conservatives believe in clear distinctions between men and women: Men are designed (by God and/or Nature) to be one way (to have one set of characteristics and fulfill one set of roles), women are designed to be another way, and it’s Bad and Decadent to muddy the distinction. Society works best when everybody knows their proper place and sticks to it.

13

I think deep in their hearts, conservatives don’t give two shits about any of this. But there is a vocal minority in the Republican camp that really really really really hates abortion and same sex marriage. Republicans learned long ago that they could harvest cheap votes quite easily by giving lip service to being against abortion, so that’s what they did. Just Darwinian selection, those that expressed the desire to end abortion survived, those who didn’t, didn’t. This is why you see Republican congressmen telling their mistresses to get abortions, they simply don’t care about the issue other than the easy votes they get from it.

14

Yeah, making sure not to live a life of mistreatment of others and committing heinous crimes against your fellow man only because you’re afraid of “getting caught” by the God you believe in and spending eternity in flames is in NO WAY anything but selfish acts of self-interest. Religious morals are rooted in in fear. Which is absolutely antithetical to the morality of those who come to know what to adhere to and live by through their own introspection and self-awareness.

15

I think they feel like families are the fundamental unit of society, and that society functions best if most people are part of a traditional 2-parent family where all members are more committed to the welfare of the family unit than to their individual interests. (This takes the place of a lot of broader social safety nets) I think they feel like the traditional sexual mores lead to stronger, healthier families.

16

Their definition of “religious freedom” is, “You are all free to be Old Testament Christians like us.” In truth, they ardently desire to invoke a Christian version of Sharia Law. Homosexuality is considered an “abomination” and thus to be energetically expunged over and above probably any other perceived sin. Often, people like this are less upset living next door to a paroled axe murderer than living a block away from a known homosexual.

They will often pompously invoke the saying, “This is a Christian nation!” If it is, we’ve violated the Constitution, but that seems to go over their heads, and they energetically pursue their agenda while considering themselves true Americans.

17

It’s kind of like asking why governments have so often chosen to put together an army. The social control of reproduction and the harnessing of sexuality is really really central to what governments’ purpose has been for the last 10,000 years.

True, but until relatively recently the institutional organizations that promulgate the big-guy-in-sky stuff have not been an entirely separate concern from what we call “government”. The notion of a separation of church and state, and the accompanying notion that the former doesn’t have the authority to control the society with actual coercive power, is a new development. So the churchy interest in controlling sexuality and reproduction isn’t meaningfully different from the princely or chieftainish interest in doing so.

Starting with the conversion from hunter-gatherer to agricultural civ, we were a lot more vulnerable to the vagaries and variances in harvest, rainfall or flood or drought, and defense of the fertile planted lands and their crops from other folks (including, at least initially, those unconverted wandering savages who don’t understand the concept of “our land”). Additional mouths to feed can be a problem but so can insufficient young able-bodied laborers and soldiers. If the leaders could link reproduction to productivity and service to the society, especially as they defined it…

The system that feminism calls patriarchy is/was a contract of sorts: the tribe or group would no longer take care of any and all kids and instead individual parents would have to take care of them all by themselves; child care being what it is, it tended to make women more dependent on men, but that gets conveniently turned from tendency to near-absolute if you incorporate some attitudes towards slutty women who don’t save it for their official designated husbands, which has the reciprocally useful effect of making horny young men suddenly find a significantly sexy reason to want to demonstrate an ability to support a family. And to have less inclination to rebel against the elder men running the society. Effectively the culture’s male leaders end up being able to control the supply of female companionship as a commodity, at least to a signfiicant extent. Sprinkle in some corruption and marinate in “do as we say and not as we do”. Define deviations as, well, deviance.

18

That’s the logical consequence of the argument, but I don’t really believe it’s at the heart of anyone’s behaviour, conservative or otherwise. Conservatives and religious people don’t refrain from murder, rape etc because God says so - they refrain for the same reason as most normal, nonreligious people refrain - they recognise and accept those actions as bad; the attribution of this behaviour to observance of a set of rules is just lazy retrofitting both on their part and the part of outside observers.

The fact that their religious moral code coincides with how they would probably choose to behave anyway makes it look like the code is right and they are righteous, but when it comes to the ‘moral code’ rules that are easier to break (adultery, masturbation, etc), the whole thing dissolves into nonsense, because religious people are no better at keeping that part of their moral code than nonreligious people.

19

I would not necessarily disagree with this and I’m an actual card-carrying member of the democratic party. Most organizations - corporations, families, societies, schools, whatever - DO function best when the individuals involved know their roles and requirements. It’s one of the reasons stories about a kid ‘finding his place’ are so popular.

However, I’d want to rewrite the quoted statement above to clarify.

“Society works best when everybody knows their own and everyone else’s proper place and sticks to it.”

Just as important as knowing one’s own place is knowing the places of those around one. It’s not enough to know your own because humans are relational beings. As a whole, we like to evaluate things by how another stands in relation to ourselves. Whether that’s someone in Washington DC asking a new acquaintance ‘what do you do’ so that they can evaluate who’s closer to the seats of power (True behavior pattern if you grow up in DC, no fooling) or fanboys trying to outnerd each other people like to define space and relationships for ease of interaction.

Now, the last clause in the quoted statement, ‘and sticks to it’? That’s where the fun comes in. Those people, the ones who don’t want to stay in their lane, are where advancement and change happen.

20

Sexuality is a powerful thing for good or bad. In the right circumstances it can bind two people together as the basis for a family. In the wrong circumstances it can break up families or prevent them from forming. All social science shows that children raised in two parent households are better off than those raised by single mothers. They are better economically and have better mental health and are less likely to be criminals.
Likewise when children are exposed to sex too early it can have lasting consequences. Teenagers brains are still forming and they are generally bad at self control but the mistakes they make as teens sexually can be permanent. These mistakes can mean high rates of STDs, teen pregnancy, emotional trauma etc.
Thus it is best for a society to create mores which stigmatize unhealthy expressions of sexuality such as adultery, and fornication. Sometimes these mores can overboard and stigmatize non-harmful things and cause harm to people.
A society where sex outside of marriage is stigmatized would have less poverty, less criminality, and less mental health problems. It would be somewhat repressive of sexual non conformists but everything comes with costs and benefits.