I’d like to think we’ve made some strides over the last four thousand years. We no longer display disemboweled corpses around our cities, for instance. Even though we’ve been carrying around the morals of the ancient Hebrews for a few millennia, the more extreme of them have slowly been jettisoned, one by one. Progress is being made, through education, and people can learn not to fear all change. Enlightened attitudes don’t cause the downfall of empires, over-extension and the concentration of wealth does.
4 Likes
spontaneous horse farm
That is totally my next band name.
10 Likes
No, I mean it wasn’t reality TV at all. Granted, you might have been watching something else where someone really did say something that inane…
1 Like
Yeah, see, I have no idea then, it was two “footballers wives” type girls, sitting on stools in a pub, talking about oral sex… I have no idea what it was, if it was a documentary or reality show, but it was a fictional TV show… so uh, I got nothing. 
@caryroys - “guaranteed”?? So its just a site for pros then, pretending its not… wow, thats a bigger story and no one is talking about it… ?
1 Like
The neocons in power use social conservative rhetoric and thus ensnare the large amount of social conservatives in the US to get what they need. It doesn’t matter if they’re sincere or not. They are effectively promising to return to a fantastical time that never existed in the past. But the framing is pure social conservative.
These people exist, and they are still powerful in the US.
2 Likes
We’ve got evidence going back thousands of years that societies often decline. I’m not sure why the evidence that people pointed this out at the time is a problem.
People like to pull out Socrates on this subject, but he was right. His society was going into decline at the time. Perhaps part of why was that people like Socrates were questioning received truths, like the truth of the Greek religion or the proper way to run a polis.
Really? Looking at history, I see lots of people complaining simultaneously that society is too permissive or too restrictive regardless of the specific society or time period we’re talking about.
Uh, headless corpses as warnings just south of the US border over the last few decades? It doesn’t take much for the old ways to worm back into the repertoire.
You’re begging the question by calling the attitudes in question “enlightened”.
I think over-extension and concentration of wealth are big factors, though I think the concentration of wealth is in part caused by a failure to respect the value systems and traditions that brought the society together in the first place.
1 Like
Dude, leave me alone.
Exactly what I am wondering as well. At this point, speculation on my part with no proof as yet. Could be nothing, given:
2 Likes
Considering how many people still believe that sex before marriage is a sin (I know a couple who were both virgins when they got married at about 26-27 years old - they are only 35 now), it’s not surprising to me that a lot of people may not discuss their sexual compatibility before they get married. Or not fully discuss it, at any rate. Or ignore sexual incompatibilities because everything else seems great, in the hope of improving the sexual stuff down the road.
As long as you are in a state that will garnish your partner’s wages if they fail to pay. And you have the money to pay for a good lawyer to actually get you what you are entitled to, which is presumably less likely if you are also completely financially dependent on your spouse in the first place.
Now, to this article: dude is 43, says he joined the site 8 years ago (so, age 35) and that “Finding women to have sex with was easy”… But the first woman he talked to was when he was 38, so only 5 years ago. Taking 3 years to find someone to have sex with doesn’t sound so easy. How sure are we that this isn’t simply a “Dear Penthouse Fusion - I never thought something like this would happen to me…” situation?
4 Likes
Your post (which I think is very good btw) is reinforcing the point that marriage means different things to different people in different societies at different times, and that all of these differences are subsumed under one word. It’s almost as bad as “god”.
The Venn diagram above can apply to the same two people. I think it must be very rare for two people to have identical ideas of what they expect to get out of a marriage, and there are areas in most marriages which can’t really be discussed because they are outside the comfort zone of one member. The idea that marriages must be perfect must be an invention of divorce lawyers.
My marriage isn’t perfect but it is pretty good. There is no way I would ever find myself on AM or anything like it, but I can imagine different circumstances in which someone like me might act differently, so I find it very hard to be judgemental on the subject.
And now a little story. When Mrs. Thatcher became so bonkers/drunk that she had to go, and a Conservative backbencher, Sir Anthony Meyer, was persuaded to stand against her. A Thatcherite newspaper was approached by someone with a story; this MP was married and had a mistress.
He was told in short order that the MP’s wife was bedridden with a chronic illness, that he refused to divorce her and cared for her deeply, but that he had a longstanding relationship with his mistress since his wife’s illness started, and that no reputable journalist would print the story.
That was nearly 30 years ago. Have standards of journalism gone up or down since?
6 Likes
I don’t have the exacts, but there was an expose well before this story broke of employees/contractors fishing for paid accounts through AM’s system. It’d be interesting if someone cross-referenced the data.
Many persons were treated as chattel at different times, but that it was considered acceptable to do so is not a justification for such behavior.
1 Like
That is one impressive Euler diagram.
1 Like
I have no intention of questioning your experience. My experience is that sex is a nice-to-have and sex problems are minor inconveniences compared to general anxiety about everything. I’m not sure that experience makes good general advice because its different for different people. But I observe that while both sex problems and financial problems end marriages, people talk about sex problems and financial problems in completely different tones. As if you have a moral obligation to be faithful to your partner sexually but you don’t have a moral obligation to be responsible with your partner’s finances. Also, people have financial relationships with people they don’t have sexual relationships with all the time, it can certainly be done.
I’ll agree with that, but periods of extreme restriction have messed up some societies pretty badly. Progressiveness and conservativeness are necessary counterparts.
But whatever people are saying today about homosexual marriage being the death of society, I promise you they were saying that about the end of slavery and desegration. People’s complaints about video games are mirrored almost exactly be people’s complaints about TV and people’s complaints about novels when those were new. I don’t trust any at-the-time assessments of whether society is becoming too permissive or losing its way.
See, I think to myself, what if my marriage vows had bizarrely included not overeating. Well, I’d be sneaking doughnuts on the way home and brushing my teeth feverishly hoping that my life wouldn’t be in a state of upheaval over a behaviour that I know I would sometimes fail to control. Whether are not I am a total shithead for being willing to cheat on my spouse like that doesn’t depend, to me, on whether I happen to have been accidentally born into a world where this is absurd instead of normal. I definitely wouldn’t be honest.
Sex is different than doughnuts, but I was just born as the kind of person who has the right kind of compulsion for staying married to the person I am married to. Or maybe you could say I married the right person. Either way I just feel like sex gets way too high billing.
6 Likes
Are you seriously comparing someone caring for their ill spouse and not abandoning them to someone cheating on Ashley Madison?
Partner abandonment during serious illness is a thing we know about and study, and surprisingly enough, men abandon their seriously ill wives more often then wives do their seriously ill husbands. (http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/11/11/men-more-likely-to-abandon-partner-during-illness/9479.html) So kudos to Sir Meyer for not being a complete dickbag, still no cookies for not being a dickbag though, but that is not what is going on with the dude in the story above. Not even close.
3 Likes
Not to detract from your larger post about relationships, but I wish more right-leaning people I know would read and understand this paragraph.
4 Likes
Trouble right here in River City!
5 Likes
That’s kind of what my thinking was when I was young I first got married to the guy who seemed financially stable but not so good in bed. Now I have another view of things.
4 Likes
Great points.
Also fair.
I actually got to thinking about this in one of the threads about California’s water crisis, in regards to the fact that farmers who have “seniority” in terms of water rights are kind of “defecting” in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma kinda thing, and that the emphasis on freedom of the individual in our society might indicate that people are giving up on the shared values upon which our society was built.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you think of our society.
But the point is, it’s not just marital infidelity and sexual permissiveness I’m pointing to – that’s one aspect of a larger gestalt.
It’s good, but “spontaneous horse farm” makes an even better name for a new dating service.
6 Likes
Life is short. Add to your stable.
9 Likes
