Sexual Morality

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Yesterday I watched Dr Phil, America’s mass psychologist, on TV try to analyse why a beautiful young girl wanted revenge on her cheating lover.

The 18 year old girl was gorgeous and obviously wounded, both in ego and in the heart. Her lover was a handsom 36 year old bachelor. She had found out that he was having sex with three other women during the same time he was dating her. His defence was that he had made no formal engagement proposal while dating her. As for dating younger women - it was because “older women carried too much emotional baggage.” He had no qualms about having multiple sexual relations simultaneously - and cited the weekly reality TV series “The Bachelor” who did the same thing in front of million of viewers, screwing at least five of them before choosing the one he would marry.

Cuts to the audience during the interview showed a lot of women listening to the conversation. Most of them looked inwardly confused. Their smiles at Dr Phil’s wise-cracks regarding the situation were somewhat strained.

Dr Phil was squarely in the bachelor’s corner. His only admonishment was that he felt the guy should have been more forthcoming about his other liaisons while dating the girl. He gave the girl a hard time about wanting revenge and told her that she should drop the guy and her feelings of rejection and move on.

The irony of the show (completely missed by the good doctor) was that he was analysing the dysfunctional behavior of a grown man, who was complaining that older women were too messed up to date, while at the same time acting as a sexual predator who callously preyed on the feelings of impressionable young women - and in the process was directly responsible for gradually turning them into the emotional baggage that men like him would not date when they were older.

The show reinforced my view that American sexual morality is skating on a very thin edge. The confused faces of the women in the audience as they painfully watched one of their own squirm in front of the camera, reminded me of the fact that the women’s lib movement has a price to pay in their fight for sexual equality. There are times when I wonder if the price is too high. It also made me wonder what Moslems thought when they viewed the show.

A century ago, if that naive young girl had been my daughter or my sister, it would have been within my rights to label the man as a cad and a scoundrel and have him publically flogged or shot in a duel. Now we have TV series that about thiose same scoundrels that enthrall millions.

Our ancesters would surely turn in their graves if they knew how drastically family values have changed. I have three beautiful young daughters of my own. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I am not so sure if my feelings about men who prey on young women for their private enjoyment have changed. I also have five good-looking sons and I know what I would do to them if they treated a neighbor’s daughter like that.

2

do you know why it got this bad? i mean in just decades ,it changes this fast!

the change is exponential…

3

The change in finding our way back onto the straight and narrow can be even faster.

4

First of all, there has been no change except an increase in openness. The behavior of the man on Dr. Phil’s show is timeless, and existed long before television shows of that nature, and also long before the time that the OP seems to believe the change occurred.

To some extent, this conflict between the sexes is written into our genes. It’s a sound reproductive strategy for a man to attempt to mate with as many women as possible, and so a lot of men tend to do that. Always have, and barring genetic engineering always will. It’s not an absolute – not ALL men do that – because it’s also a sound reproductive strategy to have fewer children by fewer women and pay more attention to their nurturance and help them survive.

In ecological terms, it makes sense for men to follow either an “R” strategy or a “K” strategy. But for women, “K” is the only strategy that works. So although women certainly do “cheat,” they are more likely to do it while also enjoying a stable relationship, into which they attempt to secretly introduce some new (and hopefully better) DNA, whereas philandering men are more likely to avoid commitment altogether.

This has nothing to do with prevailing sexual mores. Actually, all such mores do, when they conflict with natural behavior, is to shove such behavior under the rug, and/or make us feel bad about it. Most definitely they do not stop it.

5

Maybe it is wrong ethically to cheat on people because it causes them much harm and suffering… maybe it is also wrong to cheat because cheating is a form of lying which weakens the foundation of communication…

Genetics are no excuse. If we didn’t program ourselves to use toilets, we would poop outside and wipe with leaves. Resorting to “natural law” for ethics has already been proven to lead to absurd consequences…

Who cares if we naturally want to screw a lot of women? In all likelihood, we aren’t trying to impregnate those women so we are no longer even fulfilling the natural purpose which you are saying is genetically hardwired into us.

It’s just a lack of moral discipline and it can cause great harm to loving relationships.

This isn’t in regards to polyamority but in regards to cheating in a monogamous relationship (as was defined by the original poster’s context).

6

Did you think I was offering it as one? An explanation is not an excuse, it is merely a remedy for ignorance.

The assertion was made that American sexual morality was somehow in decline. This is nonsense. There has been no significant change except in the increase in openness. I was challenging that assertion, not discussing what sexual morality ought to be.

7

Well I was, at least by inference.

It seems that you have missed the moral argument entirely. We all know that men have cheated on their wives and sweethearts for centuries. I challenge your statement that sexual promiscuity was just as prevelent in the past as it is today. With common whores maybe. Decent girls dare not loose their virginity a few genarations ago. Women were stoned to death for commiting adultary. Cads were publically flogged and shot by outraged fathers and brothers. That reality kept sexual promiscuity within reasonable moral bounds. It is outrageously rampant today and, as seen on the show in metioned, very hurtful to naive young women - not to mention the AIDS epidemic. Divorce, once rare and difficult to obtain, is now the norm and is there simply for the asking, no matter the damage to the children who are inevitably emotionally split in two.

8

Having listened to the conversations of octogenarians who finally let slip their facade of moral superiority, I think it is reasonable to believe that promiscuity was as common a few generations ago as it is today. The moral stigma associated with such promiscuity in the past was, I believe, far greater than it is today, so their shame was hidden more diligently, and more ruthlessly.

9

So . . .

What I am getting from your post, MM, is that in the past these things were done with professionals, but since that avenue is now illegal, we are stuck seeking help from ametuers?

10

First off, any non-American who watches shows like Dr. Phil thinking that’s how all of us behave is narrowminded anyway.

That would be like me saying that all French people are snobs. Or all Muslims are terrorists. Or all British people have bad teeth. Or maybe that all Irish people are drunks just based on what I’ve seen on TV or in the movies.

I’m not going to stereotype an entire group of people based on how the media portrays them.

What were we talking about?

Oh, yeah. Not all American women are dumb whores.

Or wait, if people are going to cheat, then they should secure the services of a bonafide professional?

I’m lost.

11

[Deleted Moronic Post]

12

I doubt we can put the toothpaste back in the tube, at least not very quickly.

13

I don’t mean to be snide here, but MagnetMan, may I ask how old you are?

I ask that because I was born and grew up towards the end of the era you are talking about (the 1950s specifically) and saw firsthand the reality of that time. And yes, sexual promiscuity was just as prevalent then as now, except perhaps that people did not tend to engage in sex quite so young. (Although actually, young people today don’t lose their virginity, on the average, as early as people did in the 1970s and 1980s. So this is probably a back-and-forth thing, not a linear trend.) But adultery among married couples? Happened all the time. And callous cads taking advantage of innocent hearts also happened all the time. It hasn’t increased.

The past before one’s own memory becomes fuzzy and hazy and illusions prevail over truth very easily. Especially when the reality was often concealed out of shame, as it was then.

14

I was a war baby, born in 1941. As a teen during the '50’s I was pretty well versed on the sexual morality of that era. During the decades that have followed since I was trained as a professional televison producer specializing in documentay programs on social evolution.

You seem interested in sociology. Sincere challenges regarding the human condition interest me. If I had some idea of your qualifications, perhaps it would give me some point of reference in which to engage in a more informed dialogue on human behavior than we have as yet.

After forty years in the field writing and producing programs on everything from animsim to zen around the world, which have been viewed by literally millions of people, I believe I have enough well-researched information to make reasonably authoritative comments on the ethical condition of human behavior.

The conclusions I have derived from direct exposure are an age advanced on those currently taught in universities. So I expect incredulity.

Quite the contrary. Younger people have a vastly distorted view of what old age portends. I had no idea in my mid 50’s of how subtley my mind and attitude would change a decade later. We pass through seven subtle changes of consciousness between birth and death. Not all of us end up with Alzheimers. The older I get the more interesting my past and that of our ancestors becomes. Minute personal details, long forgotten and buried deep in the psyche, keep surfacing. Like discarded cuts from a movie edit, when reviewed decades later they reveal a previously hidden relevancy to the larger scheme of things. It makes one wonder why they were discarded. Each is like a missing piece of a giant life puzzle which, when juxtaposed against other larger events, reveal truths never realized when I was younger - and indeed could not have been, for i had not accumulated enough further experience then…

Shame for past mistakes is very real and burns like hellfire and the true seeker of self-knowledge does not try to hide from it.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would like to add that I have studied and documented human evioltuion all the way back to the Stone Age. I have lived with Bushmen in the Kalahari and tribesmen in Zululand, as well as cultures in the Middle East, Far east, Europe and America. I have unearthed forgotten knowledge about the foundations of human behavior that continue to affect almost every social and spiritual action we engage in today. As a professional communicator for most of my adult life, I believe that it is essential that this forgotten knowledge about who we are, why we are here and where we are going, needs to be to shared. Though my reports may sound eccentric to the uninitiated, and on the surface seem to challenge conventional wisdom, they are based on a wealth of field research and I will stand by every statement I make.

15

Magnetman:

I apologize for jumping to conclusions about your age. The line you were taking was so much like that of a starry-eyed whippersnapper romanticizing the past without a clue what the past was really like, that I assumed you were young.

Since you’re nothing of the kind – Surely you aren’t going to seriously contend that men didn’t fool around with multiple women, often without being honest about it, in the 1950s and earlier?

If you lived through World War II, even as a child, then surely you knew, or at least knew of, soldiers who talked young women into giving them a “going-away present” and in many cases left them with one? Or women married to soldiers who cheated on them while they were away for several years? Surely there was a girl or two you knew in high school who had the reputation of “putting out” easily? And, not that the White House is really any indication of overall cultural trends, but Bill Clinton had nothing on Jack Kennedy when it came to womanizing, and he never got impeached over it (and I hardly think that was why he was assassinated).

The idea that the past of our culture actually WAS significantly more sexually continent and chaste than the present, as opposed to PRETENDING to be, is a myth. You are in a position to know that from personal experience, just as I am. And so I cannot understand at all why you are suggesting the contrary.

16

Thanks for the compliment.

I had more liiasons than I can count myself - mabybe 50 all of which I am now ashamed of.

There is no need to state the obvious. We are talking about a radical increas in quantity there. There is on record one recent case of one boy in primary school that has had 5000 sexual encounters. That is a hundred-fold increase. Girls of eight are now having sex. We have a basketball star who claims that he has had 20,000 women. If that is not as decline in sexual moraity what is.

They were not just pretending, many were actually trying.
From where our ancesters come from, difficult as it is, trying to rise above basic animal instincts is called culture.