[HN Gopher] The Invention of Free Love
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The Invention of Free Love
Author : pepys
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-11-13 06:00 UTC (17 hours ago)
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| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " For her, it was this fusion of love and sex that alone could
| provide 'the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation
| of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of
| nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and
| child-begeters, certainly have no idea.'"
|
| Interesting to see the term child-begeter, reminds me of the
| _breeder_ trope. If you always expect people to find new ways to
| convince others to have sex with them, you will never be
| surprised again.
| shaftoe wrote:
| > YouGov survey in 2020 of adults in the United States found
| that, of those who are in a relationship, more than a quarter are
| non-monogamous.
|
| This seems remarkably high. Is this including "cheating", the
| very name of which implies it's not considered ok?
| air7 wrote:
| Found the source.
|
| > A YouGov poll of more than 23,000 Americans finds that about
| a quarter (25%) of Americans say they _would be interested_ in
| having an open relationship.
|
| https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/articles-reports/202...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't think that's the right source question, I think it's
| this one from this study, https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/a4tvy27
| qfw/Updated%20Results%20f...
|
| "On a scale where 0 is completely monogamous and 6 is
| completely non-monogamous, how would you describe your
| current relationship?"
|
| The results were:
|
| 0 (completely monogamous) 71%
|
| 1 4%
|
| 2 3%
|
| 3 4%
|
| 4 5%
|
| 5 2%
|
| 6 5%
|
| Not sure 6%
| nl wrote:
| So maybe people who are scoring themselves 1 or 2 are
| _thinking_ about other people, 3 flirt with others or
| something?
| sammalloy wrote:
| My understanding is that the answer is no. The 25% generally
| refers to what is called ethical non-monogamy, or open
| relationships. I also think 25% sounds high.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > What we now know as the Free Love movement began in the US in
| the 1850s, and was shaped by the ideas of the French socialist
| Charles Fourier and the anarchist Josiah Warren.
|
| Some interesting intentional communities and wild social
| experiments came out of this. See:
|
| Oneida stirpiculture
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_stirpiculture
|
| Oneida Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community
|
| > Oneida was formerly known as Oneida Depot. In the nineteenth
| century its residents were among the closest neighbors to a
| utopian socialist commune, set up by John Humphrey Noyes, lasting
| from 1848 until 1881. This commune, called the Oneida Community,
| produced silk and canned goods until the manufacturing of
| flatware picked up in the later years of the Community's
| existence. This would lead to the foundation of Oneida Limited, a
| company which survived the Community and became one of America's
| most important flatware producers in the twentieth century.
|
| Another intentional community, Temple of the People, was
| established late in 1898, also in New York like Oneida. They were
| not based on free love, but on Theosophy. They did have similar
| notions about unconditional love in a Christian brotherhood sort
| of way. They moved to Halcyon, California, in 1903. John Varian
| raised his family here, including the famous set of engineers,
| Russell and Sigurd Varian, whose inventions are often credited
| with establishing Silicon Valley.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_and_Sigurd_Varian
| steve76 wrote:
| cfiggers wrote:
| One interesting thing about comparing the relative merits of an
| entire adult life of monogamous commitment vs an entire adult
| life of non-monogamous free love is that no one person can try
| both.
| revx wrote:
| Neat article, but very eurocentric. "Inventing" free love here
| very much feels like "discovering" America.
|
| Currently reading Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner, which offers a
| (westerner's) take on the relationships between sexuality and
| Buddhism, which I'm finding fascinating.
|
| IIRC there were also indigenous American cultures that had
| nonmonogamous marriage/relationship structures but I don't have a
| source for that off hand.
| eesmith wrote:
| > but very eurocentric
|
| And Christian European to boot. Take: "But for centuries in
| Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the
| possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women;
| and no one discussed alternative sorts of relationships. There
| was one exception: a few authors defended male polygamy, as
| sanctioned in the Bible."
|
| I know very little about the Iberian peninsula under Islamic
| rule, but reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-
| Rahman_III with "His natural hair was described as being
| reddish-blond, and he apparently wished to avoid looking like a
| Visigoth (from many European concubines in his ancestry),
| desiring to look more like an Umayyad Arab." makes me pretty
| certain that that non-monogamous {wife + concubine(s)} was
| established in that part of Europe.
|
| "Polygyny , Concubinage, and the Social Lives of Women in
| Viking-Age Scandinavia" byt Ben Raffield, Neil Price, and Mark
| Collard at
| https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/pdf/10.1484/J.VMS.5.114355
| also points out evidence for multiple wives and concubines in
| Scandinavia. And it adds "it is estimated that 85 per cent of
| societies in the anthropological record have practised some
| degree of polygyny, and many societies around the world
| continue to do so today".
| jmbwell wrote:
| Interesting story for all of the big names in literature and
| philosophy it touches.
| yrgulation wrote:
| > Sex is something Godwin doesn't personally enjoy, and he
| doesn't think other people should either
|
| Ok.
| kkfx wrote:
| I think most people do not consider social evolution at a whole.
| We know we are too much for Earth resources, witch means the need
| to reduce the human population. China have tried it in a simple
| way: no more than one child per couple. Than they found a big
| issue: population aging. Witch means young people have to help
| their parents and grandparents alone, and the second generation
| might have also 4 elders to help etc. Automation help a bit, but
| does not suffice. The Swedish model of social services does help
| a bit, but again do not suffice so far.
|
| Inventing "multi-partners families" is a way to re-create the old
| family model with enough young and enough not too old to help the
| elders and the children while still ensuring a reasonably free
| and productive life to anyone "in the family".
|
| It's hard to agree ourselves also in two, in more it's even
| harder, convincing people to a new social model it's equally
| harder, but probably certain trends are a potential partial
| answer to such demographic problems that summed to others might
| "solve enough" for the not-so-far future...
| Thiez wrote:
| One child per couple means every generation will be half as big
| as the generation before it. That is such a ridiculously fast
| decrease that it is no surprise that population aging will be
| an enormous problem. Having 2 (or 2.1 or something like that)
| children per couple will also result in a shrinking population,
| but at a much more sustainable pace.
|
| Not that I particularly support such a policy. It appears that
| a country becoming richer and more educated automatically
| reduces population growth, to the point where the classic
| Western countries tend to have mostly stable populations. I
| don't see multi-partner families being a significant part of
| the solution for large population numbers.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| That wasn't the only issue with the one child policy.
|
| Countries that depend on children caps also generally see sex-
| selective abortion, because generally in most marriage customs
| the man is favored over the woman and no one wants to be
| unfavored. (Interestingly, as regulations have eased and also
| with both increased gender mobility in general and the current
| lopsided situation favoring women, the sex ratio is starting to
| swing back in China.)
|
| If anything, lopsided sex ratios are even more dangerous,
| because revolutions do often get started by young, restless
| men.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| "[A] good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though
| a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is
| worse, as many masters as he has vices." -- Augustine, "City of
| God"
|
| "The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex
| are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is
| dangerous." -- G.K. Chesterton
|
| "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and
| consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any
| difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The
| philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned
| exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also
| concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he
| personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no
| doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness
| was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system
| of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered
| with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed
| that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they
| insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of
| confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic
| revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever."
| -- Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means"
|
| Whenever you meet someone promoting free love, look at whether
| they struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done
| something sexually illicit. Margaret Mead serves as another
| example, now known for her fraudulent studies of Samoan sex life
| in which she claimed that free love is the state of nature. It
| turns out that Mead, too, had been having an adulterous affair.
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