[HN Gopher] Regency Sex Ed
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Regency Sex Ed
Author : crescit_eundo
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-01-17 16:22 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historynewsnetwork.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historynewsnetwork.org)
| ggm wrote:
| Absolutely fascinating. The deep history of obvious knowledge of
| reproduction side by side with astounding ignorance is palpable.
| Joseph Heller wrote about it in catch-22 and a parade of modern
| day unexpected pregnancy stories are testament to it's
| continuance.
|
| What's equally fascinating is the equally dichotomous side by
| side knowledge of STDs and their effect on pregnancy. You get a
| lot of it in "who do you think you are" ancestry type shows, when
| there is the massive family lots of children dead quickly story.
|
| I do love a good bodice ripper. Dorothy Dunnett was my stand out
| historian author, maybe I have a (-substantially more fruity)
| alternative to explore.
|
| (Bridgerton was fun but I find Georgette Heyer just as fun, and
| you can't beat her on the peninsular wars or Waterloo alongside
| the heaving bosoms)
| dvh wrote:
| A mother of a teenage son is talking to her husband about
| introducing an important topic to their son. To make it less
| shocking, she suggests using an analogy like butterflies. So, the
| father goes to the son's room.
|
| - "Son, do you remember last year when we went camping?"
|
| - "Yeah, I remember that."
|
| - "And do you remember when we set up the tent by the river?"
|
| - "Yeah, I remember."
|
| - "And do you remember when those two women set up their tent
| next to ours?"
|
| - "Yeah, I remember."
|
| - "And do you remember that one night when they visited our tent
| and what we were doing with them?"
|
| - "Yeah, I remember."
|
| - "Well, you see, butterflies do it in a very similar way."
| technothrasher wrote:
| "It's actually not that similar, since butterflies are
| oviparous, and have ZW sexual determination" - my nerdy high
| school self completely missing the joke.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I assume it's a relief for parents when their offspring
| realise a few sentences in that this is The Conversation and
| they cut to the chase. "Yes mother/ father, I do understand
| roughly how human sexual reproduction works, and I have been
| taught about consent, so we're all good right?"
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Kids sometimes _think_ they know something, but really don
| 't. You get different stories from a friend's older
| brother, a coming of age movie, porn, etc. You can't make
| any assumptions or leave room for interpretation here, so
| you should still have "The Talk(tm)".
| dvh wrote:
| The best I've seen is "Son, do not create future
| obligations!"
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| This is about how I was told. "Do what you want but don't
| make me raise another baby while you're a teen!"
| technothrasher wrote:
| When my son was in preschool, I went to pick him up one day
| and the teacher took me aside and said, "we were reading a
| story about a mom and how she had a baby in her tummy, and
| your son raised his hand and said, 'That's not true. It's
| in her uterus!'"
|
| I've never had "the talk" with him, I talked to him
| continuously through his childhood. As he asked questions,
| I gave him answers.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| This reminds me of the difficulties Louis XVI and his wife Marie
| Antoinette had in conceiving an heir:
|
| > In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany,
| Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete
| blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced--
| then still only 22-year-old--Louis XVI had confided in him the
| course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed;
| saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there
| without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having
| completed the act and "bids goodnight."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_c...
| whycome wrote:
| I believe that's called "soaking"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soaking_(sexual_practice)
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Someone decided that that article needed an illustration.
| Astounding the breadth and depth of things you can find on
| the internet.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Oh, Wikipedia is in the constant change of what do need an
| illustration and what does not or what type it should be.
| Back in 2009 the most pics in the sex and genital articles
| had a self-made pics, which even prompted this:
| Internet access - $25 A digital camera - $250
| Making the whole world see your vagina - priceless
| For everything else there is MasterCard
|
| And somewhere in 2018 I discovered what almost all photos
| in these articles (on the English Wikipedia, other
| languages didn't changed much) were replaced by the most
| basic _pictures_ or the illustrations from _19th century_
| anatomical atlases.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is such a bizarre thing to do from a young
| man/evolutionary instinct standpoint. I wonder if his hormones
| were awry. I see speculation that he had hypogonadism or
| phimosis.
| pavlov wrote:
| The crown prince of France spent his entire life surrounded
| by courtiers who would fulfill his every whim. He barely
| needed to lift a fork to his mouth himself.
|
| Maybe he had depression from this kind of passive lifestyle.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Reading this, it might be as likely that they didn't
| sufficiently like each other.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI#Marriage_and_family
| _...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think it follows that people who have everything given to
| them would turn out to be ungiving lovers, either out of
| ignorance or expectation.
| ndileas wrote:
| Sure, but in this particular case he's not even being
| selfish.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| He was also hella inbred. Look at a picture of him. Not
| too surprising he'd have a messed up endocrine system.
| sdwr wrote:
| "Important" people get trained into helplessness very
| quickly. They are the symbol that validates power, but any
| real action they take is a risk to the movers and shakers
| surrounding them.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| It could also simply have been impotence that he did not want
| to acknowledge.
|
| Made perhaps even more likely with Antoinette's alleged
| proclivities, her children's questionable paternity, and so
| on.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Always leave them wanting more
| tgv wrote:
| The article is --per usual-- not warranting the scope of the
| title. A more accurate title would be: Some literature possibly
| used in educating aristocratic English women about sex. The
| subtitle then would be: while simultaneously plugging my own
| book.
| janalsncm wrote:
| A lot of nonfiction writers only do interviews/podcasts when
| they have a book to plug. I don't mind it, even though it's
| kind of an ad, because the content is still interesting. I
| think the authors want to sell their books, but they're
| typically very interested in the topics and like talking about
| them for the sake of conversation.
| miniwark wrote:
| This is a nice text, but it's heavenly oriented to the very upper
| class society. The author talk a lot about "sexual books" of the
| times, but you will certainly not find the "Memoirs of a Woman of
| Pleasure" (Fanny Hill) in the hand of a proper young woman. (this
| stuff where costly rarities for men too).
|
| It was far more simpler than this, no need for books.
|
| Every rural girls and boys, and women and men living in a city
| did know, without any books, what there is to know simply by
| looking at the animals in the farms or the horses and dogs in the
| streets.
|
| There was also the "education" at the wash-houses... The hubs to
| know everything there is to now at the time.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Yeah. If anything, the 20th century was sort of a nadir for
| this sort of thing, as increasingly large portions of the
| population became more alienated from the natural world. That
| made it _possible_ for young kids and teenagers to have no
| clear idea.
|
| Sex and reproduction was no mystery to almost anyone
| historically. No doubt people, then as now, maintained various
| superstitions that _coincidentally_ involved rationalizations
| for what they wanted to do anyway, but that 's not really a
| matter of _ignorance_ , so to speak. ("Come on, it's your first
| time, it will be OK, nothing will happen...whoops!" is not a
| matter of _ignorance_ generally, but _willful_ ignorance.)
| shellback3 wrote:
| As for books in the 1700's over 60% of women were not literate
| so if one happened on one of the books it couldn't be read -
| but the illustrations would have been interesting to them.
|
| I think that many of the poor lived in habitations where they
| all slept in one, unlit, room where they would get hints about
| sex from childhood.
| btilly wrote:
| It also covers a long time period. The period of extreme
| prudishness was fairly short, and happened during the Victorian
| era.
|
| I have a book from the 1850s that was meant to (mis)inform on
| this topic. The whole masturbation makes people go blind
| nonsense. For people raised on this kind of book, I can believe
| that they would not understand sex. For people a few decades
| earlier, it would be a different story.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Aicha Limbada in _La nuit de noces. Une histoire de l 'intimite
| conjugale_ (in French only) talks about the fact that this
| "education" was sometime done during the night after the wedding,
| when the bride was raped by her new husband.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Well that's one step less bad than the German city states with
| Prima Nocte with the mayor.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Isn't that an urban legend? (We have the same kind of stories
| with lords and peasants in France, and here it's definitely
| an urban legend).
| velcrovan wrote:
| For any society where breeding domesticated animals is a familiar
| aspect of life for most people, I would guess this isn't obscure
| knowledge.
| xattt wrote:
| The subtleties of human courtship that enable bilateral
| pleasure and the principles of animal husbandry are quite
| orthogonal.
| bckr wrote:
| Yes, but TFA starts with questioning whether women knew about
| insertion.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I think that is false, but struggle to explain my point
| without being excessively graphic. People get a lot of bad
| advice, that results in people being anxiously stuck in their
| head during sex, trying to "do a good job" and "pleasure
| their partner."
|
| The reality is mammals have instincts that make sex
| pleasurable both both parties, and it is usually shockingly
| aggressive, even violent seeming. If people could get out of
| their head and into their body and primal desires- and quite
| literally act more like an animal, they'd have much better
| sex.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Given that most animals get it done in under a minute for
| fear of predation or other violence, I'm guessing the
| author is male.
|
| Chimps and bonobos, our nearest cousins, do have a pretty
| spectacular sexual toolbox of course that acts as a kind of
| social lubricant. But it's not all about reproduction, or
| even pleasure, and quite a lot of what they get up to will
| get you jailed in most countries.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I am a straight man, but talking from the perspective of
| what women partners have told me they enjoyed, and were
| interested in doing repeatedly- and it has consistently
| involved acting 'dominant/primal,' physically aggressive,
| and getting deeply into my body and out of my head. Not
| everyone likes the same thing of course, unlike animals
| consent, communication, and mutual understanding are key-
| and much more so than usual when trying things like this.
|
| Counter-intuitively, getting into this headspace makes
| sex last much longer, not shorter- I suspect human bodies
| and minds are different from a lot of other mammals in
| this regard. It is more often that anxiety, tension, and
| over intellectualizing causes issues with men not lasting
| long enough.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| You're assuming that if it's natural, it's good.
|
| One glance at the animal kingdom - there are plenty of
| natural practices that will put you in prison for life.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Not at all- we're mammals but we're also humans, and you
| need to navigate both sides of that in a way other
| species never could or would. What I am talking about is
| essentially a form of BDSM that absolutely requires
| consent, deep mutual trust, and communication- even more
| so than usual when trying things like this together with
| a partner.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Funny how the animals having no problems figuring it out.
| telesilla wrote:
| Anyone who has adopted a kitten too young to spay will know
| very well she knows what to do once her body develops. It's
| interesting humans know how to eat, drink and ablute but need
| to be taught in the most essential:reproduce.
|
| Note: true, teenagers! I completely forgot =/
| beAbU wrote:
| Have you met/seen teenagers?
| hoseja wrote:
| When you mistake Bridgerton for anything but a funny dress-up for
| unrooted americans and attempt to legitimize printed porn
| addictions at the same time.
| amelius wrote:
| How do they learn it today? Hopefully not from the internet ...
| eadmund wrote:
| Basing one's knowledge of history on Bridgerton is much like
| basing one's knowledge of New York City on Metropolis in Superman
| comics. Bridgerton is completely and totally ahistorical. It's
| cosplay.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The puritan moral codex we laugh about today, were actually- sex
| ed. In a time with unhealable venereal diseases, not going
| astray, was vital for survival. Stay true or die with syphilis.
| So- ironic as it sounds, most of the preacher preaching - was the
| sexed which was the style at the times.
| kergonath wrote:
| That's post hoc rationalisation. Other cultures had basically
| the same outcomes without the oppression and obscurantism.
| sombragris wrote:
| Just arguing for GP. It may be post hoc; but other cultures
| did not have such trouble with STDs. England, as a naval
| power, was expected to have such a problem and thus the
| puritan's advice also had practical benefit.
| like_any_other wrote:
| Which other cultures were sexually liberated, and did not
| have trouble with STDs? Large cultures that is, as larger
| populations are more at risk of disease.
| waltercool wrote:
| Starting an historical article with Netflix.
|
| No way I'm reading this.
| like_any_other wrote:
| You short-change yourself. The article mostly consists of how
| false the Netflix depiction is. Though the author doesn't word
| it that way, it's a good reminder of how libelous films are of
| our history.
| sombragris wrote:
| The writing was somewhat interesting until this:
|
| > I found myself confronting the rise of bans on books that
| discuss gender identity and sexuality. Today, sexual education in
| public schools grows increasingly under threat in places like
| Florida
|
| Please. There are no bans on books discussing such matters. You
| can purchase them from Amazon and other booksellers, while in
| 19th century England there were civil and criminal penalties for
| book publishers for the mere act of publishing. That's quite
| different. Public schools may ban books only for their own
| institutions, never for the general public. Any "school ban" does
| not prevent any parent righteously concerned with censorship to
| provide their child a copy of such banned book.
| 333c wrote:
| > There are no bans on books discussing such matters.
|
| contradicts
|
| > Public schools may ban books
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not the same. Public schools (and private schools, and any
| library) choose which books are on their library shelves.
| They have no control over what is published elsewhere.
| sombragris wrote:
| You are right. Edited in order to better express myself.
| Apologies; English is not my first language...
| bobxmax wrote:
| There are large groups of Americans who believe The Handmaidens
| Tale is a real potential future. The lack of perspective and
| melodramatic discord in political theater is exhausting.
| gsk22 wrote:
| I don't follow your objection. Banning books on sexuality from
| public schools threatens sexual education in those same
| schools. That is true even if individual parents can purchase
| such books for their children on the open market.
|
| The point of universal education is to provide for all
| students, _especially_ those whose parents are unwilling or
| unable to provide a quality education independently.
| sombragris wrote:
| The point is that decisions made by schools about which books
| they use or not are not equal to legally enforceable book
| bans for the general public. The article commingles these two
| ideas. That is the objection.
| gsk22 wrote:
| The snippet you quoted does not support that objection,
| though. It is clear from context that the "book bans"
| referred to are in the realm of public education.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| What prior ages had the sense to do was to confine the subject of
| sex to private discussion instead of flouting it in public. It
| also shows a greater reverence and respect for sexual intercourse
| and sexuality; it is not like having a glass of water, to cite
| Kollontai. Our unjust mockery and even caricature of previous
| ages reflects poorly on us.
|
| Public indecency, both in speech and behavior, is a disaster. It
| has a horrible effect on human relations.
|
| 1. It causes scandal in the traditional meaning of that word.
| That is, is creates precedent that people will copy, lowering
| moral standards and causing the spread of bad behavior.
|
| 2. It titillates and exploits the effect sex has on human beings
| in order to manipulate and evade reason. Why do you think sex
| appeal is such a big part of marketing?
|
| 3. It stands behind the rise in sexual abuse we say in the 20th
| century. When decency is normal, the fear of social consequences
| of being indecent keeps would-be abusers in check. It gives
| potential victims an easy way to defend themselves. When
| indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to sexual
| mistreatment. Protestations are viewed as unreasonable or
| prudish, and sexual misconduct is even viewed as funny. These
| accusations have been used to pressure victims into sex.
|
| That being said, not everything was well in the past. I would
| also not exaggerate how common or popular some of the literature
| mentioned in the article was (assuming the interpretations are
| correct; we tend to read our own presuppositions into history,
| producing anachronism). Pornography also existed back then, but
| it was not something most people ever came across. It was mostly
| the product and province of seedy segments of society.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| > it is not like having a glass of water
|
| Sometimes I wish it was. Putting it on too high of a pedestal
| also has negative effects, including introducing unwarranted
| guilt and getting into irreversible bad relationships simply
| because you want sex. I would say has more negative effects
| thnan being open and honest about it.
|
| 1. Scandals are bad due to dishonesty and violated trust in
| authority, not necessarily talking about sex in public.
| Societies that repress sexual expression will always treat
| sexual scandals with more intrigue simply due to repression.
|
| 2. People who are easily manipulated will at some point succumb
| to some type of manipulation including easier-to-do ones like
| fear-based manipulation.
|
| 3. Was it a rise in sexual abuse or a rise in _talking_ about
| sexual abuse?
|
| > When indecency is normalized, we become desensitized to
| sexual mistreatment.
|
| When "decency" as you describe is normalized, we simply don't
| hear about sexual mistreatment. The social consequences can
| work both against and for an abuser.
| dsr_ wrote:
| > What prior ages had the sense to do was to confine the
| subject of sex to private discussion instead of flouting it in
| public
|
| Citation, as they say, needed.
|
| Counterexamples:
|
| The Romans.
|
| The Greeks.
|
| The Babylonians.
|
| The New Kingdom of Egypt.
|
| Most of the Indian cultures prior to the British invasion.
|
| > When decency is normal, the fear of social consequences of
| being indecent keeps would-be abusers in check.
|
| That would depend strongly on what each culture meant by
| "decency" and "indecency".
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Was there a rise in sexual abuse in the 20th century? Or did we
| just shine more light on an ongoing problem?
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