Not Grandma! Ewwww

by digby

I remember reading a review of “Titanic” that said the movie was unbelievable because young ladies of that era did not have premarital sex. It made me laugh. Now I see that a new study says that 95% of American adults have had prermarital sex, and I’m laughing again:

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

Contrary to every generation’s belief (mine most especially), they did not invent sex. Women who were born in the 40’s came into adulthood in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, for crying out loud. I thought everyone knew that people were fucking like crazy during that era. (It wasn’t called the sexual revolution for nothing.)

But then people have always been doing it. A lot. It’s just that before modern feminism and the pill and the right to choose, there were “good girls” and “bad girls” and shotgun weddings and back alley abortions and lots and lots of guilt and shame about doing what humans have been programmed to do since we emerged from the primordial slime. You can’t talk people out of having sex. But you can allow society’s moral scolds and hypocritical busybodies to make everyone miserable about it.

I’m sure that today’s society has problems with sexual issues that are of concern. But going back to the days when society enshrined lying and guilt as a positive social value is hardly going to solve them.

Not that that they won’t keep trying…

.