Sexual Taboo

[Grammatron]

I was reading one of Malachi151's posts and it got me thinking: Why is it "communist" countries who were strictly atheist put as much if not more taboo on sexual activities as capitalist countries? I hope someone on this forum can provide me with a reasonable answer.

[jj]

Originally posted by Grammatron
I was reading one of Malachi151's posts and it got me thinking: Why is it "communist" countries who were strictly atheist put as much if not more taboo on sexual activities as capitalist countries? I hope someone on this forum can provide me with a reasonable answer.

Offered for discussion:

It's a question of control, not of religion.

[Grammatron]

Originally posted by jj


Offered for discussion:

It's a question of control, not of religion.

Thank you for replying.

How does, for example, making prostitution illegal helps you control the country better?

[Nasarius]

Originally posted by jj


Offered for discussion:

It's a question of control, not of religion.

Exactly. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, regardless of your economic model. And atheism doesn't preclude sexual conservatism. Governments come and go...societal norms can be slow to change.

[Crossbow]

Originally posted by Grammatron
I was reading one of Malachi151's posts and it got me thinking: Why is it "communist" countries who were strictly atheist put as much if not more taboo on sexual activities as capitalist countries? I hope someone on this forum can provide me with a reasonable answer.

I think that it was a legacy of their past.

Keep in mind that Russia was still largely a fudeal society prior to 1917 and they still had a good bit of societal growth to catch up on and there simply were not that many communists who were well versed in the details of what it involved. Most of the people who called themselves communists were haters of the monarchy who would have signed on with about anyone who had the same enemy that they did.

[Ove]

I think that one of the ideas behind the communism was that you should give up your own needs for the benefit of the gommon need. In other words, enjoying sex is a strictly personal matter and all good communists should allways think of the common good. Sex was nescessary for reproduction, PERIOD.

Also you'll find that in communism equality was very important and in the communist "camp" there was a lot of very rabiate feminists that saw sex as "mans way of opressing women". We have an organisation that runs some scools etc. here in Denmark called "Tvind". It is run on a VERY marxist basis. All the employee's pay their salaries into a common "fund" and then they recieve food, homes etc.

Love is discouraged strongly, it is seen as a way of "binding" people and taking their minds off the "common cause".

On a side note they are currently under investigation for Fraud and Taxevation on a massive scale. Their leader was found living in a billiondollar apartment in Florida but was extradited last year.

As jj said, sex is a way of controlling people because sex takes their minds away from "more important" matters. Why do you think the church attacs sex so agressively?;)

[Jon_in_london]

Originally posted by Grammatron
I was reading one of Malachi151's posts and it got me thinking: Why is it "communist" countries who were strictly atheist put as much if not more taboo on sexual activities as capitalist countries? I hope someone on this forum can provide me with a reasonable answer.

Basically as has been said above, it boils down to authoritairianism (too early to spell).

Take another case of restrictions on sexual activities: Aparthied South Africa. Sex between races was illegal- you could be locked up in jail for humping someone not of your own racial classification. Sodomy was illegal, if you were arrested on a charge of sodomy and tried to escape- the police could (and would) shoot you on sight.

Aparthied South Africa was a seriously religious regime- although athiesm wasnt illegal it was certainly considered a sort of vice, kind of like being drunk on a sunday.

[Nefertiti]

Originally posted by Nasarius


Exactly. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, regardless of your economic model. And atheism doesn't preclude sexual conservatism. Governments come and go...societal norms can be slow to change.
I concur. Societies held in a state of strong control, can take many years to shake off the effects of that invisible control collar.

[Malachi151]

Originally posted by Grammatron
I was reading one of Malachi151's posts and it got me thinking: Why is it "communist" countries who were strictly atheist put as much if not more taboo on sexual activities as capitalist countries? I hope someone on this forum can provide me with a reasonable answer.

Why do you think that they have taboos on sex?

Sex is very open among Russians as far as I know, much, much more so than here. Umm.. AIDS is a big issue in China must mean someone is having sex, but anyway China is a product of its own cultural traditions as well. Far as I know prostitution is rampant in Hong Kong, I dunno about the rest of China though. I knwo that the main point of going Communist for the Chinese was to end Western exploitation, which included prostitution and drugs, so they came down hard on those things. What sex is like in China right now I have no idea. What about Cuba? Are you saying that Cubans aren't very open sexually? As far as I know the opposite is true, they are very sexal.

So first of all, provide some evidence that any Commnist country was sexually reserved.

[Grammatron]

Originally posted by Malachi151


Why do you think that they have taboos on sex?

Sex is very open among Russians as far as I know, much, much more so than here. Umm.. AIDS is a big issue in China must mean someone is having sex, but anyway China is a product of its own cultural traditions as well. Far as I know prostitution is rampant in Hong Kong, I dunno about the rest of China though. I knwo that the main point of going Communist for the Chinese was to end Western exploitation, which included prostitution and drugs, so they came down hard on those things. What sex is like in China right now I have no idea. What about Cuba? Are you saying that Cubans aren't very open sexually? As far as I know the opposite is true, they are very sexal.

So first of all, provide some evidence that any Commnist country was sexually reserved.

As I said few times before on this forum, I lived in what was formerly known USSR and as far as I saw sex was no more open than it is here in the USA. I don't know where you are getting the idea that Russians are far more open about sex than Americans. Also, Hong Kong and communism have nothing in common, I have no idea why you are bringing it up in this discussion at all.

China is a bit different, forgoing AIDS which wasn't always a problem, and China has overpopulation to worry about so I see the incentive for them to control sex.

What about Cuba? Well I don't know about Cuba but I would assume that when they were more "communist" back when USSR still existed, you would not be able to find any strip clubs or any establishments of that nature.

[Malachi151]

Well, since I have no real information about the sex in "Communist" societies its impossible for me to say.

I don't know what sex was like in Communist Russia or what it was like in Czarist Russia, which you would need ot know to compare, the same goes with any other place.

What is obvious is that none of the so called Communist countries in the world were anythign at all like the Marxist/Leninist ideals of utpoian freethought socities, so to try and compare Marxist Communist ideology with the Stalinist or Maoist practices is kind of impossible an any level, economic, sexual, social, etc.

The idea of Marxism was to create the most open and democratic society in the history of the world, and obvioulsy nothing of the kind was produced from the people who took control in the name of Communism.

I did always presume though that sexual attitudes were more progressive in Russia, though I don't have any real reason why, other than perhaps it was just old Cold War propaganda to make the Russians look corrupt compared to traditional Christian values.

[renata]

Sexuality was seen as bourgeois decadence.

Homosexuality was against the law in the USSR. Sex was not talked about in the media and in the schools. Premarital sex was seriously discouraged. Abysmal living conditions made it nearly impossible, so many marriages happened while people were were in their late teens or early twenties. One of the consequences of government imposed silence was that HIV and AIDS was not talked about, information was suppressed, and epidemic was not dealt with appropriately. Of course that resulted in an explosion. In addition, at one point in the 20s or 30s because prostitution was a symptom of bourgeois society and could not exist in communist paradise there was no law on the books about, and so prostitutes could not be prosecuted. It was quite comic, really. I believe this episode is described in Gulag Archipelag.


http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/14/spotlight/


"The state created various administrative obstacles to extramarital sex," theater critic Irina Glushchenko wrote in a recent Moscow Times article. "Unmarried couples could not share hotel rooms; nonresidents were not allowed to stay the night in student dormitories. Soviet people basically had nowhere to be alone."

....

Under Soviet anti-sodomy laws, she points out, male homosexuals found themselves vulnerable to blackmail from the KGB -- which could demand they inform on their friends, family and associates. Lesbians also were persecuted.

"It was very dangerous," adds Essig. "Female lovers were institutionalized as manifesting schizophrenia. If their lesbianism would not 'go away,' they were given heavy anti-psychotic drugs or encouraged to have sex-change operations and become men."


http://www.aaronsgayinfo.com/timeline/time30.html


March 7, 1934

Article 121 makes sodomy between men illegal in all the republics of the USSR. Maxim Gorky, a popular writer and the leading Soviet intellectual of the period, praises the "proletarian humanism" of the law, which punishes sex between consenting male adults with up to five years' "deprivation of freedom."
....

January 1936

USSR: People's Commissar for justice Nikolai Krylenko asserts that homosexuality is counterrevolutionary and cannot exist in a socialist state.



http://pages.zoom.co.uk/lgs/gwrussia.html



1917-1933 ~ The October Revolution threw out the entire Criminal Code of Imperial Russia, including the offence of muzhelozhstvo (male homosexuality). Social disapproval continued, however; homosexuality was still associated with the / pre-revolutionary bohemian elite. Stalinist policies led to recriminalisation, because of perceived associations with Nazism.

1984 In Leningrad the first organization of gay men was formed, but was stopped by the KGB.

1993 ~ With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Article 121 was repealled and gay men who had been imprisoned under the article began to be released

1989 ~ The Moscow Gay & Lesbian Alliance was formed in the new glasnost era, headed by Yevgeniya Debryanskaya.

1991 ~ UKRAINE becomes the first country of the former USSR to decriminalise homosexuality.

1991 ~ First Russian gay Pride celebration, June 20th-30th.

1993 ~ With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Article 121 was repealled and gay men who had been imprisoned under the article began to be released. Gay communities and businesses have flourished in Russian cities, along the lines of Western Europe.




http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/ja/transfor.htm



The "sexual question" was treated quite many-sidedly in Russian literature during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s new Russian social research into sex and sexuality flourished. But just as the "woman question" was far from being "solved," so was the "sexual question." After the Revolution of October 1917 and during the 1920s there was an attack on bourgeois sexual ethics with its capitalistic decadence and double standards, and on the traditional family organization and the institution of marriage. Women, whom most Bolsheviks regarded as societally, economically and mentally backward, were to be socialized to equality and a proletarian consciousness in an atmosphere of comradeship. Still there was uncertainty about gender issues, sexual identities and sexual norms.

....

But, on the whole, Bolshevism could not cope with the sexual diversity and relativism found in sexual morality. Sexuality was either mechanically biologized or bodily pleasures and personal desires were harnessed to machines and heroic productive work. Physical fitness, athletics and sport were the guiding activities for the proletarian consciousness, and anarchic sexuality was controlled according to collective ideals and proletarian class interests

For example psychoneurologist and "pedologist" Aron Zalkind in his popular books was opposed to Kollontai and the "winged Eros," and provided the revolutionary proletariat with "Twelve Sexual Commandments." In them he dogmatically presented, among others, that there should be no premarital, no purely physical, no frequent sexual relations. Sexual involvement with an immoral "class enemy" was forbidden, since it was comparable to the "sexual involvement of a human being with a crocodile or orangutan." Love relationships were to be monogamous, procreation-centered, free from "perversions" and jealousy. The proletarian sex-economy and sexual regulation was based on the right of the working class (i.e., the Party) to interfere in the sexual life of the class members, with the view of establishing a "healthy revolutionary new generation."37

.....

Beginning in the 1930s totalitarian control over individuals was launched, which meant administrative suppression, negation of sexuality and elimination of anything that resembled a sexual culture. The group-fantasies about glorious social and economic transformations were desexualized, filled with sacrifice, idealization and heightened sublimation. Under Stalinist (sexophobic) sexual policy, the "emancipation" of women (declared achieved) and the "socialist family" (newly labeled) only hardened the double (or triple) burden of women. The ideal called the "new Soviet person" promoted by the Party actually gave rights to men and the responsibilities to women. The ideal working woman was a kind of androgyne, subordinated to male norms. Female idols were male-like. Gender differences were mostly eliminated in the official propaganda and in school education until in 1943 coeducational instruction was changed into sex-segregated, which began to polarize sex-role stereotypes.39

There was also a growing concern in the mid-1930s among the Party about declining birth rates, so that abortion was made illegal, and women were more and more prepared for motherhood. Consequently, homosexuality became a crime (until June 1993), and divorce more difficult to obtain. In July 1944, a new family law (The Family Edicit) was accepted which included the nomination of the "heroic mother." Every family was ordered to have at least six children. In the same year, 1944, a special law freed men from alimony payments for the support of illegitimate children. Women were deprived of the right to demand such alimony, but could obtain financial assistance from the state. Thus, also polygamous and polyandrous sexual relations were indirectly sponsored by the state.40 The "great and mighty" Soviet Union desperately needed new builders of socialism, so the worship of motherhood (in fact, of the woman as a birth-giving-machine) continued well into the 1960s.41 And white Russian children were the best Soviet citizens.
....

Soviet medical sexology was called "sexopathology," which gives the idea of the "normal" and "healthy" vs. "abnormal" and "devious" sexuality.45
....

In the 1970s, a new sex-role problem began to worry the Russians; that is the "masculinization of women" and "feminization of men."46 Women were accused of abandoning their task of caring and working, and of being too mannish. The man's role, that of the victim, who had to booze ever harder, was given center stage. Pedagogical literature gave advice about behaviors that fitted gender-specific norms.....

[Dancing David]

I think that looking at the idea that Russia and China were basicaly feudal states prior to the revolutions, would be a good place to start.

In Russia there was also the strong influence of the Orthodox church, even while being persecuted.