What is part of American Culture that makes sex such a problem?

[wake.up.america]

The "Puritan" ethic?

For someone looking in, it seems pretty bizarre to read about Larry Craig belittling gays, while he is himself known to be a "switch-hitter".

Pretty screwed up, if you ask me.

The mayor of Berlin is gay. Very little discussion about that.


Wowereit: Berlin’s charming
and very determined mayor

18 September 2006: Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit is Germany’s best-known city leader and, after the departure of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in late 2005, has become one of the country’s leading Social Democrat politicians. Before the 2001 mayoral elections he told the people of Berlin that he was gay. The phrase he used “ich bin schwul und das ist auch gut so – I am gay and that’s not a bad thing” has since been adopted by many prominent people, who declared their homosexuality.



Meanwhile, violent crime increases dramatically in America and that includes rape.

[bananas]

1. Women.

[saltpoint]

2. If you haven't had a chance to read it, author Joe Bageant's DEER HUNTING

WITH JESUS gets at the root of the problem, at least in his interpretation, which is quite a good read.

It's from Crown Publishing, and the full title is

DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS: Disptches from American's Class War.

[wake.up.america]

4. Thank you. I am looking it up.

[Perry Logan]

3. It's the white guys. White guys are often messed up about sex.

[CarbonDate]

5. Religion.

That is all.

[saltpoint]

6. Bageant ascribes the response to the original immigration of

Ulster Scots:

_ _ _ _

"Since arriving in America during the first seventy-five years of the eighteenth century, Calvinist Ulster Scots have constituted a parallel culture to that of enlightened Yankee liberals. Scots-Irish Calvinist values all but guarantee anger and desire for vengeance against what is perceived as elite authority: college-educated secular people who run the schools, the media, and the courts and don't seem to mind if their preacher is a queer. One Calvinist premise has always dominated: The world of god supersedes any and all government authority. Period. That same flaming brand of Calvinism brought here by the Ulster Scots launched American Christian fundamentalism. Now it threatnes to breach the separation of church and state..."
_ _ _ _

[mwb970]

7. It's the Bible-thumping Christians.

At some point, perhaps at the very beginning, a paralyzing fear of sexuality and anything connected with it became the central aspect of Christian belief and political activism. It remains so today. Look at the key religious rightie "social issues": abortion, gay sex, abstinence education, etc. These aren't really "social issues", they are "sexual issues", all having to do with sex, pregnancy, and childbirth (the new Christian Trinity?). Social issues would include poverty, homelessness, the rich-poor gap, and so on, you know, things Jesus talked about, things political Christians seem completely uninterested in since they are not explicitly sex-related.

The repression of this natural urge is what has led to the Foleys, the Craigs, the child-molesting priests, and the rest of the sickness we see on the right. This all seems extremely obvious to me, but the righties just don't see it that way.

[indepat]

9. By George, I think you got it: much perverseness (warped thinking) on issues other

than sexual also stems from the influence Bible-thumping (so-called) Christians have on the body politic. The perverse influence Jesus-lovers have on our society through the body politic might just doom our Republic ala support of junior-types.

[mwb970]

11. I'm not anti-religion, but things do seem out of balance here.

I am thinking of the various European countries where religion is present but does not dominate the political scene as it does here. Those countries seem more balanced and sane to me than America does right now. If America were a person, I would recommend therapy to get at the causes of the religious obsessions that are holding us back and to try to restore a more balanced, nuanced outlook.

[indepat]

29. Neither am I: it's the warped things men do in the name of religion, God, and Jesus

and the political support of those who profess, especially, Christian principles but use religion as an excuse do what is wholly antithetical to every, especially, Christian principle.

[kineneb]

31. balanced now, but not in the past

European countries have learned, through the loss of much blood, that religion is not worth fighting over.

see:
The Crusades
The Reformation
The Counter-Reformation
The Inquisition

all leading up to the biggie:
The Thirty Years War

During the war, Germany's population was reduced by 30% on average; in the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two thirds of the population died. Germany’s male population was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third. The Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.
from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War

ref. also:
http://www.pipeline.com/~cwa/TYWHome.htm

Incidentally, this series of wars were what was on the Founding Fathers' minds when they wrote the Constitution. They were quite aware of the dangers of combining government and religion.

[xchrom]

8. if you want to control some one or a population -- there is simply no better way

than to get a ''hand'' on their genitals.

all these answers about religion are only surface answers.

the point to these examples is that those issuing the rules get control of who fucks who and when and why.

if the message you constantly pound out affects how people feel about their bodies and each other then you get very close to the goal of controlling them -- and their off-spring. and that's very important.

[madokie]

14. when you got 'em by the balls their hearts and minds will follow

trickie dick and ralph steadman's comic comes to mind

somewhere in here a person could find the cartoon, I just don't have time to look right now, sorry
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ralph+steadman&btnG=Search

[xchrom]

21. essentially that's it.

and every one who is in power tries in some form to exercise that equation.

and have done so since the caves.

[conscious evolution]

25. conform compete BREED consume be afraid

It is one of the five themes that saturate our society.

[Gman]

10. Australia got the criminals

we got the Puritans. The rest is history.

[warren pease]

22. The perfect 8-word summary.

We got the fundies, they got the screw-ups.

Another cruel accident of navigation.


wp

[ladjf]

12. A byproduct of religious dogma. (nt)

[madokie]

13. its something that can be enjoyed in the comforts of home

out of the sight of self-rightous eyes. I think its true some people for what ever reason don't enjoy sex, I couldn't imagine that personally, and they don't want us to do it either. The way I have always seen it is we have four sexes , lesbian female, homesexual male, female and male. I've even had a lesbian dog once. I kid you not. sure seemed like it to me anyway cause when she was in heat she would fight the male dogs with a vengenance and try to mount any female dog she seen. Oh she never had any pups either because of said reason.

bigots, now we gots lots of those I might add

[dysfunctional press]

15. white europeans with pale little penises...

they've never been able to get past it.

[Deja Q]

18. Hmmm... Scottish, British, Norwegian, Danish, and a bit of French... European, me be...

I also have pictures (and measurements!) to prove your stereotype isn't even remotely accurate.

Wanna see?

:hide:

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

20. ROFL!!!!

:rofl: No, I'll take your word for it. After all, your graphics are awesome, so I can assume awesomeness in other areas....

[dysfunctional press]

23. i never said that it applied to ALL white europeans...

(i'm a norwegian descendant who wears size 17 shoes.)

but the ones it does apply to are generally the ones seeking positions of power, & making problems for everyone else.

[sarcasmo]

16. One word.

Religion.

[Locrian]

17. mass psychology of fascism

http://www.notbored.org/reich.html

[Echo In Light]

24. Thanks for sourcing that. The social climate of America is largely cosmetic and phony

Because that's specifically how your corporate masters have wired the collective consciousness. That's why so many cling to lies and illusions over substance: they've been culturally trained to place their priorities within that familiar niche. People are every bit as instructed on matters of love and sex as they are on politics/worldview. The real catch is that people do have a visceral sense of this even without understanding how it works i.e. the "manufacture of consent." When it's explained to them however, it makes them feel 'bad' so they retreat from truth, and, as instructed by establishment thinking, resort to relegating truth to "conspiracy theory" as a necessary component of the public mind's defense mechanism. People naturally prefer to think that they are rugged individualists who formulate their own views and make their own choices free from external coercion...and nothing in mass {marketed} society America could be further from the truth.

[wake.up.america]

28. Plastic fantastic BS is everywhere - But I would imagine America is on the forefront.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

19. Puritanism would be my guess

Somehow or other it never really went away when it came to sexuality. The Midwest, where the descendants of the Puritans tended to go, is especially conservative. The West is less so; traditionally, the ones who were freethinkers tended to drift westward, I think, in part to get away from old thinking and old values. I've noticed this in researching my own family tree. The South is populated, to a great extent, by Calvinists and other Protestants who took a strict view of what they considered sexual morality as well.

[L. Coyote]

26. Self-indulgence. That's obvious to an anthropologist. In some other cultures

individuals have much less sense of self. Their identity centers on their interdependent social unit and decisions are logically (in a Darwinian sense) founded on the good of the group.

[havocmom]

27. Not sure, but wondering if there is a clue in my junk mail file.

Are there really enough insecure males around to make all those offers for enhancers lucrative?
Maybe the insecure are just control freaks trying to prevent the rest of us from doing any comparison shopping?

[Blue_In_AK]

32. They're even sending those to me!

Only to get past my spam blocker, they're saying things like "enlarge your pen is." :shrug: If I had a "pen is," I think I'd try to be satisfied with it as it is.

[RainDog]

30. unmitigated capitalism

sex is then another commodity to possess or sell rather than an expression of love or lust.

Females (some old guy said something like this.. oh yeah, engels) were the first form of property. They were used as bargaining chips, not treated like human beings, to make peace or declare one party a winner. imo homosexuals upset that "agreement" and so that's a problem... how can you objectify/dehumanize one gender when others don't fit a simple dominant/submissive paradigm?

the only reason virginity in females was a good thing was because of the higher price/value for a female who could be deflowered by the person who owned her after she left her family. in order to "help" females to comply with their position as possessions, religion made this way of being "holy."

The fear of survival could also make virginity in females a higher commodity because of the male anxiety about paternity. Females know if a child comes from them b/c they give birth to. Males only know by learning some math. B-)

..and even then they couldn't be totally sure (thinking of thousands and thousands of years of human pops.)

We do not have to have our particular attitudes about sex/females if you look at other primate societies (chimps/bonobos) who have different sexual ways of being that are not hard-wired. Human societies also show that sexual ways of being are not hard-wired, either, in terms of gender roles and attitudes about our most basic natures. Bonobos act differntly in captivity. They ask zookeepers for breast implants and silicone for their lips....