Li Yinhe talks about sex

Chapter 18 Analysis of Western Sexual Revolution (2)
The impact of the sexual revolution on traditional society will inevitably bring about a conservative backlash.The trend of thought represented by the "moral majority" is traditional in terms of sexual concepts and conservative in political views, and they oppose all changes brought about by the sexual revolution and related events.The New Right opened up the battleground of sexual politics in the mid-20s at a time when public liberal attitudes toward sex were on the rise in both the United Kingdom and the United States.The social cleansing movement mobilized a considerable number of voters and gained legislative support, and contributed to the victory of the conservative forces in the elections.The thinking of the American New Right uses "sexual anarchism" as an explanation for social ills, effectively aggregating social anxieties and exploiting a potentially powerful mass base.There are two key core groups: Christian voters and a majority of middle-class voters who have a moral concern for women.The slogan of the New Right is "Defend the Family."In the United States, it has aligned itself with religion, uniting disparate interest groups under a comprehensible political goal.This is a political symbol as powerful as "indulgence" but completely opposite. It provides a powerful totem in Western politics where the power of political partisan mobilization is gradually weakening.

The forces supporting traditional attitudes remain strong.Conservative morality is generally restrictive, characterized by the belief that heterosexual intercourse in a married relationship is the only morally acceptable form of sexual activity.Sex within marriage serves two key functions: procreation and conjugal bonding.According to this moral point of view, contraceptive attempts and any form of non-reproductive sexual activity are unacceptable.In the 20s, especially after the discovery of AIDS, the conservative and moralist right dominated the field of sexual politics, not the liberal left.

America's large Christian population provides enormous money, moral advocacy, and political power to conservatives and moral movements. In 1993, the Southern Baptist Convention launched the "Waiting for True Love" campaign, encouraging many teenagers to sign premarital chastity vows.Defending "family" and its values ​​mobilizes emotions.Many people believe that family represents inevitability, stability and social status.Family life as a social and moral guarantee also makes most women proponents of moral purification.Many women vehemently opposed feminism, in part because of a fear that its sexuality shattered traditional family patterns and, more generally, the traditional bonds that bound relationships between men and women.

In addition to protecting the family, the rightist view also protects children.This involves the so-called "pedophilia" issue.Intergenerational sexuality and voluntary age lines have always been one of the most sensitive issues.Since the 18th century, children's sex has been regarded as taboo, and moralism believes that children are ignorant, which is a critical period for purification.Masturbation in particular provokes moral anxiety.Oddly enough, while most intergenerational sexual relationships occur between adult men and young girls, gay men are often synonymous with "child sexual predators."Moral absolutism holds that intergenerational sex is wrong in that it destroys the ignorance necessary for child development.

Stereotypes of intergenerational relationships mask their complex realities.The results of some surveys show that all the fantasies about pedophiles are not true, and that in male-boy relationships, the boys are generally older than the heterosexual love age group.Among self-identified pedophiles and "boy lovers," there was no evidence of cruelty or violence.And the harm from the public, parents and politics outweighs the harm from sex itself.And many adult-child sexual relationships are youth-initiated and free from coercion and conscious exploitation.

During the conservative resurgence of the 80s, right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, obscenity, abortion, and premarital sex moved from the extreme fringe to the center of the political arena, with the dynamism of right-wing strategists and fundamentalist religious movements Molecules have found that these questions appeal to the masses.Sexual reaction played a distinct role in the right's 1980 election victory.Groups like The Moral Majority and Civic Dignity have acquired large followings, enormous financial resources and unexpected political clout.The sexual resurgence was violent.The current sexual counter-offensive launched by the right is part of the counter-offensive against sexual liberation in the 60s and early 70s.Among other things, it has led to a rallying of forces and conscious cooperation among sexual radicals.

There are two modes of sexuality theory as a political tool "oppressive mode" and "liberative mode".If life is seen as a never-ending struggle between animal instinct and morality, the tyrannical policy of sexual oppression is the inevitable guarantee of civilization.There is strong support for this view, as Freud, Kraft-Ebing, and many social theorists share this position.And if sex is distorted and misused by the wrong civilization as a beneficial energy source, people should be liberated from "civilization" and realize the healthy and natural sexual freedom of the oppressed true self.There is also strong long-term support for this view, from Rousseau, Fourier, and Edward Carpenter to contemporary feminist Susan Griffin.The difficulty is in judging what is natural and what is unnatural.Rousseau was against masturbation and female sexual activity; Reich was against all non-genital sex; Susan Griffin was against pornography and sadomasochism, all in the name of nature, in which some see "sex the essence of liberation.Russell proposed: Sex should be regarded as food, which is a natural need of human beings, and its restraint should only be for the reason of protecting health, and other things should not be necessary.

During the sexual revolution of the 60s, the voices of sexual "dissidents" and sexual liberators gained increasing attention.Like those who opposed traditional values ​​in other areas of society, they adopted the term humanism to express the role of human beings in choosing their way of life and moral disposition.The followers of humanism are mainly the younger generation, sex lovers who are contrary to traditional morality and opponents of traditional rules.Humanism does not believe that the dominant sexual value in Western society is superior to the value of other cultures. It opposes the use of rules and laws to control human sexual behavior, which adds a color of resistance to law to humanism.Sexual transformation has created sexual radical movements.The new movement targets all areas, including sexual democracy.Slogans like “Our bodies are our own” articulate the common attributes of the movement, making issues of identity, pleasure, and choice that were previously considered apolitical take on a political dimension.This has undoubtedly profound implications for the future of democracy.

One of the ideas of the sexual revolution was the emphasis on individual rights.Therefore, some people call the sexual revolution power politics.The power politics of the sexual revolution emphasizes the following values: the right to choose, independence, and multiple values. The main purpose of this new sexual revolution in the 20s was the secularization, liberalization and pluralization of sex.

The process of secularization of sex involves breaking away from the control of traditional religions in terms of sexual concepts and behavioral norms.In 1992, the Republican convention in the United States tried to impose an ultra-conservative moral agenda on the party: against abortion, campaigning against the recognition of gay rights, and affirming "family values" as a strategy for winning over the masses.And the fact that most citizens, even the most traditional Roman Catholics, no longer heed orders against birth control is an example of the secularization of sexual norms in Western countries.This process is still developing healthily after the 20s.

The process of sexual liberalization includes the rejection of absolutist or absolutist values, and an increasing emphasis on the individual's right to make decisions about sexuality.In the United Kingdom, by the end of the 20s, about 80% of single women lived with men before marriage, compared with only 50% in 1970; the proportion of children born out of wedlock rose from 7% in 1980 to 12% in 1988; Four out of every marriages end in divorce.The divorce rate in the United States is as high as 25%.The shifts in belief and behavior appear to be long-term, over which governments have very limited influence.Governments can enact draconian laws, can condemn "promoting homosexuality", can add to the sum total of human suffering.However, the government cannot force people to behave in ways they do not want.

The process of sexual diversity involves an increase in people's tolerance for diverse sexual patterns.People are gradually accepting the fact of sexual diversity.People have different needs and desires, they live in different types of families, and they have different types of relationships.However, many people are unwilling to accept pluralistic standards, and when they judge people, it seems that there is always a common moral standard by which they should live.Rather, one of the major problems of the 20s was the attempt to move society from awareness of diversity to acceptance of diversity as a normal phenomenon.The famous sexologist Weeks said: "There is no other field that is more uncertain than sex." Sexual pluralism also includes: from essence theory to construction theory, no longer treating some distinctive sexual orientations as The essence of human beings; from procreation to multiple motives—no longer judging whether a certain sexual style is normal or in line with the requirements of nature based on whether it is possible to reproduce; from abnormality to difference—no longer treating minorities in sexual orientation as abnormal , but only as a difference in people.The principle of pluralism is that there should be no attempt to reduce the sexual differences of people to a uniform "correct" pattern of behavior.Pluralism focuses on the exercise of power and the necessity of a struggle to transform existing social relations, the main subjects and main beneficiaries of this struggle are various sexual minorities.

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