LOL sometimes grandma's aren't too grandma-like. At one point in their lives they were young and pretty too
My mom came from a large family and I asked my grandma why did she have so many kids. Her reply "I just liked doing it with your grandfather too much... and before we knew it, there was another baby"
I'm not even sure that much is really true. At least not to the extend you might think. They were probably a lot more open about it with their peers than they were with you. Just like the people here probably wouldn't be as open about it with their children as they are here.
This doesn't really hold up as sex positivity and openness has shifted significantly in recent decades. Yes, people are more open about it with their peers than cross-generationally, however, at the societal level, it is absolutely objectively true that current generations are more open than previous ones (irrespective of current rates of sex by generation).
I think it's something that fluctuates naturally over generations. The 50s were buttoned up, 60s were very sex positive and more open, 70s/80s a lot of places drifted more conservative again. We've probably trended more open since the Victorian era but it's not linear.
Man, every time I read threads like this I'm like... y'all need some fuckin history. Read some of the horny shit the classical Greeks or Han-era Chinese were writing, lmao. It would make the raunchiest smut writer blush even today.
I was watching an entirely unrelated video on ancient Egypt and there was a question along the lines of their attitudes on sex. Apparently and unsurprisingly, they were very open about it and enjoyed it often. According to the researcher they had a phrase for it - "having a pleasant day" IIRC but I'm sure that was a cleaned up version.
You're confusing specific bits of literature for wider legal and societal recognition and discourse regarding sex. They can overlap, but they absolutely can differ, too.
Hmm, I'd respectfully disagree agree with the specific statement but add a lot of nuance. I don't want to get too into the weeds in a random reddit thread to a two-sentence comment, but I do have a strong interest in the actual lived experience of normal people (as opposed to the character-driven historiographies that have predominated for centuries, which has thankfully been changing since the latter half of the 20th century).
Speaking in very broad terms, my understanding is the textual evidence that we have access to today usually reflects (significantly) more conservative sensibilities than we would expect the average contemporary to have. This is the natural consequence of literacy being rare, writing and transcribing being labor- and resource-intensive, and preservation of documents usually being restricted to administrative or ecclesiastical purposes (with many exceptions, but they still generally served a practical purpose).
edit: but while we're chatting I'd add that we, speaking in English on Reddit, also have quite a lot of cultural baggage just based on that alone. It's difficult to separate our own understandings of sexual, social, and religious morality from our understanding of the past, and to really grasp that these people really did wholeheartedly believe some crazy shit.
Houses with more than one room are a relatively recent invention. Homes with more than one bed are a relatively recent invention. Where do they think people were having sex?
Even more recently, we tend to view history looking back through the lens of the (ostensibly) prim Victorians, but they were pearl-clutching in response to their very... earthy Georgian grandparents.
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u/cybah 9h ago
LOL sometimes grandma's aren't too grandma-like. At one point in their lives they were young and pretty too
My mom came from a large family and I asked my grandma why did she have so many kids. Her reply "I just liked doing it with your grandfather too much... and before we knew it, there was another baby"