Posted on 03/22/2012 7:13:31 AM PDT by C19fan
The writer James Boswell is best known today as the upstanding biographer of the great critic and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson. But if you read Boswell’s London Journal, written in the 1760s, you get a very different picture of Boswell. With one of his girlfriends, an actress-cum-whore called Louisa, he enjoyed ‘five times rapture’ in one night. He contracted venereal disease no fewer than 17 times — and died of urinary complications in 1795. But then, 18th-century society was awash with sex.
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My Grandfather told me that back during WWII things got so crazy you would wake up in the morning and have to introduce yourself to the woman beside you in bed!
There were times when such things were more open, and times when such things were kept more behind closed doors; but I don’t imagine there was EVER a time when such things did not go on.
But the ‘end of the world’ feeling of WWII - and the numerous young men sent off to war - and the ‘professional’ women complaining about the ‘amateurs’ “giving it away!” - and the recent advent of the automobile and the sexual license it allowed - all made that time “rather interesting” to hear my Grandfather tell it.
Yes, but did it start with the Georgians? Samuel Pepys’s diary is as salacious as Boswell’s.
There was an old Dagwood comic strip where the son walks in all goo-goo eyed and Dagwood asks him what's going on. The kid retorts "Your generation wouldn't understand anything about love" and prances off. Dagwood turns to Blondie and says "And I suppose he thinks we're just good friends."
My grandmother who was a “flapper” said the roaring ‘20s made the ‘60s look like kindergarten.
Pretty obvious, isn’t it? But humans have very short memories, huge egos and don’t bother with history much. Most think they’re the very first to experience primeval thoughts and feelings.
I think most 18th century playas smelled to high heaven; but I could get past that if Moll Flanders really looked like Kim Novak :)
Eh, the amount of sex doesn’t change, it’s just the rhetoric about it that does.
Another factor is “good ‘ol days”-ism, the idea that everything was perfect until about 1966.
Exactly right.
Humanity keeps screwing up. Humanity keeps correcting its course—usually only after something brutal and terrible happens. And then humanity screws up again.
Progressives utterly cannot understand this. Some conservatives can’t either actually.
That's a good point also. I'm sometimes surprised at the trashiness/smuttiness of films from the early 60s. Don't know why I'm surprised exactly. The late 60s couldn't have come completely from nowhere, could they?
My great uncle told me the same thing. Lot's of sex at the Canteen and USO shows. All those short month long romances you heard about back then the couple was married was because they HAD too because the woman was preggo.
People had the same amount of premarital sex in the 1940's and 1950's as today but it was just kept quiet.
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