Thank goodness we live in a culture in America, as known to
the rest of the world through Hollywood, where we would
never ever think of following the dictum that "sex sells."
Posted on 12/15/2006 6:32:58 AM PST by Atlantic Bridge
German kids like their sex. A survey of European teen sex habits has found that only pubescents from Iceland are quicker to jump in the sack. But when it comes to safety, the Dutch are tops.
The casual observer in Germany might be forgiven for thinking the Germans are oversexed. Pornographic cinemas and blush-inducing sex shops are a familiar part of the urban landscape, while exposed breasts are a common sight on advertising billboards and magazine covers.
With all that stimulating material around, it's not surprising that young Germans apparently have sex on the brain. A newly-released World Health Organization (WHO) report on sexual habits among teenagers in 26 European countries reveals that German teens are quick off the mark when it comes to losing their cherry; the average age at which Germans -- both boys and girls -- first have sex is 16.2.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Homosexuality is not "accepted" in France anywhere near the way it is accepted in America, at least here in New York.
In both places, there is a homosexual community which is out in the open. In both places, the community feigns tolerance. However, Americans actually ENFORCE tolerance, with laws, and Americans, in private, are furtive about ridiculing homosexuals. The French ridicule homosexuals. They do so in private, and they do so in lines of command too. There is formal legal tolerance, but in America there is always a court to run to to punish someone who makes you feel bad. In France, there isn't. Somebody ridicules you, well, that's just too damned bad. Sue? How.
I often say that Americans have made an idol out of the law and worship it. It is surprising the extent to which the deep reach of the law - the threat of the lawsuit - reaches into the most private recesses of life and causes Americans to be very guarded. In the French legal system, it is damned hard to sue anybody, and there are only judges, no juries. Result: you ridicule a homosexual, and he goes home sobbing, and THAT'S IT. He can't sue. There is no RECOURSE to big daddy judge, like there is in America. The party whose feelings are hurt cannot go grab the law. It doesn't work.
And THAT, in the final analysis, is REALLY the key difference between America and Continental Europe. In America, if somebody gets made enough there are lawyers who will take cases on contingency fees and rush into court for anything, relying on sensationalism and emotional manipulation of the facts before a jury. The threat of a lawsuit pervades life in America; everything is predicated on not political correctness but LEGAL correctness, lest someone get sued. In Continental Europe, it's basically impossible to sue anybody unless he physically harms you, badly, and even then the contingency fee is illegal, so you have to pay for your own lawyer. There's no jury to be manipulated; just a panel of judges.
If I had to put my finger on one thing that makes all the difference between the two countries, it is that any loud and vitriolic dispute in America can end in a lawsuit, and probably will. In Continental Europe, it can't, and won't, and doesn't. Net result, a lot more fistfights in Europe, actually, and a lot less politeness. In Europe, people TOLERATE the gays, and mock them. In America, people used to do that, but are now afraid of lawsuits if they even mock them, and so employers have cracked down, and everyone watches what he says.
Homosexuality is more silently acquiesced to in America than it is in France. In America, the sole place where one can object to it is on the narrowly defined stage of political speech. And so the politics of homosexuality are highblown in the USA.
In France, people tolerate it, and make fun of it (like they USED to in America, before all the lawsuits). And that's the key difference, in America, the gays got offended, got legal aid, and sued. Now everybody walks on eggshells. In France and the rest of the Continent, the gay that gets offended goes home and sobs himself to sleep in his pillow, because he cannot turn to the law to give him power to silence others. There is no LEGAL recourse that is effective, at least not yet.
England is different, because the English have the same legal system as the Americans, and thus every pantywaist ninny who feels OFFENDED can get his day in court. And that is a very bad way to run a country, because it's through the legal system that the one-percenters have managed to silence everybody in America and England.
In France? Most people don't CARE about homosexuals. Sexual perversions are treated with a bored tolerance, and made fun of. If you ever find yourself in Paris, and find yourself in an area with Orthodox Jews in black hats walking down the same streets with leather-clad gays, you have found the old Jewish/new gay quarter - Le Marais.
If you listen carefully as you walk through, you will hear an awful lot of English spoken. The national joke in America is that the French are cheese-eating surrender monkeys. The national conviction in France is that Anglo-Saxons are all closeted gays, and that English men and women become completely indistinguishable from one another after the age of 45. Elton John and Boy George are exhibit A. It is a mystery, to the French, that the English manage to reproduce.
And tolerance? Well, the former French Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, outright said at a press conference that she didn't like in in London because the men didn't look at her, 'because they're all gay, you know'.
I think that the language barrier between the two worlds makes it hard for each other to REALLY see what the other is like. But no, Europeans are really not more ACCEPTING of gays. They simply view sexual perversion with a sort of bored aristocrat's tolerance.
Because of the lack of lawsuits, French conversations are far more frankly racial than American conversations are. Because Americans are AFRAID to speak freely, and rightly so. The French are not, because there is nothing particularly to be afraid OF.
Politics is more important in America, because it's the only place where people are permitted to fully express controversial thoughts without fear of a lawsuit.
Thank you very muich for this reply, it was really interesting reading.
Where do Latinos stand on gun control? That is my other hot-button issue, with abortion being first.
I always enjoy reading your posts, although I don't agree with a lot of the Catholic theology, but you are always well-reasoned and make cogent points.
Ed
If this is what you call genocide, who is behind it? Are you suggesting that there is a conspiracy and everyone who has an abortion is part of it? Who is ultimately responsible?
If that is typical of American behavior, how come our birthrate is higher than Germany or Iceland?
Clearly we are doing something right.
Who is ULTIMATELY behind the mass murder of babies?
The Devil, of course.
Who is ULTIMATELY responsible? The individuals who have abortions, perform abortions, abet abortions and those who provide the legal and political framework in which the death mills can efficiently carry out their work, which is to say, individuals, and the nation as a whole.
Our birth rate is higher because we have an open border with Mexico, and Latinos are flooding into America and having babies. Hispanic fecundity, and nothing else, is what drags the US total above replacement.
Wishful thinking that is politically motivated auto erotic and therefore irrelevant BS. If Europe does not exist why do people like you invest that much emotions into it (BuHuHaHa!). We should invest our time into a more reasonable discussions.
There have been comments about the backwardness of America re Europe. Actually, by 1776, the average per capita income in America was the highest in the world of the major countries. That is why the English were a bit upset at the small level of taxes they were receiving from the colonies.
You are very correct about the damage done by the two world wars in Europe. Europe is now headed for a new conflict that may do them in and it appears they do not have the will to resist.
You have made up your own definition of genocide. Abortion is an individual decision. The Devil doesn't make you do it.
No, check the statistics: even our white folk have more kids than comparable Europeons.
Sir Ed,
I don't think gun control is on the Latino radar screen of issues.
Let's start with basic demographics: most of the Latinos in the USA today are immigrants or the children of immigrants, all from Latin America. Latin America is a macho, gaucho culture - a beef-eating, heavy-drinking culture with the same sort of cabellero cowboy legends as the US has, the same sort of popular revolutionary tradition America has - but with multiple iterations! - all overlaid with the spirituality of SPANISH Catholicism (the national identifier turns out to be important), which itself disciplined the organized and systematized torture-and-death spiritualism that preceded it. Most Latinos are mestizo, and that mix came about historically through a combination of lust and rape. Untying these threads, what we discover is that Latino culture brings in a lot of violent and independentist and sexual and spiritual strains together which MATTER as far as Latino character and culture goes.
I mentioned the Spanish Catholicism aspect. Latin America didn't get her spiritualism from unarmed black-robed Jesuit Frenchmen who martyred themselves all across the northwoods to bring the light of Jesus Christ to the disorganized natives. Nor did the Latinos get their spiritualism from Anglo-Saxon Puritans, who emigrated en masse from England, with their womenfolk, but who did not much succeed in converting the natives, other than with very localized exceptions. The Latinos got their Catholicism from the priests who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadors. Indeed, the whole story of the conquest and conversion of Latin America by Spain (and Portugal, in Brazil, however for a substantial period during the time of conquest and settlement the Portuguese crown and Spanish crown were united in the King of Spain at the height of Spanish power, and Portugal and Brazil were all part of the Spanish Empire) is something of a black legend as taught to Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
We should remember that Spanish Catholicism and the military prowess of the Conquistadores were themselves forged in a 500-year long war with Islam, which Catholic Spain won decisively, both through military conquest and through spiritual conquest. The rigors of the Spanish Inquisition are viewed with horror and repulsion today, but we should remember, too, that the REASON the Spain is wholly Catholic and Spanish, without (until very recent years) a Muslim or Moorish "fifth column" within is BECAUSE the Spanish Church carried on relentless spiritual warfare and uprooted Islam utterly and totally drove it from Spain, after 500 years of entrenchment. That is no mean feat. The Muslims themselves were not as effective at WHOLLY driving Christians from the Middle East as Spanish Catholicism was at expunging Islam from Iberia. Nowhere else on the battlefield between Islam and Christianity were the Muslims not only defeated in the field and at sea (by Spain, in Spain and at Lepanto and elsewhere), but the religion actually extinguished. The Spanish were militarily very aggressive and effective - that is why they won - but that militant nature was also expressed spiritually, which is why they also won the spiritual war with Islam.
Latin America is Catholic because the Spanish were peculiarly engined, by their history and experience, to face off against massive, organized civilizations, in some cases very violent civilization, with their own strongly entrenched (and exceedingly violent) spiritualism. The French, English and even the Americans were never so SPIRITUALLY equipped as to be able...or WILLING...to follow up a military conquest with a militant campaign to convert an entire continent. Only Spain truly thought that way, and only Spain was truly equipped to actually carry it out on the massive Central and South American civilizations.
To get a good idea of what the Spanish were up against, see Mel Gibson's new movie Apocalypto. For comparison, remember that the Americans and the French were each fought to a standstill for a century in upstate New York by perhaps 20,000 Iroquois. The Spanish faced 2 MILLION Aztecs and perhaps 20 million Incas. England did manage to take over India for awhile, but the English never were able to change Indian religion (nor did they try - to the extent that Indians are Catholic is chiefly dates from Portuguese efforts during the Spanish Imperial period) nor to supplant Indian languages. And the English did it all during the age of steam power, machine guns and electrical communications.
The Spanish, with swords and muskets and fanaticism - and native allies - were able to take over the Incas and subdue the Aztecs. From San Francisco to Tierra del Fuego there is one religion, one form of law and government, and one (and a half: Brazil) languages. No imperial nation has ever been as successful at wholly transplanting itself over so vast an area as the Spanish were.
It MATTERS that it was the Spanish and the Spanish Church, because none of the other European powers could have possibly managed the conquest and conversion of Latin America. None of the others had the requisite military fanaticism, or the requisite RELIGIOUS fanaticism to actually convert every nook, cranny and village of a vast continent. Beyond that, these were no Hindus the Spanish were contending with. The Aztecs were far more bloodthirsty and horriffic than the Muslims, even, have ever been. A deeply entrenched and fanatical religious tradition of human sacrifice spread over all of Meso-America. It was against THIS that the Spanish had to contend. Send in French black robes or tender men like John Wollman into Tenochtitlan, and they would have been bent backwards over the stone altar with their hearts being sawed out in the next batch of victims. To get a Cross atop the Aztec ziggurats required the steel-helmeted conquistadores of Cortes to FIRST conquer the place. Cortes and tens of thousand of Indian allies. There is another story here. It was not Spain who conquered Mexico. It was, rather, Spanish troops at the head of a vast army of Mexican Indians who conquered the Aztecs. The Spanish Conquest is taught as a black legend, but in truth -in spite of the savage excesses of a warlike people, which the Spanish conquistadores were par excellence - it was a MERCY for most of the peoples of Mexico. The herds of human cattle used by the Aztecs for their entertainment and religious rituals were all too willing to take up the Spanish Cross and go to war against their captors.
Thus did Latin America become Latin, and Catholic, and Iberian language speaking. In war, much of it civil. It became free through more war: Contiental revolution led by Simon Bolivar. And then there has been more war still: revolution and coup in country after country. Mexico's revolution, in the 20th Century, was the bloodiest revolution in world history, with perhaps tens of millions dead...it is difficult to say, because Latin government in general is not as organized and systematic as Anglo-Saxon government is (another aspect which, incidently, militates against gun control in Latin America: who will enforce such laws? The police?)
Is it necessary to delve into the past half-millennium of history to answer a question about Hispanics and gun control? I think it is VERY instructive. People see things through the prism of their own history. Up this very thread, some folks were expostulating at me that Hispanic is not a RACE, because there are black and white and mixed and Indian Hispanics; there is no identifiable Hispanic race, therefore, they argue.
But this is nothing more than seeing "race" through the particular AMERICAN demon of skin color. All of Latin America was Indian. All of Latin America was conquered by one Empire, the Spanish, who brought one religion: the Spanish variant of Catholicism, one legal code (the Spanish Royal Code), one language (Portuguese is the exception, but it isn't much of an exception, because it was the Spanish Church that filled Brazil too, when Portugal was in the Spanish Empire) and one common generic history. The Amerindians were distinct cultures and languages, but they shared certain similarities imposed by their climate and condition just as Western Europeans share many things, even though their cultures and languages are different. The tribal divisions persist, and are expressed as national rivalries. Cubans don't respect Mexicans, Mexicans don't respect Guatemalans, etc. But they all identify THEMSELVES as Latin, Latinos, and vis a vis the rest of the world they recognize a commonality. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and there is no reason to think it should. An AMERICAN, looking at the world through the peculiar AMERICAN prism of black-and-white racial history that ravaged the USA, defines race by skin color. He might even try to deny the existence of a Hispanic "race" because it doesn't fit America's historical model of race. It might even be nice for the American if he could DEFINE AWAY the concept of Hispanic, and pretend this isn't a new race to deal with. But the Hispanics won't play ball. They recognize their commonality, ESPECIALLY when in the American boat together, and therefore they constitute a race, regardless of skin color.
An example from within America of roots making a difference is easily found in the case of the Lowland Scots, who later emigrated to Ireland and thence to America, the so-called "Scotch-Irish" Presbyterians who settled the American back-country in pre-revolutionary war days. As a group, these were the most stalwartly pro-American people in the Revolution, and to this day, they are the most pro-gun (and the most prone to violence) segments of the American white population. Heavily concentrated in Appalachia and the upland South, they form a distinct bloc in American political and social life, giving us strongly conservative and pro-gun politics and the lion's share of country music stars to boot. Ancient roots matter.
In the case of the Latinos, they do not come from well-organized and prosperous cultures. They come from spiritual cultures (which is not the same thing as prudish or particularly moral cultures) and they come from macho and violent cultures.
There is no gun control to speak of in Latin America. Country folks all have guns, for hunting and protection. City folks can easily get guns. In America, there is no particularly identifiable Latino push against gun rights. There is a reason for that too, and though it is partly negative, it is instructive. Anglo-Saxon Americans think in terms of laws: what am I ALLOWED to do. Thus, gun RIGHTS are a key argument. Actually HAVING a gun is sort of like smoking cigarettes when you're 17: it's pretty easy to do, and if you are at all careful, nobody knows about it and can do anything about it. Having a gun or not, like smoking cigarettes, is not a MORAL issue (at least not to a Catholic)...if you think you need a gun for protection, you get one. Smoking isn't a SIN; it's just against the law below a certain age.
So, why is the Anglo so worried about gun RIGHTS? Because Anglo-Saxons really idolize LAW. The LAW, the RULES are really important to Anglos. It comes from the Protestant background, no doubt. Having thrown off the traditional Church with its unwritten rules and codes of behavior, Anglo Protestant loved (and love) code books, like the Bible. A supposedly definitive set of clear, explicit, written rules: Do THIS, and you are a good person. Do THAT, and you are an evil person. The Puritanical mindset that is the foundation of American thinking is very code-driven, indeed very JEWISH in its Talmudic complexity. The LAW is the icon (or the idol).
So, it is not enough for an American to actually HAVE a gun to protect himself against criminals. He must have the clear and explicit right, written down in law, to own that gun. If the law says he can't, but he does anyway, this sets up a dramatic MORAL tension within the American Anglo, because he is breaking THE LAW, and THAT is SIN - American spirituality is Puritan Protestant, code driven and very legalistic. To break the written code of civil law is to sin against the rightful (and righteous) authority of the civil magistrate. This idolizing of the law causes Americans to self-police at a surprisingly deep level. The voluntary tax code, with all of its complexities, works in America because most people do not cheat, even when it is within their interests to do so. Everywhere else in the world the STATE calculates your taxes and sends you the bill, because everyone knows full well that most individuals will cheat to save themselves money. After all, it's THEIR money, and they need it, and the state is corrupt and extracts the money by force, so OF COURSE you can cheat on your taxes to prevent the state from taking it and spending it on the rich cronies of the state. DUH!
The Italian or Frenchman, or Hispanic, thinks like that. The state is just one of those necessary evils in life. It passes laws - mostly to benefit the rich and powerful who run it - and it uses force to make people do what the police and other authorities say, but it doesn't have any DIVINE authority, certainly. Breaking some law or other of the state is not committing a SIN, the way that, say, aborting a baby is (and that's LEGAL, in America; illegal in Mexico and in all other Latin American countries except for Cuba and Puerto Rico - no surprise there).
Legality or illegality is pretty much beside the point to a Latino. After all, most of them are here because they or their parents or grandparents broke the law. This doesn't make Latinos lawless - they still have a moral code, particularly centered on family loyalty, and loyalty to their close inner circle. But the general laws? Hispanics...perhaps Catholics in general, and Latin Catholic in particular...do not confuse the rules of the state with the laws of God.
This is important on the gun control issue, because to a Latino immigrant it's a legal abstraction. Latinos are poor. They came from a world where anybody who wants one has a gun, and in America they live on the underworld fringe where anybody who wants one has a gun, or marijuana to smoke. Same thing. Smoking marijuana and having a gun to protect yourself are not immoral, at least they are not SINS. Anglos might do both, but feel GUILTY about it if they are breaking the law, and want to make sure that the law says its OK for them to do these things. Thus, they agitate about the state of law, and worry about it.
Latinos, like most Catholics in most Catholic countries, view the human law as a sort of abstraction. If the law gets in the way of something they really want to do or think they need to do, they break the law and concentrate on not getting caught. If they get caught, there is no sense of SHAME. It's a shoulder shrug, like a speeding ticket. Yeah, you got me, what do I owe you? To the extent that the police can be paid off to go away, as in all of Latin America and in the fringe areas of America where immigrants live, you pay the bribe and they go away. A sin? For the cop taking it, maybe, at least in America. In Mexico cops need to eat too, and they get paid nothing. Bribery is part of their income. But no, not a sin. Just one of the irritating necessities of life.
Latinos don't believe that there's a basic power out there in the state to regulate everything, and that the rules ought to be gotten right. That's a very abstract, philosophical Anglo-Saxon Protestant Bible-focused way of looking at things. Latinos have a simpler, more Catholic and human (and, from the perspective of law-focused Protestants and Jews, corrupt) way of looking at things. God gave us life. We have families. There are certain basic rules: you're not supposed to kill people, but you can defend yourself against bad people even if that means killing them, or steal from good people (but you can take things from bad people because they stole it anyway and are bad). This does not make for a crystal clear, orderly society of contract and law. Latinos generally won't rip you off in the sense that if you pay them for work, they will work hard and do the job. But they don't have a sense in the back of their mind that because there is a law that says some of that money they worked for is supposed to go to the government, that there is some sort of MORAL duty to pay the taxes. The government doesn't know, and the Latino doesn't intend to let the government know. He needs the money for himself and his familia. Immigration laws? Another obstacle to be gotten around in order to earn the necessary living. Forged papers? Why not. The state, of rich white people who stole the land from our ancestors (Latinos are aware of their history) try to say who can live where. But who are they to set rules like that? Catch me if you can.
Gun laws don't come onto the radar screen. If a Latino wants a gun, and lots do, he gets one. Whether or not it is against the law is beside the point, except that it determines the extent he has to hide it a little bit, like smoking marijuana, which Indians have been doing for a thousand years before the whites showed up in the land and tried to make it illegal.
Anglo-Saxons, if they understood the mindset, would first find it bewildering. Not care about the law? Why, ANARCHY would ensue!!! (Actually, it doesn't: Mexico is disorganized but by no means anarchic: there ARE moral rules, that come from God, and people do try to respect the big ones) And then anger comes: NOT IN MY COUNTRY.
But the Latinos laugh at the "your country" business and come as they please, and have kids, who by your laws are now citizens and you can't leave them. They take the benefits they get too.
America has always faced the problem that the Puritanical Protestants who founded it want to set all the laws, but have always desperately needed LABOR for the economy, and so have imported non-Puritans, who then don't respect the Puritans laws. First they ignore them, then, when they get numerous enough, they have changed them. That's the pattern. It starts to break down, though, as people come in who are less inclined to WORRY about what the "law" says, and who live their life in ignorance and disrespect of the established law.
Latinos as a group don't have a stance of gun control. They own guns for protection. They do not give a damn whether the law says they can or can't, because the law is of secondary or tertiary importance to the Latin mind. THAT is the part about Latinos that ought to scare Protestants as much as Muslims should scare Europeans. America as this Germanic Puritan Protestant country of laws will not so remain with a Latino majority. America will become like Miami.
Fascinating, Vicmte, absolutey fascinating.
Thank you...maybe you are right and the immigration-wave of Latinos will bring about an end to the culture death in America.
You've given me lots of things to think about.
In Israel, God would often use other, hostile nations to chastise or punish Israel, maybe immigration from down South is God's way of bringing about an end to abortion that we here in America have been unable to do.
See you,
Ed
No, check the statistics. The American white fertility rate is 1.8 children per woman. That's below Ireland certainly. It is difficult to tease out the racial statistics from France's 1.96 fertility rate, because the French administration cannot legally collect data on the race of French people. To be French is too be French; French law does not recognize the existence of racial categories. Of course, this is a problem, because there ARE racial categories, and whether it's white middle class French women having the kids, or Fatima and Aisha in the banlieu, makes a difference as to the French future.
And it doesn't matter anyway. If American whites have a fertility rate of 1.8, and blacks a fertility rate of 1.99, they are both STILL dying out. More slowly than Russia or Germany or Japan or Italy, but still dying out.
It is Hispanics' 2.45 fertility rate that pulls America up to 2.1 overall, just shy of replacement. Immigration accounts for the rest of the growth. Needless to say the "pivot" there is all in the direction of the Hispanics, and will likely remain so, because the political will does not exist in America to either curb abortions, which snuff out the whites' and blacks' replacements, or to close the Mexican border.
You seem to consider yourself more European than German. To be European, you must also be French, Belgian, Spanish and Italian, etc. My German ancestors are weeping in their graves, although my English ones are laughing uncontrollably...........
My wife got some nasty looks around Americans, and appreciative looks from Germans. They don't like bottle feeding over there either. Even the baby formula commercials say essentially "Breast feeding is always best, but if you can't do it, use our formula."
I suspect it's commercial slutty shots to sell clothes, beach resorts and beer. And ubiquitous commercialized nipple and crotch-shots are something we can do without.
I don't remember any that focused right in on the breasts (and none on the crotch). I remember two billboards off the top of my head: a hot tub scene with many people and a woman's breasts visible (nothing under the water visible) and one of those Las Vegas-type dancers.
I re-assert what I said before: streetcorner display of female nudity doesn't translate into a sense of reverence for sexual wholeness.
I guess you're right. It's not so much considered sacred, but natural. And you shouldn't be ashamed of something natural. An unsightly consequence of this is that very fat, hairy German men will wear small swimming trunks at the pool.
One other thing about the public pools, kids up to about five years old often run around naked. Americans tend to freak out at the thought, but Germans think they're just little kids, and if you see something sexual in that then you have a serious problem.
In general, German society seemed to have a LOT less sexual tension than ours. Yes, you'll see breasts on billboards on the rare occasion, but it's not always "Sex! Sex! Sex!" like it is here. And any of that that does happen is usually from American products. I also never heard of those young teenage orgies or oral sex on the bus like happens here a lot.
My favorite example of that can be found at the butcher. The kids always get their "extra," a slice of wurst, free to eat right there. Sometimes I'd only need to get a few slices of prosciutto and my three kids would get three huge, thick slices of wurst, more than I bought in prosciutto.
Yes, U.S. baby formula companies are required by law to put this same caveat on their packaging--- "Breast feeding is best, but if you can't do it, use our formula"--- but in teeny tiny print! From an objective or scientific point of view, non-Mama-milk is sub-standard, and in my opinion should be prominently labeled as such. For about a million reasons, too lengthy to be discussed here!
"I also never heard of those young teenage orgies or oral sex on the bus like happens [in the U.S.] a lot."
I don't think it happens here a lot. When it does, it gets publicized, both because we're appalled by it and because we're titillated by it. But that's what's coming, unless we figure out a way to turn this thing around. Europe is 20 years further along the path of sexual disintegrtion than we are, in my opinion. The only time I was ever in Europe (Italy, Ireland, England, Holland and Germany) was back in 1984, and even then I was distressed by the open display of nudity on billboards, magazine covers, etc. and the casual attitudes towards gay guys pursuing each other in public toilets, and other sexual imbecilities.
The extreme low birthrate ---and even more strikingly, the extreme low marital birthrate --- throughout Europe amply demonstrates that European culture does not value sex as something "natural." All of Europe is significantly below replacement level: some birthrates at the lowest levels in human history, all the more remarkable because this is happening at a time of peace and prosperity, not war or plague years.
The two most indispensible powers of human sexuality, the power to make a durable bond between a man and a woman, and the power to continue human society into another generation, are failing rapidly.
My question would be, not why you're (we're) so sexy, but why sex has become so shriveled and powerless.
No, the U.S. isn't much better. Our marital fertility rate has been below replacement for decades, and without immigrants and the first-generation children of immigrants, we'd be swirling the demographic toilet-bowl with our European cousins.
However, ubiquitous public sex display and the society-wide shrinkage and failure of sex as a power for family-formation are concurrent phenomena. Ever wonder why?
The last commercial I remember had it in the voice-over, and not in that fast-talking disclaimer speech. It was almost like they were saying "We're sorry for you if you have to use our product."
All of Europe is significantly below replacement level: some birthrates at the lowest levels in human history
In large part it's economic. Their economy sucks so bad, everybody's afraid to start a family despite the massive perks given to parents (including hundreds of dollars a month stipend just for having kids).
However, ubiquitous public sex display and the society-wide shrinkage and failure of sex as a power for family-formation are concurrent phenomena. Ever wonder why?
Nope. I think you're committing the logical fallacy of mixing up a causal vs. casual relationship.
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