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 ...
Sorry, forgot to tell you: There's a big thing among German parents about the effects of American-style advertising coming into Germany, with its in-your-face promiscuous sex message.
You wrote: "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?"
I know why: the public introduction of effective oral contraceptives in 1961 made sex easy and (apparently) safe. There was no risk of pregnancy, and no risk of incurable disease, so why NOT? Sex is fun. So much fun that civilization forever has had to tamp it down and limit the sexualization of everything and everyone, which naturally occurs if people let their libidinous natures run riot. Illegitimate babies and poverty (and the social stigma that came with both) were always powerful limiting factors. We laugh at "I Love Lucy" with their separate beds, but the Hollywood standard was not intended to be REALISTIC, it was intended to avoid a prurient interests. Aroused prurient interests in an age before easy and safe - and FEMALE CONTROLLED - contraception were actually really dangerous.
But then came 1961, and with it, everyone was "set free".
Or, as it turned out, unmoored.
Females controlled contraception now (the prior techniques all required male cooperation, and the possession of embarrassing telltale prohylactics, which women would have to get men to use...but women would be ashamed to buy.
The pill removed the barrier, which was an improvement. It allowed spontaneity, which was an improvement. It also allowed females absolute control over reproduction, or so they thought...then unwanted pregnancies blossomed, but there was no way in hell people were going to give up the free and easy sex - and so abortion became NECESSARY, in order to protect the "gain" of sexual liberty that 1961 wrought.
Then came herpes and AIDS, but self-repression has not come back. Instead, in order to protect that obsession with "liberty" (which has become more of a slave's chain and a anchor around our necks), we have to sexualize children young, to teach them about AIDS and protection, so they don't get hurt.
Everything is relentlessly sexualized, but procreation is not associated with it. This even warps our sense of history. Watch a modern Western, and men and women are getting in the sack all the time. It didn't happen like that at all back then: PREGNANCY was the danger, and a severe danger. Sure, there were always prostitutes, but the world became sexualized in an explosuon of "liberty" post 1961.
Etruscans.
No, that's just what I was careful NOT to do. I observed that they were "concurrent," not causally related. But I also asked why they're concurrent.
Are you curious?
I am.
The advent of birth control itself can't be the main cause. I think the biggest problem is that the social stigma associated with having children out of wedlock eroded over time. It used to be that women who did that were social pariahs, but not anymore. Now they don't get married just so they can rake in the welfare benefits.
No-fault divorces also surely helped in that marriage can so easily be dissolved, fostering the attitude that marriage isn't sacred anymore. And all the children bearing the burden of that grow up in single-parent homes, and I believe just about every study done on the subject shows that such homes are not as good as two-parent homes for raising moral, well-adjusted kids (the kind who are less likely to sleep around a lot).
Looking back on that text, it seems to be a vicious feedback loop.
Good question. It's not exactly ubiquitous in Germany, just nobody freaks out when they see it. Honestly, Germans just don't get the titillation you see in America with a flashed breast or the like. Even with all the billboards and sex shops (which, BTW, are usually classy establishments mostly frequented by couples), they just don't seem to be as hung up on sex as Americans.
It reminds me of the alcohol age. There, soft booze (beer, wine, etc.) can be purchased at 16, and you don't get your drivers license until 18. IIRC, they don't have as much of a problem with teenage drunk driving as we do. The kids are raised in an environment where alcohol isn't considered evil, and by the time they get their license, booze isn't the special forbidden fruit that they must have.
Maybe the fact that Europeans treat sex as entertainment is a reason for an aging population, low birth rates, etc.
You will not be surprised to learn that I think that it was the onset of The Pill in 1961 that produced the conditions that broke down the social stigma of having children out of wedlock, and created the social conditions that led to rapid adoption of no-fault divorce.
I probably ought to explain myself (and probably wouldn't be able to restrain myself from doing so even if I oughtn't).
What female contraception - The Pill - hit dead center on was the basic human desire to have unfettered, spontaneous and unprotected sex. Without being too crude, before The Pill, there were only condoms. The social stigma was there, so females (who are the ones who need the protection) certainly would not go in and buy them. And males? Males have never been very responsible about that sort of thing. Besides, condoms are not spontaneous...you have to actually HAVE one at the time...and people would PREFER to engage in sex without them, because it feels better.
Sorry, but that's the case.
The Pill eliminated that immediately. A woman got it from her doctor/pharmacist, so all of the stigma was gone. She controlled it herself - the male was completely uninvolved. And THEREFORE sexual spontaneity could occur - be accepted by - even be INITIATED by - any protected female whenever she wanted to.
Men liked the spontaneous sex, and the "unprotected" sex.
And the social pressure on women for the attention of men became pretty acute. The girl, on The Pill, who put out was popular. The girl who didn't was a prude. Remember, in the 1960s there was no AIDS and nobody had ever heard of herpes, so why NOT?
For married couples, it was viewed as a "godsend": spontaneous sex, whenever you want it, without the consequences of huge families difficult to maintain on middle class incomes. To quote Loretta Lynn: "The Pill might change the world tomorrow but, meanwhile today, here in Topeka the flies are a buzzing, the screen door's a bangin' and the floor needs a scrubbin', one needs a spankin' and one needs a huggin', Lord, one's on the way...(O gee, I hope it ain't twins again)".
Birth control, at FIRST, ended the baby boom by allowing married couples to have sex all the time WITHOUT children. The morality didn't fail immediately. First it was primarily the marrieds using it.
But then things started happening. There was always a DEGREE of people sleeping around, to be sure. But there was always a RISK associated with that. The Pill removed the risk. MORE people slept around, and therefore got caught, and there were, naturally, more divorced. Also, the single girls found out pretty quickly that if they put out, they got a lot more male attention. Now, of course they DID still get married (the world did not change overnight), but they had had quite a time with several sexual partners before marriage, something far too risky before The Pill. Men and women became expendable to each other. Of course, then, divorce needed to be made easier.
It all flowed from The Pill, because the pill made sex conasequence free for 20 years. Then disease set in. And now, collapsed birth rates.
Of course, prostitution's been around since before Christ.
I don't get into the "this world is going to to hell in a handbasket because of..." speech much. The main reason is that I was talking with my wise grandmother (who's pushing 90) on the subject once, and she basically said "Every generation likes to point to something that's perceived as causing society to fail, yet somehow we survive." You should hear her talk of the uproar when rock & roll first came out (she was in her 30s raising four kids at that time). You'd think it was the cause of all of the ills of society.
-Got that right. And Pope Paul VI saw it comin' almost 40 years before the rest of us did.
Oh, no, don't get me wrong. Society will survive. Even in Europe, Allah Fubar.
Funny you should mention that. Muslims still have the social stigma against sex outside of marriage. In fact, several Muslim families in Germany have killed their daughters for adopting "Western immorality." One was a drive-by at a bus stop by her brothers for dishonoring her family by dating a German.
Christian social stigma against sex outside of marriage was only very rarely murderous. It was stigma, as opposed to "stuck like a pig".
But your 90 year old grandmother, and all the 90-year old grandmothers of history, did not live in a world of massive abortion or birth control, where the future was being literally snuffed out. This IS something new under the sun, and the past generation has no experience with it, and therefore no wisdom to offer. Their wisdom, in fact, has it backwards. The world always DID survive, in the past, because the world couldn't do to itself then what we are doing today.
There actually IS an historical model, of great-grandmothers for 200 odd years, that DOES show things can get horribly bad with low birth rates. Condoms allowed the French to practice birth control in the 19th Century. They did. Their population stagnated. And they were destroyed by the Germans in two world wars as a result.
I believe thieves ought to face social shame, too. And the bigger the thief, the bigger the shame (e.g. Abramoff.) I don't, of course, endorse dismemberment.
He didn't steal anything, did he? But I do agree with your larger point.
She's still alive, she lived through all of it.
And they were destroyed by the Germans in two world wars as a result.
Population wasn't the reason for their loss. It was superior German tactics. No matter how many people France could have had, the stupidity of their military tactics would have rendered them useless in the initial invasions of both wars.
Umm, hoss, France STOPPED the German invasion in World War I. Stopped it cold. That's why the Germans went into trench lines and tried to win by attrition (against a country with only half the population of Germany) what they couldn't win outright on the field.
Yes, in World War II the French were totally outmaneuvered, and lost as a result. But there was much more to that. Had the French any spirit to really fight the Germans in World War II, the result could have been quite different. Only Paris? SO WHAT. And fight on. Germany would have had a very difficult time actually subduing and occupying all of France had the French army remained in the field, fallen back, and continued to fight. They didn' The national morale failed completely, and that was BECAUSE OF the mass death of World War I. In World War I the French Army STOPPED the Schlieffen Plan. The German invasion FAILED. But France was so outnumbered that she could not win a war of attrition without British, and later American, help. The population differential was the key to the balance of power between Germany and France in World War I. German tactics were not appreciably superior, as the French DID stop the Germans, cold, and held them, as the two sides bled each other to death. With only half the people, France was going to bleed to death faster, and was so ravaged that the will to do it again, a scant 20 years later, with a reduced next-generation thanks to the war dead from the last one, was not there.
Population was the key, and France paid dearly in the 20th Century for zero population growth in the 19th.
Suppose, instead, that France had grown in the same proportions as the rest of Europe. The French would have outnumbered the Germans, and the Germans would not have dared attack them in the first place in 1914, let alone 1870.
Most of European history, during the long periods from the Middle Ages onward when France was the super-populous country, were the histories of various coalitions to stop the relentless expansion of the French Kingdom pressing on its borders. When the birth rate plummetted after the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, France ceased to be the pressing threat, and it was the rising, rapidly expanding population of Germany that became the largest, and the menace to the peace.
Demography is destiny.
First, the German invasion of Belgium and France suffered from having to run two fronts since Austria-Hungary wasn't taking care of the Russians on the East. Having to commit massive troops to East Prussia, the German numbers available to fight on the West weren't much larger (if at all) than the French and British numbers.
Second, the initial French attacks were failures. Only two things kept the Germans from wiping out the French: the thought that the British wouldn't join the battle in significant numbers (and certainly not us joining), and ignoring the Schlieffen Plan.
In World War I the French Army STOPPED the Schlieffen Plan.
Rupprecht weakened it as he just did a straight counteroffensive against the then-entrenched French instead of digging with minimal troops while the strong north flank surrounded the French army. Even then, the plan almost worked, but the Germans marched to the East of Paris instead of along the Channel, exposing a flank. Still, the French Plan XVII was a complete failure, and they would not have survived if not for the British intervention. The British commanders were highly critical of the ineffectiveness of the French commanders -- they were actually worried that the uncoordinated French retreats (as they were wont to do) would expose their flanks.
The French had the people, they just had horrible commanders.
The French would have outnumbered the Germans, and the Germans would not have dared attack them in the first place in 1914
The combined Arab nations far outnumbered the Israelis in population and they lost, a few times.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.