Of course perverion and lechery have existed since time immemorial, as well as have murder and robbery.
Some time periods have more, some less.
I still hold that the same level of perversion and lechery has not existed in any civilized country, say sticking to western civlization for now. I don’t think 30 to 40% of children were born out of wedlock at any time in the last few hundred years (in the UK it’s around 50% right now, in some Scandivanian countries it’s higher), or that children were sexually active in any numbers the way they are now.
Some accounts said that 1 in 6 addresses in London were houses of prostitution? Can you cite some sources, please? MOST children were illegitimate?
Okay, take the 19th century in the US. If you want to make asserions about “they were just as lecherous and perverse as people are now” you at least ought to have the honesty to cite sources.
I’m not going to cite any sources because you are the one making the claim, it’s not my job to prove you wrong, it’s your job to prove yourself right.
Apologies, I should have said I was quoting form A N Wilson’s book The Victorians, for me the best social history of the period. Unfortunately, I don’t have any direct historical sources readily in my head, but they are not difficult to find. The statistics about prostitution and illegitimacy are well-known and often quoted by politicians when they want to make then-vs-now points.
But yes, a few things ARE now different. For a start, what was tolerated among the working classes was not tolerated further up the social scale. There was an expectation that the middle and upper classes would behave respectably. Remember back in the 90s when Prince Charles and Princess Diana first separated, then went on television to announce extra-marital affairs, and then divorced, and nobody batted an eyelid? In the old days, it would have been a major scandal and probably led to the end of the monarchy.
Another difference is that in the past, irregular living was primarily confined to the big cities with their anonymity, with rural areas being more conservative. But now, a live-and-let-live attitude has spread everywhere and all that has changed.
I think you are right that levels of illegitimacy are higher in every social class now - in the past, the phenomenon was more isolated. But I’m less certain about the age at which children became sexually active; the UK age of consent was as low as 12 in the past. Life was, as they said, nasty brutish and short, and child-bearing in the teens was not uncommon.
It often takes a lot of detective work to discover what really went on in societies of the past, because historians were less interested in recording sexual minutiae than their modern counterparts. Of course today, they are interested in little else!