>>Amen, Michael. Just another sign that our species is slowly growing up, I guess.<<
Are we? If an alien ship was to pull into orbit, and do a study on the history of human stupidity, and two faced savagery, I doubt they would find better examples short of war then in how our sexuality finds expression and repression.
Attitudes towards sex have gone all over the place throughout all of recorded human history. "Free Love" as a concept wasn't invented in the 1960's. H.G. Wells was an advocate of this concept, but if the Etruscans are any indication, he was a latecomer to the game by at least 2500 years.
When you get right down to it, a lot of the taboos come more from protecting economic interests then anything else. The old "Mother's Baby, Father's Maybe" thing applies here. The ancients were well aware of the causal connection between Making Whoppee and reproduction, and where inheritance depended on the purported legitimacy of the heir, establishing paternity was essential. Especially in patriarchial cultures.
The really unfortunate result of all of this was that women really have been getting the dirty end of the stick. Petty treason for example was not an offence against the state, but an offence against one's mate, and the penalty could be burning at the stake.
We don't do that sort of thing anymore, but go to the Arab states and you'll see that stoning as a penalty for adultary is alive and well, as it is for women who have sex outside of marraige.
Where attitudes were "liberal" by most modern understandings of the term, you rarely saw much of this sort of thing, but where it was otherwise, the case can all too easily be made that women have suffered for it far more then men. Think "Double Standards" and you'll get the picture.
