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Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️🫂 🔞

FIVE SEX PANICS

In the 19th century there was a panic about masturbation and its effect on the nation on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the beginning of the 20th century there was a panic about women's liberation, in sex and politics, destroying society.

By the mid 20th century there was a panic about sexual liberation and free love.

Later, in the 70s and 80s, there was a gay panic and gays were presented as predators and deviants.

Now, in the early 21st century, there is a trans panic and its trans and non-binary people who are seen as the social threat.

These are five separate panics across over 150 years, But, actually, they're not separate at all: they are the same panic generated by the same people that comes again and again and again in waves. Its a panic generated by the sexually puritan and socially authoritarian whose politics is that of coercion and control.

This tendency is the ultimate enemy of all lovers of social and personal freedom.

#lgbt#lgbtq#trans

@autoerot1ca@kinky.business don't criticize what you can't understand, for the times, they are a'changin'

@autoerot1ca I think you could have ended the post with just

"This tendency is the ultimate enemy of all lovers."

@frigginglorious I could have. But my agenda is bi: its about sex and politics.

@autoerot1ca Don't forget the porn/sex addiction panic going on quietly in the last little while, too. Oof.

@Omisspearl @autoerot1ca Indeed. FFS, let's remind people that unless there is an explicit chemical dependence, it's not an addiction. It could be a compulsion, but that's only if the act itself causes the subject distress. Liking something, then feeling bad about it in some stupid "post-nut clarity" is not an addiction or a compulsion. It's puritanical bullshit ruining your good time. And you need to unlearn that shit, or else somehow decide to go without sex or masturbation.

@autoerot1ca The worst part is that each time the reactionaries succeeded in blunting the radical edge of each thing.

@autoerot1ca They haven't changed their values at all, they just say the shit they can get to resonate with people

@autoerot1ca Reminded of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in the 1910s-30s

Been noticing parallels with the U.S. in the 2020s and Germany in the '30s lately

@autoerot1ca if you don't mind my asking, what exactly does "sexual liberation and free love" mean in this context? We've seen the terms associated with "hippie" culture but i don't really know what they refer to
-F

@autoerot1ca You forgot about the satanic panic of the 80s

@autoerot1ca The common theme, of course, is the bicycle.

@autoerot1ca

I first read your headline as

FIVE SEX PIANOS

And while your information is sound and valuable... I'm kinda disappointed it wasn't the other one.

@GuerillaGrue I'm known for my off key toots. Sorry.

@autoerot1ca I recall a book, I think by Doris Lessing, that talked about the 20th century war; not wars, but a single war that just shapeshifted over the decades. In the same way, it's reasonable to say there has been a single sex panic in America that has gone on since the first Puritan set foot on this stolen continent.,

@cherold Absolutely. And Emma Goldman would have agreed with you.

@autoerot1ca "comes again and again and again in waves"

@autoerot1ca The 19th century obsession with masturbation is a bit of an exception, because I'm not really sure how that threatened the established political order, but all the other panics are very similar:

They involve a historically disempowered group challenging the established social/political order, and the sex panic is largely a canard created by the establishment to delegitimize this challenge, and thus preserve the status quo ante.

Presenting anyone who dares challenge the established power structure as a sexual deviant and threat to "the family" is basically textbook social conservatism (in the anti-progress/anti-change sense).

(Now I'm mildly curious who stood to benefit and who was threatened by masturbation so much that it became A Thing in the 19th century… I suspect it's a similar instance of the same pattern, but I just don't know enough about that period.)

@Kadin2048 The anti-masturbation panic is a classic example of the genre. It was thought by medics to lead to madness and death in extreme cases and was a classic example of what all the panics are regarded as being by the puritan and the conservative: uncontrolled sex. Because the issue in all the panics is control of sexuality in a context in which the conservative believes sexuality is a form of social pollution, a deviation from imposed norms. Looked at from a wider angle, then, the issue here is not really sex at all but social control. The conservative and the puritan, really from the time the first white person (who was a puritan) set foot on Turtle Island, is control. Thats why such people panic when they discover others doing things they don't want them to do.

@autoerot1ca That makes sense.

Although the other 'sex panics' have a fairly distinct target group who were actively pushing for rights and power outside the sexual sphere—suffragettes / independent women, hippies and nonconformists and the anti-war movement, gay people, trans people—and in each case the accusations of sexual deviancy are pretty clearly related to the establishment looking to delegitimize that political movement.

Presumably there was some distinct perceived threat to the established order that led to the 19th c. masturbation panics, but I'm not sure what it was. (Immigrants? Humanism in the wake of Darwin, Comte, etc.? The family-planning movement? Catholic overpopulation?) I'm sure there's probably some political trigger.

@Kadin2048 Increasing social control, what Foucault called "biopolitics".

Sex & society

@autoerot1ca
But look where we have ended up: Children are sexual abused at record low levels. Some abusers get prosecuted. Domestic abuse is socially unacceptable. Many women leave abusive men.
Society has changed.

@autoerot1ca It's the tendency of people who have what they think they want (privilege) feeling no real satisfaction with it, instead seeking gratification from a 'cause'—that is, chasing scapegoats whose very existence gives them an enemy who has less power than them.

It's been called The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and it's very old.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Para

en.wikipedia.orgThe Paranoid Style in American Politics - Wikipedia