Why is sex generally viewed at as a bad thing, separating one's self from a pure, virgin state? What do traditional western beliefs and religion have to with this? Why does pleasure have a major correlation to "bad" sex?
Diablog 3 Follow Up- Sexual Negativity
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I think why sex is viewed as bad in Western culture has a lot to do with the huge influence of Christianity in the Western world. While we do have many different beliefs and religions, Western civilization is heavily dominated by Christianity. I'm not sure about the other branches of Christianity, but in Catholicism Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. There's something about the innocence and purity of being a virgin that others don't always want to mess around with. Also, I think that formally sex is viewed poorly, but also taking into account popular culture, there's a very fine line that we walk when discussing sex. I think this was very nicely summed up in the movie "The Breakfast Club" when Allison and Claire are talking about sex and Allison says, "Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have you're a slut. It's a trap." This is the same thing that goes on in popular culture today, except with virginity being prized somewhat still. Going along with this, what are the differing views of virginity across class, racial, and gendered lines?
The Virginity issue is biased between men and women. There's no such thing as virgin man, isn't? Is that socially or biology constructed? For example, what if your boyfriend said he lost his virginity? Will you see him as masculine or feminine then?
Not just Western culture used to downgrade sex, but so did Eastern culture with the same reason as GSchuney discussed. In this case, those are Buddhism and Islam. Promiscuous female was depicted as beast, or animal such as in a Chinese movie "Journey to the West". A monk was assigned by Buddha travel to the West to receive scriptures from the living Buddha. Along the journey, he was attacked by beasts, monsters which disguised as women. There're a lot more examples of virginity issue from literature, history.
To reply back at MrFeynman's comment about there being no such thing as a virgin man in the context of our culture, I agree. There's two very different faces of virginity in our society. For women, virginity is prized for almost the same reasons as I stated above. Nobody wants to be associated with a slut, right? Okay, so that's an extreme, but you get the picture. On the other hand, men who are still virgins are seen as a rarity...kinda like unicorns, except male virgins actually exist. This is also seen as a guy having "no game." In our society, promiscuous men are almost praised for "getting some" whereas women are scolded because they were being a "slut", "hoe", "skank", or any one of the slew of words that can negatively describe a promiscuous woman.
Where is the line drawn between virgin and slut? I'm not terribly familiar with how sluttiness works, but surely there must be some room between the two. Also, while it's certainly true that promiscuity in straight men isn't stigmatized in the same way it is in women, how does this work for promiscuity in homosexual men and women?
Its been seen that some cultures emphasize that sex should only be performed for the continuance of the species. While certain cultures stress it, others are relaxed about it. One example would be how the winter solstice festival of Saturnalia is depicted for pagan cultures where sex is an integral part of the auspiciousness of the day compared to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan where sex is banned for its entire duration. It may be helpful to examine why such norm's in these cultures exist. One reason which scholars suggests for the ban of sex during Ramadan is that people should forgo all pleasure and concentrate on god and worship, which brings us to the question that is sex solely performed for pleasure ?
I'll honestly can say I don't know much about religion, and going back to whole religious side that brought its part to sex negativity, it's interesting to hear from someone that knows more about religion than I do. I was kind of thinking that pleasure was viewed as a bad thing because it strays from the whole sex as a mode of reproduction, and turns sex into just another form of pleasure. It's interesting to hear how religions view things such as pleasure, and that pleasure needs to be avoided in order to do things such as fully worshiping god (kind of makes me glad I strayed from religion at a young age). I guess it applies to sex in the same way, pleasure kinds of take the focus off the reproductive side of sex, and focuses it on an apparently less important goal.