In 1994, David Crosby received a liver transplant. He lost his liver to a Hepatitis C infection and long-time drug use.
Around the time of his transplant, in an interview he said something like "I came of age after the invention of antibiotics and birth control and before AIDS." as an explanation for the "wild" (or hippie) lifestyle he had lived which had led to his Hepatitis infection. That's one of the best nutshell explanations for the hippie era I have ever seen, though it overlooks a few things like post-World War II abundance and higher education levels.
In human history, more sexually free cultures or eras generally correspond to times and places where for one brief shining moment, people could have sex without undue fear of pregnancy, disease and death. They are typically times and places where people were generally comfortably well-off, relatively well educated and some form of somewhat reliable birth control has been worked out.
My impression is that the spread of disease is usually the culprit that puts a stop to such "free love" periods, much as Crosby observed that AIDS more or less put a stop to the hippie era of free love.
Some things I have read:
Historically, if you tested positive for an STD, a social worker asked you for the name of all your recent sexual contacts, tracked them down, told them they had been with someone who had tested positive and tested them and treated them if necessary. This worked pretty well to contain outbreaks.
But AIDS in the US was initially associated with gay men and IV drug users. Neither group wished to give up the names of their contacts for fear of people being thrown in jail, fired from jobs, etc.
So they advocated for research into drugs to treat AIDS and changes in policy to protect their right to privacy and not give up those names.
What I have come to believe is that a lot of cultural practices related to love, sex, marriage, etc are rooted in a heteronormative culture that developed during a time when reliable birth control was not a thing. A lot of our best practices -- like "virgin until the wedding night" -- are rooted primarily in a fear of unplanned pregnancy.
In fact, I read once that some scholarship in some place in or near Great Britain had to update its criteria. For hundreds of years, young women could get the scholarship if they were "virgins" at the start of college (as one of probably a few criteria). The proof of virginity: Never been pregnant.
Too many women were showing up and saying "Why, YES, I would love some free money for college, thank you!" and they realized, you know, these days you can avoid pregnancy some way other than just saying no to sex.
There are other ways in which the world has changed that interact with this space and exacerbate certain issues. Historically, you likely grew up in a Tribe or Village or Small Town and likely married someone you knew socially well before marriage was considered.
You happened to interact with them and hear things about them and so on under circumstances that did not require dating and you knew that information was reliable because it's much harder to LIE to someone if you both know a lot of the same people.
There were also a variety of social practices for letting two people become intimate without risk of pregnancy that no longer exist (a la bundling bags as seen in the movie The Patriot).
So a lot of the social context that let people get to know each other slowly has been stripped away in modern life and it's created a situation where there is this logistical steep cliff which has a lot of social, emotional and psychological consequences.
One consequence: People often have to consciously CHOOSE to divulge information about themselves that might have historically been known via happenstance. The act of deciding whether or not to divulge it takes on a different meaning for both parties than if it was something someone knew because you both knew a lot of the same people.
In a worst case scenario, they each have a completely different idea of what it means for this person to CHOOSE to divulge the information.
I personally run into a LOT of friction over this because I'm a social creature with a long history of long-time relationships to people I know well and I've done a lot of therapy and so forth. My set point for how big a deal it is to divulge info is different from most people and I get a lot of weirdness where people jump to conclusions about how I am their new BFF or clearly their ONE TRUE LOVE and yadda.
Historically, you could not have SEX until marriage -- SEX being "PIV intercourse" (penis-in-vagina intercourse) aka the way you get PREGNANT -- but a lot of other things could and did happen to help you get to know each other, establish trust, decide if this was the sort of person you wished to marry, etc. And the reason you couldn't have sex was mostly because it led to babies.
So now there are an awful lot of people welding old cultural artifacts to details that occur in a completely different context and that "cliff" of "no sex before marriage" has become a social, emotional and psychological cliff where people want to know you LOVE THEM and WILL FOR SURE MARRY THEM because they revealed a single secret or some such and it goes all kinds of weird places and actively makes it hard to get to know someone well enough to decide in earnest "This will likely make for a good marriage."
Society needs to work out new best practices for this and the way society will most likely work that out is INDIVIDUALS will work it out for THEMSELVES and then that info will proliferate for some reason.
One really major issue: If you are gay, sex with a same sex lover is very unlikely to lead to unplanned pregnancy. No, that does NOT mean you can just sleep around casually as if there will be no consequences. The AIDS epidemic and David Crosby's liver transplant tell us that even if pregnancy is not a concern, disease still is, so be mindful of that at a minimum.
But it does help explain why heteronormative culture and gay culture seems to have a lot of friction: Cultural practices that are primarily rooted in a fear of unplanned pregnancy don't really apply to a person with a very low natural risk of unplanned pregnancy because that's not the kind of sex they are having.
That and people clearly tend to OVERSIMPLIFY the issue, acting as if "This ONE RISK does not apply, so ANYTHING GOES." and that's a good way to discover the hard way all the OTHER things that can go wrong and will go wrong sooner or later if you roll the dice often enough.
If you are gay and trying to come out of the closet -- especially if you are a gay woman who has always slept with men and you are trying to get your first girlfriend or first gal pal with benefits or first same sex hookup -- it will likely be easier to navigate if you think through all the assumptions you have always made about how you MUST handle things due to the threat of unplanned pregnancy.
For cis het women, access to birth control doesn't completely eliminate the risk of an unplanned pregnancy. Women who act like it does sometimes find out the hard way just how much damage can be done to your life by an unintended pregnancy from a one-night stand or similar.
I will no doubt try to expand futher on the ways in which culture needs to change because we DO have birth control, women tend to have fewer kids and so on and it simply no longer makes sense to PLAN for ALL WOMEN to be full-time moms and homemakers, thus the cultural norms rooted in such assumptions are no longer best practices. It is something I have talked about some before (for example: Out of Africa; Best Practices of a Bygone Era).
For now, just realize you get ONE life to live. Especially if you are a WOMAN, your life will be fuller if you take some time to think about such expectations and don't just follow social norms and expectations by default "because that's just how it's done."
TLDR: Human cultural norms the world over tend to be rooted in the assumption that "Sex leads to babies, so you best be ready to declare your undying love and marry them, OR ELSE!" and this has a lot of knock-on effects that these days seem to do more harm than good because that framing is out of step with current reality, both for some specific individuals and for the world at large.
Ironically, White men -- who were frankly ASSHOLES to parttake and THEN be judgy jerks -- likely were judgy jerks due to STDs being a thing in their world. Social stigma tends to grow out of real world negative consequences and tends to be shorthand for 'Yeah, EVERYONE who has TRIED that has gotten BADLY BURNED. So don't do that, STUPID!"
[2] FYI, I do NOT condone the practice of "get pregnant and then sleep around" as a means to make sure you know who the daddy is while having a very "free" love life. I don't think that's in the best interest of the health of the BABY.
It's just an EXAMPLE of how someone who was educated and had a particular social context that tolerated her sleeping around chose to deal with the logistical challenges. As noted above, stigma tends to be rooted in negative consequences and if you are EDUCATED and have other factors that allow you to do X without it ruining your life, your social group may have no reason to stigmatize that particular thing.
This fact will NOT prevent you from getting a lot of ugly judgment from people who have learned "That's a bad thing and should be socially stigmatitizing!" Good luck trying to tell them "It's NOT a bad thing and everything will be FINE."
Reality: A lot of other people who thought that have already learned the hard way that there is SOME OTHER REASON it is STILL a Bad Thing and THOSE FOLKS tend to go back to their small town or their church or whatever and become the biggest judgy jerks ever because they wish they had LISTENED and NOT DONE THAT.
So it's hard to convince people you really have, in fact, accounted for ALL the ways this can go sideways and it really will be fine EVEN if you have and, well, you MAY NOT HAVE.
Life: A complicated pain in the ass.
Around the time of his transplant, in an interview he said something like "I came of age after the invention of antibiotics and birth control and before AIDS." as an explanation for the "wild" (or hippie) lifestyle he had lived which had led to his Hepatitis infection. That's one of the best nutshell explanations for the hippie era I have ever seen, though it overlooks a few things like post-World War II abundance and higher education levels.
In human history, more sexually free cultures or eras generally correspond to times and places where for one brief shining moment, people could have sex without undue fear of pregnancy, disease and death. They are typically times and places where people were generally comfortably well-off, relatively well educated and some form of somewhat reliable birth control has been worked out.
My impression is that the spread of disease is usually the culprit that puts a stop to such "free love" periods, much as Crosby observed that AIDS more or less put a stop to the hippie era of free love.
Some things I have read:
- The "Eskimo"[1] practice of letting their wife sleep with a visitor developed in circumstances where STDs were not a thing. Then White men showed up, gave their wives STDs and also were judgy, bible-thumping jerks about the practice as well.
- The Romans who had such a reputation for all being "man whores" supposedly had a plant that worked as reliable birth control -- at least until they used it up to the point of EXTINCTION rather than cultivate it. DER.
- One upper class Roman woman who had a reputation for being ...very liberal with her affections was asked by someone "How is it all your kids look like your husband???" and she said "Don't take on passengers until there is cargo on board." (AKA sleep around after you know you are pregnant)[2]
- In addition to their sexual practices, the Romans used kissing to seal a deal, the way we shake hands on it. The result: Cold sores became an epidemic and some Emperor outlawed kissing to stop the spread.
Historically, if you tested positive for an STD, a social worker asked you for the name of all your recent sexual contacts, tracked them down, told them they had been with someone who had tested positive and tested them and treated them if necessary. This worked pretty well to contain outbreaks.
But AIDS in the US was initially associated with gay men and IV drug users. Neither group wished to give up the names of their contacts for fear of people being thrown in jail, fired from jobs, etc.
So they advocated for research into drugs to treat AIDS and changes in policy to protect their right to privacy and not give up those names.
What I have come to believe is that a lot of cultural practices related to love, sex, marriage, etc are rooted in a heteronormative culture that developed during a time when reliable birth control was not a thing. A lot of our best practices -- like "virgin until the wedding night" -- are rooted primarily in a fear of unplanned pregnancy.
In fact, I read once that some scholarship in some place in or near Great Britain had to update its criteria. For hundreds of years, young women could get the scholarship if they were "virgins" at the start of college (as one of probably a few criteria). The proof of virginity: Never been pregnant.
Too many women were showing up and saying "Why, YES, I would love some free money for college, thank you!" and they realized, you know, these days you can avoid pregnancy some way other than just saying no to sex.
There are other ways in which the world has changed that interact with this space and exacerbate certain issues. Historically, you likely grew up in a Tribe or Village or Small Town and likely married someone you knew socially well before marriage was considered.
You happened to interact with them and hear things about them and so on under circumstances that did not require dating and you knew that information was reliable because it's much harder to LIE to someone if you both know a lot of the same people.
There were also a variety of social practices for letting two people become intimate without risk of pregnancy that no longer exist (a la bundling bags as seen in the movie The Patriot).
So a lot of the social context that let people get to know each other slowly has been stripped away in modern life and it's created a situation where there is this logistical steep cliff which has a lot of social, emotional and psychological consequences.
One consequence: People often have to consciously CHOOSE to divulge information about themselves that might have historically been known via happenstance. The act of deciding whether or not to divulge it takes on a different meaning for both parties than if it was something someone knew because you both knew a lot of the same people.
In a worst case scenario, they each have a completely different idea of what it means for this person to CHOOSE to divulge the information.
I personally run into a LOT of friction over this because I'm a social creature with a long history of long-time relationships to people I know well and I've done a lot of therapy and so forth. My set point for how big a deal it is to divulge info is different from most people and I get a lot of weirdness where people jump to conclusions about how I am their new BFF or clearly their ONE TRUE LOVE and yadda.
Historically, you could not have SEX until marriage -- SEX being "PIV intercourse" (penis-in-vagina intercourse) aka the way you get PREGNANT -- but a lot of other things could and did happen to help you get to know each other, establish trust, decide if this was the sort of person you wished to marry, etc. And the reason you couldn't have sex was mostly because it led to babies.
So now there are an awful lot of people welding old cultural artifacts to details that occur in a completely different context and that "cliff" of "no sex before marriage" has become a social, emotional and psychological cliff where people want to know you LOVE THEM and WILL FOR SURE MARRY THEM because they revealed a single secret or some such and it goes all kinds of weird places and actively makes it hard to get to know someone well enough to decide in earnest "This will likely make for a good marriage."
Society needs to work out new best practices for this and the way society will most likely work that out is INDIVIDUALS will work it out for THEMSELVES and then that info will proliferate for some reason.
One really major issue: If you are gay, sex with a same sex lover is very unlikely to lead to unplanned pregnancy. No, that does NOT mean you can just sleep around casually as if there will be no consequences. The AIDS epidemic and David Crosby's liver transplant tell us that even if pregnancy is not a concern, disease still is, so be mindful of that at a minimum.
But it does help explain why heteronormative culture and gay culture seems to have a lot of friction: Cultural practices that are primarily rooted in a fear of unplanned pregnancy don't really apply to a person with a very low natural risk of unplanned pregnancy because that's not the kind of sex they are having.
That and people clearly tend to OVERSIMPLIFY the issue, acting as if "This ONE RISK does not apply, so ANYTHING GOES." and that's a good way to discover the hard way all the OTHER things that can go wrong and will go wrong sooner or later if you roll the dice often enough.
If you are gay and trying to come out of the closet -- especially if you are a gay woman who has always slept with men and you are trying to get your first girlfriend or first gal pal with benefits or first same sex hookup -- it will likely be easier to navigate if you think through all the assumptions you have always made about how you MUST handle things due to the threat of unplanned pregnancy.
For cis het women, access to birth control doesn't completely eliminate the risk of an unplanned pregnancy. Women who act like it does sometimes find out the hard way just how much damage can be done to your life by an unintended pregnancy from a one-night stand or similar.
I will no doubt try to expand futher on the ways in which culture needs to change because we DO have birth control, women tend to have fewer kids and so on and it simply no longer makes sense to PLAN for ALL WOMEN to be full-time moms and homemakers, thus the cultural norms rooted in such assumptions are no longer best practices. It is something I have talked about some before (for example: Out of Africa; Best Practices of a Bygone Era).
For now, just realize you get ONE life to live. Especially if you are a WOMAN, your life will be fuller if you take some time to think about such expectations and don't just follow social norms and expectations by default "because that's just how it's done."
TLDR: Human cultural norms the world over tend to be rooted in the assumption that "Sex leads to babies, so you best be ready to declare your undying love and marry them, OR ELSE!" and this has a lot of knock-on effects that these days seem to do more harm than good because that framing is out of step with current reality, both for some specific individuals and for the world at large.
Footnotes
[1] Yes, I know, Eskimo is not an ideal word and I don't know what a good word would be. Nor do I know the details of the practice. This is no doubt an outsider's point of view. I am NOT going to pretend to be an insider, thank you very much.Ironically, White men -- who were frankly ASSHOLES to parttake and THEN be judgy jerks -- likely were judgy jerks due to STDs being a thing in their world. Social stigma tends to grow out of real world negative consequences and tends to be shorthand for 'Yeah, EVERYONE who has TRIED that has gotten BADLY BURNED. So don't do that, STUPID!"
[2] FYI, I do NOT condone the practice of "get pregnant and then sleep around" as a means to make sure you know who the daddy is while having a very "free" love life. I don't think that's in the best interest of the health of the BABY.
It's just an EXAMPLE of how someone who was educated and had a particular social context that tolerated her sleeping around chose to deal with the logistical challenges. As noted above, stigma tends to be rooted in negative consequences and if you are EDUCATED and have other factors that allow you to do X without it ruining your life, your social group may have no reason to stigmatize that particular thing.
This fact will NOT prevent you from getting a lot of ugly judgment from people who have learned "That's a bad thing and should be socially stigmatitizing!" Good luck trying to tell them "It's NOT a bad thing and everything will be FINE."
Reality: A lot of other people who thought that have already learned the hard way that there is SOME OTHER REASON it is STILL a Bad Thing and THOSE FOLKS tend to go back to their small town or their church or whatever and become the biggest judgy jerks ever because they wish they had LISTENED and NOT DONE THAT.
So it's hard to convince people you really have, in fact, accounted for ALL the ways this can go sideways and it really will be fine EVEN if you have and, well, you MAY NOT HAVE.
Life: A complicated pain in the ass.