Bad Times Good Times

We most of us moan that things were better then than they are now. I once heard that the people in the Bronze Age used to say that things were better in the Iron Age.

In the Middle Ages, insist that wine is just symbolic of Christ's blood, and not his actual blood, and you would be burnt at the stake for heresy. (Not to mention hundreds of other misdemeanours for which you would be tortured or killed horrendously.)

Only just over a hundred years ago, you went to church or would be punished for not attending. The vicar is paid by the lord of the manor, so what he preaches to the shanghaied congregation is what his paymaster agrees should be preached. "Know thy place."

Masturbate a hundred years ago and, as well as blindness and deafness and hair growing on the palms of the hands, you'd fear a remedy like blistering of the penis with red mercury ointment: cauterisation of the spine and genitals were recommended as late as 1905*.

Be outed as homosexual, less than four decades ago, and you'd be in clink.

The power of ignorance.

Without all that ignorance...

without myth, superstition, and fear of punishment from elsewhere, we are free-minded to live in the light and think clearly our own thoughts.

Let's keep it that way.

* Source: World Sex Records - there's also much more stuff on Prudery, Superstition and the Law.

Image courtesy of outnorthwest.
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Morality not the law's business

In 1957, after its three-year long inquiry, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain came to the conclusion that outlawing homosexuality impinged upon civil liberties.

It said society and the law should respect "individual freedom of actions in matters of private morality."

"Ultimately, private morality or immorality was 'not the law's business'."

Source: BBC On This Day, September 4th 1957.

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Added November 30th 2005:

From thefword.org.uk (in an excellent piece on Women's Sex Toys):

"...according to Colin Spencer's “Homosexuality: A History”, at least two female transvestites were discovered using dildos in 16th-century France; one was hanged and the other burned alive."

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Added December 14th 2005:

A brilliant read on the whole story of Masturbation.

It includes the absolute final word on all that religious bullshit about Onan who earned God's wrath by 'spilling his seed upon the ground'; thus creating the 'Sin of Onanism':

"And as for Onan being cursed for spilling his seed, it seems it wasn't masturbation or coitus interruptus he was in trouble for - it was failing to knock up his dead brother's wife. (Onan was supposed to provide her with an heir to avoid the shame of being childless, but instead he 'spilled his seed upon the ground' so he wouldn't have to split his inheritance with her offspring.)"

Another telling piece from that same source:

"On December 1, 1994, at a United Nations-sponsored conference on AIDS, U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders stated that masturbation 'is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught - perhaps even as part of our sex ed. Curriculum.' America was not ready for such a message. Teach children to masturbate - or even that it was okay to figure out on their own how to masturbate! Scandal!

The Clinton White House (ever quick to know which way the wind was blowing) made it clear to Elders that if she did not resign, she would be fired. She resigned. (Ironically, Clinton himself was later accused of having his pants down, not for masturbation, but for a blowjob courtesy of Monica Lewinsky. He, however, never resigned.)"

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Added February 20th 2006:

William Acton, the famous Victorian physician, describes the ravages of masturbation:

"The frame is stunted and weak, the muscles undeveloped, the eye is sunken and heavy, the complexion is sallow, pasty, or covered with spots of acne, the hands are damp and cold, and the skin moist. The boy shuns the society of others, creeps about alone, joins with repugnance in the amusements of his schoolfellows. He cannot look any one in the face, and becomes careless in dress and uncleanly in person. His intellect has become sluggish and enfeebled, and if his evil habits are persisted in, he may end in becoming a drivelling idiot.... Such boys are to be seen in all stages of degeneration, but what we have described is but the result towards which they all are tending."

Source: The Marijuana Smokers.