Quote:
Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ
Sure.
Many North American Mormons are suffering from a case of hyper-Victorianism. The Victorians attacked us over our sexual deviance (polygamy) and in our defeat we compulsively serve the ideologies of those who defeated us. Victorianism has influenced the larger American culture (the 1950s stereotypes are rife with it and so is the Mars/Venus material), but it is more acute with Mormons because we have been bludgeoned. This is what I mean by Uncle Tom-ism.
Therein we go back to Victorian sex norms like a person going to an astrology book to find himself. We take what we find there and obsessively try to mold ourselves into it. Stereotypes about maleness and femaleness are considered to be universally and objectively true and their cultural constructedness is ignored. The angel-whore dichotomy (which keeps women as objects), the true cult of womanhood thinking, the hyper-enforced sex divisions, the myth of the rugged Western male, the idea that the body is dirty and something to be encaged (Victorian dresses literally put women in a kind of iron cage)--these are all part of it. Sure, biology plays a role in some of these things, but many of them are culturally specific and are not demanded by scipture or a Godly sense of right and wrong.
The Victorians dressed modestly and new how to host in the parlor, but there was a whore house being run out back.
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As a father, I see reversing this Victorian/taboo stuff about sex as one of my most important duties in teaching my children, but it's not that easy.