Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Lets try this again.
Suppose youre a gay man. Your family, village, whatever, doesnt accept gays, so you marry a woman. Quite possibly you do your family duty and father a child or so.
But women just dont do anything for you, so you sneak out to have sex with other men. Because society frowns on any extramarital sex, and especially gay sex, you have to do this in secret, in dark alleys, unregulated 'bathhouses', etc. With the hiddenness of this, theres no way you could enforce 'monogamy'.
True, if youre a younger son, in a city, you might manage to avoid marriage and settle down with another guy of like persuasion. But if youre the older son, if youre in a more conservative society, if you never dared admit to your parents your orientation, if you THINK you can be satisfied with women, .....
Suppose youre a gay man. Your family, village, whatever, doesnt accept gays, so you marry a woman. Quite possibly you do your family duty and father a child or so.
But women just dont do anything for you, so you sneak out to have sex with other men. Because society frowns on any extramarital sex, and especially gay sex, you have to do this in secret, in dark alleys, unregulated 'bathhouses', etc. With the hiddenness of this, theres no way you could enforce 'monogamy'.
True, if youre a younger son, in a city, you might manage to avoid marriage and settle down with another guy of like persuasion. But if youre the older son, if youre in a more conservative society, if you never dared admit to your parents your orientation, if you THINK you can be satisfied with women, .....
Sulemain
Banned
HONF is High Octane Nightmare Fuel. An earlier HIV/AIDs Epidemic certainly qualifies.
I suspect TTL's free love revolution will come late then OTL, but at the same time be more long lasting; society will have already learned to deal with it's consequences. BTW, check out this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtRSX38b7Y
It's lyrics are relevant to TTL. BTW, was the public health campaign you mentioned inspired by the OTL Thatcher Government one?
I suspect TTL's free love revolution will come late then OTL, but at the same time be more long lasting; society will have already learned to deal with it's consequences. BTW, check out this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtRSX38b7Y
It's lyrics are relevant to TTL. BTW, was the public health campaign you mentioned inspired by the OTL Thatcher Government one?
For those who may have missed it, the update is on the previous page at post 4374.
Of course you're right - in fact, what you just said should have been blindingly obvious if I'd taken off my 2014 glasses.
So yes, monogamy's out. It might be possible for some to have a regular partner at the bathhouse or the upper room of the tavern, but not for others, and even they'd need to keep it pretty secret. Hygiene, however, is possible, and condoms are pretty easy to conceal. So maybe what would happen is that the bathhouse owners would set rules, and higher-risk practices would become frowned upon within the subculture.
Of course, there will also be those bathhouses that attract customers by not having rules. And it will never be possible to tell for sure where a prospective partner has been. Solving that problem would require a cultural change on both the gay and the straight side - well, I guess we know what Theodore Roosevelt's last cause in TTL will be.
You may well be right about that. Sexual conservatism in TTL exists for genuine public health reasons rather than just being a reactionary religious thing, so it will be harder to shift. Once it does shift, though, the habit of talking about sex in terms of hygiene, safety and honesty between partners, rather than exclusively in terms of traditional taboos, should help make the transition stick.
TTL's public health campaigns didn't have any specific model; if anything, I was thinking of some of the military anti-syphilis campaigns of the early 20th century OTL (which were a lot more honest than most civilian sex education was at the time).
Of course you're right - in fact, what you just said should have been blindingly obvious if I'd taken off my 2014 glasses.
So yes, monogamy's out. It might be possible for some to have a regular partner at the bathhouse or the upper room of the tavern, but not for others, and even they'd need to keep it pretty secret. Hygiene, however, is possible, and condoms are pretty easy to conceal. So maybe what would happen is that the bathhouse owners would set rules, and higher-risk practices would become frowned upon within the subculture.
Of course, there will also be those bathhouses that attract customers by not having rules. And it will never be possible to tell for sure where a prospective partner has been. Solving that problem would require a cultural change on both the gay and the straight side - well, I guess we know what Theodore Roosevelt's last cause in TTL will be.
You may well be right about that. Sexual conservatism in TTL exists for genuine public health reasons rather than just being a reactionary religious thing, so it will be harder to shift. Once it does shift, though, the habit of talking about sex in terms of hygiene, safety and honesty between partners, rather than exclusively in terms of traditional taboos, should help make the transition stick.
TTL's public health campaigns didn't have any specific model; if anything, I was thinking of some of the military anti-syphilis campaigns of the early 20th century OTL (which were a lot more honest than most civilian sex education was at the time).
Deleted member 67076
Condoms in wide spread usage in the 20s. Wow.
The world birthrate is going to smaller than OTL for one.
The world birthrate is going to smaller than OTL for one.
Actually it could be the same or slightly higher; the only socially acceptable way ITTL to have sex is within marriage (or a longterm relationship in other instances), and married men are probably gonna refuse to use condoms with their wives when it's obvious they're being faithful to them, so you'd see more children being born as a result of men only being able to get release with their wives (or there hands, but that would probably be seen as something you only do if you're not married/men want sex, not a handjob).
Condoms were widely marketed during the 20s and 30s in OTL. The fully-automated process for making them was invented in 1930. The main barrier to using them in much of the world was illegality, not availability - and in TTL, "there's a sexually-transmitted disease that kills you, and no one knows who has it" will overcome the protests of many (albeit not all) who would otherwise object.
BTW, before birth-control pills were invented, married couples did use condoms if they didn't want or couldn't afford another child. The saying "condoms are cheaper than children" dates from the Depression.
The British West Africa update will be next - really.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this last night, and there some HUGE consequences, socially. IOTL, the amount of sexual abuse of the powerless, children and women and natives, say, was horrific. When Freud was presented with many middle class women presenting tales of rape and abuse he refused to believe them (our sort of people dont do that sort of thing), and invented, instead, weird ideas about 'penis envy' and such.
ITTL, with the huge turn away from Victorian(pretend it doesnt happen) morality, and the turn towards boys/men actually being expected to obey the same rules, I think a lot of this will be uncovered much sooner.
Clergymen (not just RC) abusing choir boys. Orphage workers abusing orphans. Residential schools. The woman who was raped in Downton Abbey (tv), and couldnt say anything to anyone. All these things will come out, slowly, very slowly, but it will start in the 30s not the 60s.
Also, if sex is strictly limited to marriage, is masturbation going to become more acceptable? I suspect it has to. Initially, no doubt, its condemnation is de-emphasized. Then gradually reduced. Ultimately, though, there might be discussions in sex ed classes for 'if you cant hold out', at least for boys. How long it would take for girls' problems there to be addressed, I dont know.
Virgins. If there is a resurgence in demand for intact hymens, do we see a massive drop in girls doing ballet and gymnastics? Will there be a European uptake of the Asian practice of surgically recreating a hymen.
Will oral and manual sex take off massively, especially with not yet married couples?
Surgery is going to take a huge hit. Testing for HIV in the blood takes, iirc, modern technology. This is going to mean that blood banks shut down. Surgery will require that the patient round up family with similar blood types, which will mean emergency surgeries cant happen. Appendectomies will far more often be fatal, etc.
Wow. I think I may have had more, bit this is enough to start with.
ITTL, with the huge turn away from Victorian(pretend it doesnt happen) morality, and the turn towards boys/men actually being expected to obey the same rules, I think a lot of this will be uncovered much sooner.
Clergymen (not just RC) abusing choir boys. Orphage workers abusing orphans. Residential schools. The woman who was raped in Downton Abbey (tv), and couldnt say anything to anyone. All these things will come out, slowly, very slowly, but it will start in the 30s not the 60s.
Also, if sex is strictly limited to marriage, is masturbation going to become more acceptable? I suspect it has to. Initially, no doubt, its condemnation is de-emphasized. Then gradually reduced. Ultimately, though, there might be discussions in sex ed classes for 'if you cant hold out', at least for boys. How long it would take for girls' problems there to be addressed, I dont know.
Virgins. If there is a resurgence in demand for intact hymens, do we see a massive drop in girls doing ballet and gymnastics? Will there be a European uptake of the Asian practice of surgically recreating a hymen.
Will oral and manual sex take off massively, especially with not yet married couples?
Surgery is going to take a huge hit. Testing for HIV in the blood takes, iirc, modern technology. This is going to mean that blood banks shut down. Surgery will require that the patient round up family with similar blood types, which will mean emergency surgeries cant happen. Appendectomies will far more often be fatal, etc.
Wow. I think I may have had more, bit this is enough to start with.
Well, I think that with the discovery of TTL's AIDS will come the means to treat it. I mean, the first years will be painful, but the profound changes would allow different approaches to not only how to cure it and the means to prevent it but also the exploration of synthetic blood or the blood structure (stem cells' research on the 50s, anyone?)
No.
We got very, very lucky iOTL. There were NO antivirals until shortly before HIV was discovered, and its not like there werent lots of other viral diseases theyd be useful for. How do you culture HIV and guage the effectiveness of an antiviral, even if someone stumbled across one 30 years early?
They dont even know what DNA is, let alone RNA, let alone reverse transcriptase blockers. Nope. Prevention is the only game in town until 1970 equivalent.
Note, too, that treating HIV IOTL requires a cocktail of multiple drugs - none of which they have even theoretical grounds to be looking for for about half a century. If you happen to find a drug that works, and use it by its self, HIV develops immunity to it really fast. So. No. A treatment is ASB for multiple decades.
Note, too, that even today we have no way to CURE HIV, we can just treat suppress it by continuous application of drugs.
As for artificial blood. Afaik, the only thing thats usable today is a fancy fluorinated hydrocarbon, which they are, again, multiple decades away from finding.
Last edited:
Deleted member 67076
Wait, what.
Condoms =/= less chance of having children. Being faithful is irrelevant to the matter. I'm sure people are very much willing to take advantage of that, no matter what the time period it is.
Well, thats interesting.
Nice update, and shows how something like an earlier spread of STDs can touch off massive social changes. Coupled with Jajas, Baha'i being more a reform movement within Islam, and more political power for women in other countries has really taken feminism in earlier and different directions than OTL, adding to an overall earlier progressiveness in TTL. Yet this comes at the price of many deaths and social disruptions from the disease, and a more conservative movement such as the re-hardening of the caste structure in India and stronger pressure to push the value of virginity, which is a good reflection of the social views and technological progression of the period. So good job on having Congo Fever/AIDs altering the already alt-culture of TTL rather than just having OTL's reactions sloppily slapped on top.
This sounds about right - and it's likely to feed into an earlier cynicism and distrust of authority figures in general. Mid-century in TTL looks like it will be a weird combination of our Victorian era, 1920s and 1960s.
Well, there's no way to stop it, really, and with the spread of sexual-hygiene education, it seems likely that some of the more pragmatic instructors will point teenagers toward lower-risk behaviors. No doubt this will be a major scandal the first time it becomes public - TTL's *Margaret Sangers may have an easier time winning tolerance for birth control, but the fight against Congo fever will touch off many other culture wars.
Hmmm. I'd imagine that, with girls from good families in the more liberal societies, there'll be some willingness to take their word for it, as well as a recognition that sports and dance might damage the hymen. In more conservative societies, there may indeed be a push away from athletics for girls, and those are also the societies where surgical procedures might become an option at least for the rich. It could cause some fault lines if, say, a young French woman marries into a Portuguese family.
And yes, I expect that unmarried couples will steer themselves, and be discreetly steered, into lower-risk forms of sex, at least until condoms become thoroughly accepted and reliable.
Hmmm. I wonder if electron microscopy might help at least somewhat - they'd be able to take sample blood cells and examine them for abnormalities, even if they don't yet know what the abnormalities are. The first electron microscopes in OTL were invented around this time. Of course, even if that technique is viable, it would require every blood bank to have an expensive piece of equipment and to test each individual sample by hand, which would probably be out of reach in most places.
Failing that, it would be safe to take blood from virgins (sounds like medieval magic, doesn't it?) so there might be blood drives among young women of high school age or a bit older. A desperate enough hospital might institute a certificate-of-character system and accept the risk of error, figuring that in an emergency, it needs to save lives first and deal with the risk of infection later. But neither of these work-arounds would produce anywhere near a sufficient supply, so blood would have to be severely rationed - stored blood would be for emergencies only, and more ordinary surgical patients would have to get donations from their relatives. This will offset most if not all the gains from TTL's earlier advances in tropical medicine, meaning that until an assay for *HIV is developed, the bulk of the population won't be any healthier or longer-lived than OTL.
He's getting up there in years, but he's still got one more campaign left in him.
What David said, pretty much. In OTL, viruses were theorized as early as the 1890s and could be isolated through filtration and electron microscopy during the second quarter of the twentieth century, but no one had any idea of how they worked or how fast they evolved. Moreover, HIV isn't the kind of virus that can be fought with an inactive-pathogen vaccine like polio was (although doctors in TTL are likely to try, with very bad results).
There was rudimentary knowledge of DNA at this time in OTL, but it was the 1950s before we started to understand its structure or how it worked. With Congo fever as a global epidemic in TTL, more money might get thrown at DNA/RNA research once the RNA composition of viruses is discovered (in OTL, they were known to be made of nucleic acids during the 1930s), but we're still probably talking about the 40s before serious DNA discoveries begin and the 60s before any real attempts at anti-retroviral drugs can be made. Until then, the "treatment" of Congo fever will involve prevention, palliative care for the opportunistic infections (which won't work for long) and various immune enhancers (which won't work either).
It stands to reason that an HIV breakout in a time when the cultural norms and state of medical science were different would provoke different reactions. And you're correct that feminism is taking a somewhat different direction in TTL, and will remain sexually conservative for a longer time; in fact, after the abortive permissiveness of the 1900s, mainstream TTL feminism might stay somewhat longer with the first-wave notion of sexual freedom as a means by which men abuse women. The movement will certainly be concerned with family life, as it will support the autonomy of women in marital and family relationships and oppose abuse within marriage, but it will be less focused on the sexual side of things and more on the civic and economic side. Condoms, and eventually anti-retrovirals, will change that, but slowly, with relaxation of sexual taboos mostly a matter for the 1950s and later.
There will be too much pushback for a rigid caste system to be put back in place in India, but Congo fever will make the reformation a much longer and harder struggle than it would otherwise have been.
What I'm saying is that men are dicks (no pun intended), even more so in the past, so there's going to be those who demand sex whether the wives want it or not AND refuse to use condoms since they know their wives don't have it and vice-versa thee wives know they don't have it.
I understand your point, but what to do in this cases? I bet for a stronger sexual education based in accepting the responsibility of every act that has been done, and campaigns of the kind of "Protect yourself if you care" or something like that (I was going to do something like "If you hump without protection you're humping with Hitler" but, well... I have the feeling that this will be to no effect.)
People need to remember that the actual chance of HIV infection with any one sexual encounter is relatively small. The highest risk, 3%, is for being the "bottom" in anal sex. But for everything else, the risks are significantly less than 1% - more like 1 in 300 for any heterosexual encounter for either partner.
What this means is statistically speaking you're pretty unlikely to get AIDS, even if you don't use condoms, unless you:
1. Have hundreds of one-night stands a year. Realistically speaking, this is only likely for certain subsections of gay culture (like the bathhouse culture IOTL), as well as prostitutes. The average straight man simply cannot get enough casual sex to put themselves at risk, unless they use prostitutes, and most cannot afford such heavy usage anyway.
2. Engage in multiple concurrent sexual relationships (e.g., Polyamory). This is how AIDS became so widespread in Africa IOTL. If you have a wife, as well as a lover, and both your wife and your lover also have one additional regular partner, and so on, your risk of getting infected is actually much, much higher.
As modern-day sexual norms in the west drifted to serial monogamy, risk was kept relatively low. But if the focus becomes on "being safe" with prostitutes and reducing causal encounters, but a system which promotes lifelong mongamy but in practice continues to have mistresses and the like, the potential for AIDS epidemics in the West is much, much higher than IOTL. Sadly, people will actually tend to curtail the only moderately risky parts of their behavior, seldom using protection with their long term second partners, and thus the spread of AIDS will continue.
What this means is statistically speaking you're pretty unlikely to get AIDS, even if you don't use condoms, unless you:
1. Have hundreds of one-night stands a year. Realistically speaking, this is only likely for certain subsections of gay culture (like the bathhouse culture IOTL), as well as prostitutes. The average straight man simply cannot get enough casual sex to put themselves at risk, unless they use prostitutes, and most cannot afford such heavy usage anyway.
2. Engage in multiple concurrent sexual relationships (e.g., Polyamory). This is how AIDS became so widespread in Africa IOTL. If you have a wife, as well as a lover, and both your wife and your lover also have one additional regular partner, and so on, your risk of getting infected is actually much, much higher.
As modern-day sexual norms in the west drifted to serial monogamy, risk was kept relatively low. But if the focus becomes on "being safe" with prostitutes and reducing causal encounters, but a system which promotes lifelong mongamy but in practice continues to have mistresses and the like, the potential for AIDS epidemics in the West is much, much higher than IOTL. Sadly, people will actually tend to curtail the only moderately risky parts of their behavior, seldom using protection with their long term second partners, and thus the spread of AIDS will continue.
Deleted member 67076
And thats gonna be the majority of people? Ok. You're gonna need to give me some proof.
Fact of the matter is, a huge barrier to contraception has been lifted. The social disdain for contraceptive use is being eroded as well. There's a huge panic about the disease, which will cause uncertainty no matter what. I don't care if there are several who'll have the mindset you describe. For many people, they will take advantage of this, and that will translate into a smaller birthrate.