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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Indeed, particularly in the case of B- has there ever been any society which has had success in keeping stupid but not actually literally mentally disabled teenaged girls from broken homes from getting taken advantage of until they wind up in a bad spot in a way that can't be fixed, like ever in the history of the world- some of these people will never have good outcomes, but you can probably make their outcomes less bad just by removing the worst aspects from society.

Girls knew that if they got pregnant out of marriage, terrible things (and I mean, really terrible things) would happen, so they did not get pregnant. This was barbaric in some ways, but it shows that teen girls, even when dumb, respond to incentives.

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.

I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.

The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:

'A Chastitute is a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman . . . rustic celibate by force of circumstance.' John Bosco, who 'hasn't the makings of a dacent sin in him', is a chastitute, a bachelor farmer and all he is searching for is a plain decent woman to share his life. He nearly got there a thousand times but nearly never bulled a cow'. This play tells of his many endeavours to find a mate and the end result.