Could the "sexual revolution" ever be un-done?

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First off, we're talking about different things. I was talking about orgies, in the sense of organized gatherings of people who engage in sexual activities together, a topic that came up in this thread due to kraftiekortie's mention of Renaissance-era Popes who engaged in orgies. In today's world there exist small organized subcultures of people who have orgies NOT involving sexual violence or exploitation, and this is very unlikely to have occurred in past eras. Of course, sexual violence still does happen too, but that's a different topic.

What is your evidence for the alleged rise in rape and sexual assault? Rape rates are notoriously hard to study due to under-reporting, but in general it would appear that the long term trend has been for rape rates to be going down, if anything. See Statistics Show Drop In U.S. Rape Cases By David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, June 19, 2006.

Rape is likely to have been far MORE under-reported before the 1970's than afterward. In the 1970's, thanks to the feminist movement, rape crisis centers were established, and there was at least some attempt to change police procedures to be less re-traumatizing to rape victims. Furthermore, before the 1970's, rape victims themselves were much more stigmatized than they are now, which made reporting even less likely back then.


Crime rates were indeed unusually low (in the United States at least) in the 1950's due to postwar prosperity (again, in the United States), but there had been plenty of previous big crime waves, such as the one in the 1920's and early 1930's due to Prohibition-era gangs.

As for the massive crime wave that started in the 1960's and then peaked in the 1980's (not the 1990's as I erroneously said earlier), it likely had many causes. One of them may be lead poisoning. (See this article, with an update here.)

Another likely cause of the 1960's crime wave was the economic upheavals in the black community. For nearly a century since the Civil War, most black people worked on southern farms, as sharecroppers. In the late 1950's and then throughout the 1960's, vast numbers of sharecroppers lost their jobs due to farm mechanization. So they had to move to cities, where many of them were unable to find other jobs due to racism, hence had little choice but to get involved in drug gangs, etc. The resulting crime wave would probably have been a LOT worse than it was without the War on Poverty and then the advent of Affirmative Action.


Having grown up in that era, I definitely do not agree that the benefits were "scant." Without the positive social changes of the 1960's and 1970's, I personally would have been far worse off, not better off.


In terms of crime, yes, the 1950's were an era of unusually low crime in the U.S.A. As for overall "morality," though, that's debatable. Depends on which moral values you consider most important, I guess.


In your response, you did not answer the above question. I would still be very interested in your thoughts, if any, as to why divorce rates are now lower in the more socially liberal states than in the more socially conservative states. By the way, in what general kind of a place do you live?


Even in the 1700's and early 1800's, married women were, legally speaking, not much different from slaves. This began to change only in around 1839, when Mississippi passed its Women's Married Property Act, and other states followed suit over the next 30 years or so.

Certainly our society has become less patriarchal since then. Another big leap forward was women's suffrage, and still another big leap forward was 1970's feminism. Currently I would say that our society is only vestigially patriarchal, i.e. it retains some patriarchal customs but is not patriarchal overall. There is, however, definitely a threat from the religious right wing (and any Supreme Court justices appointed under its influence) to take us on a great leap backwards.

As recently as the 1950's, sexual morality was thought of largely in terms of male property rights over women. Female pre-marital virginity was still a big, big deal. Rape victims were stigmatized as damaged goods. Such attitudes continue to linger even today, although they are no longer mainstream.


Feminism and the sexual revolution are distinct but definitely intertwined. A good brief history can be found in the Wikipedia article on "Free love". (By the way, "Free Love" in the sense used by the historical Free Love movement is NOT the same thing as what kraftiekortie apparently meant by "Free Love" earlier in this thread.)


Could you give some examples of what you mean by "junk they don't need"?

As I see it, what was going on here was NOT that the products themselves were useless or unnecessary. (On this point, which has been argued by various cultural critics, see Women and the Myth of Consumerism by Ellen Willis, published back in 1970.) Rather, corporations were resorting to desperate measures to get a leg up on their competition in a mass market. Mass markets are always tougher to sell to than either niche markets or small local markets; and, when selling a new product to a mass market, in the era of mass media and information overload, the toughest challenge is simply to get a potential customer's attention. Hence the advent of sexy ads. Hence also the advent of sexy mass media in which ads could be sold.


I haven't yet read that particular book itself, but I've read various online debates inspired by it. I'll have more comments later on what I understand (admittedly second-hand) to be the issues he raised. I need to get to work on other things now.

Regarding Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism:

I haven't read it yet, but I gather that his main complaint is that Americans have lost a sense of community and have developed a tendency to relate to the world as atomized individuals, without concern for future generations or for the well-being of any community.

I happen to agree with these concerns, and I think they have several causes:

1) The increasingly competitive nature of American society. This is primarily an economic problem, but it results in an endless need for self-improvement and validation.

2) Americans' endless migrations. Too many people have had to move away from the place where they grew up in order to find work. Many have had to move multiple times to different parts of the country. This makes it hard to sink deep roots anywhere. It also destroys the EXTENDED family. In most traditional societies, grandparents had a significant role in caring for children. Not so in most families here.

3) Mass culture. Simply by virtue being mass culture, rather than local or subculture-based, it is impersonal. Most people will never meet their favorite musicians, actors, etc. in real life. Therefore, anyone who does NOT also have a deep emotional investment in being part of some smaller, more human-scale subculture (e.g. a religious group, or a small ethnic enclave, or something like the LGBT community, or perhaps even a group devoted to some academic or professional interest, or to some common hobby) will be lost in an impersonal cultural sea, with nothing to care about in any deep, personally meaningful way, except perhaps for the fate of one's own children if one happens to have any.

4) Unrealistic ideas about romantic love, derived from mass culture. This is a complex topic in itself, which I don't have time to go into now.

5) Belief that a world-destroying nuclear war, or some other world-destroying catastrophe, will inevitably happen within one's lifetime or soon afterward. In that case, why even think about any longterm future, rather than just live for the day?

I would NOT blame the advent of (relative) sexual freedom, except insofar as it has fed into #4 above, but that's not intrinsic to sexual freedom itself.

Of course, I would have to read Lasch's book to find out his understanding of the role of big business in shaping culture. I've already stated, in previous posts, my view of this question.

I hope that the sexual revolution never gets undone. Things are much better than they were before the 60s. LGBTQ people are free to be themselves today which is a benefit to me, being that I'm one of those types. Women can have any career that they want these days. They're no longer barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I'm free to be the unique individual that I am. If these were the 1950s or earlier, I'd be locked up in an asylum for using masculine items as a way of expressing myself.

Yes the sexual revolution could be undone. I'm pretty sure the sexual revolution was undone in Iran.

The only evidence required is that one encounters reports of such cases every day, when this was far from being true for my grandfathers. I don't doubt that rape cases have probably dropped over the past few years, but as already stated, this is irrelevant to my point; I don't deny that there's a possibility that the 00s were more degenerate than the 10s and the 90s more degenerate than the 00s, or any other such arrangement you might like to conjure up; I'm saying only that the world post-1960s is vastly more degenerate than the one before it. Which is the most degenerate of the decades that followed the 60s is of all but no interest to me.



And yet "rape crisis centers" were never needed in the more traditional preceding periods, because men respected and cared for their wives - and womankind in general. Feminism, beyond the point where women received the vote, when it still had a serious point to make, has been the greatest disaster for the wellbeing of women by as it were bringing them down to Earth from the more reverenced realm they previously occupied and thereby making them "fair game" in the eyes of criminals, advertisers, employers and so forth.



Yes, crime rates were rather high in the major American cities during the Prohibition era - though I'd dare say not nearly so high as we'd imagine from watching The Roaring Twenties and The Untouchables, the usual kinds of sources for the popular imagination of those times. Nevertheless, we didn't witness the same corrosive effects as those resulting from crime in its more modern, depersonalised forms, where the cult of uninformed, unenlightened individualism, which was the impetus behind the sex revolution, has led each man to conclude that the other is, by being the "other" as such, an enemy to be suspected rather than a friend to at least, prima facie, be trusted. One could still find, in the Twenties, real, paper phone-books in telephone boxes, without some teenage troglodyte setting them on fire for the sheer brainless hell of it. One could still strike up conversation with his neighbour on the bus without being assumed to be a thug or a conman, one could still expect, as an old lady, to be invulnerable to the criminal actions of even the worst gangsters. Indeed, crime in the daytime was itself close to unheard of.


I never realised, before I joined this forum, that Aspergians, being the socially iconoclastic group they're supposed to be, could be such sheep as to support something so vicious, irrational and racist as Affirmative Action. There is absolutely no rational justification for the state responding to one evil with another and as such, you'll forgive me for concluding that the only reason you support such a disgusting policy is that you're emotionally attached to your title of "liberal". I too am left-leaning in the economic sense, because such a position is rationally justified in that case, but I have the presence of mind and integrity not to in general extend this attitude to socially "liberal" ideology just because of the accident that it shares the same adjective; such rational justification as mentioned is, for the most part, grossly lacking in the latter case.





Such perennial moral values as kindness, sympathy, humanity, community and self control, to name a few.




What you say in your first paragraph suggests an ignorance of how statistics work; temporal trends never decrease for a single instant, only for some extended length of time. At any point in this time interval, one could say that they are "continuing to go down", whether this is for a minute, a day, a year or a century - depending on the subject of the statistical analysis in question, so this proves nothing.

I have only your word for the divorce rates' geographical trends mentioned, but I'd suggest the issue is partly down to poverty. Of course it's important to note also that there really is no such thing as "socially conservative" states anymore; promiscuity, divorce, misogyny (in the true sense of the objectification of women, not the ridiculous feminist sense which sees the objectification of women as a virtue) and so forth are by a long margin the rule rather than the exception EVERYWHERE in the Western world, though the trend may reach greater levels in some states.




Yes, you're right to object vis-a-vis property rights, but I'd hardly conclude that women were in a position of servitude on consequence, except in a rough metaphorical sense.



This is the first thing you've said which is COMPLETE nonsense. Sexual morality is and always was almost entirely an individual affair. One was to refrain from pre-marital sex, masturbation, adultery, lewd talk and so forth; the obligations were overwhelming the same for both sexes. There may have been slightly more tolerance for male violations of these tenets, which is another issue, but the obligations in themselves were the same for both sexes, except where the different anatomical or psychological features of the sexes were involved.


Pre marital virginity, at least for couples marrying for the first time, should still be a big deal, because it implies the kind of serious, mature commitment that is required for a marriage to work. The only reason virginity was never such a big deal for men is that there is no biological way of knowing for sure whether a man is a virgin or not, which would render such concerns pointless. That rape victims were stigmatised is certainly one of the few justified complaints you've mentioned so far.



Free love was advocated by enlightened men like Bertrand Russell on the reasonable hypothesis that, if couples could experiment sexually before committing to marriage and producing children, they would be less likely enter bad marriages, having had a chance to inspect each other's faults beforehand. This hypothesis has since been invalidated owing to the fact that evil human nature, rather than appreciating its philosophical merits, just took it as infinite license for sexual promiscuity, ignoring its original intentions.



Designer clothes, expensive cars, takeaways every night, Netflix subscriptions, payday loans - purchases which are utterly irrational from the point of view of the proletarian who thereby is likely to get himself into lifelong debt and penury, but into which he is lured by sophisticated advertising techniques, often manipulating equally engineeredly high sex drives. Of course it doesn't help that the proletariat is denied a good education through a state "education" system whose purpose is indoctrination rather than education and which pumps out functional illiterates incapable of understanding just how manipulated and exploited they will be at every stage of their adult lives by the bourgeoisie. Of course "New" Marxism has been instrumental in this.




Point 3, too; the problem is not mass culture per se, which has always existed, albeit previously as a monopoly of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, but rather a mass culture which, being an almost inevitable consequence of the market economy and what Lasch called the "age of diminishing expectations", becomes a stale commercial hodge-podge which reduces each man to the state of a worthless object to be manipulated for one's own gain by those in turn facing the same manipulation.

Both points three and four are also logical outcomes (from the point of view of corrupt human nature itself) of the broader exaltation of the predatory individual, which includes but is not limited to the sexual objectification of the "other" resulting from the sexual revolution.

That's far from sufficient evidence. How do you know this isn't because newspapers these days are freer to publish such stories than they were back when your grandfather was a kid, or because more rapes are reported because rape victims are treated better these days?

It is VERY hard to say what rape rates were in past eras, due to under-reporting, due to the stigmatization of rape victims in past eras.

Regarding violent crime in general, as far as I can tell, it is generally agreed by historians that the longterm trend over the past few centuries has been for violent crime rates to go down, and also that violent crime rates have gone down drastically over the past 30 years -- at least here in the U.S.A.; perhaps things are different in other parts of the world? Regarding historical violent crime trends:

- Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime (PDF) by Manuel Eisner (publication info here)
- The History of Homicide in the U.S (PDF)
- Pssst: Crime May Be Near an All-Time Low By Justin Fox, Bloomberg News, February 12, 2018


Please define exactly what you mean by "degenerate." (I'm inclined to suspect that, whatever you mean by that term, it very likely might NOT have a positive correlation with rape rates.)


I don't think very many social historians would agree with you on this. There have always been men who may have "respected" the women in their own family and other families within their social circle, but regarded other women as fair game.


If by "bringing them down to Earth from the more reverenced realm they previously occupied," you mean large numbers of women working outside the home, that's something that would inevitably have happened anyway, for economic reasons. Had it not happened under the banner of feminism, it would have happened under some other banner. More about this in another post, later. (I probably won't have time for this for the next few days.)


Hmmm, I recall reading plenty of stories about various destructive "pranks" (though not phonebook-burning in particular) that happened back in the 1920's or earlier. I don't have this info handy but will try to dig it up later if you're interested.


From where are you getting your info?

Here in NYC, conversations between strangers on the bus or subway are uncommon, but they do happen now and then. Crime has gone down to sufficient degree that most people aren't scared of everyone they meet, but still tend to be unsociable with strangers, probably (I would guess) due to feeling overwhelmed by the crowds and by all the other things they need to think about and do (New Yorkers are notoriously busy).


No. As explained in your quote from me above, Affirmative Action helped to prevent far worse problems. I do see Affirmative Action as something that should be only temporary, though. It should be phased out eventually.

I need to go out now. I'll try to respond to the rest of your post later, probably in a few days.

It's a shame demographics have not been mentioned yet. I think the progressives are finally beginning to understand the alt-right equation demographics = destiny, at least in part, when they talk about old white voters dying out in the next few decades and then the country is theirs!.

Applied to the sexual revolution though, the free love crowd is losing the demographic battle, both within territories and globally. The freer women are, the less children they tend to have. The smarter women are, the less children they have (making the revolution horribly dysgenic at the same time). If no one does anything at all, the sexual revolution will simply be undone by sheer mass of people born into culturally prudish households.

I find it's a pointless line of argument though. When it comes down to it, these revolutionaries do not care about future generations, only themselves - after all, if they did care, they would be as Puritan about divorce as we are. When told the future in Europe looks more like Islamabad than San Francisco's heyday, where homosexuals are thrown off buildings for sport, they are happy that at least they are taking horrible Christianity to the grave with them.

Depends how many young people decide to leave those culturally prudish households and join the other culture. The future of the Earth does hang in the balance depending on this.


Actually, demographics is the most compelling reason why the sexual revolution needs to be spread worldwide. The only question is how to do this in a non-imperialist way. Consider the alternatives:

1) Patriarchy means endless population growth, hence endless competition for limited resources, hence endless war. Well, endless until it ends in nuclear war or some similar worldwide catastrophe.

2) Worldwide sexual revolution means worldwide population decline, just as more and more labor is being taken over by robots.

Considering the above gives new meaning to the old hippie slogan "Make Love Not War."

My own support for the sexual revolution these days is primarily out of concern for humanity's future.


There are feminist, gay-friendly reformers within Islam who need to be supported. Currently, however, in the Western world, most of these same reformers are more worried about being persecuted as Muslims, by non-Muslims.

[P.S. I haven't forgotten about Prometheus's post above and will be continuing my response later, hopefully within the next couple of days.]

If this were possible on any kind of meaningful scale, we'd be living in a very different world. The big problem of the age and perhaps the greatest short-sighted failure of the progressives, is the now obvious fact that most people don't leave their cultures and join others. The invention of the multi-culturalism doctrine was a response to this failure, effectively formalising it as "the new normal". As our territories become more diverse, the greater these divisions become and the harder everyone fights to retain what they have and are. Cultural change must come from within the tribe, not from without, else you see that knee-jerk anti-imperialism response. The conservative cultures now here are just laughing at you as your obviously decadent society collapses around you.



I'd say that makes you a very rare exception then.



Not much hope to be gleaned here either. You said it yourself, it's these exact people who need bodyguards and 24 hour police protection, not the imams who call for their deaths.

Radical cultural change has happened in the West and can happen (from within) in other cultures too. The main precondition is sufficient prosperity. For example, in the Middle East, things will likely start to become a lot different if/when they ever finally manage to solve their millenia-old water shortages. Hopefully, recent advances in de-salizination technology will help in this regard, at least in the countries with access to large bodies of salt water.


Culturally progressive groups do exist within most ethnic enclaves, as far as I can tell.


Yes, which is why we must support reformers (in a non-aggressive way), rather than impose anything from without.

Hence the left's emphasis on intersectionality.

Besides provoking an anti-imperialist counter-reaction, imperialist wars also destroy the prosperity needed for progressive social change to happen.



So, what is your answer to the problem of endless population growth, resulting in endless competition for resources, hence endless war, until humanity is completely destroyed?

I accept that it's not perfect evidence, but in the absence of reliable statistics, one has nothing to go on but simple intuition and common sense. I don't believe that a violent rape would ever have gone unreported by the press, albeit the victim might have been given more anonymity and the more intimate details of the attack may have been omitted - not so today, where our society gets perverse satisfaction out of reading about sadistic sex crimes, and even watching them re-enacted; do you seriously think I Spit on Your Grave could have been released in mainstream cinemas in the 1950s without its creators being (rightly) arrested? Again, blame sexual "freedom".


I'd imagine such statistics include things like duels, small skirmishes by errant nobles and other things which make the overall figures artificially inflated. I admit that I haven't read the reports quoted, however, in full.

At any rate, the dynamics of crime were vastly different in early modern and pre modern times; as already stated, the corrosive, impersonal aspects of crime which make it such a scourge today were absent in those times.





"Characterised by a lack of moral standards", which, unless you're telling me rape is a moral act, obviously does have the correlation mentioned. You'll probably ask me at this point what I mean by moral values, but since I've already answered that question, I shan't answer it again.


Again, this is the fallacy you've been guilty of at least once in each of your previous posts directed at me in this thread so far which is, namely, the fallacy of composition: you take an instance of one individual case where my claim was falsified and make an unwarranted generalisation from this case towards a broader conclusion which it doesn't justify.

There have always been men who saw women outside of their family as "fair game". Nobody - certainly not myself - would deny this; it's an obvious consequence of the fact that at every time in the history of civilisation there has always been at least several tens of millions of men alive, some of whom must quite obviously have been exploitative of women by sheer probabilities. What you don't have a right to do is conclude from this that men were as exploitative as or more exploitative of women than they are today in those times.




This is the naturalistic fallacy in reverse; I'm not talking about what is, but about what should be. I don't believe in historical inevitability, either, not being an Hegelian. But even if those trends were historically inevitable, it wouldn't mean that they were desirable.



This is another piece of obscurantism I've noticed recently: demand a statistical "proof" for every claim made as if the subject at hand were a new pharmaceutical drug rather than a - relatively - simple proposition. There are a great many propositions for which a formal proof is required; any proposition in mathematics or physics, for instance. From this, it is dishonest to conclude that EVERY proposition of any sort requires the same standard of formal proof; for instance, the proposition "many people are afraid of spiders" doesn't require formal proof, being capable of being validated by the generality of experience. The same is true of a proposition like "more people lock their doors today than in the 1950s".

I don't believe there is an answer of the kind you seek. At least not a civilised one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8

Great Thoughts, Previously,
On The State of Nature in too much
Take than Give From Humans in the Balance
of What It Means to Survive in the Long Run for
We the Human Species; And the Rest of the Living
Earth too. It's True, when a Sexual Revolution Comes in Terms
And Conditions of Mutual and Electronic Virtual Sex also Known and
Felt and oh God Yes Sensed as Porn These Days Easily Accessible and as
Close as 'A ProXy'
in Some Countries
that Attempt to Censor
IT WHere Folks are SmART
Enough to get the Work Arounds
to Get off as such; "These Days" Teenage
Pregnancies are at Lows instead of Highs
As Sex is no Taboo of Mystery Any more Among
the Masses; As True when there are other Options than
The Problems that Come With Flesh and Blood Hook-Ups;
Folks will Take the Options Even in Marriages to Avoid the
Complications of Potential Pregnancies and Further Financial
Despair too; In other Words, the Real God that and who among
us too is the Irrefutable God of Nature that and who is Real Among
us as Us too; Yes, This Real God Has this Balance of Nature as Nature Covered.
Get Stressed
Out and
Prenatal
Hormones
Make it more Likely
That Homosexual Folks are
Born; Yes, Have More than
A Few Sons and the Similar Aspect
of Nature in Epigenetic Effects Shows
His and or Her Face in the Joy of Same
Sex Sex or perhaps no Sex at all in A-Sexual
Ways too; Winner Be Nature in all the Ways He and
or Her or "The OTHeR" Comes or Does not Come now;
It's True, the Sexual
Revolution
And the
Pinnacle of
Free Porn Easily
Available at the Hands
of Modern Ways of Obtaining
A Never Ending Variety of Free Pleasure
too; Does Replace Many 'Missionary Positions'
of Old; Does Replace Many Churches too; Does
Reduce the Population And Karma is Real; Humans Get
Out of Balance With the Rest of Nature and This is Reality to Pay Next
iN All the Ways
Reality
Comes
Still For Nature
Balance Now; No one
(iN Charge) Said IT is gonna Be Easy
NoW BuTT iT is what it is; Get In Balance
or Pay the 'Big Piper in the Sky', Mother Nature Now as God True;
in all the ways 'SHe' Comes to Visit as Remember Technology
is Just an Extension of Mother Nature's Balance too, YuP;
Even Electronic
Porn is
'God'
in this way too;
Humans Just Aren't
That SmART; Let's Face
Trump FActs, False, Still, Overall; Trump.
Anyway; Reminds me of A Scene From 'the Big Lebowski';
Nothing to Get all Hung Up About Either Strawberry Fields
Forever Now and some of are still having the Days of Our Lives
in Heaven of Bliss NoW iN All the Ways Pleasure Comes as Long
As This Peace Will Last This Way As Heaven as the S Continues to Hit the Fan of Dark and Hope too.

I Vote 'Again' For THE Nature Of And As GOD;
And The Sexual Revolution Still Coming Strong
too; For Sure, i am Nature Awake, Not Fallen Asleep.

"Jackie Treehorn", Would/Will Agree; HeHe That tHere Is A 'Rhythm Method' to mY "Madness", too..

Freedom Is 'Contagious'; And As Social Science SHows; Yes, More SKin iS Coming iN 'Those' 'Other' Countries too..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OteoG5c4zRg

It has been done and un-done throughout history. Look at the difference in the attitudes about sex between ancient Greece and Christian Europe. Or the attitudes toward sex in any culture.

And the fact of the matter is that whether society is accepting of sex or treat sex as taboo, people are going to have sex! For example, the sex industry has existed for a long time. Some people will be monogamous, some polyamorous, and some don't want a relationship at all. Some will prefer vanilla, some will have their kinks. And let's not forget the diversity in sexual orientations. If you do your research, you will find that these sexual practices have existed for a very long time; they were just cast to the margins of society.

The only thing I want from people is to be safe about it and to seek and give consent to and from their partners. Otherwise, you do you, buddy.

It's not people having sex that I'm having questioning about. No, not so.
I believe there are shades of gray in this too.

uhm a society must have traditional rolemodels and within that tolorance is desirable

the hippies formed 'communes' that turned out to be total failures

then the punk- squatters didn't even have any community at all, weirdo's could roam and no one protects no one

take a look at the old pedestal (no pun intended till here) of 'enlightening examples'




^ this as example of how things work

don't know on schlomo fraud yet but that'll come

track back on that last century must be done

more trouble coming still "How is This a Thing? 19th of November 2018"

its old as predators that dress up as saints (meta-pedo-physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine ... iginal_sin"

For hundreds of years neither sex not marriage were endorsed by the western chuch.
St Augustine had said that the only sex that was not a passage to Hell was the carnal union of two Saved Souls for the sole purpose of creating another soul to be saved. Thus most marriages were considered to be at least potentially sinful (unlike sacred marriages between holy men), and it was not until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that the Church declared marriage to be a sacrament - with a prescribed ritual - and ensured it's eventual demise by espousing the 'family values' so despised by Jesus and the first Christians.
It is no coincidence that this came very shortly after the new cult of the Virgin Mary replaced the respect accorded to Mary Magdalene and Lazarus the Leper in the previous hundred years. " (-beyond the pale)