C
Contarini
Guest
The population of Asian immigrants may be part of it, but I think it is true that in some ways standards of sexual morality are higher than they were 20-30 years ago. There seems a lot more stigma for adultery than there was then. At least that’s true in pop-culture portrayals. For all the railing about Hollywood, adulterous affairs are almost always portrayed as wrong in Hollywood movies. That wasn’t true a few decades ago. Casual promiscuity is not glorified as liberation but is seen as a form of promiscuity and a failure to “commit.”I work as registered nurse in psychiatry. I must say I work with some very sexually immoral people, most who are already in their late 50’s or 60’s.
I was told stories of how it use to be like to work as nurse in psychiatry when these people were younger, like over 15-30 years ago. I was really shocked
Back then, it was a normal thing to have sex on the ward with your other colleagues, or after work. These people who were doing it, were also not single but also happily married people. Nobody cared if you are married or not, to ask you out. Like some staff, would only know each other for like 2 days and ended having an affair. Some would also have an affair as revenge to a husband or wife who was already cheating.
The scary thing also is that almost none of these nurses who are now in their 50’s and 60’s find anything wrong with what they did, nor have any guilt or remorse. They say that it was a normal thing back then.
But now, I cannot imagine anything like what use to occur to happen now. We had cases where some married men were wanting to have affairs with some single women, but it was put a stop too as these women knew these men were married and knew it was wrong.
At this time now, we also have the highest number of nurses working from an Indian and Asian backgrounds. I find that these nurses have higher moral standards and are more conservative compared to most other nursing staff.
Are times changing for the better? It looks like it.
Here’s my characterization of what’s happened–I’m sure there will be plenty of disagreements:
Immediately after the sexual revolution, Hollywood and many secular, "liberated’ people glorified promiscuity and casual sex. This combined with the older double standard and the acceptance of workplace romance (and of inequality in romantic relationships) to create a toxic mix. However, much of the culture still saw things in more traditional terms.
Now, the values of the sexual revolution have spread much more widely (this is what people mean when they talk about moral degeneration). *But *in so doing they have become highly diluted, and they have also now been shaped by political correctness and the “soft” feminism that is orthodoxy in our culture at present. Hence, a new set of moral norms has formed or is forming. In these new norms, sexual relationships are supposed to take place between equal partners who respect each other, care for each other in non-sexual ways, and are “committed”–that is, they are going to be monogamous for as long as the relationship lasts and are not going to break up casually or cruelly.“Cheating” is considered wrong because it’s dishonest and hurtful, whether the person you “cheat on” is your spouse or only a “significant other.” Casual sex is considered a sign of emotional immaturity which needs to be transcended in order to have a “meaningful relationship.”
I am not defending these norms. I am not sure that they are that much worse than the norms that prevailed in the 50s, which seem to have winked at male adultery and allowed men to exploit women with little stigma or guilt. But I may have too jaundiced a view, overly influenced by Hollywood and by my very conservative family, who have considered the modern world a sink of iniquity for about 100 years and don’t idealize the 50s as much as some folks do (though they still despise the 60s even more!). I certainly take the point that in a small town in the 1950s things were very different, and maybe even in the 60s or 70s (I’m less sure about the 80s, because I actually remember East Tennessee in the 80s–but I’m willing to admit that things are even worse there now).
Edwin