/lit/ - Literature

>>13346528
Stalin’s return to sexual conservatism saved the Soviet Union. Witness its experience in the 30s and 40s—no nation has ever been subjected to such incessant turmoil, upheaval, and slaughter. And yet the population and economic statistics in the 50s and 60s were healthy. Why was this? Because Soviet women took it upon themselves to bear and raise children. For all the drastic changes which occurred following the revolution, the women never lost sight of their sexual significance to their families and—yes—to the state. It was this commitment to sexual normalcy that saved the Soviet Union. Amazingly, it was not until the imposition of capitalism that Russian birthrates plummeted to suicidal levels.

That was Russia, but the same story played out in revolutionary France. The libertine atmosphere of the early Revolution died out quickly. By the time Robespierre rose to power, sexual liberation was not a philosophy of the ruling government. English liberals may still have held onto pipe dreams of open marriages and orgies, but the revolutionary government certainly did not. Robespierre inveighed against atheists and wantons as fervently than a pope; go to nearly any of his speeches and try to find that does not put great emphasis on public virtue. Nowhere are Sade’s perversions evident in the Terror government or its successors; truly, even the liberal madmen who composed the French government were sane enough to lock up Sade. Virtue, not sexual vice, was what the revolutionary leaders wanted from their subjects.

Was the Russian revolution an outgrowth of the French Revolution and Enlightenment? Assuredly so. But the unifying thread was a belief in the prefectability of man. Sexual liberation was used as a tool of the revolution, but not as a tool of the government. Jones seems to suggest that liberal/Enlightenment government innately desires to use its subjects sexual desires as part of its ruling philosophy. But the facts just don’t back this up. Jones’s thinking in this regard is fatally muddled.

To put it simply, Jones is not able to draw a distinction between Malthus, who studied the sexual habits of a population in order to better the material prosperity of its members, and Sade, the anarchist. Malthus is a man of the Enlightenment; Sade is a character from human prehistory. The behaviorists and eugenicists were sex rationalists like Sanger, Watson, and the Rockefellers may have had their sexual failures (Jones doles out stories of these rather too readily), but Freud, Reich, and Kinsey were clearly of another breed—modern Sadists. These two programs are not the same. The Eugenicists and birth controllers had serious, broad political programs in line with the liberal state; the Sadists did not.

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These are the kind of posts /lit/ needs. Thank you based anon.

I would also probably be interested in this but more importantly how do you come by mushrooms?