Has The Pill lead to our current amoral, porn-heavy society?

Ah yes, it’s all the fault of those pesky women who want to be in control of their fertility and not lead lives of utter drudgery

Ffs. Of course it would be better for women to just continue being purely there to make babies, silly us forgetting our place, I mean just look at what we've made the men do to us now..

Sorry, posted too soon.

I blame the Internet. And I bloody hope there are some women involved in his Moral Maze discussion. Fucksake.

Yeah! Once women could do to/with sex what men have always done society was bound to become morally bankrupt. Women are, after all, wholly responsible for the human race!

Hopefully anyone brave enough to sit and listen will find they aren't as stupid as it sounds and the outline was written to incense, outrage....

Ash Sakar will be the woman on the moral maze and she is no friend to women

I hadn’t realised that men didn’t have sex before the pill. Or is it just Bad Women?

Absolutely ridiculous. The pill is a great invention for women's rights and choice and for porn if women choose to work on it or make their own it's their choice.

Libby Purves had a column in the Times on Monday about the pill and its ramifications

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-pill-is-a-blessing-but-all-blessings-are-mixed-p50cmv0hl?shareToken=00f194b574b7d250357278cf65f81acd

Oh its bound to be our fault, isn't it. Poor men, being corrupted by us loose women

It’s Adam and Eve all over again, isn’t it…

What’s the logic? In most nations unmarried women could not get the pill so for many nations it was only married women taking the pill. So how do they account for this?

People have always had sex outside of marriage. The difference is that there were bastardy laws and women were punished by being social pariahs for having a child with no husband. But this is not the case anymore.

The reason we are in a porn filled world is because men wanted it that way. Men wanted easy and free access to sex, porn and prostitutes. Not women… And they have plenty of dick pandering handmaidens to help them achieve this.

I blame men and so called “feminist men” and western liberal feminism.. what is it with the 4th wave? I don’t get their stance. Everything they consider “empowering “ is about a man’s sexual needs and pleasure. This is not a feminism I understand or want any part of. Sex work is empowering.. being topless on Instagram is empowering, doing porn is empowering… how?

So in my opinion it’s a combination of men who have always sought ways to get sex from women without having to invest or sacrifice anything, and women who think having the approval of men is more important than the safety of women.

Meant to add * in the early days of the pill, only married women were able to get it from doctors. .. so it wasn’t single women out humping all these men, because many single unmarried women were not even able to get the pill in the first place.

it allowed women to choose whether sex was for recreation or reproduction

What gets me about this is it feels like it minimises the really revolutionary thing about the pill, it wasn't just to allow women to have fun recreation sex, it allowed them to control their lives. To choose if they wanted kids, how many they wanted, and when. That's a very male POV to reduce it just to being about recreational sex.

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago. I used to believe that the pill was a great feminist invention, allowing women to have sex for fun.

But for most women, even today, sex may be fun for a handful. For most it is not fully consensual, even in the West. Everything from societal and/or cultural pressures, sulky husbands, or the emotional labour of sexual expectation mean many women are having sex because not having sex would be too dangerous or too much hassle. The relationship board on mumsnet is testament to this. Historically men have always been able to have sex when they want, either through rape or coercion, or within marriage.

So all the pill has really done is allow men to orgasm without consequence, not that they ever had to live with the consequences anyway. And promoted the social norm of sex-positive women, which encourages sex without intimacy or love. As an ex polyamorist I look at my past with jaded eyes.

The older I get the more cynical I have become!

It's the Internet over the last 20 years, not 60 years of the pill!

I've been watching reruns of Sex & the City and it's amazing how "vanilla" the sex scenes / sex commentary is, especially in the early episodes from the late 90s. A lot of squeamishness about vibrators, anal sex, filming sex acts etc- which are, so I understand, pretty normal things for today's 20-somethings.

I think Libby Purves has it about right - it's a blessing but a mixed one.

The separation of sex from reproduction has had a variety of consequences - some very good (women's choice, acceptance of homosexuality) and some bad. And some which may be seen as good or bad depending on your POV - the whole debate about 'what is a woman' is surely linked to this separation.

Buerk by name....
Sorry couldn't resist. I like Michael buerk really

So all the pill has really done is allow men to orgasm without consequence, not that they ever had to live with the consequences anyway. And promoted the social norm of sex-positive women, which encourages sex without intimacy or love. As an ex polyamorist I look at my past with jaded eyes.

The pill didnt do those things. ''The patriarchy'' - which absolutely depends on female socialisation and compliance (including persuading women of what their 'true' sexuality is) - did those things.
''The patriarchy'' will take anything and turn it into a weapon.
Its a death cult. It kills love between men and women, and between friends. It destroys trust, and villifies everything good, kind and pure. It replaces real love with a plastic, ersatz state of dependance and compliance.

Normalising porn is a big part of the problem. Porn is not sex any more than rape is sex. Sex work is not sex any more than rape is sex. Its a form of abuse, and abusers always escalate as they become jaded.

I'm not sure why that would be in any way a shocking thesis?

Well I do - society feeds us the idea that of course this could only be good, but you know I think it's a positive thing to question that sort of assumption.

While the pill had some very positive outcomes, it is rarely or never the case that social or political change, especially when we tinker with nature, represents a completely one-sides benefit. Choices and technology almost always have consequences and trade-offs.

In the case of the pill, one result has being that the most obvious natural consequence of unrestrained sexual activity has been largely removed from the picture. Immediately, the most basic arguments for treating sexual activity as serious and significant lose much of their force. Can we really picture people arguing that it is a perfectly reasonable thing to use aps like tinder for casual sexual encounters with strangers without birth control? Would people be as accepting of sexual activity in their teenage daughters and sons?

It's taken a number of generations, but in the minds of many people the connection between pregnancy and sex has been so completely severed that even if you discuss things like historical subjects, they fail to make the connection between people's behaviours and beliefs and the fact that sexual activity was likely to produce a child. (Not to mention a significant risk of untreatable VD that could be passed on to said child.)

Where the consequences of sex are serious, society has to manage them, and one of the ways it does that is by treating really casual sex as a bad thing. The casual acceptance of hard-core porn and the idea of sex work as just another job are both dependent on that link being broken. Sex work existed before the pill, but the horrible consequences in terms of unwanted infants, child pregnancies, babies born blind, and the rest, were socially evident and seen as just that - horrible.

It's fine to have this discussion and I don't see it as about blaming women, although women do get blamed for everything, including things brought about by Stonewall and trans activist campaigns. I do agree about the technology point and the assumed enlightenment but I don't agree with the notion of a 'debate' about 'what is a woman'. Everyone knows what a woman is. There are precedents, however for disrupting the current order at the behest of campaigning groups and that is of relevance.

Much social change was brought about by the availability of the pill, along with developing notions of freedom, rights, individualism and by the commercialisation of pornography by such luminaries as the proprietors of dedicated magazines and clubs in America and even popular newspapers, all of which spread here. These were men, almost entirely.

As for Michael Buerk, I don't assume the topic is one of his choosing though be might have something to do with it and I don't like the man and do consider him hostile to feminism (which is often the same as hostile to women), from comments he has made, but that isn't apparent to me in his chairing of Moral Maze discussions.

I'm not sure I wouid describe society as a moral.

Porn is a problem.

And there might be something in the idea that breaking the link between intercourse and reproduction meant that it could become a recreational activity. And that has changed what people do.

But the ubiquity of porn is very much linked to the rise if the Internet.

Even though the pill had been around from the 60s and was widely available from the 70s, widespread pornification was a phenomenon for the late 90s onwards. Before that it was magazines, clip joint cinemas and then smuggled videotapes.

Then it became available via just a few clicks, and much harder core (what was considered dreadful in the 1980s wouid be called vanilla now)

And those timelines just don't fit the ones of contraceptive technology

I miss Mary Whitehouse. Often pilloried, she kept standards in public broadcasting very much on the agenda. We have sleepwalked into a very different environment

Wow.
Is there anything at all in this world that isn't our fault? 🙄

Wow, he blames the pill not the internet / porn?

Yes, the internet is what allowed porn to infest everything.

And before that, the camera, the invention of which coincides with the invention of the word pornography.

The change in attitude to sex generally in the sexual revolution dovetailed with the increasing availability of media quite neatly.