Once you see what they all have in common, you can’t unsee it.
I love to write about sex, and sexuality and culture, and in my deconstruction of religious norms and medicine and social structure, I found it helps to ask: Who benefits from this? That gives you the why.
But I also found the key question, when you begin digging, all sexual taboos come down to this:
Is this a reproductive act?
(i.e., does this promote the creation of a baby? and thus a nuclear family structure to maintain that baby, and if so, who benefits?)
Because, as I began my deconstruction of the sources of shame in my life, it kept coming back to this. “Real sex” is penis-in-vagina intercourse where he comes inside her. This is what “sex is for.”
This is why you wait for marriage (because you might get pregnant).
This is why birth control is wrong (because it prevents you from experiencing “the consequences” of sex.)
This is why abortion is wrong (because it prevents you from experiencing “the consequences” of sex and the point of sex is having babies).
Let’s try to list out the taboos (definition for your convenience: a social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a practice or association with a particular…