So that thing that keeps recurring, where the honor of an unmarried woman inhered in her virginity and the honor of a man in his unmarried female relatives’ virginity?

That’s often presented as a religious thing but it’s really more a rural thing and it’s maybe the only way to organize a small isolated society that’s not full of incest?

Like, the Amish don’t really have that and well

The word “taboo” comes from the Polynesian “tabu” which were these extensive systems of cultural restrictions that all these small island cultures had and at the center of them was like “jfc, don’t fuck your relatives”

and it cuts both ways, because Freud was maybe onto things when he saw so much neurosis originating in Not Fucking Your Relatives, and it is not a mistake that the Great Liberation of The Sixties was so tied up in the public recognition of youngsters as sexual beings and in rendering them available, unintentionally or otherwise, to their elders

(like, dating from that era NAMBLA has the same stab-in-the-back narrative about gradualist sexual minority activism that trans groups do, and they don’t even get spotted a letter in the acronym)

I’ve been in Portland for a year and change now and I love it to death, before I first showed up I thought “pinch me I must be dreaming” or “I’ve died and gone to heaven” were stock phrases, but no I really find it so perfect in every way that it’s hard to imagine it exists in the same world that I lived the rest of my life in

But you know occasionally I get the uncanny and fleeting impression that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” wasn’t so much a metaphor as a feminist response to “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”