Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable for a man of his time and class. It would have been more surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he’d anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual propriety.

View on HN

The average man in the 17th century did not, when bored on Sunday, attempt to molest multiple random women in church. Even for his time Pepys was, well, a bit much, and he knew it, and felt guilty about it occasionally in the diary.

It's an absolutely fascinating read, and it's well worth reading, but you should not fall into the trap of thinking "well, that's just how it was back then"; Pepys was abnormally badly behaved on a number of axes even for the time.

Pepys wasn't the average man, though. That's why I specified a man of his time and class. He was a successful and increasingly powerful man on the edges of Restoration court and aristocratic culture, in which such behaviour was the norm. It's complicated by the fact that Pepys was well aware that his behaviour was wrong, but hypocrisy and a public/private moral duality was, again, pretty normal in men of his station. That conflict is one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure. What irks me is the rush to focus on his transgressions as though people need to be "warned" that he wasn't a moral paragon by modern standards. That they might somehow be tainted by their encounter with him or be embarrassed if they express interest in or admiration for a bad man. As if that makes him any less fascinating or worth reading.

I barely have a clue about the attitudes and behaviours of the people around me - and yet you think you know not only Pepys' but also his contemporaries' attitudes and behaviours, so much so that you feel comfortable making a generalised comment about people who lived 3-400 years ago. Remarkable! Perhaps you are a historian.

You could still confidently say that casual sex is normal in America currently, even without a perfect window into the soul of every American.

Can I? Is it really?

Yes, and yes. Why not quit being obtuse for the sake of disagreeing for disagreement's sake?

I'm simply considering my personal experience. It's not aligned with these general comments.

Do you live inside an amish community perhaps? Nobody who at all interacts with the vast majority of American society can say with a straight face that casual sex isn't common and normal. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, I have no problems with casual sex, but as a basic widespread tendency of said modern, generally liberal society.

Define 'casual sex'. (Perhaps define the opposite too.) And then, think across the breadth of the American people you know and all those other people you don't - across different ages, places, religions, circumstances, etc. And then say that tell me you know that 'casual sex' is the general behaviour and attitude of everyone.

And then, go back to the original point for a bonus, and consider what you know about the general behaviour and attitudes are of the people in England 400 years ago.

OK, Jordan Peterson.

> And then say that tell me you know that 'casual sex' is the general behaviour and attitude of everyone.

I said it's normal.

> what you know about the general behaviour and attitudes are of the people in England 400 years ago.

Plenty. Pepys wasn't that weird.

Perhaps you should reconsider your assumption that everyone is as ignorant of history and psychology as you appear to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com