It's funny, in a way, how 21st century Right wing Americans think that most of the West is on the highway to Hell due to sexual licentiousness and violence, when in fact there was some really weird stuff going down in their own country in the 19th century.
I'm pretty sure I have read something about it before, but I don't seem to have posted previously about the Oneida Community, which comes to my attention this morning due to a book review at the Washington Post. It's about the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, and how the assassin was a former member of the (sex) utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York.
The review doesn't give many details, but puts it this way:
From the outside, the Oneida Community looked idyllic. Led by the preacher John Humphrey Noyes, it was the most successful utopian colony of the period, spanning more than 30 years. At its height, tourists flocked to what Wels describes as the “wild woodland” in Upstate New York, with orchards, livestock, “whizzing mills” and women with “queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts.” But behind the facade, Oneida’s free-love philosophies descended into pedophilia, incest and experiments in eugenics.
So, let's trip over to Wikipedia:
The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, and mutual criticism.
The male sexual continence thing seems a hard sell, if you ask me:
Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence" , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control.
A different website explains:
You see, rather than using the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus, which was one of the most effective birth control methods historically, and is surprisingly just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy, even in real world practice, the community instead practiced coitus reservatus as their main method of birth control- where the man was not to orgasm at all. The idea was that this would simultaneously prevent pregnancy, ensure the man maintained his vitality (the belief at the time was that the loss of semen negatively impacted a man’s health), and made sure the woman was optimally pleasured for maximal spiritual benefit.
As to the question of the age of sexual partners, it gets creepier still;
Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.
Then there is the system for self improvement, which is like group therapy turned on its head into something like group psychological lynching:
Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.
It's notable that the community was still going strong at the time of the Civil war - I can't see anything about whether any male members went off to fight, but I have my doubts that they would. Hence, 100 years before free love hippies of the Vietnam era were having sex instead of going to war, free love (alleged) Christians were doing the same.
As utopian communities, free love or not, inevitably do, it all fell apart when leadership was attempted to be handed over, and oddly enough, most of us probably have seen the word "Oneida" because of this:
The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.
Anyway, back to the assassination of Garfield, this is really a remarkable coincidence:
...Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was at the train station and saw Garfield’s shooting. It was the second presidential assassination he witnessed, having been at his father’s side as he died in 1865.
And as this website explains, he arrived in Buffalo years later on the same day President McKinley was shot!
Presidential assassinations seemed to follow him around. He did live to 83 though, so I guess he wasn't as unlucky as he could have been. (He also attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - there's a photo of that at the last link.)
The main prominent free love community I know of in my lifetime is the Rajneesh movement - which of course all fell into a heap when the leader aged, too.
Anyway, always good to remember that radical ideas about sexual utopianism have been around for a long time.
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