Category: History & Culture - Page 2

The Hicklin Test: How Courts Once Defined Obscenity

Dec 5 2025 / History & Culture

The Hicklin Test was a 19th-century legal standard that banned any material deemed potentially corrupting to vulnerable readers. It led to the censorship of literature, medical texts, and art for over 60 years in the U.S. until it was overturned in 1957.

Unmarried Cohabitation: Why More Americans Are Living Together Without Marriage

Dec 1 2025 / History & Culture

More Americans are living together without marriage than ever before. Driven by economic shifts and changing values, cohabitation is now the norm for young adults and growing fast among older generations too.

1950s Shift: How the AMA’s Sex Education Series Changed American Schools

Nov 30 2025 / History & Culture

In 1955, the American Medical Association launched the first nationwide sex education program in U.S. public schools. It taught facts, not fear-and reduced teen pregnancy and STDs. Its legacy still shapes how we teach sex education today.

Gendered Narratives About Self-Pleasure: How Power and Shame Shape Women’s Sexuality

Nov 29 2025 / History & Culture

Gendered narratives around self-pleasure have long silenced women’s sexuality. From Freudian myths to modern shame, this article explores how power, culture, and systemic neglect shape women’s experiences-and how change is finally happening.

Victorian Separate Spheres: How Domestic Women and Public Men Shaped Gender Roles

Nov 28 2025 / History & Culture

The Victorian separate spheres ideology divided men into the public world of work and politics, and women into the private world of home and family. This rigid system shaped education, jobs, and even literature-and its legacy still echoes in gender roles today.

Etruscan Funerary Scenes: What Sexual Depictions Reveal About Death and the Afterlife

Nov 26 2025 / History & Culture

Etruscan funerary art features explicit sexual scenes not as decoration, but as sacred rituals to guide the soul into the afterlife-revealing a culture that embraced pleasure, death, and spiritual transformation.

Decline of Sexual Optimism: How AIDS Changed American Sexuality Forever

Nov 26 2025 / History & Culture

The AIDS epidemic shattered the sexual optimism of the 1970s, forcing a radical shift in how Americans approach sex, intimacy, and health. What began as a crisis of disease became a revolution in sexual responsibility.

Sex Robots and AI in Porn Production: The Real Ethics Behind the Speculation

Nov 25 2025 / History & Culture

Sex robots and AI-generated porn are changing how we experience intimacy. With no laws, no data, and no consensus on ethics, we’re stepping into a future where machines simulate desire-but can’t feel it.

The Fascinum in Rome: Phallic Charms, Protection, and Public Display

Nov 25 2025 / History & Culture

The fascinum was a phallic amulet used in ancient Rome to ward off the evil eye and protect children, soldiers, and even generals. Far from crude, it was a serious religious tool tied to survival, magic, and the Vestal Virgins.

Hittite and Assyrian Laws on Sexual Consent: Early Codifications and Gaps

Nov 24 2025 / History & Culture

The Hittite and Assyrian legal codes from 1650-1100 BCE contain some of the earliest known laws addressing sexual consent, revealing stark differences in how ancient societies handled rape, consent, and gender roles - with the Hittites recognizing mutual willingness and the Assyrians enforcing brutal retribution.

Lipstick and Signals in Ancient Egypt: How Cosmetics Communicated Sex, Status, and Power

Nov 22 2025 / History & Culture

Ancient Egyptians used lipstick not just for beauty, but as a coded system to signal social status, sexual availability, and spiritual power - with Cleopatra’s crimson lips becoming a symbol of political and erotic authority.

From Religious Condemnation to Medical Pathology: The Real History of Onanism

Nov 21 2025 / History & Culture

The history of onanism reveals how a biblical story about inheritance became a medical panic and a moral panic. From Augustine to Kinsey, the shift from sin to pathology to normalcy shows how society controls sexuality through fear.