Eternal Sexual Freedom: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|"Each generation thinks it has invented sex, Nuala, and is shocked and not a little displeased to discover that its predecessors enjoyed it too."
|'''Andrew M. Greeley'''|''"Irish Gold"''}}
Times change, and so do sexual mores, but you wouldn't know that from most modern historical fiction. While it's certainly true that people have had premarital sex, extramarital sex, and even gay sex since the beginning of time, doing so (or at least getting caught) was, in many time periods, a Very Bad Thing. However, some writers of period fiction don't seem to realize this and thus their character behave as though contemporary sexual mores (or even looser ones) exist in their historic worlds.
This isn't to say that sex shouldn't happen in period fiction; on the contrary, sex happened ''a lot'', it was the attitudes about sex and its results that differed. For example, there's nothing historically inaccurate about a story set in Topeka in the 1930s about a married man having an affair. But if the mistress has his child, and everybody is perfectly fine with it, the woman isn't shunned or gossiped about, and the child is acknowledged openly as his son, then it would fall right into this trope. Put another way, it's not so much ''what'' the characters do as ''how'' it's treated by the other characters.
The only way to avoid this trope is to [[Did Not Do the Research|Do The Research]] on the time and place in which the work is set: attitudes toward pre- and extra-marital sex and illegitimacy varied widely from class to class, time period to time period, and country to country. And then use the trope [[Deliberate Values Dissonance]] as needed.
Writers can also err when they show couples enthusiastically partaking in forms of sex more common now than in other time periods. Oral and anal sex and various mild kinks that are now viewed as perfectly acceptable may well have been regarded as completely depraved in the time and place the work is set.<ref>Although this is a particularly unknowable subject, as in many time periods people simply didn't write about sex in anatomical detail, except in porn which is a bad source for what people actually did instead of fantasising about</ref>
Because this is a subtrope of [[Did Not Do the Research]] that applies to ''historical accuracy'': it doesn't apply to fantasy settings, [[Alternate History]] works, [[Free
See [[Everybody Has Lots of Sex]] for the setting most commonly invoked by this trope.
{{examples|Examples }}▼
{{noreallife|this is a trope about how characters are depicted in media.}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* Subverted humorously in a recent{{when}} Carl's Jr./Hardee's TV commercial in which a man in a suit, having apparently time-
== [[Anime]] ==
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== [[Comic Books]] ==
* Lampshaded in ''[[The Ultimates]]'' volume three; it's set in the 21st century and when the implied and mostly humorous [[Brother
** Not to mention, they were rather a bit more lenient back then on some of what we would call incest now. Brother Sister incest was as unacceptable then as it is now, but first cousins married sometimes.
** More to the point, why was the Wasp talking as though brother-sister incest is considered normal or acceptable nowadays?
*** Because she's nuts.
== [[Film]] ==
* The 1995 version of ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]'' imposes this trope on the Puritans, of all people, by portraying the main characters as feeling guiltless over their adultery. [https://web.archive.org/web/20121215062837/http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[The Shadow In The North]]'' provides one example. When Sally's friends seem perfectly thrilled she's got knocked up outside marriage and don't even seem to worry this might be difficult for her.
** However, in the next book ''[[The Tiger In The Well]]'' this turns into a huge problem for her when a fake husband turns up and hardly anybody is willing to believe Sally's side of the story. Possible [[
* Averted in [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Time Enough for Love]]''. While main character Lazarus Long travels back to 1916 and has copious sex with his mother, and they seem to have no issues with what they're doing, they both put ''a lot'' of effort into making sure the relationship appears chaste and wholesome to anyone else. The part where they're banging like bunnies is kept secret from others. Additionally, she knows that she is already pregnant from her husband, so she does not have to worry about contraception. Of course, [[Parental Incest]] was just as unacceptable when Heinlein was writing as it was in 1916, but the only two people who know that she's his mother are the two parties involved. One other person believes him to possibly be her half-brother, and the rest of the world simply believes he's an unmarried friend of the family. Of course, as a middle-class married woman in 1916 she's risking complete social annihilation if it ever becomes publicly known she is sleeping with ''anyone'' but her husband.
* Diana Gabaldon's ''[[Outlander (
* Justified in ''[[Freedom and Necessity]]'' by Steven Brust and Emma Bull: Susan and Kitty's rather modern sexual mores are [[Hand Wave
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* In the second episode of ''[[New Amsterdam]]'', during a flashback set in the early 1940s, John produces a baby apparently outside of wedlock and no one cares. Lily was fired after her employer saw her with a white man and she had to enter the hotel through a service elevator. Her father was very upset with them both, and said they could never make it in the world. The hotel staff react more reasonably than you would expect in real life in the 1940s, but they may not have known John and Lily were together. Lily herself breaks it off, knowing they'll be together in the long run. It turns out this after she gets pregnant, and when they reunite in the black hospital, there are some very pointed looks.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* Averted in the ''[[
* The ''[[
* Rome was ''filled'' with sex and violence, supposedly historically vetted. But while the show prides itself on well-researched use of [[Deliberate Values Dissonance]], it also makes a few mistakes. For example, oral sex, referenced frequently with its western connotations, was considered vulgar and disgusting by the otherwise-licentious Romans.
* Partly averted on an episode of ''Foyle's War'' with a gay, [[WW 2]]-era RAF pilot. He feels a great deal of [[Gayngst]] and has to stay closeted because he knows that if it gets out, they'll never let him fly another mission. He tries to get a girl to be [[The Beard|his beard]], but she's disgusted by him. It's a clever episode because the audience can see the tragedy of his situation without any [[Author Filibuster]] pointing it out. Still, it's only a partial aversion because Foyle himself, being the saintly gentleman that he is, has absolutely no problem with the fact that this guy is madly in love with Foyle, Jr.
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* In ''[[
== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[Tropico]] 3'', you can legalize same-sex marriage... in the 1950s. Granted, the Cold War is [[Anachronism Stew|grafted on to an island with mostly 1980-2010 sensibilities anyway]].
* In ''[[
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Did Not Do the Research]]
[[Category:Sex Tropes]]
[[Category:Gender and Sexuality Tropes]]
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