I refer to my comment on your more recent thread regarding pleasure and stuff. So ditto those comments here, but again, I think this is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Even ravenously Protestant countries, like the Netherlands and to some extent England, are not as anti-body, anti-pleasure as we are. Of course, the more Catholic Latin-influenced countries like France, Italy, and the Spanish speaking world, are much more liberal about matters of pleasure. Of course the Protestant Reformation was in part caused by the Catholic Church's perceived sanctioning of drunkenness, fornication, and all sorts of bad things like that. Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all this.

So somewhere along the line, we got this meme handed down to us that pleasure was bad and suffering was ennobling. Go to any social gathering (at least among we squares) and you will never hear a conversation about the rollicking orgasm somebody had last night or the all-night jungle sex they had over the weekend. You will be more likely to hear about bad hips, sore backs, sinus trouble. People would rather hear and talk about the suffering than the pleasures and I cannot imagine why. SophiaSerpentia, I am always more interested in reading your "sex filter" posts than I am with the other entries on my Friends Page.

For some reason I am reminded of that Shakespeare quote from Julius Caesar: The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.