Word: puritans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...revolutionary, if that?s what Hefner was, has to take attacks from all sides. He got it from the puritan right and the feminist left, though both made the same point: that Playboy objectifies women. The Playmate, one clergyman fumed in the early years, is ?the symbol par excellence of Playboy sex, for she may be folded when not in use ... the Playboy girl is detachable and disposable.? Benjamin DeMott denounced Hefner in the Jewish-intellectual magazine Commentary: ?In place of the citizen with a vote to cast or a job to do or a book to study...
While it seems unreasonable to attribute people’s being flattened in Wal-Mart parking lots to Increase Mather, Will’s indictment of Puritanism is hardly unique. In section and dining hall discussions, “Puritan” may be understood as shorthand for “obsolete, sexually repressed, joyless prude.” It is one of Harvard’s milder ironies that vilifying Puritans has become something of a pastime at the College that was once a cradle of the Puritan orthodoxy. In October, on this very page, for instance...
...this Puritan-maligning has made me suspect that our picture of 17th century New England was not entirely accurate. I am not sure that it is possible for a society to be as gloomy as the one we imagine the Puritans inhabited. Surely extreme asceticism is as doomed a societal ethos as extreme hedonism. This suspicion drove me to e-mail David D. Hall ’58, the Divinity School’s Bartlett Professor of New England Church History...
Hall wrote that the idea upon which Will’s criticism was founded—“the ‘repression’ idea,” which also posits that Puritans were “mean to kids, didn’t like sex, etc.,” wasn’t accurate either. Hall directed me to Edmund S. Morgan’s forthrightly-titled essay “Puritans and Sex,” in the December 1942 New England Quarterly. And it turns out that Puritans were by no means the prudes...
This is not to say (even setting aside the executions for sodomy) that Puritans were faultless—even the sympathetic Edmund S. Morgan admits that 17th century Puritan New England “was not a society in which most of us would care to live, for the methods of prevention [of sexual transgression] often caused serious interference with personal liberty.” But it does suggest that our criticism of them is unfair. As heartening as it is to define ourselves in relation to the Puritans—so we don’t get out much...