Talk:Premarital sex/Archive 1

Extramarital sex?
Would this be a better title? "Sex without marriage" seems rather vague-sounding. "Sex outside marriage" or "extramarital sex" would seem more accurate to me. Kasreyn 16:44, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * For the life of me I can't figure out why the name was changed from premarital sex in the first place. The stub was created and the previous redirect to religious attitudes towards sex removed specifically because "premarital sex" is an important political topic in western nations, particularly where discussions of sex education in the public sphere is concerned.JFQ 20:02, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Why this article is called "premarital sex"
The stub was created and the previous redirect to religious attitudes towards sex removed specifically because "premarital sex" is an important political topic in western nations, particularly where discussions of sex education in the public sphere is concerned. These issues are not captured by the various unsupported renamings, particularly since the substance of the article is largely unchanged. Unless anyone has a good reason not to, i'm going to change the name of the article back so that it can be a legitimate neutral discussion of the concept of premarital sex.JFQ 20:05, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, there are lots of articles that link to Premarital sex as can be seen in the "what links here" tool. Right now, this whole article is a mess of redirects that needs fixing. Please do not move it again to yet another name and exacerbate the problem. If editors would like to write about topics other than Premarital sex, I suggest that they consider the wide range of considerably confused and confusing articles already extant before further contributing to the mess.JFQ 20:16, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * That makes no sense. We can make a redirect to deal with that problem.  Kasreyn 21:11, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I disagree. "Premarital sex" is an example of a title with structural bias:  it presupposes that all relationships eventually result in marriage.  If a couple do not desire to ever marry, how can their sex be "premarital"?  If a gay couple have sex, in a place that has banned gay marriage, how can their sex be "premarital"?  The title is inherently biased.  Additionally, the See Also links betray a specifically religious, rather than general, viewpoint on sexuality (with use of loaded terminology such as "living in sin", "fornication", etc.)  I think we need a different title.  No, more than that.  We need a significant restructuring and reorganizing of quite a few articles on sexuality, to remove structural bias.  Kasreyn 21:11, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * JFQ, have you any reply? It's been a week.  Kasreyn 09:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It makes no such assumption. Premarital sex refers specifically to sex between young, unmarried people, whom the users of the term consider to be destined for marriage. The point of this article is not to have neutral attitudes about sexuality but to present various attitudes about sexuality in a neutral fashion. I may not personally like the fact that there are certain points of view from which sex outside of marriage is sinful, and in fact I do find those points of view abrasive. That doesn't mean I can't present that view in as neutral a fashion as possible. Like it or not "premarital sex" is a concept with a certain currency in western culture and that's why there is an article here about it. It is specifically referred to the common occurence in western culture whereby young people have sex while sewing "wild oats" before "settling down" in a heterosexual marriage wherbey their sexual intercourse with their marriage partner is sanctioned by the society. Whether that is right or wrong or illustrates various bias's is beside the point of whether the institution exists, and it does. You're well within your rights to call into question whatever you like to about the term, but changing "Premarital Sex" to some other title because of those biases is unacceptable according to wikipedia editorial guidelines. I encourage you to include within the article criticisms of the concept. Just bear in mind to cite your sources.JFQ 23:25, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not interested in resolving this by including material within the article. I am saying that I feel the article should be moved to Extramarital sex and treated as a subtype of that.  Note that I'm not calling for the deletion of anything, simply a recategorization.  How else are we going to report on those who have intercourse with no intention to marry?  I'm not sure that this is adequately covered by any other article we have.  What about those who have intercourse who are not allowed legally to marry (such as, in some countries, gays)?  In a country where gay marriage is outlawed, of which there are quite a few (for instance, Iran), it would be foolish to call gay sex "premarital" because there is no possibility of marriage in the future.  "Premarital" sex would then become a special case of "Extramarital sex", which seems fairly NPOV to me.  How does that sound?  Kasreyn 00:05, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It's problematic because nobody ever talks about extramarital sex, and in any case, anything having to do with what you're calling extramarital sex falls under the purview of the articles on Adultery and Sodomy. Premarital sex is a special case of Adultery, but it is a political issue in communities where certain types of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have a particular amount of political capital invested in the public discourse on sexuality. More to the point, this issue is not about whether or not Premarital sex might be better or more neutrally described as a special case of some other behavior. At issue in this article is the FACT that where it comes to sexual education of young people, the topic of whether or not to engage in Premarital sex, whether that is a good semantic match for the wide range of behaviors it attempts to gather under its umbrella or not, is real, it's talked about in those terms, and it should therefore have it's own wiki article. I recognize your points about gays and people who do not plan to marry or who are prohibited from marriage, they are however entirely irrelevant to an article on Premarital sex. More importantly, I think those aspects of marriage are more effectively dealt with within the article Marriage and if you want to write about Premarital sex as it relates to the problems you've raised, being careful that you aren't including original research or unfounded statements, then I suggest that you deal with those issues there in a subheading, and possibly link to the article on Premarital sex for a fuller discussion of the particular political and social discourse resolving around the concept of Premarital sex. Does my objection to your renaming seem clear now?JFQ 21:12, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I really do not feel the popularity of a term should come before using the most accurate title for a Wikipedia article. After all, we can redirect from the popular term to the accurate one.  For instance, the pop culture term may be "Voodoo", but adherents of the religion prefer it to be called Vodou, and so that is the name of the Wikipedia article; Voodoo redirects to Vodou.  It is trivially easy to then explain in the first paragraph why the reader's search has led them to an article with a different title than their search string.
 * I understand that the issue of gays and people who do not intend to marry are irrelevant to this article. That is why I feel Wikipedia should have an article with a broader scope which could include both the extramarital sexual activities of those who are planning to get married, and the extramarital sexual activities of those who are not or cannot.  I'd say they would not be better dealt with under Marriage; it seems to me they would be even more irrelevant there.  I'd say your objection is quite clear, and thank you for taking the trouble to explain it.  I have to disagree though, because I still don't see where exactly Wikipedia can cover the topics I mentioned, unless a reorganization of the information is undertaken.  Cheers, Kasreyn 00:12, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Again I point you to Adultery, Sodomy, and Sex as good articles to deal with these issues. If you really feel though that these articles aren't quite as relevant, or that the topic of sex without marriage really warrants a separate article, then create a new article with that title. Although I really do think you can probably raise all the points you want to raise either in Adultery or Sex.
 * Umm, this once was such an article: it was called "sex without marriage", and it was then moved to "premarital sex".  I don't care for either title, and prefer "extramarital sex", which seems to be more accurate.  JFQ has a lot of objections, but from where I stand it appears that most of them can be solved pretty easily by redirecting premarital sex to extramarital sex and including it as a subheading.  Kasreyn 03:53, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
 * No, Kasreyn, this once WAS an article about premarital sex that you RENAMED extramarital sex in an attempt to impose your own political beliefs on the article. All I did was change it back. I see that you have now created an article called Extramarital sex in a further attempt to do that. I have no objection to such an article, but fail to see how it is anything but redundant to other existing articles.JFQ 02:25, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Excuse me??? I don't believe I read that correctly.  Please check the history page for this article, where you will see I have never renamed this article (merely proposed it), and the creation diff for Extramarital sex, where you will see that I did not create the article in question.  If you're going to accuse me of "imposing my political beliefs" on an article, you might want to actually do some basic research beforehand.  Good day, Kasreyn 09:53, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I apologize Kasreyn, I assumed because you were advocating a similar position to the previous editor who had renamed the article, and because you and I began having this conversation at around the time that that happened, that you were the same editor. Mea Culpa. That being the case, I'm sorry I attributed to you an agenda that I belonged to somebody else. If you follow the threads of the history pages, you'll see that premarital sex was previously renamed then redirected to sexual ethics, which was then redirected to sex and morality, which itself was renamed Religion and sexuality, all of this, I believe, was done by a small group of wikipedians with a specific political agenda regarding human sexuality and which I think really was clouding issues that don't need to be cloudy. I think a lot of my resistance to your arguments has been located in that mistaken impression, and again, I apologize for that. That having been said, both this article and extramarital sex are very spotty and really belong in context of a wider discussion about human sexuality I think. I think a lot of the difficulty we're having categorizing these things, and also seeing where the overlap with Adultery and Fornication, has to do with slicing things too finely. Having taken a crack at improving the new Sexual ethics article, i really think that's the place for a lot of these topics like premarital and extraamarital sex (you're right, not a neologism, i'm just so used to seeing 'extramarital affair' that 'extramarital sex' looked unfamiliar.) Particularly considering that there doesn't seem to be a lot of room to expand either of these articles without repeating information on the various religion and sexuality pages which need some consolidation of their own. I think the need for comparison of issues warranting stand alone pages is useful here. Note that homosexuality and rape are both linked to from Sexual Ethics and I don't think that either premarital or extramarital sex are of the same level of complexity and can be dealt with completely in that page. What do you say, does that sound like a reasonable compromise? All I really want is an accurate presentation of the various issues in contemporary discourse using the words and phrases that are actually used to talk about them. I'm amenable to any situation that brings that about, although I don't think, given my new perspective, that simply merging premarital into extramarital goes far enough.JFQ 20:47, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Isn't premarital sex a sub-set of extramarital sex? In that case, extramarital is the main, and premarital is a break out article. --Striver 18:35, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Exactly; the latin of the words themselves proves their eminent logic. Kasreyn 23:10, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Except that premarital sex is a wellknown concept and extramarital sex is a neologism you've cooked up for your own political ends. seriously kasreyn, this is ridiculous. do you understand the point of wikipedias NPOV policy at all?JFQ 02:25, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Try Googling it. There are nearly 2.2 million hits on the phrase "extramarital sex", and that's excluding Wikipedia.  Wikipedia adds another 10,000 all by itself.  So I hardly see how I've "cooked up" anything.  Once again, your accusations have no merit whatsoever.  My intentions remain as they have always been - to replace titles loaded with local cultural and religious biases with more encyclopedic and neutral titles.  My only great disappointment is that no one else is bothering to join our discussion.  Kasreyn 09:56, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Removal of second redirect
I find the redirect to Fornication problematic, since I was trying to find the German article on premarital sex--since there was nothing listed under de:Voreheliches Geschlechtsverkehr, I thought I would try using the interwiki from English to locate the article. The interwiki from Fornication, however, is to Unzucht, which does not discuss pre- or extramarital sex at all, but is about zoophilia, sodomy, etc. Pre-marital sex might be considered to be a kind of fornication, but it is a different kind than that which is discussed in the German article to which the interwiki redirects. I think the subject should have a separate article.--Bhuck 09:12, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, it was just a grammar problem in finding the German article... it is under de:Vorehelicher Geschlechtsverkehr. Still, I think the subjects of pre-marital sex and zoophilia should be discussed in separate articles.--Bhuck 09:17, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

See: Extra-marital sex. Pbarnes 20:01, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I restored the article. The redirect was absurd, and your user page indicates a strong POV.  Viriditas (talk) 14:02, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Article Really Needs Heavy Work
Like what the title says...Children of the dragon (talk) 09:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge Proposal
Comments about the merge have been compiled here for easier discussions. Pbarnes 07:06, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

I would like to express my aprovable of the last gentleman's imput. Thank you, sir. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.183.133.143 (talk) 21:16, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Teen pregnancy is misleading
Teen pregnancy rates are misleading when in reference to permarital. In the united states for example, only 18% of teens receive an abortion, while the EU average is over 40%, with it being as high as 50% in Italy and 63% in Sweden. This gives a very misleading impression. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.181.103.83 (talk) 23:11, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Some parts of the article are heavily biased
Following part is nonsense and not true: "After World War II, divergence in Christian teaching on sexuality accelerated. Today, most mainstream and progressive Christians around the world affirm that the teachings against premarital sex arose erroneously due to a man-made law (the Hardwicke Act), or that they applied only in some cultural contexts. By contrast, Christian fundamentalist groups, most of which originate from the United States, hold onto the idea that premarital sex is sinful."

Well, the Catholic Church has never changed its teaching about premarital sex, they remain the same. The writer of that part of the article is relativising (even denying) sin. Despite what some non-Christian Liberals may tell you, premarital sex is of course a sin, it is called fornication, for Pete's sake! It has nothing to do with any "Hardwicke Act"; Jesus condemned fornication, which is sex between to unmarried persons.

This sentence is funny: "Today, most mainstream and progressive Christians [...]" -- Excuse me? Aren't Catholics "mainstream Christians"? Why is this writer writing false things about what Christians believe?

And by the way, the Vatican is in Rome, Europe, not in the United States, in case the writer doesn't know that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.218.28.164 (talk) 15:27, 15 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Nowhere in the Bible does it explicitly say that "two unmarried people having sex" is a sin. You are correct that the Bible says that "fornication" is a sin, but whether or not "fornication" includes sex between two unmarried people is a matter of interpretation, as the article correctly points out.


 * And you are correct that the Catholic Church still maintains that any sex outside of a marriage is a sin, and the article says this. But most Catholics in the U.S. do not agree with the Catholic Church on this issue just like most don't agree with the Catholic Church on the use of birth control pills being a sin. Rreagan007 (talk) 19:09, 16 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Hello, Reagan. You seem to forget all the references in the Old Testament (for example when Esther is praised for her chastity [book of Esther]). In the New Testament, Susanna, disciple of Christ, is as well praised for her chastity and purity, and St. Joseph made vote of perpetual virginity, as did John the Evangelist, called predilect and beloved disciple of Jesus. And Jesus Christ our Lord was virgin His entire life, that should give us a clue, don't you think? In the Apocalypse we find a clear appeal to purity:


 * "Hi sunt qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati, virgines enim sunt. Hi qui sequuntur Agnum quocumque abierit". (Apocalypse 14:4)


 * In the seventh of God's Ten Commandments, He instructs us not to have sex with anyone other than our spouse. Sex is something special only to be used in the matrimony. As written in Scripture, "The two become one." (Corinthians 6:16). If we live as carnal or fleshly Christians, we will seek to gratify the desires of the flesh and live only to please ourselves ("Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking", Corinthians 13:4-5). If we live this way, pleasing our flesh, the Bible says we cannot please God. We will be miserable under the weight of our sin. As we continue to feed our fleshly desires, our spirit will grow weak and our relationship with God will be destroyed. Complacency with sin leads to worse sin, and eventually, spiritual death.


 * "Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live..." (Romans 8:8,13).


 * "Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body." (Corinthians 6:18)


 * "Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral." (Hebrews 13:4)


 * After martyrdom, the most noble and courageous sacrifice one can make to God is that of the virginity and chastity.


 * The Tradition of the saint Fathers of the Church and the Magisterium of our holy Catholic Church teach very clearly that extramarital intercourse is always a mortal sin. That is what Catholics believe, and if some person refutes this, he is putting himself outside our beloved Catholic Church. You cannot say "But most Catholics in the U.S. do not agree with the Catholic Church", because they simply stopped being Catholic.


 * There are always consequences to sin. If someone is an Atheist or a Liberal and he is not sure if premarital sex will harm him, he should follow the old British saying "If in doubt, let it out!"


 * Veritas et nobilitas super omnia.


 * God bless. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.218.87.92 (talk) 18:27, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Criticism of the term
The very morphology of the word—“before marriage”—implies that marriage will necessarily follow after the said sexual relations. What if it won't? Can we still call it “premarital sex”? Are we presuming that everybody wants to marry sometime in the future? If someone suggests a source where the same accusation is made against the term, we can add it to the article. EIN (talk) 03:11, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Pre-marital sex and risk of divorce?
Many studies have found a link between pre-marital sex and divorce. I think this should be added to the article.

"The results presented in this article replicate findings from previous research: Women who cohabit prior to marriage or who have premarital sex have an increased likelihood of marital disruption. Considering the joint effects of premarital cohabitation and premarital sex, as well as histories of premarital relationships, extends previous research. The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption. This effect is strongest for women who have multiple premarital coresidental unions. These findings are consistent with the notion that premarital sex and cohabitation have become part of the normal courtship pattern in the United States. They do not indicate selectivity on characteristics linked to the risk of divorce and do not provide couples with experiences that lessen the stability of marriage." http://socialpathology.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html

"those who are virgins at marriage have much lower rates of separation and divorce.”" http://pastors.com/premarital-sex-divorce-is-there-a-link/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hellznrg (talk • contribs) 00:50, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Copyright problems
In addition to what seems to blatant traditional copy-paste from one of the cited sources, this article includes quotations used non-transformatively - for instance, the entire section on "French Polynesia" except for the word "traditionally" is copied from http://www.sexarchive.info/IES/frenchpolynesia.html. I'm afraid that content needs to be properly paraphrased with limited quotation to comply with our copyright policies. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:11, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Premarital sex. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
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Non-marital sex
I think non-marital sex is a much better term than pre-marital sex. Pre-marital sex should be confined to the sex that occurs between a particular couple before they get married, considering that "pre" means "before". Non-marital sex, however, covers sex between those who never have any intention of marrying one another, as well as the sex engaged in by the perpetually unmarried, widowed, and divorced. After all, no one ever speaks of "post-marital" sex. As an umbrella term, it would also include extramarital sex. It also has the benefit of being a neutral, more precise term. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tracy58 (talk • contribs) 16:41, 6 May 2013 (UTC)


 * At first blush, I agree with this. On reflection, though — and speaking as a stern opponent of gratuitous proliferation — I'd make the case that the two were considered clearly separate phenomena a half-century ago in the United States.


 * It was not at all rare that someone known for denouncing the "sin" and "immorality" of premarital sex, predicting this as the prime harbinger of utter social collapse, and often calling for iron-fisted police action would be exposed as a flagrant adulterer, which activity would never be met with a similar level of vitriol. Weeb Dingle (talk) 17:35, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Additions
Hello all, for a project I'm sprucing up some sections. I added virginity tests to the gender differences section and increase in sexual violence and divorce in the United States section. Adding a section on religion might be beneficial since premarital sex is greatly linked to it. Please let me know your thoughts Samuelcasey (talk) 19:42, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 August 2020 and 4 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Samuelcasey.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:08, 17 January 2022 (UTC)