Which Utopian
Community Would I Join? By Aaron Roberts
If I had to
choose a Utopian Community to join, it would probably be the Oneida community
in New York. John Humphrey Noyes started
the Oneida community in 1948. A big
theme the Oneida community revolved around was pretty much sharing
everything. They practiced complex marriage,
which was pretty much the men were married to the women and all the women were
married to the men. The Oneida community
did not believe in monogamy, but sex was very important to them[1]. I think the idea of sharing is pretty cool,
and I like sex so the Oneida community sounds pretty favorable over other ones
like the shakers who were not allowed to have physical contact between sexes. Having no physical contact between sexes
sounds pretty shitty in fact, I wouldn’t wish that upon any heterosexual. A draw back to being in the Oneida community
for me would be the practice of coitus reservatus, which is that women were
allowed to orgasm, but men could not orgasm.
They paired older women with young boys to teach them to control their
orgasms. I wouldn’t really want to
suppress an orgasm, but suppressing an orgasm sounds much better then not
having physical contact with the opposite sex.
Another custom of the Oneida community was stripiculture which was
pretty much the board (comprised of 48 departments) selected who would
reproduce with who, in order to breed certain traits. The Oneida community did not last long
however and had an array of issues including the deterioration of a main
ideology they practiced, which was the complex marriage. People would get jealous, and this formed
monogamous marriages within the community, which ended up sending John Humphrey
Noyes into exile[2]. Out of the other Utopian communities, the Oneida
community sounded the most tolerable compared to how society is today, so
that’s why I would pick that one to join out of the others communities.
[1] The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Oneida Community
(utopian religious community)." Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/429132/Oneida-Community (accessed
April 30, 2014).
[2]
Moore, Crystal. “Utopian Communities in Victorian America” The History of
Sexuality in America, Charlotte, NC, April 28, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment