“Prudery is a kind of avarice — the worst of them all.” – Stendhal
More than just the enemy of sexual pleasure, the prude is the anti-hedonist, the fundamentalist who takes certain moral values as absolute in themselves — a self-styled champion of propriety who cannot and will not accept basic truths of human nature.
Prudery is the mask of the hypocrite, the disguise of the self-loathing person, the pretense that repression is good. Such repression has yielded all sorts of complexes and neuroses which in turn sustains a thriving industry in psychoanalysis. For the prude, moral values are black & white, that no context has anything to do with the content of the moral judgment. Moreover, slut shaming & rape culture cynically rides shotgun on this relic of medieval values.
Moreover, the prude is obsessed with appearances, and thus is other-centered, because he fears the judgment of others. Despite being obsessed with the politically correct, the prude is often the most fascinated by transgressive feelings. Thus he bends over backwards to hide the slightest taint with his deepest desires — a self-loathing prig.
Moral judgments or values are distorted into vices when they are taken as absolute, objective and beyond all time/space/context. Since our values or judgments are always contextual, historical, and cultural, prudes need to get over themselves and step down from that horse they often ride on.
1. Ignorance
2. Seriousness
3. Mediocrity
5. Humility
#6. Self-Deception
#7. Boredom
