Sex and Culture Cover
Podcast Mentions

Sex and Culture

Joseph Daniel Unwin

In Sex and Culture (1934), Oxford scholar J. D. Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe.

Podcasts 1
Quotes 2
Honestly with Bari Weiss

This Edwardian anthropologist's work was revisited, hypothesizing that sexually permissive cultures tend not to be socially expansive ones, suggesting civilizational decline.

"

I revisited recently, um, for an essay, the work of, um, this Edwardian anthropologist, British anthropologist called J.D. Unwin. He wrote a book called Sex and Culture, which was published in the 193...

— Episode: How to Find Love in 2025

Episode: How to Find Love in 2025

This Edwardian anthropologist's work was revisited, hypothesizing that sexually permissive cultures tend not to be socially expansive ones, suggesting civilizational decline.

"

I revisited recently, um, for an essay, the work of, um, this Edwardian anthropologist, British anthropologist called J.D. Unwin. He wrote a book called Sex and Culture, which was published in the 1930s.

And he, uh, he concluded that, um, sexually permissive cultures are not socially expansive cultures, which is to say that sex be have a re having a really sexually permissive culture tends to cause civilizational decline and the societies, civilizations that are on the up tend to be sexually conservative, but there's a kind of cycle.

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