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Doctor Hammer's avatar

"For most behaviors, there’s no neutral equilibrium where there’s no shame. You can either stigmatize or celebrate something, there’s no stable in-between equilibrium. "

I think you need to do more work on this concept. It is doing a great deal of work in your argument, but it is not at all clear that it is true. Off the cuff, it seems that the majority of behaviors have neutral equilibriums without shame, neither celebrated nor stigmatized. Propriety is pretty broad since most behaviors don't directly effect other people in major ways.

I think you would do better considering why some behaviors go from being merely indifferent to celebrated/shamed, in society in general and more specifically in the political movement sense. Why do some groups or subcultures push odd or even destructive behaviors into the celebration category, while other groups tend not to. It does not seem to be just human nature, but the result of some other human behavior, as such totalizing behavior such as putting everything into the forbidden and mandatory categories is definitely a subset behavioral type.

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John of Orange's avatar

"If you had a kid out of wedlock, you became an outcast" is kind of a travesty of history. It's a little like saying about today, "if you lost your home, you became an outcast."

What I would say is:

* Welfare-cases and community-dependents were resented and virtue-tested, and children of absent fathers were treated worst of all

* Women were stigmatized as prostitutes, or the equivalent, based on whether their family structures conformed to expectations, almost completely regardless of the woman's actual behavior

* Upper-class men were slightly stigmatized from being too open about their second and third and fourth families, and had trouble bestowing inheritances to them and so on

I would also add that none of this actually worked particularily well for any desired purpose, and that mostly its effects were things like making 19th-century London a paradise for upper-class perverts to buy sex.

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