Puritans and Sex

When the common man hears the word Puritans, the last thing he would expect would be the fact that they were as open to sexual intercourse as people are today, they are connoted as pure beings and the notion of them having sex almost sounds crazy. Well, believe it or not, even the Puritans had sex. The Puritans were completely fine with sex inside of a marriage; in fact they thought it was a vital part of human nature. However, the Puritans did not approve of sex outside of the marriage and their disbelief of sex outside of the marriage is probably what stemmed the stereotype that Puritans didn't like sex, altogether.

Before reading this article, I was completely unaware of the subject. I figured the Puritans obviously had to have sex to keep their colonies thriving; however, I didn't really think it through and know much more about the subject. I, too, perceived them as pure being too good for sex. Personally, this article has absolutely no significance to me whatsoever. It isn't really relevant for me to know that the Puritans were fine with having sex inside the marriage and that the laws gave those who had sex outside of marriage fairly because they understood the will of man. I honestly don't care if the Puritans made sure to practice prevention over punishment when it came to adultery and that even slaves, although most of them were not married, also had opportunities to have sex. I don't really see how the topic of sex is important to anything except when it comes to populating a colony, which clearly the Puritans had no problem doing.

I found this article rather redundant, it could have been a page long and a lot blunter and the idea that it was supposed to convey would have still been accurately portrayed. I got uninterested when the article told of different circumstances in which adultery was committed and what the various repercussions were for said act. I got side tracked multiple times while reading this article because it is so repetitive. To keep me focused on the article, I tried to find interesting facts. An interesting fact that I found was that the Puritan government adapted to the excess of sexual violations to adopt a system that reflects the child support system of today. Basically, if a child was had outside of the marriage, much like today, the man was required to pay child support. Honestly, other than that, nothing really sparked my interest or registered with my mind. Although, this article is important in the fact that it counterattacks the notion that the Puritans were indeed, pure by all means, it is not so important that it needs to be dragged on for more than two pages.

I came into this article mildly interested in what it had to say and came out informed, yet uninterested. Although it is nice to have my mind changed about the Puritans and now know that even they had sex, I still think that this article could have been better written to spark the interest