this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Not exclusively bad though . It is just every country is not in pace with 1960s sexual liberation movement of US and the West.
The irony is that many places were well ahead of The West in that regard until the colonizers came and forced their binary norm onto them.
Well I don't about your country but India was pretty much backwards in terms of any rights of women and the oppressed castes. It was the British who employed the lower castes and gave them some dignity. That's all. Hijras in india were always frowned upon and were ostracized by the mainstream society for years. They are not mentioned in vedas and hindu texts (although gods can be trans or can have both feminine and masculine genders).
Go further East and things change considerably.
A good case study is Thailand. They managed to avoid being outright colonized, and their approach to gender is so far ahead of their SEA neighbours (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines) where historically they were very similar.
I think it's due to some kind of buddhist philosophy. India was and is pretty backwards
It's not exclusively from Buddhism. Buddhism wasn't prevalent in the Philippines, but the indigenous animist religions had gods and legends that Western culture would call trans. The spiritual leaders, the babaylans, were exclusively women and the few men that felt a calling to that role switched gender expressions.
Queerness in Russia was apparently quite normal before Christian missionaries began westernizing them
Hawaiian people had trans people as part of everyday culture, and many words attributed to them. The missionaries from the west ruined that.
Every culture deals with these issues in their own way. We should not expect that sexual and gender liberation will look the same in all parts of the world. In some instances the main reason why this liberation is now needed is because of patriarchal norms imposed by European colonizers. In order to liberate themselves they do not need to emulate the West's historical path but rather to go through a process of cultural decolonization drawing upon the progressive elements in their own traditions.
And keep in mind, not all aspects of the 1960s sexual liberation in the West were good...the normalization of pornography for instance happened during that time. There were quite a few aspects of the 1960s counterculture movement that were less than desirable from a Marxist viewpoint. Some of the more harmful ones like excessive drug use were deliberately pushed and encouraged by Cointelpro in order to subvert revolutionary groups and divert the energies of the youth into avenues that are non-threatening to the bourgeois state.
The CIA was also behind quite a few of the more popular "radical" media (magazines, etc.), artists and intellectuals of the time.
Well it's better you have liberation one way or the other. Instead of that we have rapes and sexual harassment of women and underage age due to frustrated males and lack of sexual education and free dating culture. What we have is a rigid caste based system and marriage, most people lose their virginity by marriage.