The sexual revolution in Iran, Romania and Northern Ireland

This is a very interesting article on sex in Iran, by Afshin Shahi in Foreign Policy. It shows how very Westernised Persians are, thanks, I suppose, to the Shahs. 

It reminds me too that the sexual revolution in the 1960s permeated the Iron Curtain and reached even faraway Bucharest. Though other aspects of the 1960s social revolution did not, for which I am pretty thankful. 

It may be too that sex before marriage is a political gesture in Iran. Irish Catholic girls in the 1980s told me Ulster Protestant girls slept around because they read The Sun and, as Unionists, wanted to resemble girls on the mainland.

A wise thing on the subject of the sexual revolution was said by Dorothy Day, the Communist activist who converted to Catholicism. 

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

This seems to me to be true and to apply, among other things, to homosexual marriage.