Yep. In the ENTIRE world.
Considering how progressive Ireland has proven itself to be over the last few years, you would think that the rest of the world would have picked up on that.
However, there has always been something about Inis Beag, which actually led to cultural anthropologist John Cowan Messenger studying the small island off the coast of Cork in the 1960s, reporting that the men and women of viewed sexual intercourse as duty, and something “to be endured”.
Old habits die hard though, as JOE reader Darragh Coleman discovered when perusing a Spanish trivia booklet published in 1998.
Under a section titled “Which society is the most (and least) liberal in the world?”, he discovered that, according to the booklet’s author (and a separate researcher), the world’s liberal were some Papua New Guinean tribes who frequently engage in communal orgies.
On the other end of the scale, however, were the inhabitants of Inis Beag.
Now, we don’t speak Spanish, so (along with the accompanying image below), we’ll let Darragh tell us what he found.
“The description of what the islanders get up to, or better, don’t get up to, behind closed doors (very closed doors apparantly) gave us quite a laugh,” Darragh told JOE.
“According to the researcher (of whose credentials is unkown), the people of Inis Beag are so sexually ‘repressed’ that the men view sex as ‘a loss of vital energy’ and they avoid it for this reason. Women who ‘experiment with orgasms’ are accused of being ‘depraved and perverted’.”
Now, again, we’ve come a long way in the 20 years since this booklet was published, and while we’re not saying that the folk in Inis Beag have gone full Papua New Guinea-orgy, we should probably investigate if the Connemara-adjacent folk still feel like the beast-with-two-backs is depraved and perverted.
Cheers to Darragh Coleman for sending this our way. Got a story for JOE? Fill out our online form here.
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