[5] Max Weber saw rational articulated religions as engaged in a long-term struggle with more physical forms of religious experience linked to dance, intoxication and sexual activity.
[11] In the latter, the degree of control might vary from time to time and region to region, being least in urban settlements;[12] however, only the last three centuries of intense urbanisation, commercialisation and modernisation have broken with the restrictions of the pre-modern world,[13] in favor of a successor society of fractured and competing sexual codes and subcultures, where sexual expression is integrated into the workings of the commercial world.
[14] Nevertheless, while the meaning of sexual immorality has been drastically redefined in recent times, arguably the boundaries of what is acceptable remain publicly policed and as highly charged as ever, as the decades-long debates in the US over reproductive rights after Roe v. Wade, or 21st-century controversy over child images on Wikipedia and Amazon would tend to suggest.
Michel Foucault considered that the modern world was unable to put forward a coherent morality[16] – an inability underpinned philosophically by emotivism.
Nevertheless, modernism has often been accompanied by a cult of immorality,[17] as for example when John Ciardi acclaimed Naked Lunch as "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of narcotic addiction".