Some thinkers believe the movement of history is progressive, others see it as cyclical. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the course of human events features a definite direction governed by the spirit of the times, and the outcome is a world which becomes ever better, with respect to the development of human freedom. Karl Marx also thought that the patterns of history demonstrated progress; in this case, progress leading to the control of the workers over the means of production.

Another nineteenth-century philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took a somewhat different approach; one which was eventually developed as the sociocultural analogue of the changes in biological systems documented by Charles Darwin. Societies, much like living organisms, evolve over time, pressured by the need to adapt to their environment; it was actually Spencer who originated the phrase “survival of the fittest,” to describe the force of those selective pressures. This evolutionary process is thought to assert that societies will never cease changing for the better. “Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity,” said Spencer.

Alternatively, the possible existence of cycles in history is a profound fascination for many social philosophers and behavioural scientists. The ancient Chinese philosophers interpreted history in terms of the oscillations of Yin and Yang – of passivity and order vs. activity and chaos. The medieval Moslem historian Ibn Khaldun spotted a cyclical rhythm in the rise and fall of political systems, and the Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico recognized a recurring cycle in the histories of Greco-Roman and modern Western civilizations. Such historical cycles, if they can be shown to exist, would seem to contradict the ideas of smooth, uninhibited progress; and therefore, history could be found to be just as capable of retrogression as of progression.

In order to test this idea, it would be impractical to analyse all of history, but it just might be possible to examine a small subset of history, such as Seduction and the history of sex. What follows is thus an attempt to create a timeline of seduction and sex, which can then be evaluated to determine whether or not there are cycles, trends or any other patterns that might help determine the future course of sex and seduction.

This is currently an ongoing project, and is very far from being complete. However, should you notice any gross omission or inacurracy, then please do report it.

One option here would be to use a model from Epidemiology. If an idea is to spread, it could be likened to a disease or even a computer virus, so we could therefore assume that the idea has an infection rate (the rate at which it spreads from contagious people to susceptible people) and a removal rate (the rate at which infected people stop becoming contagious, either through recovery or death).

The graph of the number of people infected after the introduction of a new idea would follow a mathematical curve P=1/(1+e^-rt), where P is the proportion of the population infected, r is the infection rate per unit of time and t is time.

Of course, the rate of transmission of errors would be much higher for ideas than for diseases or computer viruses etc. However the model might still be quite helpful… We can note that a major national happening, unrelated to sex and seduction may lower the infection rate of ideas related to seduction, by defecting attention away from it. Whereas national news that ties in with, or encourages discussion of the seduction process may raise the infection rate.

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