Tabooery

Tabooery (taboo + ery) is the human tendency to quickly develop and maintain bans or prohibitions (taboos) on certain behaviors, items, substances, or subjects and often extending stigmas towards anyone or anything else remotely associated with such things (especially if the taboo is "radioactive"; i.e. it contaminates everything it comes into contact with).

Some taboos have lasted a long time; others have developed (or greatly intensified) only relatively recently. Certain societies are more prone to developing and/or maintaining taboos than others. For example, very religious and/or educationally-backwards communities and societies tend to be very prone to tabooery. The United States (or at least certain parts of it, especially in the so-called "Red" (strongly Republican-leaning) areas) is very given to some of the most ridiculous tabooery in the developed world. This is probably due to the largely "Pilgrim-Puritan-Protestant" heritage of most of the people who live in these places, nowadays manifested in their affinity for evangelical, fundamentalist, and other conservative forms of Christianity.

Islamic tabooery includes such things as mandating the wearing of burkas and otherwise insisting that absolutely no part of a woman be publically visible. Though long a Muslim tradition, the Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan took it even further in the 1990s when they required that not even a woman's eyes be visible (thus starting in the 1990s they were required to wear thick metal-mesh burkas resembling the headgear of fencers or beekeepers, something rarely if ever done to this extent before even in Muslim lands).

Some recent American tabooery includes such things as expecting "at least one shower a day plus massive deodorant & body spray" to combat the ever-present B.O.; avoiding tobacco smoke like the plague (least someone assume that you might be a loathsome smoker); avoiding the smell of alcohol on your breath and person, no matter how drunk you actually are; acting drunk ("not being able to hold your liquor"), no matter how much you have actually drank; zealously avoiding swearing phrases like "God", "Jesus", "Christ", "God damn", "Damn it", etc., while liberally using terms like "Shit", "Fuck", etc.; anything remotely "faggy" (gay or feminine) regarding a straight male; zealous avoidance of popping any pills of anykind (even aspirin) or drinking energy drinks ('cuz they're "drugs"), while partaking liberally of coffee, tea, softdrinks, beer, etc., and banning all cussing, smoking, lewdness (no matter how remote) anywhere at all near ANY "children" (including even newborn infants as well as 16-17 year old teenagers; some might even ban it around pregnant women, but of course, many of these folks think it is wrong to do any of this around any women as well, no matter how mature or "knowing" she might be), and want to censor children from exposure to anything even remotely sexual in the media (like couples kissing or holding hands), yet "liberally" let them watch the most gruesome & graphic scenes of gratutious violence, body mutilation, etc. Likewise, many of these prople will say they want summary executions (or even torture & mutilation preceding certain death) for anyone even suspected of looking sideways at (let alone even touching!) a child, dealing drugs, driving drunk, or sometimes even for rape of an adult woman, but they might be more OK with letting a murderer go free (especially if they killed for "moral" reasons, like sexual possessiveness (monogamy), punishing a deviant, making a revolutionary right-wing political statement, etc.). Since the mid-to-late 1980s, there has been a growing disparity, inbalance, or lack of proportion between the kinds of offenses (mostly violent ones) more likely to be excused and the kinds (mostly sexual or drug-related) that are severely punished, a reveral of the previous trends that dominated from the 1960s through the 1970s and earlier 1980s.

Taboos are more than just individual preferences (likes and dislikes). Rather, taboos are socially-mandated (required) and enforced prohibitions that most people in a culture (or subculture) just accept unquestioningly (without thinking; they just assume that it's like a "God-given" absolute or fact of nature, like gravity, that everybody "just knows it" and they can't imagine why or how, even for a second, anyone else could possibly do it any differently at all).

Of course, some of the most common taboos in both American and Muslim cultures is anything and everything to do with sex (sexual intercourse and sexuality), although in America, everybody (or at least every peer group, if not quite every subculture) seems to draw the line in a different place ("I'll do this but never that!").