Amerika

Maybe our annoying elders were right: sexual liberation, or the cutting loose of sex from family intentions, ruined the family. After all, you got the reward without the obligation, so why bother?

Like most revolutions, the sexual revolution was formed of popular notions that in opposition to common sense denied consequences and focused instead on the moment, the feeling and the social aspects of the act.

Those annoying elders have no idea, the revolutionaries said. People were always having sex; throughout history, 2/3 of brides were not virgins. With liberation, everything is fair, we’re all equal, and we can enjoy this glorious bodily function without strings attached.

Except that they don’t tell you a few things. First, saying 2/3 of brides were not virgins tells us little about the brides. As far as I can tell, 2/3 or more of people live in squalor, hate their families and litter compulsively while working entry-level jobs out of incompetence and laziness. These people cannot control their impulses, appetites and desires long enough to save up enough money to fix the roof; it’s not surprising they rut like hamsters.

In the course of not telling you a few things, they also performed a classic con: they paid off today at the expense of tomorrow. If life were so easy as “have whatever you want, right now,” we wouldn’t need evolution. Instead nature walks us through a series of steps in which we defer our desires in order to apply ourselves to finding solutions to what pains or ails us.

Tomorrow is the whole of your life. You will probably want a family because families are fun, and having kids is fun, and raising those kids in a stable place ensures that you will enjoy your kids and not have to watch them flounder in misery. Even more, it lets you move on to new challenges.

You don’t want to be trying to live the ideal college lifestyle for the rest of your life, or to pretend you’re 27 when you’re 37. You want an ever-evolving series of goals and challenges to get the full experience of life.

Sexual liberation however wants you to pretend that how you are right now is how you will be for the whole of your life, and to ignore the consequences of your actions now on the rest of your life. For example, any action you repeat inculcates you to expect more of the same; at some point, you get hard-wired for it. Even more, your first experience of anything is sacred and the more you adulterate that, the less you experience great intensity (or quality) and the more you experience repetition of diminishing intensity (or quantity).

Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it’s true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University’s campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.

And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren’t asking for much in return these days—the market “price” of sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual options—more supply for his elevated demand—it takes some measure of price control away from women. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also, quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young women look more like those of men than they once did, at least when women are in their twenties. The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than they used to be. – Slate

The sexual economics of humanity favor two basic strategies: either you have many partners and spawn and invest little in each, or you are very selective and invest heavily in your choice. The latter is riskier but gives you the ability to find a more selective match and to more carefully manage your offspring’s education and maturation.

Of course, the second strategy also requires more overhead. You don’t raise a family without some kind of contract saying “we agree we’re in this to win it for as long as that takes,” and if you’re going to translate that into any kind of pleasant scenario, you probably want all the gooey goodness about true love too. These things are natural and sensible.

When we throw those out the window however, you get a society of empowered men and women who act differently.

To the men, the risk of long-term partnership grows because since the woman they may marry will have had many partners, she’s less likely to stick with one. That means a man faces a greater chance of being cheated upon, raising a child that is not biologically his, and then having to pay alimony after the inevitable split. Because of this risk, men are less likely to commit.

A woman faces less risk, but also less likelihood of success. She can get away with having multiple partners and then must convince one to settle down, but at that point, she’s not getting the good one — she’s getting the scratch and dent sale that is willing to tolerate the risk of infidelity or alienation because he doesn’t care all that much anyway. The woman is thus likely to pick up a dweeb and carry him around until she chucks him out, resulting in her spending most of her 20s and half of her 30s chasing men, then her 30s and half of her 40s in a loveless marriage, and then when menopause hits, she gets dumped to a future life of low-rent casual sex and loneliness.

What Hymowitz cannot understand (and because she’s an older conservative woman, is constitutionally incapable of understanding no matter how many times it is explained to her, no more than a cat could understand calculus) is that it is the condition of women, not men, that caused the great drop in fertility, the great increase in single-motherhood, and the great delay in marriage and adulthood by most men. Simply put, women for the first time ever, can widely choose sexy men instead of responsible ones. And they choose SEXY EVERY TIME just about. Leaving really, zero incentive for men to “man up” as she puts it. There are other factors at play, including a re-jiggering of the economy to put most jobs done by men by outsourced or H1-B visa holder cheaper replacements, the growth of female-dominated (and White male unfriendly) government, fashion, advertising, media, and corporate jobs. But the heart of the reason most White men in their twenties remain slackers is that women choose sexy men over responsible men. And only a very few men (usually less than 10% of the population) can be sexy. – Whiskey’s Place

This blogger has half the story. “Sexy” is a made-up word referring to people who are momentarily appealing. Past generations would have found this a baffling category. Sexy looks like casual sex, low commitment and probably flakiness. Why would you want that? Women fall for the media archetypes however, and go chasing the surly sweater model, the lanky-haired artist, the so-bad-he’s-good rocker, and so on.

When they’re done chasing and bedding these flakejobs, they go looking for a responsible man. All of those however are wise to the game and realize that women of unclear sexual past who suddenly want a good man are spent in that they have had so many lovers they are prejudiced against anything but casual sex. They’re sexual burnouts, and in the game of sexual politics, that makes them high-risk investments.

This is how sexual liberation kills the family. It pits the interests of men and women against each other. When men see the game is stacked in favor of them hooking up with a burnout, they simply choose not to play. When they get older and have enough income, they can simply buy their way to a cute young thing in breeding mode. They’re not going to deal with the sexual burnouts because those represent nothing but concealed losses.

If we were less selfish as a culture, we’d see that the right to sex right now is trumped by a plan that involves a lifetime of family, love and happiness. But those things are intangible, and almost too good to be true for your average drone, so they figure they’ll take the goods up front and ignore the future. If you don’t believe in happiness, you’ll take whatever you can get.

Tags: crowdism, sexual economics