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Really great write-up. Thank you.
Your response is valuable because it demonstrates the mix of slippery-slope, bad faith reporting, and sleight-of-hand that poisons the abortion debate. Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion. Thus, re-framing an issue has an outsized impact on changes in opinion. I like your consistent use of alternative headlines to point that out.
There are very few pro-life folks who are zero-exception pro-life. Rape, incest, and life of the mother are the default exceptions. But the focus shouldn't be on the exceptions (which will always be a small percentage) but on the modal abortions and the contexts that produce them. The article (and your response) do a good job of highlighting that abortions are often the product of repeated bad life choices and general irresponsibility. I don't think being generally kind of a fuck-up should be a life long sentence for poverty, but there is a limit to what you can be absolved of. Denying a child from being born is far, far past that line.
Going back to the culture war angle, it gets difficult to even "hear out" pro-life arguments because they get so slippery. Obama used to take the median liberal position on abortion that was summarized as "safe, legal, and rare." That last part made the conversation at least possible. It wasn't like we were having parades for abortion or anything. The median liberal position today seems to be on-demand abortion access for any reason, potentially into the third trimester or even at birth. Point out how crazy that is and you get responses like the ProPublica article - "women are literally dying because of these anti-abortion laws." It isn't moving the goalposts, it's making up new rules as you go while also manipulating the score.
If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women. Once we linked sexual activity to the amorphous "personal expression" we let the genie out of the bottle. The argument goes: "Anything you tell me to do is oppression and potentially violence. Anything I demand from society is actually a guaranteed human right that has been withheld because of systemic oppression." Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.
Taking a look at my own history that went from casually pro-choice to rigid pro-life, I'd assert that if you draw any firm line in the sand you are setting yourself up for a slow (though possibly accelerating) drift towards a pro-life stance because the opposite end keeps getting more extreme. Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.
Or suggest an IUD implant, those are super effective, last for a decade, and don't require sticking to a schedule (like with pills) or proper use (like with condoms). Also, IUD effectiveness leaves those others in the dust even with proper use.
Would you support making a free IUD implant to any female who wants one?
Potentially.
But an IUD doesn't deal with the social, interpersonal, emotional consequences of sex. One of the big lies of the sexual revolution is that you can divorce sex from emotion. I don't think that's true between healthy and reasonable adults. I think the only way to do that is to dehumanize one or both of the participants. This is what happens with prostitution. Outside of that, both men and women who are really into casual sex often fall into deep existential crises. This is the end to The Game by Neil Strauss, I think it's a subplot of Magic Mike (I've never seen it, but I remember this popping up in conversation when that movie came out).
I would worry that IUDs would function as (literal) talismans in the minds of some women and men. "You have an IUD? Great, sex has no consequences!" Not true on a physical level (STIs/STDs) and not true on the mental/emotional/social level.
Again, I'm not recommending puritanical sexual codes for society at large. I'm advocating for the hard re-linking of consequences with sex. You can have lots of sex with many partners if you want, but be aware of and accept the consequences. If you don't like the sound of those consequences, abstinence is a good option, and shouldn't be pilloried as some sort of "internalized sexual repression."
That's a good point. The consequences you list are serious, and they are carried by the person having sex (and that person's sexual partner). But if the woman has an IUD, the consequences of her sexual act won't be carried by a baby.
When I was a teen, it was generally known that one can drop by a Planned Parenthood and grab some free condoms, no questions asked. Quite a few of us availed ourselves of that option. Some didn't, but that didn't stop them from having sex. (They did ask friends for condoms sometimes.) Having a well-known option of easy-to-get free condoms didn't eliminate unprotected sex, but it reduced it.
I propose that if there was a well-known option of easy-to-get free IUD implants, then many more women would use that option, and that would greatly reduce the number of babies who must bear the consequences of their mother's sexual choices. The women who make poor life choices would still have plenty of natural consequences to deal with.
I would further propose valorizing the act carrying a baby to turn to give it up for adoption. Like in the 2007 film "Juno", for example. I honestly can't think of another popular movie, show, or book that presented giving-birth-for-adoption in a positive light, but I can think of tons that are from the child's perspective about the emotional pain of finding out you're adopted. I know some adopted kids, and they're fine. The whole mother-didn't-love-me-so-she-gave-me-up trope needs to die.
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There's only one consequence of sex that conservatives seem to actually try to hard re-link to sex, though, that is having the baby. You can't force people to feel proper emotions when having sex, but you sure can deny them abortion and slut-shame them (the "social consequences").
I'm not sure what you're saying here.
Are you for slut-shaming? Or are you more pro free love? Genuinely confused.
I'm pro-emotional connection and anti-slut shaming, inasmuch as birth control makes chastity obsolete.
These aren't mutually exclusive in your model?
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This is something I've always found odd, both from personal experience and more generally.
As far as personal experience goes, I am a single Christian who observes traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality, which is to say that I don't engage in it outside of marriage. As such I am functionally and voluntarily celibate, and have been for a long time. As far as I can tell my quality of life has not suffered significantly from this. Sex is not required for a fulfilling, satisfied life. It is not! Yes, you can go without sex. It is not difficult. Unless I'm some kind of bizarre mutant who feels sexual attraction much less intensely than most people (I definitely experience it), I take my own experience as evidence that it is possible. You can just not have sex! It's just one instance of the much wider principle that any good life will require some exercise of personal discipline, no different to avoiding overeating, or making yourself get enough exercise, or forcing yourself to roll out of bed and go to work even when your head is screaming that you'd rather sleep more. Life is a long exercise of self-disciplining. Why should sexual urges be any different to other urges?
Of course, it probably isn't just sex. Anecdotally I'd argue that the whole concept of discipline or self-control is suffering. I think of how Tanner Greer described the temperance movement, and how much voluntary self-control, in the form of things like pledges, was significant. Either making yourself do something unpleasant, or making yourself refrain from doing something pleasant, is a skill that you can practice and learn. But, not to sound too much like a grouchy old man, I feel like that's less the case now, and we have more focus on immediate, rapid gratification.
Now on the broader scale...
I feel obliged to note that in the wider culture, sex is decreasing in frequency, primarily among younger generations. It would appear that just having less sex is viable, because people are having less sex, to the point that conservatives worry about the sex recession (yes, The Atlantic, but Wilcox and Stone are both on the conservative side). If anything, we're probably having too little sex, collectively. So the idea that it's just impossible to avoid sex seems counter-intuitive. People aren't going outside and suffocating in constant opportunities for sex - rather, sex is happening less frequently than in supposedly more puritanical times.
Historically, I'd argue that the idea that abstaining from sex is dehumanising seems rather absurd - the counter-example to come to my mind is the liberatory effect of vowed celibacy or virginity for Christian women in the Roman Empire. Under the crushing weight of social expectation, renouncing sexual and family life in favour of pure devotion to God could be very attractive. Moreover, today, if you feel that marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution that dehumanises women by reducing them to the role of baby factories or housebound servants, then the idea of renouncing sex might indeed appear liberatory on similar grounds? We might compare something like Korea's 4B movement. I'm not saying all those things are equally good (I think there's obviously a huge difference between voluntary Christian celibacy as commitment to God, and radical feminist celibacy as secession from patriarchal society); just that they seem like cases where deliberate abstinence from sex is experienced as humanising.
So I find the two implied arguments here - that abstention from sex is impossible, and that abstention from sex is oppressive - to be implausible.
Now I will grant that there are specific circumstances in which abstention from sex might be practically impossible or oppressive. If it were demanded of a married couple for an unlimited time, it may well be destructive to that relationship to the point where I would say it's not reasonably possible. Likewise abstention can be enforced or imposed externally in unreasonable ways - someone whose vocation is to marry might be forced into religious life inappropriately, for instance. But the fact of abstention by itself is not enough to conclude oppression or harm or anything unhealthy.
It’s possible to never take a nice, hot shower. You can live fine and happy without ever doing that!
Of course. Lots of people do and have done that.
I'm not sure what the point is?
Obviously I'm not arguing "it's possible to live without sex, therefore it is good to live without sex". I'm not asserting the superiority of celibacy as a state. I'm saying that living a good life requires some measure of self-control around sex in the same way that it requires self-control around food, or alcohol, or anything else. Whether necessity or luxury, self-control is an important virtue. Food is necessary, but we still expect people to exercise judgement and prudence around what to eat, where, when, and so on. Alcohol is not necessary but can be pleasant; we then expect people to show judgement and responsibility when indulging.
Likewise for sex, I would say. There's nothing wrong with desiring sex in itself, but of course judgement, discipline, etc., need to be applied to the choice we make around that desire. Thus the entire field of sexual morality.
As such, I submit that there are times, perhaps even extended periods of time, where "just don't have sex" is a viable course of action. You can just not, and depending on the circumstances, it may be prudent for you to just not.
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Yah might be a mutant. I require sex at least once a week and usually much more. Have you been checked for low T?
Also, why do you want people to suffer for things? Isn't having things come easy a great joy?
I don't know how I'd even go about testing my level of testosterone, and to be honest I find the idea of doing so pretty weird. I know there are people who are, from my perspective, strangely invested in their hormone level, but I don't think that's a very wise approach to take to life. I eat well, exercise, and feel energetic and healthy. That's enough for me.
I'm aware that I have a lower libido than some (I once knew a friend who admitted to masturbating daily, which sounds very uncomfortable to me), but it's definitely not non-existent. I do get attracted to people in daily life, have idle sexual fantasies, and so on.
In any case, as far needing sex goes, well, I confidently predict that if you were trapped on a desert island with a supply of food and yet no sexual partners, you would survive more than a week. You may strongly desire sex once a week or more, but I think you could go without it. It's not like food or water.
For the last point - I don't see where I said that I want anybody to suffer? I said that I think self-discipline is a good thing, to the point of being able to make yourself do unpleasant things, or resist pleasant things, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that I think unpleasant experiences are to be desired. I don't think it means that I want people to suffer if I think that people should be able to make themselves do hard yard work, or refrain from pigging out on an entire chocolate cake. I'd argue that this kind of self-control is actually essential for having a happy life overall.
I mean you can technically go without a lot of things. You don't need food 3 times a day, or water. But life is much better if you get those. Jerking off daily is also not odd, why would it be uncomfortable? Why not enjoy all life has to offer, we're only here for a short time and then back to nothing.
See above. I'm not asserting that celibacy is a superior state to marriage. Sex is pleasurable and there's nothing wrong with pleasurable experiences. I'm asserting that sexual self-control is both possible and necessary.
(I do think there are other conditions that apply to sexual morality - I'm pretty negative on casual sex, for instance - but you can just take as read that I have a Christian sexual morality. That's not necessary for my general point. Even if you have a much more robustly progressive sexual ethic, I think self-control remains a necessary virtue not only in one's sexual life but in all of life. If your ethics have any concept of illicit or inappropriate sex at all, you'll need some kind of guardrail or discipline between you and doing it.)
Sexual mores are byproducts of evolutionary kinship knowledge creation and gene propagation. Without being hijacked by culture or religion you should be negative on casual sex for your mate and positive for yourself. You have been deeply hijacked if I recall correctly.
Well, I'm a Christian, which I was quite open about. But I'd rather this discussion not be some kind of referendum on the existence of God. My point is just that - regardless of where you are on the God question - sexual behaviour can and should be limited in certain circumstances, and the idea of going without sex, whether temporarily or over the long term, is not so ridiculous as to be dismissed out of hand.
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Or what? You explode?
You might want to have sex multiple times a week and you might be unhappy if you don't get it, but you don't require it. Even high-T very horny men are perfectly capable of going without sex. They might not enjoy it, but it won't harm them.
Right, but you're at least going to jerk off in the shower right? Like sheesh. I am typical minding it again, I know. But really I've been scolded enough times by people saying we are only here to have kids. How do they think that happens and why do they think humans want or need sex? You can't have it both ways.
Jerking off in the shower is not sex for the purposes of this topic, because showers can't get pregnant nor impregnate you.
We were talking about abstinence for birth control purposes. Any act that can't produce a baby is still available.
You don't have access to the こんにちは、尊敬するお客様、どうぞ中に捨ててください。Auto Shower 3000? A kid every 10 months or your yen is refunded.
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I'm sure most people would, but I am very confident the guys who do "No-Fap November" do not explode or die.
You're not typical-minding; you're hyperbolizing.
A bit of both I am sure. But damn, some folks need to eat some red meat and bust a nut, or get on Test.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BR4R6kPI2g0
Should the tip of the spear of the hard right be lead by sexless online incels?
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I don’t think it’s practical to expect humans, which natural selection has caused many to be horny, to avoid fucking entirely. And if they do fuck recreationally, there’s bound to be accidents.
Even Christian teens “sin” with premarital sex. I don’t see abstinence as a workable strategy for anyone but the asexuals and others who don’t enjoy or care for sex.
Metabolic syndrome and obesity are the leading causes of death in the western world. This says nothing of the economic and healthcare drains also caused by poor diet and overeating.
Is "eat less / eat better" invalid as a prescription? Is the hardwired need for food - especially carbohydrates - any less compelling than the sex drive?
The modern condition is one of hyper abundance among a species - humans - adapted for scarcity. Successful life strategies in the modern world mostly revolve around discipline and not doing xyz bad thing.
I agree that there will still be many, many humans who choose irresponsible sexual behavior. Teaching abstinence will not directly solve the problem, but it will open up a new approach to directly solving the problem. Specifically, social pressure. Right now, there is zero mainstream social pressure to support sexual self-discipline. "As long as it's safe and consensual" is the median take. I would argue that this is the equivalent to "eat whatever you want whenever you want" which is not the median recommendation of any doctor, dietitian, or even woo-woo online YouTube "wellness" influencers.
Fair enough. I actually do agree with this take. But
That is why I don’t believe advice that’s valid for individuals is workable for society. The more you design a society to rely on individual discipline to function well, the more dysfunctional it’s going to become. Humans by and large haven’t yet evolved to be more disciplined over baser needs, although perhaps the 21st century would exert greater selection pressure than usual. But not if a ban on abortions cause greater numbers of children to be born from those who can’t control their sex drives.
I don't think this was your intention, but that statement's logical extreme is authoritarianism. "We can't rely on people to make good decisions, therefore, we have to take aware their ability to make those decisions."
Again, I don't think this was your intention, so I'm not going to hammer that point.
This is correct. But humans do have yet another base need that is nearly as strong as food/shelter/sex -- social esteem. Sure, there's a small fraction of a percentage of people out there who literally need zero human interaction, but we can safely round them off for the purpose of this argument. We all need some level of interpersonal approval to live happy and healthy lives.
Status and social esteem matter a lot. A core theme of Lorenzo Warby's "Worshipping The Future" is that our need for status can get warped so that we begin to not only beleive but champion all sorts of awful horrible causes. If a culture can status-associate and amplify a certain thing then that thing will become more valuable.
I believe that for much of human history, chastity was a valued thing. This is where you can cue some antagonistic screeds about "chastity was about ConTRroLLing WomEns BodieSS!!" et cetera. I don't buy it. Chastity was held in esteem because it signaled a lot of valuable, pro-social, and pro-evolutionary traits and conditions. Technology changed the equation.
Much like mass produced food high in simple carbs (i.e. sugar), we, as a species, created a hack for mal-adaptive sexual behavior with the Pill. We then shoe-horned our social reasoning to fit into this technological capability by advocating for "enlightened" free love. But that's a red herring - the number one method of female-to-female character assassination is still largely gossiping about sexual promiscuity. I'd submit that our closely held, personal beliefs about sex are far from the generally accepted popular stance on sex. If anything, it's abstracted into "personal choice" much like saying "I'd never drink and smoke pot everyday, but if someone else wants to do it - and be safe about it - I'm not going to step in their way." Sure, from an abstracted freedom of choice perspective, that's a cohesive argument. But, come on, confront the issue; is smoking and drinking every day a good thing to do? No. Is hopping into bed with someone you've known for a matter of hours a good thing to do again and again in your 20s and 30s ... often with alcohol involved? No. It isn't. Even if "no one gets hurt."
I'm not advocating for a full RETVRN to a virgin-until-marriage situation. I'd simply like to re-link sex to the consequence of pregnancy. On top of that, I'd like to add that sex is emotionally resonant and causes non-physical consequences. The fact of the matter is the plurality of people who hurt women are their intimate partners. Phrased differently, if you are a woman in the west today, the man statistically most likely to harm you (although the absolute probability is quite low) is the guy you're currently sleeping with. I haven't found hard numbers, but it stands to reason that if you're sleeping with multiple guys concurrently, those numbers go up. In short, sex matters in many, many ways. But we treat it like it's a fun little handshake.
Excellent point but I'm going to quibble about what is tradition, what is virtue, and what we're returning to...
I recently had a drink with a friend of mine. She was upset because her second grade son, together with his second grade boy gaggle of friends, had convinced a retarded kid in their class to make a "naughty" hand gesture. The retarded kid got into trouble, but under interrogation, it became apparent that he had been baited and hoodwinked. Parents were called. She was almost in tears worried she was raising a "bully."
I said that the optimal amount of bullying for a kid to engage in isn't zero. A kid who never does anything bad is probably a herbivorous, smarmy, teacher's pet of a goody-two-shoes. Bullying isn't good in and of itself, picking on retarded kids isn't a good hobby to get into, and certainly she should discipline him for it. But at eight years old, this is a good sign of development in many ways. He's clever, he has a group of friends that have espirit together, he's spirited and engaging in mischief to amuse himself, he's getting along with people and landing towards the top of the hierarchy rather than at the bottom of it. Those are all good things! Discipline him, make sure he isn't growing up to be cruel and take advantage of others; but the alternatives to him growing through this phase probably weren't "he's perfect and would never say anything mean to anyone" but "he's such a teacher's pet that he never has an independent thought or the courage to pursue his own desires" or "he's such a loser that he has no friends that would want to do mischief with him" or "he's at the bottom of the pile getting bullied."
Chastity is a virtue, it shows discipline to make good decisions. But it can also, particularly when taken to extremes, be a result of and indicative of character flaws. It's a pretty frequent problem in evangelical communities that you have the teenagers who are really good at chastity, and then they never grow out of it. It turns out the good chaste boy who never hit on girls was just gay, or that the good chaste girl who never snuck out of the house at night to see her boyfriend is frigid and doesn't "snap out of it" the moment she gets married in a church. The dropping partner counts for young people don't represent good trendlines for society, and certainly not for traditional values.
Similarly, sexual incontinence is mostly a character flaw, and whoring leads to all kinds of bad outcomes. But it can also indicate virtues vs the control group. Seeing something you want and making the moves to get it requires courage and risk taking. Someone who is attractive, who has potential paramours drooling to get with them, is going to require more discipline to achieve chastity than someone who is unattractive; hence why I think celebrity marriages are simply a different animal than ordinary folk.
Truth and virtue exist in conflict, in tension which creates balance. We need to be seeking to set up a tension that produces the virtues we want to see.
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I appreciate that. What I was trying to get at was that if you have a society which assumes most people will act in a way contrary to their nature, that society is not going to work well. Eg the communists and how they expected people to contribute “according to their abilities” without responding to incentives. I don’t know if there’s a better way to word it, but to me you're expecting something similar, of the average person to practice rational discipline instead of succumbing to baser biological drives.
Chastity was more reasonable when people were regularly getting married off during their horny teenage years. Not so much these days when many are putting off marriage until their thirties, if ever.
Even back then, with all the pious Christian emphasis on family values, there was plenty of infidelity. So if we could magically make chastity a thing again, there’d probably be less sex, but I’d doubt the effect would be that major.
But let’s assume that we could greatly reduce the amount of sex in society by shaming those who have too many partners. How does less sex make society better?
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Whats the radical part of that sign?
Demanding for it to be free? I do agree that it should be the gentlemen’s responsibility to pay.
"On demand ... no apologies" is the radical part. Those folks are unapologetic (heh) about advocating for 9 month / partial birth abortions (for free) without any caveats like life of the mother, significant abnormality etc.
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