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I think a lot of people are confused why the sex recession could be concerning to socialcons, so I thought I'd chime in and give my take.
First of all, in an "only Nixon could go to China" sense, I'm a strong opponent of casual sex. I think it's bad. And I've thought it's bad since I first formed opinions about sex, and continue to believe it. I think it's damaging to the individual and to society, and I think it cheapens something that is of great significance.
So my problem with the sex recession is not that I think promiscuity is great and I lament its decline, it's that the problem with the sex recession isn't actually about sex at all -- it's an underlying intimate relationship recession and a loneliness crisis.
What's happening isn't that a bunch of people are getting into intimate dating relationships and keeping it in their pants until marriage, or at least until their relationship is solid and long-term oriented. What's happening is straight people aren't talking to the opposite sex at all. And, if they are, they find no interest in dating any of them, because they have unrealistic expectations, or they don't understand the appeal of a relationship, or they are so neurotic that they're unable to form a stable intimate connection with another person.
That a whole bunch of young people are so atomized and neurotic that they're unable to form intimate relationships is actually more damaging, in my view, than casual sex is per se. So I'm concerned about the sex recession in much the same way as a socialist might have been concerned about the Great Depression.
"Ah, but!" you say, "the Great Depression was all about the banks and the capitalists losing their money in the stock market crash!"
"Well, that was what started it," the socialist replies, "but the real problem was what happened to the workers, who became unemployed and unemployable, who were forced to stand in breadlines for food and travel the country in search of work."
The Great Depression was bad for the capitalists, just as the sex recession is bad for people who want casual sex. But it is also very, very bad for people who want intimate relationships in general, even socialcons who want to settle down with a nice girl and have a family. Because, as it turns out, many of the skills and capacities necessary for people to have casual sex are also necessary for people to have long-term intimate relationships. And if the social environment -- as sex-positive and gung-ho about casual sex as it is -- cannot get people to have sex, well, it probably can't get them to settle down, either.
So the sex recession serves as a sign of the times, a statistical revelation of a deeper problem. There's a reason the news reports on the stock market, and it's not just because many Americans have investments -- it's because what happens on the market ends up affecting the economy as a whole. And so it is with sex.
I hold that a big part of the ultimate problem is a lack of strong, conservative institutions, including marriage, but of course I believe that.
However, just as a socialist would insist that the ultimate causes of the Great Depression were the flaws of capitalism and the lack of worker control over the means of production, I would insist the ultimate causes of the sex recession are the flaws of the sexual revolution and the lack of willingness to sacrifice in order to make relationships work. While, of course, lamenting the loneliness and the emptiness and the suffering that the sex recession engenders.
And just as the socialist would say that the Depression necessitated a revolution, I too say that the sex recession necessitates a serious reevaluation of the "sex system" we've established. This is a system which insists on the greatness of sex while utterly dismantling the insitutions that helped most people safely and meaningfully have it. And I suppose, like the reddit-tier socialists insisting we live in "late-stage capitalism" while expecting the revolution any day now, I hope and pray we are in "late-stage sexual libertinism" where the contradictions and the failures of the casual sex system become apparent to the masses.
All of this comes as people's ability to form platonic friendships is damaged as well. It's a totally generalized loneliness crisis. And it's a massive problem for our society: I think it threatens to tear the social fabric apart. My suspicion is that this will happen less as a bang (pun not intended, but appreciated) and more as a slow, methodical, sorrowful loss of social support and increased low-level suffering. I think this has already been happening for a while now, with the results evident in real life and online.
I hold that many of the problems of wokeness -- the obsessiveness about identity markers, the dogpiling on opponents, the extremely online bickering, all of that -- form but another cluster of symptoms of the same problem: a neurotic, atomized, empty, soulless, lonely society. People are desperate for something to give them an identity and a purpose, because their family and their society and their friends and their (at times non-existent) partners have utterly failed in the basic social function of giving them that.
And it should be explicitly noted that the cause of the loneliness epidemic is in large part the internet: the destruction of in-person interaction, and a turn to interractions oriented in ways other than centered on people, whether that be consuming content, or interacting with individuals about a topic as we are right now.
I personally think the causality goes the other way on that — Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, based on a 1995 essay, and the forces of atomization were already incredibly strong by that point. In some ways, the internet has actually mollified some of the trends against human connection, even as its algorithmization of connection has made the quality much worse. I think people resort to the internet because of the atomization that has already occurred.
Before the internet, people were still disconnected and lonely, they were just disconnected and lonely watching TV or reading books instead of binging YouTube and reading tweets. If anything, I think the great gender disconnection that would lead to our present was well in place by the 90s. I Love Raymond was not exactly a positive depiction of marriage.
Yeah, I've seen people in this general sphere argue that early helicopter parenting and Stranger-Danger paranoia killed a lot of outdoors socialization, combined with the isolation of suburbia and the decline of latchkey kids. The Internet and video games, as much as people might malign them when the topic of the modern Battle-of-the-Sexes comes up, at least provide some sort of alternative to "literally nothing."
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FWIW, for my personal life I have concluded that relationships are mostly not worth the effort.
When I was 18, I did not worry about finding a girlfriend at all, just assumed that it would be something which would happen on its own eventually. When I was 25, I noticed I was wrong about that, became depressed and so on. From 30 to 40 I had a relationship which felt like net negative at least in the last years, in retrospect. About a year on, my feeling about relationships is "been there, done that".
I mean, both getting laid a lot and being in a good relationship would be net positive in an abstract way. Having a helicopter pilot license would also be a nice thing to have, I guess. But just like I don't have any big dream of becoming a pilot, I also don't have a big dream of becoming a sexual successful man or starting a family. Getting to either of these three goals would take perhaps a few years of work, with the helicopter thing being way more deterministic.
I mean, if I got stuck in the 18th century, I might conclude that cleaning up my act enough to attract a partner would be the best way towards happiness. But today, I have the whole internet at my fingertips. Video games, netflix, porn, whatever. Yes, all of that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that everything a human does is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
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