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Notes -
This may miss the forest.
The individual abortion may be typically "eugenic," for a particular definition of eugenic, in that it stops poor, unmarried women from having children, or having more children, which means they use less welfare.
Collectively, access to abortion, and welfare, may be highly "dysgenic," though again for a particular definition of dysgenic. Abortion is a kind of incentive, in that it makes a once-risky behavior less risky. Welfare does this too, so do condoms and hormonal birth control. These are prophylactics and contraceptives and treatments centered around the relationship, and since men and women produce children, I'll stick to heterosexual relationships. What's their status? Worse categorically. Dating, courtship, marriage, and childrearing; historically poor, all but nonexistent, also historically poor, a toss-up, some cases best-in-history, many and possibly the mode of cases rife with mental illness. Marriage in particular, the lack of it, the preponderance of single-mother households. What conditions brought this about?
Casual sex. If casual relationships had a positive impact on the psychological growth of a person, making them "better" at being married, we would know. What we see shows they don't. Later marriages, later first children, fewer children, more children in single-mother households. That last of which has categorically poor life outcomes. Why does the behavior persist? What conditions allowed for it in the first place? Abortion, condoms, birth control. Single mothers, add welfare and child support.
That the best of us, the people who should be producing platoons of little copies of themselves and their spouses to help our charge into space, instead have one or two, maybe three, is a tragedy. Yeah AGI is going to solve it, yeah I'm on record about the Simulacra Age and how Japan is going to be so poised for leaping ahead specifically because of their low TFR, but I think a lot of humanity is good and I want it to stick around. Pretty much all of you are pretty cool, I'd like for more of you to be around. I'd like my closest friends to stick around, to have the little copies of themselves to be friends with my kids so when they're grown they'll have some same sense of the joys I've had and continue to have. But most of them aren't having kids, and some of that is motivated by political rhetoric that functions to encourage mostly whites to not have kids, while then complaining about the economics of low birth rates and using those to in part justify dropping tens of thousands of foreigners on middle America.
That rhetoric is why I don't dignify the possibility that all the negatives above are still somehow consequentially "eugenic."
The executive-holding political faction in the most powerful country in the history of humanity derives significant power from maintaining access to abortion. This is not an appropriate interest of government; maybe it's equally inappropriate for the government to prevent abortion, but I can confidently say on the category, that of the two sides, the "Protect us from the consequences of our own actions" party will in all cases be infinitely the lesser. We are highly intelligent animals, we are meat computers, we learn and improve through consequence. Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics. These people vote, their politicians hold office. We sent men to the moon in a decade, now there's an oligarchy-appointed presidential candidate who at least at one time supported funding the transitions of incarcerated illegal aliens and a nontrivial number of her voters support her for no reason greater than her promise of protecting their "freedom" from having children. Abortion isn't eugenic, it should in virtually all cases be understood as the definition of dysgenic behavior, lest words mean nothing at all.
I agree that the sex revolution enabled by effective birth control (and abortion procedures) did have negative side effects.
But then, any important invention had negative side effects. The printing press was near the beginning of a causal chain which lead to a few bigger wars in Europe. The Internet contributed to increased human isolation. The chemical revolution enabled the horrors of chemical warfare.
It was not all sunshine and rainbows before the sexual revolution. For men, raising a family with their wife may be close to the optimal evolutionary strategy, but it can still be improved upon by impregnating a few other women in whose child-rearing you are not invested on the side.
The trope of a man seducing a virgin girl, having sex with her and then moving on, leaving her either 'dishonored' and unfit for marriage in the eyes of their society or actually pregnant, in which case her choices might be suicide, infanticide (which will be punished as murder) or becoming the sex worker society already considers her to be anyhow are pretty omnipresent in German literature, from Goethe's Faust to Mann's Untertan. Or high status men fucking their female servants (who are in no position to object) and then kicking them out of their household in shame as harlots once they are visibly pregnant.
While I agree that the number of unmarried sex-acts per capita has doubtlessly increased since then, I would argue that the negative consequences of such acts -- especially for women -- have drastically decreased since then.
I guess you don't wear a seat belt in a car, as its only purpose is to protect you from your consequences of your decisions. Granted, sometimes the decision was just 'enter the road when you know that there are unsafe drivers', but that is just the way of life.
Those high-status men are still fucking the help, it's just now they don't have to worry about troublesome heirs. That's why men of status supported the sexual "revolution," not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted. It's David and Bathsheba replayed again and again on our entire civilization. Their beautiful wives and beautiful families wasn't good enough, so make it "easier" for the help, rather than harder for those despicable men. Remove the negative consequences from that specific act, which have indeed drastically decreased, but if I compare a maid being tossed out to the subtle and myriad horrors of modern life as a woman I'd say it's at best a tie, and a tie that favors tradition. What benefits some all too often harms most and social pressures and economic interests have a funny way of taking once-niche-choices and demanding them of the whole. Like pressure to become Strong Female Protagonist when most would rather be Stay At Home Mom.
Seatbelt laws are nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when someone gets launched through their windshield and meat crayons the road. Regardless, Big Seatbelt isn't dictating national elections.
Because it's unthinkable that a woman would ever want to casually have sex with a man.
Those groupies were all definitely raped, and they all regret it and never brag about it.
Indeed.
The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped. A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame. They were adolescents caught up in a wave of historically unparalleled wall-to-wall social and peer pressure. The music was good and they could feel it, but those teenage groupies had no context, they were fans of the Beatles and the Stones because they were that-which-is-most-popular. I'm sure you've seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; those girls didn't spend the entire performance screaming because they were there to hear the music. This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift. She is measurably popular because she is popular, and I say that as someone who likes a fair number of her songs and who doesn't care what she's chosen to do with her life. Back then, what would show a girl's "fitting in" more than for one precious moment being the desired object of one of the most famous men alive?
Much of this applies to the teenage girls who were legal adults, who while I would say in their case had nothing happen justifying prosecution, were nevertheless coerced with a lie. The lie of status, the story is perceived status, but it was always and only ever fake. "For that moment, he wanted to fuck me" for that moment, an immensely famous man on a world tour unsurprisingly wanted to have sex with a young and attractive girl who would do anything for him. She tells that story for the exact reason that she wasn't good enough; else she would have married one of those guys, or we would know her as a model or an actress. I'm sure we do in some cases, but those guys went to a lot of places, and those places had a lot of groupies. They weren't sleeping with future models every single night, even though they could have been sleeping with actual models every single night.
All that aside, of course it's not unthinkable, because we live in the time when it isn't unthinkable. But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened. They would see the evidence and they would know it made everything worse. And even ignoring everything else here, everyone knows we happily indulge in things that aren't bad for us, been to the store lately? Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle? Four kinds of Funyuns, ten of Doritos, several dozen flavors of Pringles? Who's that for? (It's me, and I love it. Get it?)
Yeah, well enough, though your point might be a bit unclear. Ultimately I'd just stake Chesterton's Fence on the subject, whatever it's ostensibly about, it sure did work for a very long time.
No they weren't (aside from the ones that 50 years later regret the decision just as it becomes politically convenient to do so). I get that women who want the notch in the bedpost is completely nonsensical from a biological standpoint; so women who get it and then brag about it in the same way a man would do is even more bizarre. It's kind of like when older women sleep with young men- obviously, that's a malfunction (how are they going to take care of the inevitable baby) or just malicious (same thing, doubly so if they're teenaged or less at the time)... except that's not quite how the men see it.
And yet, that's exactly how it worked. Being able to just have risk-free sex is observably pretty great for women who like sex for the sake of sex.
Because they weren't choosing 14 year old you, and you never got over that. We get it. Of course, your answer appears to me to be that it's a problem with men seducing
P-zombieswomen, where my answer is more concerned with noticing that the conditions that allowed the average 14 year old man to get laid (and the conditions that allowed the average 14 year old woman to see the average 14 year old man as a viable option), and the average 20 year old man to start a family if they wished, appear to have disappeared. I'm not convinced the Sexual Revolution is the entire explanation why they disappeared; but I am convinced the Sexual Revolution was an emergent property of those conditions.Really? Her songs are basically all about having male groupies (or at least, the kind of groupie the average woman would want) but I don't think any exist in reality. Contrast the rock groups, where their stock song wasn't breakup-playbook-101 and they were literally drowning in pussy.
Ironically the biggest celebrities that have the largest collection of male groupies are just particularly masculine-coded women that don't show their faces (be that because they're busy showing off everything else- not a particularly feminine trait- or because they're a cute anime girl playing video games- also not a particularly feminine trait). The men throw bags of
commitmentmoney at them in the same way women throw bags ofsexflesh [i.e. themselves] at their celebrities.What, that angry men and angry women would still be angry about it in 60 years' time? The free peoples of the past are just going to call you a square and do it anyway.
I'm not sure why the existence of such would be sinful outside of their existence being tempting to those given to Oreos. Of course, the same thing naturally must apply to loose women given how much I hear about how damaging their emission of XXX-rays are claimed to be.
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Again, people say this, but all of society is basically to find "freedom from consequences" whether it's penicillin, germ theory, or better ways to keep a building warm or cold. You just don't like this way of a avoiding a consequence. You take antibiotics? Why are you trying to avoid the consequence of dying of a minor cold like millions, if not billions of people had to do for the entire history of the world until incredibly recently?
The mitigation of risk is the natural result of technological progress. It isn't always bad, penicillin and the whole of medical research being obvious examples, it's also not always good, see my above comment. Contextually I thought I was clear, it seems not, that I was describing specifically "protection from the highly predictable consequences of poor choices." A person who does something unjustifiably foolish and knows it's foolish if for no other reason than its possible consequences, deserves whatever they get. Living in society means you're going to get sick, it's not unjustifiably foolish to live and go about among other people. Living in temperate climates is a hair different as maybe it would be ideal if most humans lived in a climate like Southern California, but there are resources we need that come from harsh climates, and we've long since adapted to living in climates that require heating in some parts of the year and cooling in others. It's also not the same sort of risk, not today; two hundred years ago if you were unprepared by say, not bothering to get enough wood to burn to keep yourself warm in the winter, you'd deserve whatever happened.
And I say this, people say this, because the American Democratic Party would operate in a categorically different manner if it couldn't campaign on protecting its voters from the consequences of their poor decisions. What would they be if they couldn't deliver on abortion and welfare? What would they be if they couldn't back the mass importation of foreigners who will be dependent on government subsidy? For my money they'd be far stronger, as remaining options and ideological inclination kept them as the natural allies and champions of domestic, native-born labor — the platform they once owned.
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