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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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