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Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Last I heard, trad life gave better outcomes in pretty much all of these, while also offering superior protection from STDs, out-of-wedlock kids and psycho murder as well. Still, it seems obvious to me that there's large amounts of less dramatic but still highly significant misery generated by Free Love leftovers.
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen. But there are also times when they don't happen. Sometimes people have pre-martial sex - even quite a lot of pre-marital sex - and then they go on to happy marriages with children and everything is fine. So pre-marital sex isn't guaranteed doom - it's an action that carries a certain level of risk, similar to many other actions we undertake.
I don't have exact numbers on hand detailing the number of positive outcomes vs negative outcomes compared to number of sex partners. But then, I wouldn't want my children to get in the habit of consulting a table of probabilities detailing the likelihood of a positive outcome before they make decisions, even if said probability table is certified "trad". They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
Neither chewing bubblegum nor consuming fentanyl guarantee doom. But there's a pretty large mountain of evidence that Free Love is closer to the Fent end than the bubblegum end, and thus, it seems to me, something people should generally steer away from. It's not close enough to the fent end that I'd advocate passing laws and enforcing them with the police, but it's close enough that I'm not really interested in expending significant effort to stop others from doing that, even when they're being quite dishonest about the nature of the problem. It's certianly bad enough to make an explicit point of the chain of causality between the Free Love narrative of "harmless fun" and the very real and apparently quite significant amounts of harm it has been causing for the last several decades. As the evidence continues to accumulate, hopefully people will learn to make better choices voluntarily, and those who do not can serve as cautionary examples.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
I am of course opposed to "believe all victims", the draconian on-campus tribunals, #MeToo in general, etc. I'm about as libertarian as you can get on this issue. You get to reap all the rewards, and all the risks. I think that's a consistent position.
Sure. It's a classic sliding-scale boundary problem. We both presumably recognize that some things are worth the risk and some things are not, but the question is, where do we draw the line? Is pre-martial sex more like fentanyl, or is it more like chewing gum?
I don't think that question itself is very interesting or worth debating. I believe we both agree enough on the empirical facts that we're not going to learn anything new from it. The real question is why do you think the way you do, and why do I think the way I do? Why is it that, when we are both presented with the same information, you say "I dunno man that looks too dangerous to be worth it", and I say "I dunno man I think it looks fine you should go for it"? What explains this?
See my reply to 100Proof for more details.
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There's hand waving and then there's guiding an aircraft to landing levels of hand waving.
@FCfromSSC listed a number of bad outcomes from promiscuity and you addressed them with "yeah, but like, maybe good things also can happen." This is a pretty egregious failure to engage with the argument.
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people. And this is one of the big failure modes of Free Love and Do as You Feel - it utterly ignores the fact that these actions you're talking about (specifically sex) are not solitary actions. They aren't even the "indirect" nature of doing drugs or drinking. Sex, by definition, only occurs with another person/people. To take such a self-centered view is inherently anti-social. "I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
Would you want your children to take into the consideration the perspective and feelings of other people, including their intimate partners?
It's not. It's roughly the same response that I would give to someone who said that we should ban cars because sometimes people crash, or we should bring back prohibition of alcohol because some people become alcoholics. In most contexts, what they would get from me is a shrug and a "well, life is risk, so deal with it".
Of course you can get into the weeds on any particular issue and start detailing all the positive and negative outcomes, the probability of each, tally up the expected values, etc. I recognize that risk does have to be balanced against reward, of course. But I have little interest in engaging in that sort of discussion on the sex issue because I think it would simply be beside the point. Psychologically speaking, I think that the typical anti-sex advocate doesn't first encounter the potential risks of promiscuous sex and then draw the conclusion "that seems so dangerous that we really need to discourage people from doing that". I think what comes first is the commitment to abstaining from sex as a moral value - typically either as part of a religious identity, or as a generalized commitment to traditional values - and then they start looking for evidence to support this pre-existing ethical commitment. I think this is a very common pattern that generalizes across multiples types of issues. In the discussion on unions further down in the thread for example, I don't think most posters are opposed to the strike because the longshoreman union boss is a slimeball - I think the anti-union commitment comes first, and then they're happy to discover later that the union boss is a slimeball because it bolsters their case.
I am in no way exempt from any of this of course. I too have a pre-existing commitment to promiscuous sex being a good thing (or at least a tolerable thing) as part of my identity that has little to do with its actual empirical effects. The saving grace here is that I don't think this fact has to terminate the conversation. The reasons for these foundational identity-commitments are themselves amenable to debate to some degree, and we can make an attempt to elucidate them. I just think that if we're going to get into the weeds on this, we should stick to the actual meat of the issue, and not just "sex can lead to bad things". Yeah, it can. Lots of other things can too. So what is it about sex that got your attention, specifically?
Yes, obviously. Where did I imply that I didn't?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. If you said that extra-marital sex is bad for your soul, spiritually, I would take that much more seriously than recourse to divorce statistics. I, conversely, think that sex is good for your soul. So that's something that we can have a real debate about. Now we're at the level of genuine, heartfelt convictions. The stuff about divorce and fertility rate stats is just window dressing.
This entire part of my comment (which you failed to address):
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people. And this is one of the big failure modes of Free Love and Do as You Feel - it utterly ignores the fact that these actions you're talking about (specifically sex) are not solitary actions. They aren't even the "indirect" nature of doing drugs or drinking. Sex, by definition, only occurs with another person/people. To take such a self-centered view is inherently anti-social. "I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
I have a genuine, heartfelt conviction that divorce is bad disproportionately to younger children.
Please spell out more explicitly what the risk to other people is. Is it just a repeat of the other points already mentioned? Then my response is that all parties should be consenting and all parties must necessarily accept the risks involved, same as before. There are no further complications introduced by the multi-party scenario as opposed to just considering one party in isolation.
If the other party consented, then yes, it is quite literally on them.
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You... Wouldn't want your kids to consider risks before taking actions? Would you be okay with them smoking fent, or is there just some point at which it becomes "obviously regrettable"?
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