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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?

The ideal of the Sexual Revolution was free love (no need to get married to have sex, no need to be married to cohabit), removal of shame and secrecy around sex, removal of jealousy etc. because now anyone could get sex so nobody needed to be possessive, all the drama around sex would disappear because the prudery and disapproval and hypocrisy would be done away with. Now you could control your fertility (and medicine seemed to be on the verge of making STIs no more troublesome than having a cold), so no pregnancy unless you wanted it (and hence no babytrapping/shotgun marriages/unhappy marriages where there were more kids than you could afford).

Women would be equally as liberated as men, so that the double standard would be done away with. Being sexually experienced would no longer be something shameful, but something desirable. Now that we understood the drives behind human instincts, due to psychology and psychotherapy and evolutionary psychology and so forth, we could finally understand what we wanted and why.

Sexuality was now separated from reproduction, and it was understood that the purpose of sex was for fun, enjoyment, and pleasure. Casual, no-strings-attached sex and sex that wasn't straight missionary vanilla sex was all the rage.

People would be happier and healthier and more fulfilled. Everything would be open and sunny and happy.

How do you think that worked out in reality, given the rise of the "incel"?

How do you think that worked out in reality, given the rise of the "incel"?

Has the number of incels actually risen? Or has the proliferation of social media allowed sexless men to form virtual communities of their own?

https://web.archive.org/web/20181113130908/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/:

From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent.

People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.

In the Netherlands, the median age at which people first have intercourse rose from 17.1 in 2012 to 18.6 in 2017, and other types of physical contact also got pushed back, even kissing.

In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen too.

"Increasing number of people are sexless" is not synonymous with "increasing number of people are incels", but it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which the former is wholly uncorrelated with the latter.

But is it the sexual revolution's fault? How did the same values change from 1971 to 1991?

Who said the sexual revolution ended in 1991?

Teen pregnancy rates between the two sexual revolutions were shockingly high, so clearly lots of teens were having intercourse before 1971.

so clearly lots of teens were having intercourse before 1971

Yes; the vast majority of which was within the confines of a marriage. You could just get married at 18; you’d already have been an adult for a few years by then by the standards of the time anyway. The “high school sweetheart” is not a meme for no reason.

“Teen sex” is not actually the correct metric.

How do you think that worked out in reality

Fairly well.

The stigma on pre-marital and promiscuous sex did significantly decrease. None of my friends or family of a similar age that I can think of are virgins, unless some of them are lying, and that's not scandalous or anything anybody thinks about too much. It hasn't prevented a lot of them from entering LTRs or even getting married. STIs and pregnancy are much less problematic and dangerous than they used to be, and pregnancy in particular is completely a choice these days. All that came about as promised.

Obviously it has not created a paradise on earth, and none of the problems it promised to take care of have completely disappeared, but so what? What has? It seems to me clearly better than what preceded it.

given the rise of the "incel"?

There have always been a minority of people, mostly men, who through no fault of their own will probably never find a romantic relationship or even have sex, but it's not clear to me that number has actually significantly increased in recent years (because I think a lot, if not a majority, of incels online are not actually 'truecels'). The so-called 'sex recession' began abruptly in the late aughts, early 2010s, so I would need an explanation on why the SR only had such an impact fifty years after its beginning. What is the proposed mechanism of action here? The standard answer is, "all the women are fucking chad" but that isn't really backed up by any data.

The decrease in stigma surrounding sex is definitely there, but that doesn't mean it is clearly better than what preceded it. The de-stigmatization came from a glorification of sex and we are seeing the consequences of it in the modern over-sexualized society. As the people adjusted to the ideal of not judging anyone for their sexual escapades, they did so with a firm belief in value of true love and the institution of marriage, that enabled them to uphold the agreement and restrictions that come with it. Now on the other hand the glorification of sex has gone so far, that this value has eroded. Don't get me wrong people still value and want the security that comes with a monogamous relationship, but are more unwilling to put up with the sexual restriction that come with it. That is what is currently eroding any faith men and women have in love, which in turn is encouraging them to see the opposite sex as an object.

Are you an atheist?

Functionally. I'm not conversant enough with philosophy of religion to say God doesn't exist, but I'm 99% all revealed religions are false.

Yeah, the rise of incels seems to be the strongest evidence you can get that the sexual revolution failed on its own terms, rember, it promised to bring cheap, easy and free sex to all who wanted it, not just women.

I'm honestly unsure about the whole notion of "inceldom" but certainly there are people out there who were raised on the promise of "everyone can have love and sex; everyone has a right to love and sex; you deserve love and sex" and, for whatever reason, they're not getting that. Of course they feel aggrieved and cheated.

I don’t think it’s actually good evidence.

The term basically correlated with the rise of the Internet, which from its start was an extremely nerdy space. Geeks complaining about getting girls is not a new phenomenon. Does it predate the sexual revolution? I would assume so, but I could also believe the transition from manufacturing and agriculture to service led to a segmentation of men. Then that’s really hard to separate from the postwar booms in sex equality and in contraception.

Either way, I think the term “incel” has gotten more popular due to its sneering value. As the Internet became more mainstream, its social games got further from weird subcultures and closer to high school. The nerdy virgin is a natural target! So I’d expect to see the concept skyrocket in popularity whether or not there were actually more sexless men.

Again, I’m not arguing that sexual dynamics are unchanged. I’m saying that if the term “incel” didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent it.

Agree that the term ‘incel’ is basically just a replacement for ‘nerd’ at this point, but pre-first sexual Revolution norms probably did advantage intelligent but not particularly charming or good looking men at least relative to today and probably relative to the ‘chads’ of the day. Now of course it also seems reasonable to point out that it doesn’t appear that anyone wants to go back to them except for a minority of fundamentalists.

Now I don’t think that post first but pre second sexual Revolution norms were a stable equilibrium but it does seem worth pointing out that setting our sexual norm clocks to 1950 AD would not benefit geeky men very much. Setting them to 1890 AD might, but I don’t think that’s what incel redpill types wanting to undo the sexual revolution actually want.

I wonder.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about Lord Byron, but pre-feminist society was clearly not immune to the sexualization of wealth and power. There were still haves and have-nots; it’s just that the haves were almost never women or poor. The rake was traditionally a nobleman. Catherine II of Russia is the leading example of a woman getting her pick of lovers, and it led the British to note her “masculine force of mind.”

This raises the question: if Lord Byron was boinking all the eligible ladies and chambermaids, were they removed from the marriage pool? Was his hypergamy creating a class of forlorn bachelors?

Or, for a darker version—did mass male casualties, as in the Napoleonic Wars, leave a cadre of incel women?

I think not, but can’t be sure why. Perhaps the have-nots just kept a stiff upper lip and devoted their lives to God. Or perhaps the necessity of a husband made for more slack in the system. Still, I find it hard to believe that today’s incels face a harder dating market than various historical periods.

I’m pretty sure that the rigid class structure of, say, the regency era created a relief valve by allowing scandalized women or men who couldn’t find suitable brides to marry below their station. Of course, one has to imagine that it’s more efficient for everybody to just pretend that one of lord Byron’s conquests ‘didn’t go past kissing, I swear’ in a lot of cases, too.

It seems like in general that the existence of mistresses is a similar phenomenon, and one should note that mistresses were almost never from the same social class as their married lovers. Hypergamy was an accepted method of upwards social mobility for both men and women(although with restrictions on it).

Your other point- about the napoleonic wars- seems well taken. I’d assume that yes, there were lots of French women who became prostitutes or lived with their sister and brother in law or whatever because they couldn’t find a husband, but that leads me to the general question of how well did higher male mortality rates balance out with deaths in childbirth? Unfortunately what the marriage market was like is only really documented towards the end of the period, when maternal mortality was in sharp decline.

To identify the strongest evidence there is, I suggest going back to the comment that started this all: "There is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way". The fact - and I think it's safe to treat this as fact at this point - that average, mainstream liberal women, and I imagine many of their male hangers-on as well share this view and are willing to voice it, although mostly anonymously - again, we're talking about average normies, not incels - says a lot.

I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.

Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.

In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.

So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.

Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.

Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.

I am not a progressive, and I am probably more reactionary than 90% of this forum. But tbh this is a weak man. The ideal progressive life trajectory for women is something like ‘she has access to free contraception starting at puberty, experiments with sex and relationships as she feels is right, goes to college and gets established in a career, meets and marries a male feminist in her late twenties or early thirties, has the number of kids she wants and no more, and can juggle this with a fulfilling high status career without cutting corners on her family goals’.

Now you might say this is obvious fantasy, and except for a few women rich enough to afford full time servants that’s true, but it is what feminists hold up as the ideal even if they can’t get it.

Sure, I can agree also with that characterization. The main point being that relationship and marriage are of secondary importance. It is all about her, and the job of the man is to support the woman in her life path.

I don’t believe “wish fulfillment” is an adequate descriptor of second-wave feminism. Accusing your outgroup of lying about their deeply held beliefs demands some serious evidence, not armchair psychology.

It is no armchair psychology to understand people on their own terms. A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power? Why is it psychologizing to just state what some people literally believe? If somebody believes that cabal of twelve Jews and Free Masons rules the world, is it far fetched to say that maybe they also can believe that another group of 12 "good" patriotic people can possibly also rule the world utilizing the same level of control and make it a better place? It has to be in realms of possibility that such a mind can contemplate, desirable even at least as some sort of second worst alternative to Free Mason Jews being on top, right?

I’m sure the theorist would prefer 12 patriots to 12 Freemasons. But he won’t act accordingly, because he has other preferences, too.

A second-wave feminist might well prefer matriarchy to the existing patriarchy. But he also has other preferences.

You’re picking one such preference as the most important. I don’t think you’ve ruled out the rest.

A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power?

I don't know if "psychologizing" is the right concept, but I'd say that that's "misunderstanding" what (these) feminists believe. When they say they believe men use sexism to gain power over women, they're saying they believe something very specific with respect to men, women, sexism, and power, with no generalities about how these concepts can actually relate to each other. Sexism isn't a general thing that people can do to others by discriminating on the basis of sex, it a specifically BAD thing that only MEN can do to only WOMEN (and other non-MEN). Power isn't something people have over others as determined by what they can make others do or whatever, it's something only MEN have that they wield over others including WOMEN who thus get sexism applied to them.

So inferring from "they believe some people X does action Y on other people Z" to "they must believe that, at least theoretically, people Z could do action Y on people X" is misunderstanding their beliefs. They are perfectly capable of believing the former and disbelieving the latter in a perfectly consistent way according to their own worldview. You're not engaging with their beliefs and logic on their own terms.

Sexism isn't a general thing that people can do to others by discriminating on the basis of sex, it a specifically BAD thing that only MEN can do to only WOMEN (and other non-MEN).

Sure, I understand that concept. Bellow I even used similar example of Christian with strong beliefs. You can observe him praying, visiting church services and praising god and all that. But by understanding his beliefs you also can infer that he also believes in Satan as a force of evil. It would probably not be very far fetched to say that maybe such a person can accept that somebody got ahead in his life - getting rich etc. - by having nefarious help from demonic forces. Heck, with very strong belief you can see demonic forces in most innocent aspects of your own life.

That is the gist of what I wanted to say - that having strong beliefs has consequences. And I do not think that feminists are against using sexism to advance cause of women in the same way Christians would be against using demon worship to get ahead - like achieving pregnancy or destroying their enemies. The bar would be much lower for feminists in this case as the belief system is identity based as opposed to outcome based. "Sexism" against men is not real sexism, a boardroom full of women is the most feminist thing ever and opposed to being sexist.

In practice one can ascribe mostly arbitrary beliefs to people with this "maybe they also believe, it's in the realm of possibility" neat trick, while also sneaking it through as "just stating what people literally believe".

If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.

The Satan is a documented feature of christianity, unlike ones you ascribe to feminism and other doctrines you dislike.

Of course it is well documented, it even has a name of toxic masculinity. You have it right there in the article:

Men who adhere to traditionally masculine cultural norms, such as risk-taking, violence, dominance, the primacy of work, need for emotional control, desire to win, and pursuit of social status, tend to be more likely to experience psychological problems such as depression, stress, body image problems, substance use, and poor social functioning.

If it is, you can express the phenomenon in the feminists' own words, instead of having to "extrapolate" or "safely assume".

For what it's worth, I buck the Motte comment trend that you observed. I am nearly 100% in favor of the sexual revolution and I believe that, by the standard of my preferences (both selfish: I like having casual sex, and altruistic: I want women to be free), it has been a rousing success.

The only criticism of the sexual revolution that has any weight, as far as I am concerned, is that it may have contributed to the declining fertility of the West. Not that I care about fertility itself - the only problem as far as I am concerned is that a society with extremely low fertility might eventually be outcompeted by societies with higher ones.

However, I believe that ways can probably be found to solve this problem that do not involve undoing the sexual revolution. And I believe that we should pursue them.

I think the sexual revolution actually added more weight to the problems of the sexually/romantically unsuccessful. Previously, if you weren't getting sex outside of marriage, well, nobody was (or at least they weren't supposed to be, and those who did were held up as objects of disapproval). So while you might be a loser, whether male or female, it wasn't shoved in your face quite as hard. Spinster aunt? Bachelor uncle? Maybe you couldn't manage to find a marriage partner, and that wasn't great, but it was respectable enough to be single (at a certain age).

Now? Everybody's having sex, wild exciting amazing sex. Or at least, that's what we're given to believe, even if it's not really true. So if you're not having sex, then you're a failure. And if you're having sex but it's boring ordinary sex instead of whatever the newest Position of the Week is (what do you think will be mainstreamed after heterosexual anal intercourse?), then you're a failure. If you don't have enough partners in your sexual history (as a man) or too many partners (as a woman), you're a failure.

Leaving aside HIV/AIDS, there also seem to be newer types of STIs rising up or becoming prevalent. Again, another risk you don't want to run.

So it all seems a dreadful lot of bother, but most humans seem to want it 🤷‍♀️

what do you think will be mainstreamed after heterosexual anal intercourse?

We already know the answer to that: BDSM/fetishes, "ethical non-monogamy", analingus, camming, sugar babying, and transgenderism and its associated tumblrisms. The question is what's left? Pedos, furries, unironic incest, cyber relationships with chat apps, and the clickbait of people who want to either marry themself or their favourite inanimate object. The consistently conspicuous-by-its-absence taboo seems to be celibacy, which has become half a by-word for school shooting lone wolf terrorism.

Oh, whoring - sorry, I should say 'sex work' - like camming and sugar babying etc. are practically mainstream, doesn't everyone have an OnlyFans account? Poly is just old-fashioned harems with a twist for the neurotic (sorry, any poly people on here, but that's the impression I get from the fawning articles in the media about how Tasha and Jason and Philomel live in bliss with their various boy and girl friends and secondary partners and making it all work because they're so free-spirited and adventurous).

Incest? Maybe, although even with occasional sympathetic treatments in movies and books, that still seems to be a bridge too far for most people.

Furry? Mmmm - still a bit too niche and likely to be confused with bestiality, which again is still a bridge too far.

Pedos? I could see that, with all the spadework being done right now around MAPs. After all, if we say 16 year olds are old enough to decide to have sex, can we really say they should only have sex with other 16 year olds and not a 30 year old? And if 16 and 30 are acceptable, what about 14 and 30? Constant dripping wears away the stone, although I think the really hard stuff about "why yes I do want to fuck 6 year olds" will always be very, very difficult to slip under the radar.

Once again, dissident right hammering on "optimal fertility age" and "men consistently pick 18 when 18 is the lowest age on the poll" is conspicuously ignored, while Janet showing your teens sterile corporate memphis tab A into slot B material is evidence of them wokes laying the spadework. Never mind that the groupie rockstar culture is dead since the 90s and today is more like "you're not adult nor ready to have sex with adults until 25, and even then more than 5 years of age gap is ew".

The dissident right is a very small group of people on the internet. I won’t say they have no influence, but they do have much less influence over the normie or trumpy Republican establishment than wokes have over the DNC. Even very conservative republicans mostly think teen marriage is an unfortunate but sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options scenario.

That's what I mean, half of those are already mainstream or bordering on it and the other half are either radioactive or some form of retreat or exhile from the whole arena of sex and relationships.

Some of these things are not like the others.

In particular, expecting celibacy to show up on the hedonic treadmill is kind of missing the point. But fetish culture delivers; chastity and edging surely have their own devoted subcultures, not to mention the fad of cuckoldry.

Not that I care about fertility itself - the only problem as far as I am concerned is that a society with extremely low fertility might eventually be outcompeted by societies with higher ones.

Low fertility can destroy Western civilization through population aging as well. The idea that democracy is unworkable because the poor will vote to eat the rich turned out not to be true in practice, but the old voting to eat the young seems to be a live issue.

I would be a lot more pro sexual revolution in a world that had artificial wombs than one that didn't. I feel that the sexual revolution happened about a hundred years before it's time and that it's biggest failure are happening because we don't have the technology yet to mitigate them. Much like how a car machanic is a useful job for society in 1950 but a useless one in 1750, the sexual revolution has certain "prerequisites" to work well that aren't satisfied by the society of today, but will probably be done so in the next century.

For an example I have pretty much nothing against the sexual hedonism in Brave New World, over there it's perfectly fine and a good thing for the citizenry.

I was going to say that high quality robot prostitutes would be a good move.

Artificial wombs seem like they will have a near-null effect on fertility because people are hesitant about raising kids, not bearing them.

Plenty of women don't want the damage pregnancy does to the human body.

Given feminist biopolitics, "I don't to gestate a kid" is a more socially acceptable line than "I don't want to raise a kid" because it riffs on the idea of women controlling their own bodies - but raising a child from birth to young adulthood is harder than gestating them from conception to birth and this is common knowledge in our culture. Hell, even if you only count the nine months after birth, a newborn is harder work than a pregnancy and any mother will tell you this. But most women who say they don't want to gestate a kid wouldn't want to raise it either.

I have met a very small number of women whose identity is wrapped up in their hotness but who are not party girls (motherhood is incompatible with a party lifestyle) for whom artificial wombs would reduce their anxiety around losing their looks due to pregnancy leaving them willing to have children. But the great majority of childfree-by-choice PMC women's true rejection of motherhood is that the time and energy commitment would ruin either their competitive-but-not-well-paid-enough-to-hire-a-nanny career in arts/journalism/NGO bullshit etc. or their hedonistic lifestyle.

Artificial wombs make single fatherhood by choice as available as single motherhood by choice is now (likely impact on overall fertility negligible as not many men will sign up), but the main impact would be that they dramatically reduce the cost and risk of babymaking for older couples with fertility issues.

With artificial wombs you can get the state to rear children and tax the populace to fund it. Plus, right now there is a massive shortage of children to adopt with waiting lists over a decade in many places, which suggests that there is a shortage of children without parents who want to take care of them (which is what is primarily produced by artificial wombs, but produced not that much by natural wombs).

there is a shortage of children without parents who want to take care of them

The people who want to adopt them would probably stuff them in daycares and schools asap.

They can always volunteer in daycares and schools which are currently under-staffed if they have such a desire to take care of other people's children.

I cannot agree. Artificial wombs presumably don't pop children out automatically: you have to intend to have a child, unlike many a case with natural wombs. I would assume fewer people would back out of children they intended to have and raise than currently do out of whatever the distribution is between planned babies, surprise babies and oops babies.

Why would it be any easier to get the state to raise your kid just because it wasn't gestated inside your body?

Presumably in this scenario the state could take donor eggs and sperm and have and raise kids itself, was the suggestion.

And children from state run institutions turn out pretty badly, I think.

There's definitely a selection effect of being the offspring of parents who relegate their kids to being wards of the state, and don't have family who can raise them.

More comments

I suppose sometimes you have to run before you're able to walk, if you want to move at all.

There are known differences between sperm cells with an X chromosome and those with a Y chromosome (Y chromosome cells swim faster but X chromosome cells live longer if I remember correctly). You can very easily change the natal gender ratio if you come up with a procedure or something that selectively kills those sperm cells with a Y chromosome.

By doing this you can e.g. change the societal gender ratio to something like 2 women for every man, and at that point the replacement rate drops from 2 to 1.5 children per woman.

No artificial wombs even needed!

While it might be an appealing fantasy - yes! men will be so scarce that women will be fighting over getting to be my concubine, even if I'm not the highest quality man out there! - I think in reality it will be more like "instead of 2 women for every man, it will be 6 women for the handsome rich guy, no women for the average guy or 1 average woman, which he will bitch about because he expected to get a nymphomaniac supermodel in this Brave New World as he was promised".

This sort of surplus of women to men happens after wars, but post-First World War and post-Second World War seem to have had different outcomes; after the First World War, there was the generation of Surplus Women, and the British government set up emigration schemes to have unmarried women migrate to the colonies where there was an imbalance of excess men, but after the Second World War marriage and employment rates for women seem to have gone up.

I suspect that idea is fully-automated-luxury-space-communism-complete. Post sexual revolution, women choose single motherhood over being a 30th-percentile man's first wife, so I don't think they will be lining up to be a median-quality man's second wife either. Someone is going to be subsidising all those single mothers, and it won't be the married mothers.

Post sexual revolution, women choose single motherhood over being a 30th-percentile man's first wife, so I don't think they will be lining up to be a median-quality man's second wife either.

Citation needed. Most 30th percentile men end up paired off with 30th percentile woman, regardless of whether or not they marry. Single motherhood is by no means the choice of a majority of women in any place I'm aware of.

Looking at the US, Census report saying that 27% of children are involved in a child support claim. (This includes divorced and never-married parents) Fairly standard data showing 40% non-marital childbirth. (This includes unmarried cohabiting parents)

Essentially all single motherhood is a choice by the woman (women control fertility in jurisdictions with legal contraception and abortion, and file the vast majority of divorces where children are involved in all no-fault-divorce jurisdictions).

So I am comfortable that c. 30% of American women are choosing single motherhood. (Figures in Western Europe are slightly less, but not much). And anecdotally most of them are doing so due to the poor quality of the men available to them.

This is what happens when you get rid of male privilege, the boys just can't keep up, smh.

While the data isn't quite the same as what you claim, the figures are higher than I expected myself. Thank you for providing them.

Some people are already making this argument closer to its joints, but I'll separately argue that "failure" was not the central claim from the linked thread. Even if the Sexual Revolution as a whole was an improvement for a person's life, both Botond173's and WhiningCoil's frameworks apply: quite a lot of individual people bought into a promise of open sexuality with little or no negative consequence, and the modern infrastructure of the movement has not achieved and often repudiated that goal.

WhiningCoil spends more time on the ramifications -- unwed motherhood, sexual possessiveness/unwillingness to be cuckqueened, public shame over past sex work -- but the central claim is not just those have increased (though I expect he can make that argument, and while it's hard to separate the sexual revolution from other causes, it's hard to define the sexual revolution in a way that doesn't make cam work more common), but that their results were things that the sexual revolution claimed even as they occurred would be resolved, and that didn't happen. Being a single mother still sucks even if you don't think the sexual revolution impacted marriage rates, Helluva Boss uses cuck as an insult, people who claim sex work is work will still bleach their underpants (even at far smaller scales and far less readily identifiable ways!), and there's still an absolute mess of stigma and hurt feelings and drama around casual sex even if you think there's no more of it than in the 1950s.

There's a view (and not an uncommon one!) that this just means the sexual revolution hasn't won, yet; if these things are normalized or destigmatized, that at least some of the issues will fade or be solved. But there's another view, that at least some of these issues are issues on their own, and that they cause unavoidable problems. And I don't think the division is Manichean.

Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?

Fertility has fallen hugely, which is bad IMO. In addition to hundreds of millions of lives not lived, there are surely many discoveries and artistic products that were never made, because their creators were never born. I don't buy Malthusian logic, we could've used our resources more efficiently to sustain higher populations. Labour and brainpower is the most important economic input, more is better.

The advanced world is now below replacement rate, our civilization is literally unsustainable. A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope - I recall a statistic showing unmarried women in the 40-50 age group were hardest hit. Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.

Anyway, the massive fall in fertility came just as the sexual revolution showed up, it's not like there was a massive plague or war at the same time. What other cause could there be?

Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.

A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope

Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.

Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.

We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.

On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.

We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.

People like playing and cuddling with kids, and if those people are women they also like dressing them up in cute outfits and taking pictures of them to post on instagram. People do not like disciplining kids, making them eat their vegetables, waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them, changing their diapers, etc. For obvious reasons for the vast majority of the population the two categories go together, but I think that the first category makes people happier than the second category annoys them.

waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them

This can be rough, but when you successfully soothe them and get them to sleep again, it feels really good. Compare the popularity of Dark Souls; there's something to be said for succeeding at a challenge.

changing their diapers

This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.

This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.

It does seem like it's going to be a massive deal before you've done it though.

Only to PMC women who are afraid of dirt. Men are only afraid of it to the extent that they think it is emasculating. Traditional elite women learned to handle filth by mucking out stables as teenagers. (Old money will buy their daughter a pony, but never hire a groom for her). And working class women don't seem to have a problem with it either.

Aren't we talking about on the same level as making them eat vegetables or waking up at night to look after them? My point is about expectation childless people have of looking after kids vs the reality as understood by parents - expecting parents I talk to often seem to expect every second diaper change to look like tequila night at the burrito barn.

Ever mucked out stables and barns? Horse, cow and chicken shit is not even close to as disgusting and rank as human shit. Pig is the only kind that is even in the same zip code.

There's also the element of the distribution of tasks not being equal in many relationships; trading off 50-50 is one thing but being the designated shit cleaner for years on end is a bit much. Thankfully Millennials seem much more fair about dividing up unpleasant tasks like that, compared to the stats on single digit percentages of baby boomer men having ever changed a diaper.

Baby poop really isn't that bad. Much smaller quantities and probably much less fragrance in general. This may depend on the diet. We tend to feed babies very simple dishes like pureed vegetables, pasta, rice, cut fruits, and a lot of dairy (milk and yogurt). It may get more pungent if they eat garlic, onions, eggs, meats... It smells so little sometimes that you don't even notice it until you actually take off the diaper.

I find the biggest inconvenience to be the dirtiness of it, having to quickly dispose of a very full diaper before somebody decides to play with it and stick it on clothes or carpet. Also wiggly babies that will not let you tie them up, but eventually they calm down.

By the time it starts getting more significant, you should have them potty-trained (2-3 years old).

I agree diaper changing is no big deal. Waking up in the middle of the night during the newborn stage is just awful. My littlest is two and I still haven't recovered from sleep deprivation.

I stay up pretty late by nature (generally to 2 or 3am), and my wife has done most of the nighttime wakeups when I wasn't already awake. Taking it in shifts, we mostly get by, but there have been a couple nights where at 4:30am, the baby's wide awake and cooing, and I want to cry... but holding them while they sleep is incredibly nice. My kiddo being especially wiggly and refusing to cuddle under most circumstances is probably also part of it.

The point was throwing out the ‘work’ part in contrast to the ‘fun’ part.

sorry, was mostly reacting to the contrast between my own perceptions going in, and my perceptions now that I've had direct experience...

I can see how you’d react that way- and your point about getting them to go to sleep was genuinely a valuable contribution.

FWIW I found hanging out with kids to be surprisingly fun/less gross than it seemed at a distance.

It is hard to explain, but at least personally I am very clean and germophobic, while also being a stand off-ish introvert who finds most people to be boring. Still had a hell of a time playing with my little cousin and his snot covered Legos.

Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world.

Even earlier in France - probably due to declining authority of the Church.

Seems like revolution is still at fault.

prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom

That was a special circumstance. Think about what was happening in the US immediately prior to said baby boom.

The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.

Hunters offload much of the hard work in hunting with their guns, dogs, traps, tools, tactics... Yet they still enjoy it. Travellers offload much of the hard work of travelling onto planes, hotels, travel books. Just because you want to have more of the best parts of an experience and less of the worst parts, it doesn't follow that you don't enjoy said experience.

I'm not a parent myself but I'm inclined to believe the many parents who say they did enjoy having children on balance.

We evolved to have children not to enjoy children.

I used to think that. I was very, very wrong.

Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom

On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.

Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no'

I don't like self-reports either. If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.

On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.

Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.

If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.

I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.

Selection effects will eventually solve the fertility problem. We might see some shrinking generations in between, but we won’t go extinct.

I feel like you've dodged my argument. I have mentioned neither Russians nor peasants, the trend of more religious / conservative people having more children than secular / progressive ones is clear as day. We don't have to go full Amish (although - yes, they do have even higher birth rates).

but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing.

Revealed preferences show that many people think modern society is not worth reproducing.

As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction.

Thankfully we also have the option of just not listening to you, rejecting your worldview and your values, and reproducing the way we used to.

Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence

No one's forcing you to return to anything, you're free to believe that and act accordingly, but I don't see what gives you the right to speak in the name of all of humanity. For me, I'll happily embrace a pre-modern existence if that's the only option, and will wholeheartedly oppose any Frankensteinian invention like artificial wombs. Technology is there to serve us, not to reshape us according to the wants of those who own it.

I have mentioned neither Russians nor peasants, the trend of more religious / conservative people having more children than secular / progressive ones is clear as day.

Even among conservatives and the religious, fertility rates have been falling for decades and are barely at replacement. Even Utah is now below replacement. Only full on parallel societies like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be robustly reproducing and likely to keep it up for the foreseeable future.

No one's forcing you to return to anything, you're free to believe that and act accordingly, but I don't see what gives you the right to speak in the name of all of humanity.

I didn't claim to speak in the name of all humanity.

Technology is there to serve us, not to reshape us according to the wants of those who own it.

Technology serves us precisely by extending the production possibilities frontier and allowing us to get away with stuff that we couldn't in prior generations. Like hypothetically, allowing for the fertility rates of the 18th century without having to readopt any of the social mores or taboos.

Even among conservatives and the religious, fertility rates have been falling for decades and are barely at replacement. Even Utah is now below replacement. Only full on parallel societies like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be robustly reproducing and likely to keep it up for the foreseeable future.

Is that based on entire states like Utah, or levels of religiously / conservatism of specific groups. There's been increasing apostasy, and it's not news to me, but it only proves my point.

I didn't claim to speak in the name of all humanity.

Well, if you want us all to go extinct, if we fail to endorse your Brave New World utopia, you kinda are.

Technology serves us precisely by extending the production possibilities frontier and allowing us to get away with stuff that we couldn't in prior generations. Like hypothetically, allowing for the fertility rates of the 18th century without having to readopt any of the social mores or taboos.

My point is there is no "us" here, or if there is, it's a group vehemently opposed to my interests. In theory the Internet enables "us" to talk, organize, share, on a never before heard of scale. In practice, these conversations, organizing, and sharing is shaped by "them", while "we" are hounded on every step. At least when it comes to the Internet, it's impacts are limited to the black box in my room / pocket, with artificial wombs you are giving "them" total control over who will have how many of what kind children. From there, the assumption that humanity will even remain recognizably human for very long strikes me as extremely naive.

Is that based on entire states like Utah, or levels of religiously / conservatism of specific groups.

I'm pretty sure conservative/religious fertility is at almost exactly 2.0/replacement, while self identified liberal/secular is at 1.75 or so. Maybe it will maintain there, but considering how much higher it was a century or two ago, it strikes me as unlikely.

Well, if you want us all to go extinct, if we fail to endorse your Brave New World utopia, you kinda are.

I state my preferences. Many people, including you, disagree.

My point is there is no "us" here, or if there is

Obviously we have totally incompatible views on what human society should look like in the future.

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As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.

It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?

resign ourselves to extinction

Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out. Like this bus driver in Japan.

and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing.

Don't then. If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.

It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?

Women see pregnancy as hitting pause (and in some high-powered careers, halt or rewind) on their carreer progression for a couple of years. Unless they are in a very secure position with their mate, it is a scary prospect. An artificial womb would shorten that pause to the time spent taking care of the newborn before it can be sent to daycare, time which could be more equitably split with the father than the time being pregnant could.

An artificial womb would shorten that pause to the time spent taking care of the newborn before it can be sent to daycare, time which could be more equitably split with the father than the time being pregnant could.

It sounds like some kind of subscription child-rental business would be more appropriate if the idea is to have other people handle the birthing and then ship them to daycare. You will own nothing and you will be happy.

It really is not that hard to make babies.

Absolutely, which is why all the vapouring about abortion rights and abortion is health care and we must pass an amendment to the state constitution to make and keep abortion legal.

Why would artificial wombs be needed?

See above about abortion. It's easy to have babies, but a lot of people don't want to have babies and will try very hard not to have babies. If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.

I don’t think ‘I’m afraid of sex’ is the main reason fertility rates are dropping, I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.

I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.

Yes? That's what we're agreeing on here: sex makes babies, but people don't want babies because babies need you to take care of them and they're expensive which interferes with fun times and spending money on yourself, so people try and get around the 'having babies' part of 'having sex' via contraception and abortion.

"I don't want a dependent for the next two decades" being the case, then all the exhortations to 'do your duty for the common god and have four kids' are not going to work, and if you need every couple to be having four kids to keep your economy afloat, then you better get working on those artificial wombs.

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If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.

But why want babies?

People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few. Is the concern coming from business owners who need cheap (preferably teenage) labor for fast food restaurants or janitor positions that cannot immediately be automated? Is it because we need able-bodied workers for care jobs in nursing homes?

The solutions are robots and deregulation. Let's just make it legally clear that if you drop your elderly relative that you don't care enough about to look after yourself in some kind of hospital or managed home, they may just end up dead for no reasonable reason. You sign on this or you take them home and you deal with them yourself.

There. No more liability, no more costly trainings and procedures to avoid liability, no more staffing issues...

Let's give the unloved elderly the same level of respect we afford unloved pre-birth children.

People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few.

I have trouble using "revealed preference" to describe a situation where someone's actions are different from what they would do if they believed X and completely understood it, and the gap between their action and belief is related mainly to that lack of understanding. For instance, people who fall for scams haven't shown a revealed preference for losing money. That's not what the phrase is supposed to mean.

But why want babies?

The economy. Babies grow up to be working age adults who get jobs, pay taxes, and contribute for decades which pays out the pensions/social welfare entitlements for the current aging population. If you have a bulge where the current population is getting older but there are fewer young people coming up, then your economy is in trouble.

If robots can earn money or produce revenue to support the welfare state, then that's the way to go. Otherwise it really is a crisis about "I never had kids and now mysteriously there are no working age adults around".

People really did believe, around the time of The Population Bomb, that there were way too many people on the Earth and unless populations decreased there would be drastic and terrible natural disasters. Overpopulation was a genuine worry. That's why China, for instance, started with the One Child Policy. Things like the expansion of Cairo, which had and has a population zooming up, creating a sprawling, expanding city that is more like a collection of slums, was a visible proof of the problem (or so it seemed) - not enough resources, too many bodies, too much demand on the scarce resources:

In the second half of the 20th century Cairo continue to grow enormously in both population and area. Between 1947 and 2006 the population of Greater Cairo went from 2,986,280 to 16,292,269. The population explosion also drove the rise of "informal" housing ('ashwa'iyyat), meaning housing that was built without any official planning or control. The exact form of this type of housing varies considerably but usually has a much higher population density than formal housing. By 2009, over 63% of the population of Greater Cairo lived in informal neighbourhoods, even though these occupied only 17% of the total area of Greater Cairo. According to economist David Sims, informal housing has the benefits of providing affordable accommodation and vibrant communities to huge numbers of Cairo's working classes, but it also suffers from government neglect, a relative lack of services, and overcrowding.

...Cairo accounts for 11% of Egypt's population and 22% of its economy (PPP). The majority of the nation's commerce is generated there, or passes through the city. The great majority of publishing houses and media outlets and nearly all film studios are there, as are half of the nation's hospital beds and universities. This has fuelled rapid construction in the city, with one building in five being less than 15 years old.

This growth until recently surged well ahead of city services. Homes, roads, electricity, telephone and sewer services were all in short supply. Analysts trying to grasp the magnitude of the change coined terms like "hyper-urbanization".

There are also the problems with pollution - air, water and land, as well as lead and copper smelting.

A lot of people thought Cairo and similar cities were the future, if population growth remained unchecked.

What nobody seems to have considered is that Western nations crashing their fertility rates from a combination of "overpopulation is the coming threat" and "I don't want to be tied down with kids, now that I'm young, in a good economy which gives me plenty of disposable income, and the sexual revolution and social liberalisation means I can have an entire smorgasbord of choices that my parents' generation never had about self-indulgence" would be a bad thing. We're still grappling with "the poor countries have way too many people which they can't support", but the fertility decline in the West isn't doing anything to help that and now we are facing the results of "who will pay the piper?" because if there aren't enough workers coming up, the benefits which the retirees expect won't be there.

And the future problem seems to be not alone the lack of recognition that "the people are the wealth of the nation" but that only a shrinking number of those workers will be considered economically contributing and valuable. Well-paying jobs that provide growing tax revenues are increasingly shifted to the white collar world, and to a particular sub-set of that - IT or finance. And with AI looming on the horizon, the lower levels of those niches will be chipped away.

Not everybody can learn to code and even if they do, there's the spectre of "the machine will do it better, faster and cheaper". I imagine that's why a lot of people and institutions are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI which will magically ensure an economy of plenty, like the cornucopia, where all we desire can be drawn out limitlessly, there will be trillions and zillions of money, and we'll dodge the bullet of an aging population and an increasingly unequal society.

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It really is not that hard to make babies.

Apparently it is.

Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out.

Most of the high fertility subgroups are subsidized by larger, less fertile society. Color me skeptical of the 'Amish/Haredim will inherit the earth' scenarios.

If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.

I'm a sperm donor, so I'll have some descendants running around.

I'm a sperm donor, so I'll have some descendants running around.

So you care about the future state of fertility out of care for your descendants but you don't care enough to actually help raise them?

Most of the high fertility subgroups are subsidized by larger, less fertile society. Color me skeptical of the 'Amish/Haredim will inherit the earth' scenarios.

What other scenarios do you have?

People who don't have kids are not suddenly going to muster the courage to because Elon Musk came out with an artificial womb. Innovations in social engineering so that if you have a kid and they just up and die for whatever reason like you were too busy watching Youtube shorts then it's no big deal would go a longer way I suppose.

There was that one incident of some scientist woman who was too wrapped up in her stressful and important duties that she forgot to take out a young child out of a car and ended up losing it. This is probably what's keeping a lot of more-educated people out of parenting.

So you care about the future state of fertility out of care for your descendants but you don't care enough to actually help raise them?

He isn't laying eggs out in the wilderness, presumably the people who opt to take sperms from donors are above average in terms of dedication and interest in parenting, certainly in wealth.

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So you care about the future state of fertility out of care for your descendants but you don't care enough to actually help raise them?

I've always had kind of a niggling, I guess atavistic drive to propagate my genetics and would feel sort of guilty about terminating my 'line', which is why I jumped through all the hoops to donate (well that and the payment). But no I have no interest in raising kids.

People who don't have kids are not suddenly going to muster the courage to because Elon Musk came out with an artificial womb.

We could probably just pay people to raise them in Brave New World style barracks or something honestly.

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So was the sexual revolution a failure?

Short answer: categorically, yes.

Long answer: What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?

What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?

The broad cultural shift of the 1960s and 70s which led to the institution of no-fault divorce, the rise in divorce rates and fall in marriage rates, the removal or at least weakening of the expectation that everyone would get married and have children, the destigmatization of illegitimate children and promiscuity, the increasing acceptance of non-traditional forms of sexual expression such as homosexuality and transgenderism, the general decoupling of sexual activity from procreation, and the increasing prominence of women in the workforce, among other things.

For a conservative, obviously these are bad things in and of themselves, but surely "the outcome of the sexual revolution was disagreeable to conservatives" is an uninteresting fact since that was clear from the start, and no one ever expected it would not be. So "the sexual revolution failed" must mean "the sexual revolution failed on its own terms."

It's certainly not clear to me, anecdotally, drawing from my own life experiences, that these changes were a failure or bad things, very much the opposite. So I would need a larger, data-driven argument to convince me.

Well what were the sexual revolution's own terms?

If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.

If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.

If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.

Really the only successful goals are the destructive ones. Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters. And birth rates are cratering along with the quality of mates for both sexes.

I could go on about how life for sexual minorities was actually better before the advent of a tolerance that amounts to mandatory political membership and/or straight up extermination under the guise of acceptance but I feel like these are petty anyways. The lives of 90% of the population are much worse precisely in the ways they were supposed to get better.

But I guess women are now forced to toil too. So there's that.

If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.

Case in point: student debt is a modern form of the dowry system, but instead of the money going to her father it goes to college administrators...

That would be bride-price, not dowry. More than token bride-price is normally a feature of polygynous societies where demand for brides exceeds supply - the market value of a wife in a Malthusian society with a monogamy norm is negative (dowry being a payment from the bride's parents to the groom, or in India his parents) because there are more women than men who can support a wife.

In other words, in our society, women entering marriage with debt is stupid.

Ah, we call it mahr in our (Muslim) system, it's money given by the Groom's family to the Bride's family to provide for her in case the marriage doesn't work out for her, it's a sort of insurance no different to how a college education is insurance for a woman since she now has the skills to work for herself and be able to live a decent life if the union with her husband goes south (yes, in reality I know modern college education is nothing of the sort, but that's beyond the point here, we care about the intention, not the results).

The standard dowry you mention the woman's family gives the man's family is actually Haram.

Islam, of course, permits polygyny (although I understand it is rare in most Muslim societies). Both Christianity and Hinduism prohibit it, meaning that dowry was near-universal among landed-class Christians and continued into the early industrial era, and is still a live issue in India.

If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.

I don't think transgenerational rates of self-reported happiness or mental illness are particularly reliable measurements, for a number of reasons. Someone in the 30s probably wouldn't even think to diagnose themselves with 'anxiety' or 'OCD' while someone in 2023 with the very same symptoms would. As for happiness, it's not obvious that this is measurement invariant. To use an extreme example, if you asked a medieval peasant and a 20th century accountant to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 - 10, and the peasant said '6' and the accountant said '5,' this is very weak evidence at best that the accountant would be happier living the life of the peasant.

Even if you take such measures at face value, Western Europe has not seen similar decreases in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction as the USA, despite undergoing the same and in some cases even more extensive liberalization of sexual mores. This is also true for suicide rates, which have been steadily dropping in Europe for decades as they've risen in the US. Unless Americans are uniquely susceptible to the negative effects of the SR, it's mostly something else.

The institution of no-fault divorce seems to have resulted in a large drop in female suicide rates and domestic violence. That's a pretty clear case of improving the condition of women.

If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.

Even granting young people having less sex is a bad thing (weren't people complaining about teen STD and pregnancy rates forever?), this trend seems to have started abruptly in the 90s, so blaming it on the SR is dubious unless you can demonstrate some kind of delayed-trigger mechanism.

If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.

I'm unsure what you're referring to here. What is so complicated about relationships today?

Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters.

I disagree these are bad things. There's nothing actually preventing anyone who wants to from getting married. Most of the poor outcomes of children of single mothers (income, education, crime, etc.) don't manifest in the children of widows, so the much-touted disastrous impacts of raising a child outside of a two-parent home seem to be mostly down to confounding.

And birth rates are cratering

Birth rates have been cratering since way before the sexual revolution.

I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.

Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963. We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past. Even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.

I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.

Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963.

I don't think the data is worthless but I think it's highly problematic for the reasons mentioned. It's extremely hard to control for all of the other potential factors at work.

We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people can dissolve relationships they don't want to be in, I think that's generally a good thing. The alternative to being divorced usually isn't being in a good marriage, but being in a bad one. I'm not convinced the purported terrible effects on children are all that large or relevant net of other factors.

even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.

I'm not sure what you mean by "school success." More people go to school than ever before. Certain test scores have dropped since the 60s (but others haven't), but way more people take tests like the SAT than they did back then. Alcoholism is significantly lower today than it was in the 70s. Druge use appears to be worse, yes.

If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.

A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.

Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.

Well then I ask again: what are its own terms? What looks like a success and does the current situation look like it?

I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.

I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.

Look, you have to choose:

Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).

Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.

You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).

The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.

You'll note that I never claimed either that correlations means causation.

Social projects do not get to have control groups. All claims of success or failure, or indeed all plans for society, have to be judged on their actual outcomes instead of their theoretical consequences.

Unless you want to dispute the observations I'm stating, the sexual revolution is a failure. On its own terms. Which is the proposition I'm originally commenting on.

Whether it could have been successful were it not for other factors and whether the failure is inherent to its recommendations is frankly irrelevant, since we don't live in hypotheticals and all political recommendations have to be about the present set of humans in the present set of conditions.

The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause

These are not incompatible observations at all. People are having less sex. Most of the sex that's being had is casual and outside of formal bonds.

What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?

That is what you're responding to -- a causal claim.

Yes, you avoided ever stating any of your observations were causal, but you're responding to a question about causation by citing correlations. Your comment is either implying your correlational claims are evidence of the causal claim or it is a non sequitur.

More comments

I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.

I know too little about the topic at hand to have a meaningful opinion on it, but the discussion here reminded me of something like this, as well. Part of the responsibility of any social or political project is being robust against malicious and/or unexpected forces that come about to throw a wrench in the system. If some unexpected technological advancement or sabotaging entity successfully throws the movement off course, then the failure rests entirely on the people pushing the movement, in not taking the correct precautions or not making the correct adaptations.

I'd also say that the whole time span excuse seems either misguided or, I suspect, just motivated reasoning. If we posit that the sexual revolution started around the 60s, it would follow that the first generation of people who grew up in that environment had kids in the 80s-90s, which means that the first generation of people who grew up raised by people who grew up in that environment were entering their young adulthood in the 00s-10s. It would make perfect sense for such a society-wide transformation to have different effects on people who saw the transformation as adults, on people who saw the transformation as kids but were raised by adults who were accustomed to pre-transformation, and on people who only knew life post-transformation, raised by people who mostly knew life post-transformation. This can't be extended indefinitely, of course; at some point, the multiple generations of people living better lives makes it clear that whatever issues that came after must have been extrinsic (which then gets to the previous paragraph, that failing to account for extrinsic, unpredictable factors is just as much a failure as any other), but given what we know about the human lifecycle and societies, 2 generations seems well short enough a timeframe to draw a direct line.

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