I was away for a couple of weeks, and I left behind scheduled-ahead posts for that period.
1. I usually have about a 3-day lag between writing and posting, but the lag was longer during the vacation. Also, I was frequently without Wi-Fi or cell service, so I could not keep up with comments well at all.
2. The Canadian Rockies are justifiably a bucket-list destination, although my wife and I don’t maintain a bucket list. We enjoyed the secondary sites much more than the main tourist attractions, in part because the latter were uncomfortably crowded.
3. We could really feel the emergence of the middle classes of East Asia and India. The proportion of tourists from those areas seemed roughly comparable to their share of world population. You will know that Africa and Latin America have developed when you can say the same thing about tourists from there.
4. I thought about sex a lot. No, it’s not that kind of a vacation spot. But the one book I read was Mona Charen’s Sex Matters, which is a critical history of the feminist and sexual revolutions. Now that I have sorted out my own thinking about the battles of social norms concerning sex, I have a new essay on the topic.
Arnold, want comments here? or there?
What a great essay.
Groping is against the social norms except:
“alcohol-fueled party of college students, or when the groper is a celebrity in media, politics, or business, the social norm was that the woman who was groping-averse had to repress her feelings. I hope that those exceptions are going away.”
Reducing this issue can be a victory of the #MeToo movement, tho equating groping with rape is part of the over reaction whose backlash might minimize the change. Notice that Trump’s “Grabbing them …” quote was mostly how women allowed that – because he was a celebrity.
“The joys of a nuclear family require people to restrain their sexual impulses…
The Culture War pits sexual-freedom advocates against nuclear-family advocates.”
So true – leading this family advocate to support more family-friendly laws.
Norm Geras had many interviews, often including this question: What is an important political or philosophical point of view that you have changed your mind about, and why?
I have changed my Heinlein SF based “responsible promiscuity” to more nuclear family supportive.
Altho successful as a womanizer, I wanted a stable family (unlike what I grew up with). Promiscuity is bad for civilization, whether by Trump, B. Clinton, JFK, or any alpha-jerk friend who is successful having sex with numerous hot young babes.
“Nuclear-family advocates will insist that monogamous couples have great sex.”
They really can, but it does take some effort.
See http://marriedmansexlife.com/athol-and-jennifer-kay/ Married Man Sex Life
Mix alpha-male dominance Captain & First Mate with beta-male caring and sharing – and give (first) lots of orgasms to get plenty. Lots of good advice here, an example:
http://marriedmansexlife.com/category/alpha-and-beta-male-traits/
Boo the Villians, Cheer the Heroes << how to listen to your wife every day as she verbally reviews her day.
Missing from your essay? Age. Men want sex with 20s girls all their lives.
http://www.businessinsider.com/dataclysm-shows-men-are-attracted-to-women-in-their-20s-2014-10
Married to a lovely woman that is 12 years younger than me, I can understand this. This age-attraction difference is one of the biggest problems – and fully consistent with your own young experience.
I just read the sex essay. I haven’t thought a lot about these issues but strikes me as thoughtful and reasonable.
One part that was unclear to me:
“By the 21st century, the levers of power at colleges were held by sexual-freedom activists, who put in place rules and policies that supported the sexual-freedom approach and treated the nuclear-family approach as wrong.
In my opinion, colleges should not have sex policies”
What are some examples of such college sex policies? Not saying there aren’t any, but as someone who went to a big state university 10ish years ago, nothing is sticking out all that clearly in my mind.
Replying to this, because my question feels the same:
“I think that pornography, and even sex education, misleadingly portray the human body as a paint-by-the-numbers orgasm kit.”
What’s does contemporary sex education entail? When I got mine at a public school in the early 90’s, it was anatomy, sure, but it was HEAVY on consequences. STD’s, in particular HIV, and the like. It felt like the DARE program. “Do drugs and you will die. Have sex and you will die.”
All I can say was the sex ed back in the day seemed to reinforce traditional monogamous norms, not liberated ones.
The gym teacher scared us boys straight with disgusting pictures of extremely diseased genitals and an extremely convincing and sincere tone when telling us that we couldn’t trust any girl at all, and he had suffered finding that out himself the hard way. “I’m telling you, wear a rubber, or your Johnson might fall off, and anyway, as a bonus, she won’t get knocked up either.”
It worked! Well, about as well as anything could.
If there are 100 males in a population and 100 females and they are all sexually paired and faithful, the average number of sex partners per male is 1 and the average number of sex partners per female is 1.
If, on the other hand, 50 of the men also have sex outside the “committed relationship” with 10 of the women, the average number of sex partners per male will be 1.5, and the average number of sex partners per female will be 1.5. As a simple matter of arithmetic, it makes no difference who has sex how; the averages will always be equal.
But it certainly seems to me that in the latter case, men ARE more promiscuous than women. Not just wanting but acting. The shape of the distribution matters!
(Of course, the arithmetic changes if we take into account male-male and female-female sex. And in reality, MSMs have substantially more sex partners than FSFs. MSM = male who has sex with males.)
People in open or polyamorous marriages would dispute your claim that you can’t have both the advantages of the nuclear family and those of sexual freedom at the same time. But to be fair, that remains a small subculture. A much larger subculture skewed toward the upper class– the “Belmont” subculture from Coming Apart, you might say– instead has a strong norm that you get them serially: that is, you enjoy a lot of sexual freedom in your twenties, and in your early thirties you settle down and have a family. This has some disadvantages, but it does give people the opportunity to both get the experience of sexual freedom at the time of life they’re most likely to value it, and to then have stable and satisfying families once they’ve “gotten it out of their system,” so to speak.
This is an ideal rather then a reality. Statistically, more sexual partners in your 20s reduces marraige rates, increases divorce rate, and lowers TFR. This is especially true with the first partner but also cumulatively true each on thereafter. You can insert your reasons for why this is, but it’s an empirical fact.
Is the divorce rate claim known to be true when restricted to the subculture I’m talking about? I.e. well-educated, affluent people who do not accept traditional religious strictures on sexual morality? And if it’s true as a correlation, where’s the evidence that the causation runs from # partners to divorce rate?
I can well believe the TFR claim but this is not really an argument against it from the perspective of that subculture, in which having >3 kids is mildly disapproved of anyway.
Yes, true across class. Divorce is less common amongst the subgroup you cite but more partners = more divorce.. The problem with the upper class isn’t divorce so much as a sterile lifestyle. Low marriage rates and low TFR. Sexual adventurism probably damages the ability to pair bond successfully.
It’s # of partners before marriage, so divorce isn’t causing more partners before marriage.
The future of society is dependent on eugenic TFR. Those with good genes that don’t breed are moral failures and society shouldn’t encourage it.
Also, it’s not clear that they are even successes on their own grounds. Liberals desire higher fertility but fail to achieve their desire. It’s more accurate to see them as victims of following a flawed life script leading to bad outcomes then people actively choosing to be sterile and alone.
It is also fact that later marriage has lower divorce rates as well. The issue of society appears to be that the best marriages are religious people who wait until 29 to become married. And before 1960, the lower divorce was probably caused by hard divorce laws and few career options for women?
But how does society control the ‘Night Moves’ activity of men and boys until they ready to be married at 29? The song was about teenagers and probably inspired by the movie American Graffiti.
People should be less promiscous in college and early 20s. By your mid 20s you should only be dating people if there is a reasonable possibility of long term nuclear family success. Won’t work out everytime but would shift age of first marriage, marriage rates, and TFR at the margin, which is all you need. Would it be the end of the world if age of first marriage dropped 2-3 years and TFR bumped up to replacement. You don’t need a law just good cultural carrots and sticks.
Isn’t this slowly already happening? Teen sex has been down since 2000 and teen pregnancy is dropped 40%. It is slow but it has improved compared to any past recent decade.
So what can the culture do to promote marriage and kids:
1) Unlike 1960, being a married Christian male is no longer a signal you a good worker. (It is not a negative signal either just employers tend not think about it a whole lot.)
2) There is no economic incentives to being religious so it is not surprising religion will continue to diminish. I wish conservative would come to grips with this.
3) And how do you get people to have more kids? I am surprised the birth rate did not drop more after the Great Recession although the 2017 drop was unexpected and might be the new normal. A decent health care system would be start as I can’t imagine what life would be like without Health Insurance for one of kids.
4) Also aren’t our workers competing against Chinese workers for wages and jobs? Chinese families are having less children so they earn lower wages and compete better. It seems like Republicans are getting everything they wanted against manufacturing male workers, just when the labor supply for $15/hour with minimal benefits is disappearing. And who can raise a family on that job.
It’s hard to increase status to monogamous men because sexual conquest is a high status thing for men. The girls dream is to be the #1 gal of a man who could have any girl he wants, not the dutiful wife of a man who doesn’t cheat because he can’t do better. Monogamy is circumstantialy prized, not absolutely prized. As such there will always be tension.
By contrast shaming promiscous women works. It leads to more stable families and higher fertility. The transitory sexual satisfaction of sluts and cads isn’t particularly important to the maintence of a healthy society.
Funny thing, then, that societies in which “sluts and cads” are less-shamed are, by essentially every objective material measure, much healthier than those in which they are more-shamed.
By contrast shaming promiscous women works. It leads to more stable families and higher fertility. The transitory sexual satisfaction of sluts and cads isn’t particularly important to the maintence of a healthy society.
Aren’t the two biggest complaints about Feminism:
1) Women were not allowed to freely compete and earn in the workplace before 1970?
2) They really hated slut shaming especially since society celebrates successful non-monogamous men. James Bond became a ‘Cultural Hero’ before the hippies in the early 1960s and basically any Western Hero of the 1950s were shown to have known the ‘slutty’ women of town but marrying the right woman. (Most John Wayne characters but also High Noon that Cooper marries a good Quaker but had relations with the Mexican slut.)
Double standards exist because men and women are different. Deal with it.
Some women hated slut shaming because it limited their options for maximizing their reproductive success. Many of those strategies were ruthless and negative sum for society, so limited them was a good thing for many men and women.
They don’t seem to have cared at all about James Bond (beyond wanting to fuck him). Women’s popular romantic fiction is full of alpha cads being let of their leashes. The fantasy isn’t to emasculate these men, but to become their top woman with the legitimate offspring. They are torn between wanting to be with a man that could cheat but also wanting to monopolize him.
“Women’s popular romantic fiction is full of alpha cads being let of their leashes.”
This is a lot more complicated than it seems. How men behave in romance novels depends a lot on the specific subgenre and also the time period when the novel was written. For example, men in historical western romances are almost never “alpha cads”.
You’re probably right about modern romance novels, but heroes in the older romances are often very different. There’s probably more change between the male lead in a romance novel from 50 years ago and now than there is change in the female lead. Compare, say, Georgette Heyer to any modern Regency author.
It would be an interesting project to chart the change, but I rather imagine that romance novels have too low status for the academy.
Recently ran across the old Carole King/Gerry Goffin song that was a hit for the Chiffons in 1963, One Fine Day. It seems fitting.
One fine day, you’ll look at me
And you will know our love was, meant to be.
One fine day, you’re gonna want me for your girl.
The arms I long for, will open wide
And you’ll be proud to have me, right by your side.
One fine day, you’re gonna want me for your girl.
Though I know you’re the kind of boy
Who only wants to run around,
I’ll keep waiting, and, someday darling
You’ll come to me when you want to settle down,
Oh!
One fine day, we’ll meet once more
And then you’ll want the love you threw away before.
One fine day, you’re gonna want me for your girl.
One fine day, you’re gonna want me for your girl.
Have a nice vacation and nobody is ever wrong using Night Moves as great philosphyy of teenagers and young adults. Several questions:
1) How is culture against Family and Marriage? The most ‘feminist’ show was Sex In the City and it turned out that three of the four women were married by the end of the first movie. It seems like culture is still telling us marriage is good in the end. And Romantic Comedies have always been about poking fun at marriage/weddings and the chance of marrying/having sex with the wrong partner. 1930s Screwballs showed tons of heroines, mostly heiresses, almost marrying the wrong men.
2) How much of the 1950s was held together by a family division of labor and a job market that had signaled sex discrimination. The 1950s was not just unfair to women wanting more partners but any women who wanted a career. (I am not suggesting historical family division of labor was wrong as it was around centuries and many of the consumer products of the post-ww2 era fundamentally decreased the amount of housework necessary. Family washing of clothes was an all day reality before 1950.) So 1950 women did not have the economic options either.)
3) I wish social conservatives thinking about sex and young people would remember ‘Night Moves’ was the cause of many marriages (20%? – 25%). I wish I knew how many ‘shotgun’ marriages there were in 1960s and I believe this is the reason the divorce rate hit the highpoint in the late 1970s.
4) 80% of college students are there to get a degree and signal for a good job. And yes there are some ‘Night Moves’ action going on, as that is the reality of anybody that age. And wasn’t the reality of ‘Night Moves’ that the teenagers being Young, Restless and Bored were not good marriage partners.
5) Again divorce rates are down and in reality so is teenage sex. So what has happened? I believe the primary driver is people are looking for later marriage (living out a non-exaggerated Friends life until 28.) And High Schools are having less sex, I believe because they are more focused on school and college applications. (Remember Night Moves needed teens being Young, Restless and Bored. If you filling up your college application with activities, you are not Bored.)
6) And finally late marriage after young people are more settled on careers and have decent health insurance sounds like the right thing to do. I still think young people are not rejecting marriage or Hollywood brainwashed but understand that having your career settled improves the chances of marriage success.
Sex in the City teaches that you can have lots of partners, wait until late in life, and not develops and of the successful traits for marriage necessary and still have it all come together non he spot when you decide all of a sudden that it’s what you want now. Same with Mad Men, all the train wreck characters suddenly have happily ever get together sin last episode.
Reality doesn’t work like that. Statistically what happens is a lot of people that follow that life script never off ramp. They miss their window, marrying too late or not at all. Having fewer kids then hey desired. Because it’s not a switch you can suddenly turn on.
I believe you have a mathematical error in the section “Heterosexual men and women are equally promiscuous, on average.” Or more accurately, I think you are using an incorrect measurement for “average”.
You are right that the mean number of partners in your example is the same for male and female. But the “median” number is different. The mean number of dance partners per female is 1, but the median number of dance partners per female is 0. Meanwhile for men, both the mean and median number of partners is 1.
Tthe median number is more important here, because it says more about the distribution. A lower median implies lower promiscuity.
If you say “men and women are equally promiscuous”, I think you are implying “the distribution of promiscuity is the same for both men and women”, and that is false in your example (and probably false in reality).
I’ve got a bucket list, Banff was already on it, and now I’ll move it up.
Unfortunately, as the latest fracas involving Robin Hanson demonstrated, it is really impossible to have anything approaching a civil, forthright, and accurate public conversation about matters related to the nature and norms of human sexuality, or the whole space of possibilities and implications, which is a particularly revealing instance of the continuing collapse of our society’s intellectual life. I’ve pretty much given up all hope on the matter.
These are some of the most important things to talk about, and yet, we can’t talk honestly about them anymore. Notice how extraordinarily cautious you had to be with ‘disclaimers’ when drafting your essay.
Unfortunately, the most reliable places to get accurate information about this subject on the internet form a kind of ostracized and disreputable underground, and, it seems it is in the nature of things for most of those places, that any time they stray too far away from experience-based explication of the subject, they tend to live up to that bad reputation, and now more than ever.
Even if one tried to discuss this topic, it’s extremely hard to do so in a concise manner when the inferential distance is simply so large between reality and socially dominant narratives on the subject.
If you’d like me to go into more detail I will, but in general I thought much of the essay was pretty far off base, and I figure that’s exactly because sex in now impossible to write about under one’s real name. I’ll list a few objections:
The Average Promiscuity Equality is true but a trivial arithmetic result that does more to conceal than illuminate the extremely skewed distribution of what is really happening in the post-revolution sexual marketplace. This is exactly the same critique against using aggregates and insisting that one look at granular heterogeneity.
In your lifetime, social norms have moved in a direction that is, on average, much less favorable to men and much more favorable to women. Whether that meets some threshold for absolutely “favorable” is arguable, but there is no question about the trend.
Sexual freedom was the call of the 60’s and 70’s. But just like all the other freedoms – e.g., speech – that’s just not accurately descriptive of the progressive side opposed to the nuclear-family advocates today. People really, really need to get past the obsolete and now misleading rhetoric and catch up to the new normal on these matters. Instead of promoting an abstract “freedom”, the progressive side of the sexual debate is using its increasing cultural power and hegemony to impose its own version of strict sexual morality, part of which, in the heterosexual context, is a focus on female sexual autonomy and female power over the consequences of sexual activity. For example, how is an “affirmative consent” requirement an extention of “freedom”? It isn’t, it’s an extension of the behavioral boundaries of “rape” and thus a normative restriction the whole point of which is to cause any violator to incur punishment from the state or institutional authorities.
And there just seems to be no stable way to maintain an equilibrium of tolerance for a variety of sexual morality. Everyone has a stake in their society’s prevailing normative framework. Just as non-judgmentalism is not an option, a live and let live attitude without some kind of balance of power or limiting principle is like unilateral disarmament which just provides an invitation for someone else to conquer the territory, as we are observing.
Another thing to keep in mind when thinking about normative frameworks is that human beings have high dispersion in personality traits like self-control, impulsiveness, long time-horizon, ability to delay gratification, and conscientiousness, and so any lenient or highly individualist system that gives people a lot of freedom and options will certainly have significantly different impact on people according to these traits, which today correlate very strongly with class.
That is, affluent, intelligent, and disciplined people will always tend to adapt, figure out coping mechanisms, and through conformity and imitation of high status individuals in their milieu, discover and settle on a new equilibrium for sexual behaviors and practices that often don’t tend to line up with what they preach. (This is why Charles Murray exhorts them to, “Preach what you practice.”)
You might call this the Lean In elite female life script, propagated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Sleep around with the variety of sexy boys for a decade at least, to get it “out of your system” and satisfy yourself that you’ve tried all the flavors, but without getting married, or, gasp, having kids, or doing anything that might get in the way of one’s graduate degree and establishing oneself in one’s career without encumbrances and being knows as someone able to hang with the boys. Then, when your options start drying up, get married to the good and loyal – but less sexy – guy, because he’ll stick with and support you, and you can have a stable and secure near-middle-aged marriage. Then maybe a kid or two when the biological clock starts ticking loudly, which you can have your nanny look after or send to daycare, so you can get right back to work, work, work.
Even if you accept this life script and the implied telos, the trouble is that it doesn’t translate downmarket, so to speak. That is, lots of people aren’t going to college, so what are they learning, and where are they learning it from? “Broken Windows” works for sexual morality and behavior too.
What happens to the lower classes when exposed to all the message about approved sexual licentiousness from high-status personalities is complete sexual chaos with collapse of nuclearization and highly irregular and unstable “family” lives, with most children raised without knowing their fathers, a wide variety of social pathologies.
Adam Smith drew this distinction between the austere and loose moral systems. When norms can be segregated or compartmentalized, as it were, by class, then they can suit the specific needs and capabilities of those who are expected to follow them. But when norms become publicly universal (which they have in our society and age), then there arises a class conflict, and the question becomes who shall bear the burden. Shall the elites accept the personally unnecessary austere system out of a sense of noblesse oblige and domestic mission civilisatrice, for the sake of setting the example for the lower classes who are likely to imitate them (this state of affairs is a typical ideal vision in militaries), or shall the elites enjoy their selfish right to say and do what they like, but with the knowledge, if they care to notice and accept the truth, that the lives of the lower classes will fall apart into degradation, disorder, and misery as a result? (Our current state of affairs.)
Smith said:
This reminded me a lot of Myron Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (originally 1993).
It seems that everyone is ignoring certainty of parenthood. Male promiscuity doesn’t throw doubt on the maternity of a child, but female promiscuity makes paternity uncertain.
That is yet another way this have moved in a favorable diretion for women and against men. For example, Franch banned all private paternity testing a few years ago, and other countries have imposed ‘friction’ regulations making it difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, if not technically ‘illegal’.
In the US, courts in some states, under the infinitely malleable “best interests of the child” test, have raised the burden of proof that a man must show for the court to compel a paternity test, and if that man does not have physical custody of or access to the child, then they are stuck with the result as a legal matter. In other countries, one could use private paternity “peace of mind” tests, but none of those have any legal impact. Only ones done pursuant to a court order are admissible as evidence for a family law motion, and that’s the catch – you basically can’t get the court to order one. Tough luck. Some “patriarchy” that is.