farhakhalidi.substack.com
It's an essay about the various flaws modern feminist sex positivity culture has for women, and that it's often a good idea to refrain from sex even if one isn't religious. The author is an Only Fans model for context. I thought it did a great job laying out the downsides of ubiquitous sex.(Reposted because I accidentally linked to reddit instead of the original essay earlier).
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Notes -
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
So what's your alternative solution? Do you support purity culture, or have a fourth option beyond purity culture, sexual liberation, or the author's solution of a world where people are not concerned with purity but do properly reflect on whether a hook up will actually make them happy?
The mistake is thinking that there is any systematic "solution" that will avoid people sometimes being callow, manipulative, unempathetic, or simply mistaken in ways that result in broken hearts and worse.
I agree with the author that actually interacting with, and making informed decisions about, the individual people in front of you, is the most important thing - you can't rely on any ideology or heuristic to do the thinking for you. But I disagree because there is also a value to "purity" - having sex is a really major step in a relationship, and can really skew people's attitudes towards each other, and towards relationships in general.
Whether to have sex, and who to have sex with, really is an important decision with outsize importance - particularly for heterosexual women - and should be approached really, really carefully, given the young and immature ages at which young women become sexually attractive to men, and the drastically-different attitudes most men and most women have towards sex (see, e.g., the sexual habits of gay men vs. lesbian women).
Why does purity have value? If you think it has an intrinsic value, why? If you think it only has value because it deeply shapes impressionable young women, then I think that's the exact argument the author makes.
Because anything else sets up a couple for a less good pair bond. The long forgotten reason purity cultures form is they are supposed to create a strong pair bond because the pleasure of sex is associated with only one person, their spouse. And without those strong pair bonds couples aren't willing to risk child rearing at population replacement levels.
I don't think the social technology to do it right is even possible to develop in a world where porn and birth control are legal and easily available.
This.
Traditional purity culture struggles to exist in a world where both cheap pleasure (porn/OF/casual semi-prostitution) and consequence erasers (the pill) exist in abundance. I think another, even larger layer is the existence of social media which becomes a sort of constant relationship rubric, realistic or not.
The abundance of choice is so great that the very act of choosing - let alone the act of choosing not to do something - can feel like missing out. To sort of steel man dating apps; the image sold there is "go on dates with amazing beautiful people and have wonderful romantic trysts!" And that's a compelling narrative to both men and women alike. And it's at least plausible because of the technology today.
So the only way "out" is to actively not take part. To make a choice not to indulge. And that's the essence of the TradCon position; yes, you can go out and have casual sex. Don't do it because it's bad.
Eliminating the availability of those choices is close to illegal in the US at least (the porn-as-free-speech fight was done decades ago). It's bananas to think that adult women would have to get the permission of their fathers / brothers to go on dates. I don't necessarily know where the line is on prescription versus over the counter birth control, but I know it will never be as tightly controlled as even oxycotin ... which isn't very tightly controlled.
If you give people choices, they'll make them. Meaning, they'll make all of them (that is, over the entire population, not that one person will make every possible choice). The whole point of culture and sub-culture is to encourage good choices because we don't want the State to preemptively eliminate certain choices. That is the classic liberal (small L) argument and the begrudging position of all TradCons who aren't theocrats.
So what to do about the impending end of society because of horrible male-female relations in the west?
I've linked to it before, and you can google it - Lorenzo Warby's massive substack series
Humans aren't even going to be recognizable as such in a few hundred years, pearl clutching about population decline is a non-starter in a world that still has 8 billion and climbing and robotic and AI tech that is about to make us all obsolete anyway.
Ahhh, AhhTheFrench.
My personal value is that humans are awesome and we should do a lot (within reason) to keep the species going. I don't worry about population decline per se, but I worry about the fundamental relationships between men and women (who need to get a long to maintain the species). The global drop in fertility rates is real, but I think the jury is still out on if its actually a crisis (for instance; while fertility has dropped, so has infant death, net-net are more people making it to adulthood?)
Nonetheless, these are problems I think are (a) problems and (b) worth solving. Is your contention that either or both (a)and(b) aren't true?
It’s almost certain that societies today produce fewer new young adults than in the past, given history tended to see population growth outside of crises.
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Are there problems between the sexes and how they interact? Yes. Have there always been problems between the sexes and how they interact? Yes. Are they even solvable writ large? No.
Men and women want different things out of relationships so there will always be power struggles, strife, breakups and makeups. Messy business really.
There will always be harmonious unions and terrible joinings, because people are different and some are willing to make things work while others are not, some luck into a wonderful match, others never had a chance. This is the history of the world.
Fertility is dropping due to birth control, education, rising living standards, more options for entertainment and a devaluation of human labor. This trend will only accelerate if things keep getting materially better for people.
If you want more people 150 years from now you're going to have to grow them in a vat and raise them with a robot. That is just how it is going to be unless you're in some kind of originalist cult in AD 2174. Getting pregnant yourself when a machine womb can do it for you will be seen as grotesque and unnecessary.
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I'm not at all convinced that that "pair bonding" is a super significant phenomenon. I think it's quite likely that instead those stats reflect that women who want varied sex will have multiple partners before marriage, and then will also desire varied partners after getting married, leading to her divorcing or leading to her cheating which leads to divorcing. Especially since a lot of women who don't have sex before marriage come from cultures where divorce is socially unacceptable.
What would be more convincing is instead of stats about divorce, since that's distorted by women who're socially unable to divorce even if they'd want to, is stats on how much women who haven't had previous partners like their spouse.
How do you explain entire animal species mating with only one partner for life while other species don't?
There are a couple levels to explain things on, from neurochemical to evolutionarily. Neurochemically, I couldn't say why two birds would end up mating for life- although I will note a lot of species that ostensibly mate for life also "cheat" on each other a lot. Evolutionarily, it happens because both the mother and father of children get more expected gene-spreading value from raising and investing in their children in the niche that species operates in, instead of the father or even both the father and mother ditching the children after birth.
Is your point that lots of partners early degrades whatever neurochemical method the human brain uses to pair bond, making you unable to fully do so when you'd want to? If so, I just want to see some better evidence of it. A more rigorous neurochemical explanation of how that degradation happens, or good stats about how people who've had many partners early in life are more likely to dislike their spouse later in life.
my question was due to you sounding like you didn't believe pair bonding was a thing.
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