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 -
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?
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.
Well, shit. We agree
Yup! And this is why I am Pro-Life on the grounds of future concerns. "My body, my choice" holds some water, but when the robot-womb babies start, there's going to be some portion of the population that wants to reserve the right to unplug (read: murder) because they change their minds 6 months in.
I'm old fashioned in that I don't really see a lot of value in a human life until they come a little closer to personhood. I'm the opposite of the "every sperm is sacred" idea. Most children used to die. Other than wasted resources that parents should rightly be upset about dealing with, including pregnancy risk, I think parents should have right to terminate defective or unwanted children for even a bit after they have come to full term. Should we really force a family and society to raise a retarded child that they will neve be free from and that wouldn't even survive without modern medicine anyway?
And this is where we're just going to disagree intractably. So be it.
I was a casual pro-choicer for much of my teenager / early 20s cause I just hadn't thought through the issues (and their interesting parallels to end of life ethics). But the thing that really pushed me hard to hardcore pro-life status was thinking about future robot wombs. There will be some amount of people who decide that a fetus they were previously all in favor of will now somehow inconvenience them - and this fetus will be otherwise healthy and the technology advanced enough that a successful completion to term will be all but guaranteed.
And yet, somewhere out there, people are going to get righteously indignant about being "forced" to raise a child. I think that would be a fundamental failure of the social contract that's hard to come back from.
I mean, your parents obviously chose to. I would think you'd be thankful for that.
(Sorry, Mods. I really tried not to, but then I did.)
Yeah, you did.
History shows two previous warnings, four AAQCs. I don't see the point of a warning here, given that you obviously knew exactly what you were doing and that we don't want you to do it. Banned for a day. Please do not make a habit of this sort of thing; the bans will escalate if you do.
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