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The actions and revealed preferences of college girls and their parents corroborate that the risks of date rape drugs or sexual assault at frat parties or college parties as a whole are far overblown. Akin to UFOs, date rape drugs—despite their supposed ubiquity—are sorely lacking in documentation.
Date rape drugs are mostly a cover story for overdrinking or doing other drugs, blaming men to absolve young women of their accountability when it comes to their coffee moments while/from partying, a plausibly undeniable mechanism for enabling young women to make retroactive accusations of rape (are you going to deny a young woman’s Lived Experience and Emotional Truth that she was drugged?). Like with performative hysterics when it comes to fears of sexual assault in general, voicing fears of date rape drugs can be a form of humble-brag: “Look how desirable I am that I’m at constant risk of my drink being drugged.”
Who? Whom? Frat guys are just a politically correct target for slander. We’re not supposed to Notice which segments of the population are actually disproportionate offenders of sexual assault.
So alternate question, why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars for his daughter to thotmaxx in determining which fuck-pool-for-frat-guys she gets to join? And this is on top of paying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to send his daughter away to do what college girls do. The thought of doing so is incredibly humiliating to me.
Especially if the fathers of would-be sorority-girl daughters are disproportionately likely to be former frat guys themselves. Sometimes I wonder if having a daughter causes a man to develop retrograde amnesia of all the fatherless things he’s witnessed teenage girls and young women do as a teenaged boy and young man, otherwise the cosmic horror and existential dread would be overwhelming. Kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character inShutter Island and his delusions to cope with what happened to his family.
Or fathers cope by thinking his daughter’s Not that Kind of Girl, and that only someone else’s daughter would do such things. But it must be Someone’s Daughters doing such things (a la the Netflix meme), so many—perhaps most—of the aforementioned fathers would be wrong, if not in kind at least in degree.
It could be a twist on the question “who would you rather babysit your kid, Hitler or a randomly selected person from the Bronx?”: Who would you rather your daughter party with, five randomly selected frat guys or five randomly selected young men from the Bronx?
Likely the defeated, subconscious resignation for #SororDads as well. Under the current cultural regime, it’s impossible to thot-patrol one’s daughter. Conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit. If it’s inevitable that your daughter’s going to Have Her Fun and do fatherless things, you pay up so at least she does them for higher socioeconomic status guys. So not only is having a daughter perhaps the ultimate and final cuck, it’s like a recurring form of blackmail too.
Granted, I've never been a father, but I don't see why it's supposed to be automatically humiliating or horrible in some other way for a father to know that his daughter is having sex with dozens of guys. Seems strange to me. As a father, as long as she's safe while doing it, why should I care? I like promiscuous girls, they're usually more interesting to talk to than non-promiscuous girls, and it's easier to get laid with them. I don't look down on them compared to non-promiscuous girls. It would be hypocritical for me to judge my daughter's promiscuity based on different standards than I use with women whom I want to fuck.
Your model here is that your hypothetical daughter is having fun and no negative consequences accrue, right? She's being "safe", meaning there's no babies to take care of and no STDs to treat and she's not getting murdered by a psycho, so everything should be fine because those are the central examples of bad outcomes from sexual activity between humans?
Yes, those are the central examples of bad outcomes. I would want her to be careful and be aware of the risks, of course. But the mere fact that there are risks isn’t a reason for total abstinence. Driving a car is risky too, but I wouldn’t tell her not to drive.
Were there other types of bad outcomes that you had in mind?
Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Last I heard, trad life gave better outcomes in pretty much all of these, while also offering superior protection from STDs, out-of-wedlock kids and psycho murder as well. Still, it seems obvious to me that there's large amounts of less dramatic but still highly significant misery generated by Free Love leftovers.
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen. But there are also times when they don't happen. Sometimes people have pre-martial sex - even quite a lot of pre-marital sex - and then they go on to happy marriages with children and everything is fine. So pre-marital sex isn't guaranteed doom - it's an action that carries a certain level of risk, similar to many other actions we undertake.
I don't have exact numbers on hand detailing the number of positive outcomes vs negative outcomes compared to number of sex partners. But then, I wouldn't want my children to get in the habit of consulting a table of probabilities detailing the likelihood of a positive outcome before they make decisions, even if said probability table is certified "trad". They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
There's hand waving and then there's guiding an aircraft to landing levels of hand waving.
@FCfromSSC listed a number of bad outcomes from promiscuity and you addressed them with "yeah, but like, maybe good things also can happen." This is a pretty egregious failure to engage with the argument.
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people. And this is one of the big failure modes of Free Love and Do as You Feel - it utterly ignores the fact that these actions you're talking about (specifically sex) are not solitary actions. They aren't even the "indirect" nature of doing drugs or drinking. Sex, by definition, only occurs with another person/people. To take such a self-centered view is inherently anti-social. "I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
Would you want your children to take into the consideration the perspective and feelings of other people, including their intimate partners?
It's not. It's roughly the same response that I would give to someone who said that we should ban cars because sometimes people crash, or we should bring back prohibition of alcohol because some people become alcoholics. In most contexts, what they would get from me is a shrug and a "well, life is risk, so deal with it".
Of course you can get into the weeds on any particular issue and start detailing all the positive and negative outcomes, the probability of each, tally up the expected values, etc. I recognize that risk does have to be balanced against reward, of course. But I have little interest in engaging in that sort of discussion on the sex issue because I think it would simply be beside the point. Psychologically speaking, I think that the typical anti-sex advocate doesn't first encounter the potential risks of promiscuous sex and then draw the conclusion "that seems so dangerous that we really need to discourage people from doing that". I think what comes first is the commitment to abstaining from sex as a moral value - typically either as part of a religious identity, or as a generalized commitment to traditional values - and then they start looking for evidence to support this pre-existing ethical commitment. I think this is a very common pattern that generalizes across multiples types of issues. In the discussion on unions further down in the thread for example, I don't think most posters are opposed to the strike because the longshoreman union boss is a slimeball - I think the anti-union commitment comes first, and then they're happy to discover later that the union boss is a slimeball because it bolsters their case.
I am in no way exempt from any of this of course. I too have a pre-existing commitment to promiscuous sex being a good thing (or at least a tolerable thing) as part of my identity that has little to do with its actual empirical effects. The saving grace here is that I don't think this fact has to terminate the conversation. The reasons for these foundational identity-commitments are themselves amenable to debate to some degree, and we can make an attempt to elucidate them. I just think that if we're going to get into the weeds on this, we should stick to the actual meat of the issue, and not just "sex can lead to bad things". Yeah, it can. Lots of other things can too. So what is it about sex that got your attention, specifically?
Yes, obviously. Where did I imply that I didn't?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. If you said that extra-marital sex is bad for your soul, spiritually, I would take that much more seriously than recourse to divorce statistics. I, conversely, think that sex is good for your soul. So that's something that we can have a real debate about. Now we're at the level of genuine, heartfelt convictions. The stuff about divorce and fertility rate stats is just window dressing.
This entire part of my comment (which you failed to address):
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people. And this is one of the big failure modes of Free Love and Do as You Feel - it utterly ignores the fact that these actions you're talking about (specifically sex) are not solitary actions. They aren't even the "indirect" nature of doing drugs or drinking. Sex, by definition, only occurs with another person/people. To take such a self-centered view is inherently anti-social. "I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
I have a genuine, heartfelt conviction that divorce is bad disproportionately to younger children.
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