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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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What’s naive about it? There are lots of people who don’t have sex before marriage, which is what the pro-life position would actually advocate.

Right, I have in the past argued that it is actually not too much to ask for young people to not have sex in high school. I just didn't want to make this a post about that argument so I gave theoretical ground.

Well, who'd be doing the asking? In the current cultural milieu, parents are unable or unwilling to thot-patrol their daughters. If parents can't or won't, what chance does anyone else have without a coup-complete solution?

Some parents are even outright enablers. For example, I saw this comment on DSL a few weeks ago and I was like alan_grant_removing_sunglasses.gif. Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights. What's next, buying a chair for a corner of her room so you can better cheer on your little girl?

I have to ask this straight at this point, would you breed with your own daughter if inbreeding and social backlash was not in the cards?

  • -21

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste. "Hur dur, you just want to fuck your own daughter." Note women don't receive such attempts at well-poisoning when they prefer a real or hypothetical son to be tall/athletic/etc.

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste.

I disagree. While it is sometimes used to well-poison in this way (and while I do think that our society severely undervalues chastity and parents do have a moral responsibility to protect the chastity of their children and particularly their daughters), I think that "your behavior strongly suggests a subconscious-at-best desire to fuck your own daughter" is an insult that is deserved far more often than it is issued.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous. (I would certainly expect that this is a large part of the problem; the pathology I'm pointing at rings so false to me because it seems detached from any hope of eventually finding one's daughter a suitable husband. It's like a male-pattern counterpart to empty nest syndrome, at least as afraid of one's daughter growing up and getting married and moving out as it is of her falling victim to some cad. Watch out for rhetoric suggesting that the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood; this implies both that the father specifically objects to the thought of his daughter getting married young and that he'll be fine with her becoming a slut once she gets too old to maintain the facade of childhood anymore.) In any case, though, I don't think that this behavior helps to preserve traditional sexual morality on either a personal or societal level.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

Trads probably don't get to blame 100% of this problem on modernity, though. A lot of it does seem rooted in (echoes of the long-gone) patriarchal model, in which women are property first of their father and then of their husband, and, IE, rape is understood as a form of property crime. While such a model does have a lot to recommend it, it also clearly has a lot to disrecommend it, and though I have a very low opinion of feminism, I think one of the more compelling (and fringe) complaints they've made is that traditional societies seem to have had a lot of unreported incestuous rape going on. The parallel construction of father-daughter and husband-wife is clearly very easy to fuck up and confuse both in ancient and modern contexts, and I would generally urge people to maintain a clearer delineation between these roles.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy. The actual offputting thing is the balls, the rings, signifiers of marriage where no marriage can actually exist, with the father in the husband role. These young women should be getting married off ASAP, not LARPing as pseudowives for their fathers. I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

Of course, there are also men who deserve this insult for reasons that have nothing to do with some malformed defense of chastity. (Sometimes, indeed, because they are insufficiently protective of their daughters' chastity; because they proudly parade their daughters around in a sexualized fashion, unbothered.) Certainly, for everything positive one can say about Donald Trump, and there is a lot, this is an attack he has invited upon himself.

the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood

This naturally follows from the notion that women are property, though; it is your God-given unimpeachable right to prolong that adolescence as long as possible, and as such you may do as you wish. (The same applies to the incest thing, for what should be obvious reasons- of course, feminists have abused the privilege to rewrite 'marital rape' to mean 'wife who is only doing it to keep up the marriage', but from 1910 through now we thought the answer to 'unrestrained male selfishness' was 'unrestrained female selfishness' [and traditionalists by their nature had no good counterargument] so that's just what we get, I guess.)

"They're not even human beings until 25" (and the earlier age of consent laws, which traditionalists absolutely fawn over) were wonderful gifts to the traditionalists of that bent, especially because "preserve my child as being a child" is a natural small-c conservative impulse. In fact, that's a very womanly impulse, which should be highly insulting to those would-be property owners (who will state "our sex is endowed with a healthier sense of risk management" as a reason why women should be property) but I digress.

Remember, the most sexually libertine period in US history was also the closest to the traditionalist ideal; marriages still happened fast and young (despite only 1/5th of high schoolers retaining their virginities- guess that whole 'but muh virgin marriage' thing wasn't that important after all, and maybe simply having (on average) a more beautiful wife at marriage does a lot to sand that edge down). The fact that traditionalists failed to capitalize on the economic circumstances that led society to turn away from the sexual revolution (since this could have been a viable path as opposed to what the progressives laid down in the '80s) is, uh, all on the traditionalists.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy.

It's more about the stagnation and waste that an obsession with purity creates (just like the stagnation and waste that an obsession with ownership creates). Which your neo-traditionalism will naturally have to overcome- that is why you want marriages where none are set up to exist, because that is a way to overcome that (that doesn't enable the wicked wasting away of your daughters like the aformentioned progressive-endorsed LARPing does)- in other words, it is progress. Property rights come with property responsibilities.

Replacing it with nothing was, is, and will continue to be unworkable.

Then I question how you can be a traditionalist. Woman transfer from father to husband contingent on present and projected future funds and quality of said husband is the cornerstone of traditional thought.

Fundamentally, "men own women" is how the initial conditions work out when assuming a biologically-burned-in fear of 100% chance of pregnancy every time a woman has sex, and when all labor providing primary economic goods being only meaningfully accomplished when conducted by men (women may provide secondary economic goods, but are useless if there are no primary goods- cooking is useless when there is no food to cook) women must sell the only valuable thing they possess- their bodies- for the right to those primary goods.

Over the last 200,000 years of human evolution those axioms have never, ever been false. So, uh, why mess with tradition- especially because, if men throw that away because 'it feels bad', there's no guarantee that women won't use the tools for manipulating men that same 200,000 year evolutionary process gave them to just be turbo-selfish and fuck up everything (with revenge as the excuse).