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A couple of months ago @Goodguy left the following comment here:
I tried to initiate a discussion about this without success, with my argument being that single men „policing/controlling” the sexual decisions of single women (I'm including „slut-shaming” in this category) has actually only been a social reality in the minds of feminist culture warriors. It was never implemented as a tool of women's „oppression” anywhere. To the extent that such „policing” existed (if we want to call it that), it was mainly done by other women, mainly due to the simple and understood fact that it's such policing that serves the long-term sexual interests of women as a whole. And the men that did engage in this were mostly fathers with daughters, not single men in the current sense of the word. (One can argue that in traditional patriarchal communities it was normal for single men to band together and remove outsider single men through threats or force; I guess this may count as indirect policing, which isn't saying much.)
I'm open to reading any counterarguments but anyway, this is not the subject I want to address here. I think Goodguy touched on something rather important which didn't occur to me at first, namely that society used to have a different attitude regarding this issue before it became modern. There actually used to be a group of men who were basically deputized by society to morally shame women in certain contexts despite being technically single (as I alluded to this above): priests and monks. (And this doesn't just apply to Christendom.) They were also voluntarily celibate, which is another category that disappeared with the rise of modernity. (The cultural memory of this lingers on though, otherwise the people who came up with the „incel” label would simply have called themselves celibate.)
As I was pondering this issue, it also occurred to me that secularization meant that Western societies did lose something significant not just in this respect but others as well. It appears to me that secular society and the churches/denominations used to exist in a symbiosis with the terms never being openly stated. It's well-known that Christianity used to be in a culturally hegemonic/privileged position. But it's also true that the churches basically volunteered to take care of those social groups that nobody else wanted to look after because they're socially a pain in the neck:
singles who can't or won't get married (see: priests, monks, nuns)
generally adults lacking social skills to such an extent that they become shut-ins without outside assistance
sick/diseased people unable to pay for treatment
children sired by men who can't or won't become husbands and providers
poor people that are so helpless and lacking in agency that they die from poverty without the charity of others
children of married couples too poor to pay for any schooling
I think atheists and people hostile to religion in general emotionally get hung up on the former and lose sight of the latter. Some of them who did not lose sight of it came up with the doctrine of eugenics as a solution, but we know what reputation that has today. Instead we expect the state to pick up the slack and look after all these unfortunate groups, which only results in a multitude of horror stories about police departments, child protective services etc. being a useless bunch of uncaring buffoons.
I wonder what the rationalist point of view on all of this is.
I mean, you’re essentially correct. It’s practically axiomatic that civilization requires (and arguably is) the control of young men. Whether they are controlled by old men (as was historically the case, and indeed this is what patriarchy is) or a mix of old men and old women (as is increasingly the case now) varies, but they were always controlled. This is also why you can’t really describe BAPism or Andrew Tateism as ‘trad’, even aside from the performative misogyny, because they appeal to some kind of mythical past where young men were in control to appeal to their powerless young male audience who are, like many young men, angry at the world and their lack of pussy (again - this is often as or even more true in many socially conservative societies, hence Tate’s popularity among young men in Muslim countries where sex before marriage is taboo). But a simple glance at currently extant highly patriarchal societies makes clear they were never in control, absent the state of nature of course (and even there, our knowledge of the pre-neolithic-revolution societies our ancestors lived in is limited; modern tribesmen are by nature exceptional).
All successful civilizations controlled female sexuality heavily, and used the promise of such as the carrot.
Because it is the best carrot out there.
If those civilizations were successful, don't you think they'd still be around?
If eating the seed corn causes starvation, why is my belly full?
Huh?
He's imagining the sexual revolution will ruin society. But it takes a while for the consequences to set in. Like eating your next year's seed corn will ruin your farm in a few months.
Thank you. As an aside, I can't help but think that Henry VIII initiating the English Reformation that separated the Church of England from papal authority and appointing himself Supreme Head of the Church of England to dissolve convents and monasteries for which he was excommunicated by the pope so that he could divorce his first wife Catherine to sexually pursue his wife's lady-in-waiting's sister was quite a revolution in the sexual world of England in 1509, and yet society was not ruined enough to not produce the grassroots social conservative activism in the 1960s. I struggle to see how the legal changes brought on by legalizing no-fault divorce and the sale of condoms and allowing women to own property and open bank accounts is more ruinous to a society than a society's government changing the fundamental religion of the country so that he could cheat.
My metaphor was much more literal than that. The corn of a society is its people. If your society has values that cause it to not reproduce itself, as ours does, it will simply cease to exist. Young people alive now will, if things don't change, see their societies wither to failure within their lifetimes. That seems to me to be an unambiguous lack of success. That it will leave a beautiful corpse is cold comfort.
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There was quite a bit of grassroots resistance to the reformation in England and the Catholic Church has an entire category of saints associated with it(the English martyrs).
Notably also, the Anglican Church maintained until quite recently that divorce was impossible; Henry VIII’s annulment was based on a dispute as to whether Catherine of Aragon had consummated her marriage to his older brother before his death, which would have rendered the marriage impossible due to incest. The effect of the Anglican Church on marriage practices in England was restricted to a literal handful of cases.
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