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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!

Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:

  1. Tell them not to have premarital sex.
  2. Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.

The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?

  • -18

You can respond to this in two ways:

  1. Tell them not to have premarital sex.
  2. Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.

Why not both?

Because 1 clearly doesn't work?

Remember all the abstinence only culture war stuff in the late 2000s / early 2010s?

Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy

Teen pregnancy actually peaked in 2005 and then collapsed nationwide in the late 2000s/early 2010s such that it took the whole nation's fertility rate with it.

It turns out that it doesn't take a lot of education or healthcare access to drive to Walmart and spend 20 bucks on Plan B.

It turns out that it doesn't take a lot of education or healthcare access to drive to Walmart and spend 20 bucks on Plan B.

Yes exactly

Because 1 clearly doesn't work?

It has been found difficult, and left untried.

Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?

It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).

It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.

But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?

From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.

Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.

Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?

Yes, I'd say that's entirely fair.

But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here?

Also entirely fair.

I would say that "sex education" is a failure all around and that we've so thoroughly given up on designing a culture and education program to achieve goals that we don't have any clue how to do so. Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.

Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

This right here is a big part of what makes me a "reactionary" right there. The entire modern world vastly overestimates the capacities of intelligently-designed, top down "culture and education program[s]."

Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:

But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?

If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.

Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.

And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".

To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.

Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that

the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".

You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.

But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.

Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),

Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.

Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.

Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.

This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.

Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)

Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago

Same here, I haven't been around The Motte as much as in the old days. Reading still, usually around the monthly QC collections, but commenting less.

That Devon Eriksen quote pretty much describes a good portion of my own worldview, and your analogy about mitochondria versus viruses sums up another chunk (indeed, it's a metaphor I use myself from time to time). And I, for one, think #1 is pretty much inevitable, with maybe the slimmest hope of #3 (though I think that to be successful, #3 can't rely on "outbreeding the enemy" alone, and will ultimately have to resort to a superior capacity for violence).

For what it’s worth, there is good historical (and contemporary) evidence that people have always learned cultural practices from one another, instead of it being purely transmitted by conquest or force. A fairly elementary example is the extremely rapid spread of crops in the Columbian Exchange, a slightly deeper cut is Japan’s conscious and discerning importation of Western norms post-Meiji Restoration, and a perhaps controversial take is that cargo cults were (are?) an ineffective attempt to learn Western practices.

This would roughly be your “virus” case of horizontal transmission. But what I think your model misses is how and why people transmit cultural knowledge, and how the selection effects work mechanically. I believe that this is through conscious recognition of tangible outcomes that can be hypothetically correlated with the practice for positive selection, and implicit comprehension of norms on their own terms for retention of behavior. In plain language, you pick a practice up either because it’s doing something good for someone else or because it’s just the way things are done. Let’s call the first case adaptation and the second retention.

Every practice has its price. There’s a cost for following it instead of doing something else, including doing nothing at all. It also has a certain legibility to it. Using a certain spice in one’s cooking obviously and visibly changes the flavor, but increasingly complex crop rotation schemes will only show their merit on the order of years. Superior military practice can only demonstrate its worth in the event of a war. Finally, there is a magnitude to what the practice will do for you. Diminishing returns are always an issue.

So for adaptation to occur, you need the perceived advantage of a new practice, inclusive of how confident you are that the practice causes the advantage, to significantly exceed the cost of adapting the new practice.

Meanwhile, retention just works like any old social pressure. If you don’t do this, you aren’t cool. The power of retention is in proportion to the power and influence of the normative group over you.

Back to the actual meat of the subject. Right now, I would argue that the following propositions obtain:

  1. Our economic system, bolstered by explicit and implicit welfare schemes, is so powerful that most immediate needs are filled without any real effort.
  2. The worst risks of sex and solitary lifestyles have been massively mitigated by birth control and welfare.
  3. There is an ascendant class of tastemakers with historically unparalleled reach, influence, and power. They have displaced most of the small local tastemakers that preceded them.
  4. Points 1-3 have only been in effect for a very short period of time.

Back to adaptation. What people these days see is not a minefield of viscerally bad outcomes with cultural guardrails, or obviously superior external groups to learn from if one is not to fall behind. Instead, they see a more-or-less flat floor of outcomes with a huge amount of outdated rules that are visibly being broken to the pleasure and advantage of the rulebreakers. Cultural norms around how to get the most visible pleasure spread like wildfire, and there are clear reasons given for why the old ways are outdated. Nothing immediately and unignorably bad happens to the people who adopt these practices, so the change keeps spreading. Debt, drugs, sexual liberation, obsessive hobbies, and so on.

Meanwhile, a massive proportion of cultural practices are exported as part of a social-political program by the cultured urban elite. These have some basis in people’s preferences, but their spread is almost totally disconnected from these preferences, and is instead based in political maneuvering within this class. It’s effectively fashionable beliefs.

And finally, and most critically, most of the bad outcomes from these practices only manifest on a multigenerational basis. The fertility crisis will only really come to a head as the older people keeping the lights on retire or lose the capacity to handle their work. A life of solitude or sexual misconduct only really comes calling when you get old with no younger family to take care of you. Unproductive behavior only starts incurring costs when it spreads so far that bare minimum upkeep becomes infeasible and the pre-existing infrastructure crumbles - like an ill-cared-for house.

So my analysis would be, at this very moment we are coming down the tail end of a very unrepresentative and culturally dysgenic era. The selective pressures were encouraging bad behavior for around sixty years, and have incurred some major costs. Some of those bills are already coming for repayment, and the younger generations are starting to flail around for superior cultural practices. Some will likely not come fully due for decades to come, and will cause their own crises. But there is some intelligence behind this, and it can be directed. People are already trying to direct it. The problem is just that the outcomes we need to see are another sixty years away. So until then, the best we can do is proceed with discernment, wisdom, and most of all, faith.

Thank you for articulating my thoughts much better than I was, what a banger

Chesterton had some bangers, I also thought of a slightly sneer-y remix I'd like to get your thoughts on.

"The Marxist ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

If you disagree with this, I'd love to know why?

True Marxism has never been tried, Comrade!

More or less by definition any given "ideal" is going to be difficult, and rarely is the True Ideal tried particularly hard, unless one's ideal is sincerely some laissez-faire muddling-along sort of thing.

True Marxism has never been tried, Comrade!

This is exactly the bit I was riffing on.

I'm firmly in the camp of "both Marxism and Christian ideals have been tried and found lacking". If you think Chesterson is right, but the Marxist fanatics are wrong, I would be curious to see how that gap is bridged.

I'm not professorgerm, but I'd disagree with it because the Marxist ideal has been tried, in a way that promoting a less sex-obsessed culture hasn't since our grandparent's eras (where, coincidentally, society did in fact seem less sex obsessed).

You can say Marxism hasn't been tried. But it has.

I actually agree, Marxism has been tried (and been found wanting). But I also firmly think that Christian ideals have been tried, and that Chesterson is wrong (albeit with great prose). There are 2.6 billion followers of Christianity. The world has been dominated by Christian nations for like ~400 straight years, waning over the last 60.

If someone wants to argue "okay but that wasn't true Christian ideals" than I think they should accept the same position on Marxism.

Sure, we didn't test a society with perfect Christian ideals, but that's what happens when ideals have to map on to real life. The value of an ideal isn't based on the hypothesized textbook perfect form, it's based on the real outcomes once you expose it to human society.

History shows us that when Christianity was in fact being tried, we did in fact have better outcomes on a whole host of relevant metrics to the people yearning for Christianity. It was Christianity's decline, not ascent, that was accompanied by the degradation of society.

have better outcomes on a whole host of relevant metrics to the people yearning for Christianity

Unless you were a powerless woman, or a powerless minority, or a powerless person of slightly the wrong proclivity for various things including but not limited to sexual orientation and opinions on celestial mechanics (at relevant times).

I'd posit that if Christianity was the ideal human ideology that caused maximum flourishing, it wouldn't have declined. Or at least the places where it didn't decline would then be much better places (and presumably out-compete) than places where it did.

More comments

I don't know; I think this is not responding to the actual argument.

I think most traditionalist Christians would say, you want a culture that treats sex like it's sacred and important. Abstinence only sex education might be part of that, but it pales in comparison for norm shaping to other forces. And the norm shaping in the 90s and 2000s, via Hollywood, and network TV, MTV, and the radio, was absolutely drenched in liberal notions about "sexuality" and "sexual liberation". (I'm honestly not sure where to put internet porn in this discussion, because although it shaped certain norms about behavior, I'm less clear about its role in normalizing public social roles about sexuality, and I suspect it played an important role in the #MeToo sex negative backlash towards male sexual assertiveness). I mean, I grew up in the religious South in the 90s. And all the Southern Baptist families around me still had to deal with the fact that their kids were marinating in a sexual culture being promulgated by a million vectors of national broadcast media, all heavily liberalizing, whether they liked it or not. Fights over abstinence based education were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I think, given that broader media context, that sure, abstinence based education probably couldn't have worked. And it may well have been that kids from more traditional or religious households were less likely to be on birth control or have condoms and then, after amorous circumstances intervened, ended up getting teen pregnant. I don't know (although the other comment about the usual racial cofounder can never be ignored when it comes to the South).

If traditionalists say "tell them not to have premarital sex", they generally mean something much, much bigger and deeper than the contents of a stray sex ed class. They mean something like, a healthy culture in one where all the various sense-making institutions treat sex like it is sacred, and important, and something set aside, and not to be treated likely or traded like a product - and then people will respond to that and treat it thusly, rather than treating it like a trip to the amusement park with a new friend. Progressives deeply disagree with this, but they understand the impulse, because this is precisely how they feel about "racism" and "sexism" and "xenophobia" and "homophobia" - they get very, very upset if people treat those topics lightly, and they insist that all the various sense-making institutions that they control treat these topics as sacralized, and important, and set aside, and that everyone participate in their universal morality story.

Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras (the fact of the pill coming into existing in the mid 20th century complicates this discussion, of course). And claiming that that never worked is probably a tall order, and disingenuous to boot, because the actual crux of the argument for most progressives, really, is not, "Did it factually work?" It's "I don't want to live in a world where sex is that culturally locked down and hidden away". Which is fine, but accepting that means abandoning the fig leaf of scientism and accepting that different groups just fundamentally have incommensurable worldviews and values.

Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras...

I always feel like this is way oversimplified.

“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy” -- Arthur Schopenhauer

I highly doubt a traditional culture has ever existed where most high-agency (read: upper class, free, generally attractive and fit) men reached the alter after their teenage years as virgins.

Assuming it were possible to settle such a bet, I would put considerable money down that no King of France ever reached his wedding night a virgin other than Louis XVI, and we know how that turned out.

Really, it's probably worse than that: if I asked the many Louis' and Francois' if they were virgins when they got married, they'd be confused by the question. "What do you mean virgin, I'm a man you fucking idiot?"

What we're dealing with is a result of a culture built around equality, of the classes and the sexes, and the results of that culture.

If I had to guess at examples/exceptions, the Puritans would be pretty high on the list. The island of Inis Beag might've been too small for aristocracy.

Didn't the Puritans marry pretty young?

I can believe that you can keep a boy virginal to 16 reliably with good parenting, 18 or 20 less reliably but still often enough to make it worthwhile, but probably never to 25 unless the boy is sort of a fuck up. Like if a boy loses his virginity before 16 it says something bad about the parents, of a boy still has his v card at 26 it says something concerning about him. He might lack the libido to have a quality marriage later, or the power of will to get what he wants.

Well, we got free love and contraception and abortion and divorce, and there are still plenty of prostitutes in London, and seemingly increasing amounts of young women selling sex for cash as a signal of empowerment or something. Schopenhauer plainly could not envision OnlyFans.

I do wonder where he got that figure, and who he was including in that. Did he mean "if only men could marry several women, there would be fewer women having to sell sex to survive"? Or did he mean "if living together without marriage was tolerated, many of these women would be in stable relationships"? Because uh, we got that, and we still have prostitution, escort work, sex work, porn, etc.

EDIT: Yeah, looking it up a little, those figures seem debatable. Schopenhauer could be including "poor women who sold sex from time to time, women living in irregular unions, women in temporary relationships" and the likes:

Although London police reports recorded there to be approximately 8,600 prostitutes known to them, it has been suggested that the true number of women prostituting during this time was closer to 80,000 (Rogers).

During the Victorian Age, prostitution did not subscribe to any one tradition; some women lived in brothels, some with soldiers or sailors, and some worked on the streets. Judith Walkowitz, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, highlights the different avenues available to prostitutes in her book Prostitution and Victorian Society. The most common form of prostitution during this time was streetwalking. Women who performed this act were most commonly those who supplemented their daily income with money they could earn by prostituting on occasion, but there were also some who used streetwalking as their primary source of income.

...During the Victorian Age, the number of prostitutes who actually lived in brothels was considerably low. Despite this, customers that behaved inappropriately towards the prostitutes that did inhabit such places were normally unappreciated and unwelcome (Walkowitz, 23-25)

I would tend to go with the police estimate for "prostitutes who are street walkers or in brothels" rather than "80,000 genuine no other income or relationship prostitutes". The link for the 80,000 figure seems to go "I got this from Rogers" "Hi I'm Rogers and I got this from Mayhew" and where did Mayhew get it?

To understand the mid-Victorian perception of prostitution we must appreciate the scale of the concern. Mayhew tells us that in 1857 there were 8,600 prostitutes in London known to the police but that the true number may have been nearer to 80,000 (Mayhew p. 476).

Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor. Penguin, London 1985

Digging that one up gives me this source:

To show how difficult it is to give from any data at present before the public anything like a correct estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, we may mention (extracting from the work of Dr Ryan) that while the Bishop of Exeter asserted the number of prostitutes in London to be 80,000, the City Police stated to Dr Ryan that it did not exceed 7,000 to 8,000. About the year 1793 Mr Colquhoun, a police magistrate, concluded, after tedious investigations, that there were 50,000 prostitutes in this metropolis. At that period the population was one million, and as it is now more than double we may form some idea of the extensive ramifications of this insidious vide.

And here I stop, because I am not going to chase down Dr Ryan and the Bishop of Exeter.

But another writer cautions that Mayhew is not the most accurate for data:

Mayhew seems not to have corrected the errors in his text, even when he was willing to acknowledge them. (The long list of errata at the end of Vol. I is mostly taken up by inaccurate calculations.) E. P. Thompson’s conclusion seems reasonable: ‘Every single table and set of statistical data in Mayhew must be scrutinised, not for dishonesty or manipulation, but for sheer slipshod technique and haste in getting to press’, ‘The Political Education of Henry Mayhew’, Victorian Studies, 11 (September 1967); 41–62 (p.58).

Anyway, be it 8,000 or 80,000, contra Schopenhauer the problem was not monogamy but rather poverty: the lack of secure employment and good wages for working and lower class men, and the lack of employment for working and lower class women (street sellers of everything from flowers to vegetables to small items was the fall-back if no steady employment in domestic service or elsewhere). So it's the economy, stupid, not sexual politics that was driving women into part-time or full-time prostitution.

I like this analysis and I agree with your commentary

My point was embracing "Tell them not to have premarital sex." is a method that won't work, and thus, is silly to endorse

Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy

We'd have to fisk both sides of the claim, and I'm tired, but doesn't this sound to you like a classic case of where black population clusters also correspond with conservative Christian clusters (aka southern states)?

Slightly, but not totally. The teen pregnancy issue during the W era was actually most strongly a southwestern Hispanic phenomenon, with states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico having higher teen pregnancy rates than deep southern states. Nevada used to have a higher teen pregnancy rate than Alabama!

Broadly, those same heavily Hispanic States have seen the largest drops in teen fertility. Deep southern states also fell, but less so, more like a 50% drop, while the northeastern and midwestern states dropped something like 60%.

It’s utterly unsurprising to me that Hispanics assimilating led to big drops in teen fertility.

That does seem plausible, although a bit too narrow

But also humans like to have sex so if you tell them "don't have sex, that is all" then they won't listen to you and won't use birth control they're unaware exists

I tried skimming a few papers but figuring out which states the data came from was a pain in the ass so I gave up, happy to both walk away feeling like we're right

Isn’t the right story: get married and then have a bunch of sex — indeed you’ll have more sex compared to being single and ready to mingle?

Something's gotta give between

  1. Abstinence until marriage

  2. Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.

  3. No fault divorce.

  4. A healthy sex drive in an individual.

I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, I think I know what you'd choose. But at core those four can't, in general, live together. At least one has to go.

Something's gotta give between

  1. Abstinence until marriage
  2. Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.
  3. No fault divorce.
  4. A healthy sex drive in an individual.

So just get rid of #2 and #3, then.

What does the existence of no fault divorce have to do with all of this? Your point seems like a slam dunk with just 1, 2 and 4.

Agreed—people should marry younger

I mean yes? I'm not sure what that has to do with this but it's true

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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