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You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.
My claim is that anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex" as a method of preventing unwanted babies is being willfully ignorant of the fact it's been conclusively demonstrated not to work
Good thing I'm not doing that. Perhaps I need to repeat my claims?
We did a bit of a dosey do here.
I responded to a guy (who I now realize is not you) who was saying "don't have premarital sex" by being snippy, then you responded to my response with something that I actually agree with but was kind of different than what I was saying, so I felt slightly confused and restated what I was going at to clarify.
I don't think society is pushing "don't have premarital sex" , it obviously isn't. My point is that saying something like "our society should push not having premarital sex" is stupid because it doesn't work. It's basically "Santa Clause for Christmas I'd like a pony" level of policy discussion.
I'm not sure how I would analyze that. Someone in the past might have said that it was similarly stupid to push not smoking. Yet, we did, and major changes occurred. There are all sorts of mechanisms by which a society could push such a thing. Those various mechanisms might have different effects. It's pretty strange to me to lump them all together carelessly. It seems to be actively missing the point to lump them all under "we should simply tell them to not have sex", as if they're all actually equivalent to that. I think it would have been similarly stupid to say that all methods of pushing to reduce smoking are equivalent to "simply telling people to not smoke".
My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades. It's just seriously difficult to reason about, and flippant takes like yours are not even really serious attempts at doing so.
EDIT: I will note that my original response was with respect to your statement:
Again, this makes it sound like this is a thing that is actively being pursued. That's sort of the opposite of reality.
Yeah my wording sucked, I was being snarky and pointing out the answer to this question is "it isn't and it failed"
That's very fair. I'm sure abstinence only sex ed (or other social pressure) would work way better without the sexual liberation movement, etc
I guess I'd also say that kind of supports where I'm going with all this? The cat is out of the bag, society has shifted HARD into embracing pre-maritial non-procreative sex. So any proposal that goes along the lines of "simply undo all that" is pretty unlikely to work.
Maybe we'll have a conservative shift back if Gen Z/Alpha burn out hard on Tinder, idk. But western society has been on a pretty steady clip of "don't tell me what to do" for the past few hundred years, so again, feels unlikely.
Trying to stop single mom's from existing by telling people who aren't moms yet not to fuck is going to result in the exact same number of single moms for at least the next 5-20 years even if the societal shift were vibing about were to happen.
Do you think it was unlikely for rates of smoking to decline after society had shifted HARD toward embracing it? ...with a side of "don't tell me what to do"?
That's a great point, under this framework that doesn't really work, but it did happen.
Smoking has lots of negative externalities to those around you, which make it easier to ban I guess? I probably need another coffee to map this onto pre-marital sex.
I think applying the externality logic to pre-marital sex, pre-marital sex has much less obvious (and by definition, delayed by 9 months) externalities. So it's harder to drum up support by pointing to single mom's who may or may not have had sex out of wedlock, versus the person next to you on the airplane making your lungs miserable.
Might have double-negative'd that, idk
I think this comment assumes that banning is the only mechanism in question. Indeed, some forms of banning were used with smoking, but it certainly wasn't the only tool. Nor was it actually just a general ban. Moreover, while folks could quibble with an externality analysis, externalities are certainly not the only things that societies make "pushes" about.
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