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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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I am sure this has been asked before, but why is it that these purported consequences of the 1970s sexual revolution have not shown up until the past 10-15 years? It really took 50 years to come to a head?

While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.

If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.

The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.

This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."

No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye

Hell, Cesare Beccaria described something like this in 1768!

The problem you get with an argument that goes that far back to claim that actually people were already unhappy and things were bad is that in order to actually make your case to RETVRN to something, you now need to make the argument that things were better and people were happier before that.

You've just implicitly accused a lot of people of being naive and unable to see the unhappiness and rot in the Boomers' generation. Granting this for the sake of argument, would this not be a strong argument that it is surprisingly easy to be naive in this way about a relatively distant time? Accepting that, would any ideas that you may have about things being better once upon the time, before the boomers with their individualism, television and love marriages came along, not be subject to the same concern, turned back at yourself? How sure can you (and we) be of any impression that the Victorians or Edwardians were happy, when we just saw so many people erroneously believing that the Boomers were? Given that we know even less about those generations, they are more strange to us and have left behind fewer records, misunderstanding their lives would be even easier. At some point you might just wind up believing a nonstandard version of the noble-savage trope that involves your ancestors.

Couldn’t you answer the question by looking at communities that didn’t go down those roads. Off the top of my head, any form of Anabaptist community, Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews, or similar groups that chose not to go modern.

No, because they are heavily confounded in both directions. The people who choose to remain in such communities against the backdrop of modernity are bound to be ones that are relatively happy to do so, and the sight of modern living is bound to induce some jealousy. It would in many ways be like trying to make inferences about cavemen from the San Francisco homeless.

No model is perfect, and im not aware of any uncontacted tribes that would answer for the control group. Maybe isolated villages in Bhutan or Nepal or something. Even then, they know modern civilization exists. Even going back to early psychology is difficult because psychology itself is a modern concept— it started as a field in 1900 Or thereabouts, and we don’t have much before then except maybe someone occasionally notices people acting weird and records it or reports on it. There’s not any clean data to be had, but I don’t think that means you can’t find hints by comparing different subcultures and the pathologies they tend to have or not have.

If “modern approaches to community” are causing unhappiness or causing relationships to break up, cultures that do otherwise are less likely to have those issues. If the concept of “love marriages” breed narcissism and divorces, then there are other cultures that have arranged marriages (Orthdox Jews do, so do Hindus). If there’s a positive effect in arranged marriages, it should show up. If TV and screens cause short attention spans, we have plenty of places on earth that don’t have them. Comparing those differences correcting for other confounding variables should give us hints about this kind of thing.

There were two sexual revolutions and they both had major social instability coming in about forty years later. Can I explain it entirely? Not really. But the 2010's social chaos occurred roughly the same timeframe after the sixties/seventies sexual revolution as the sixties/seventies social chaos occurred after the 20's/30's sexual revolution. Perhaps we'll see in the 2050's some chaotic results of something LGBTQ related, history rhymes.

As for the forty years timeframe, I would suggest that it's when children who grew up entirely under the new paradigm are reaching the age to start making bad decisions. Social change is slow even if at the surface level it looks like lightning.

But children of the 90s are like 40 now and would have also grown up entirely under the post-1970s paradigm, while the rise of incel culture (and various other apparent symptoms of dysfunctional romance) seems like a phenomenom of the past 10-15 years. I am having a hard time ascribing this to the 1970s rather than technology shifts (Tinder, etc), high pace of housing inflation (which reduces incentives for household formation and makes it much harder to not rely on also-expensive daycare, aka the two-income trap), or the transition of church and religion out of mainstream (which I would argue began to rapidly occur during Bush 2 and was basically complete mid-Obama).

My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.

The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.

I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

And yet everyone is having significantly less sex today than 10 years ago.

Are you saying this contradicts the original theory? I can understand being surprised by this, but it isn't even that strange when you think about it for a moment.

I absolutely am saying that it contradicts the original theory. And it is strange if you think about it. Intuitively. it makes sense that easier access to sex through dating apps should make it more widespread.

It would make sense if men and women were looking for sex for the sake of sex with the same frequency, intensity, etc, and the only thing stopping them from getting it in the past, were those evil traditional sexual mores. This is the case with gay hookups, and you indeed see amounts of sex orders of magnitude beyond what straights can achieve. However, in the case of relations between men and women, the sexual mores performed a regulatory function (rather than a purely restrictive one), attempting to give the most amount of people at least some of what they want. But because men and women have different preferences, and are looking for different things, by abolishing the sexual mores, instead of "lifting restrictions on sex" all we accomplished was locking men and women into a defect-defect spiral, which resulted in less sex for everybody.

But because men and women have different preferences, and are looking for different things, by abolishing the sexual mores, instead of "lifting restrictions on sex" all we accomplished was locking men and women into a defect-defect spiral, which resulted in less sex for everybody.

Describe this defect-defect spiral. Because to tell you the truth, I don't see it in my experiences, and it seems to be a post-hoc explanation for an unexpected outcome.

It used to be that if you got pregnant or impregnated someone, you were expected to become a couple and stay a couple. This meant that the man was forced to have a big stake in being a parent, but also was very rarely deprived of the father role (as part of an actual family, not the modern 'weekend father'). Nowadays, a man who impregnates a woman can never get the chance to be a father, or can easily be deprived of the father role when the woman splits up. So there is less reason nowadays for men to want to have children or to build themselves up to be a good father. Instead, a lot of guys prefer infinite adolescence. In turn, this means that women see a lack of men who make good fathers, and even go looking for sperm donors and intentionally become single moms.

Women traditionally 'groomed' promising men into being good providers/fathers/etc. The taboo on splitting up meant that the risk of marrying a rough diamond was offset by the benefits of getting a better husband than the woman could get otherwise. But the ease by which relationships can be ended, resulted in women being increasingly picky and only wanting the finished product, since a perfectly groomed husband can just trade her in. However, the lack of grooming by women means that many men miss out on becoming this finished product, so everyone suffers.

All the lies about men and women being equal, logically results in the conclusion that when men have different preferences from women, this is all just bad culture that they need to change. So in a way feminism was right when they coined the term 'the personal is political,' in that women increasingly politicize their relationships, and demand leftism in their mates, with the assumption that those men then share their preferences. However, this just drives men further into right-wing politics, who do allow them to be themselves, while women get in this spiral of blaming the right wing for their relationship issues.

This meant that the man was forced to have a big stake in being a parent, but also was very rarely deprived of the father role (as part of an actual family, not the modern 'weekend father'). Nowadays, a man who impregnates a woman can never get the chance to be a father, or can easily be deprived of the father role when the woman splits up. So there is less reason nowadays for men to want to have children or to build themselves up to be a good father. Instead, a lot of guys prefer infinite adolescence.

It's just as likely that men who are forced to become fathers become inattentive or abusive fathers. Also, you are completely wrong on the fact that mot men don't want children; actually, more men want children than women do.

Women traditionally 'groomed' promising men into being good providers/fathers/etc. The taboo on splitting up meant that the risk of marrying a rough diamond was offset by the benefits of getting a better husband than the woman could get otherwise. But the ease by which relationships can be ended, resulted in women being increasingly picky and only wanting the finished product, since a perfectly groomed husband can just trade her in. However, the lack of grooming by women means that many men miss out on becoming this finished product, so everyone suffers.

First of all, why the fuck is this arrangement good for men? Why do men need to be "groomed" into being better people by women? This is utterly toxic and manipulative; most men would take the modern arrangement. Also, again, it's just as likely that the "rough diamond" stays rough, and the women is stuck with an abuser.

All the lies about men and women being equal, logically results in the conclusion that when men have different preferences from women, this is all just bad culture that they need to change. So in a way feminism was right when they coined the term 'the personal is political,' in that women increasingly politicize their relationships, and demand leftism in their mates, with the assumption that those men then share their preferences. However, this just drives men further into right-wing politics, who do allow them to be themselves, while women get in this spiral of blaming the right wing for their relationship issues.

I agree that women often politicize their relationships, but they don't blame the "right" for their relationship issues. They just blame men.

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