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I think it was Deiseach who once pointed out that second-wave feminism was actually a really sweet deal for men and a poison pill for women, with all the "free love" turning out to be just fucking around without any responsibility, and all later feminism waves are just an attempt at fixing this giant screw-up without admitting to it. I'd nitpick that it only was a sweet deal for a particular kind of men, but otherwise agree.
There was also a rather simple factor at play in all of this. We know there was a big baby boom after 1945. In plain terms, every year that passed, the cohort that was born was larger than the one before it. Add to this that young men generally seek female partners that are 3-5 years younger than them. All this meant that there were roughly 13 or so potential mates for every 10 young men looking for a female partner in 1966 or so. A sex ratio that is imbalanced to such a degree inevitably results in loosened norms around casual sex even if that is not clearly incentivized by the broader culture, which it was.
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We’re already seeing modern examples of this. I remember saying the exact same thing whenever the topic would come up in my social round table years ago. It always felt like pissing in the wind. This stuff isn’t rocket science. I really don’t know how so many people missed it.
It's not that they're "missing it," it's that they psychologically cannot allow it to be true. The villain, convinced of the righteousness of his cause, only to wail "Oh God, what have I done!?" when forced to confront that what he has done is truly evil, is a creature that only exists in fiction. In the real world, to actually admit that one's core identity is a lie would be a narcissistic inury so great that any cost must be paid to avoid it.
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Had an interesting thought.
"Consequence-Free Sex" is a great sales pitch on its face.
But then you notice that some of the 'consequences' of sex are in fact good, desireable, and constructive, and throwing those out is really losing something important.
So women thought they were getting all the pleasure without the risk of pregnancy, STDs, emotional investment, or risk of abuse... and didn't notice that this was costing them a lot of the emotionally fulfilling aspects of it.
It was a talked about phenomenon even during Victorian Britain that some women were just completely “whorish” in their attitudes. So you’ve always had licentiousness and the overwhelming biological drive of people in their youth. The question in my mind has one to do with its proper place and context. The sexualization and commodification of everything is bad for both individuals and society.
Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It also reminds me of the old, funny bash dot org quote:
“It used to be about sex, drugs and rock n roll. Now all we have is aids, crack and techno.”
In reading some accounts of the culture of the '60s and '70s, it seems like there were a LOT of true believers who genuinely thought that free love, LSD, and rock music was going to save the world and fix everything. And a lot of opportunists who saw how they could exploit this sentiment.
And as the quote implies, turns out there are some downsides to each of those things. The drugs in fact ended up killing a lot of the musicians.
To hear some tell it, the Altamont Free Concert was the day (four months after Woodstock, the apotheosis of the era) that dream died/the illusion popped.
"Wow, turns out getting people hopped up on drugs at a free concert with a Biker Gang (paid in beer) running security DOESN'T result in a peaceful, money-free utopia." And like a number of recent culture issues, the death of a black guy was the precipitating incident.
Richard Nixon was... more right than wrong about hippies.
For my part I think it was fully doomed when the Corporations Co-opted their sentiment to sell sugar water. Note this was the same year John Lennon released "Imagine."
Virtually the entire atmosphere of the postwar period was like that in the sense that the west came out triumphant. In particular with the US overwhelmingly being the biggest beneficiary. And with that you saw an attendant shift in the social values of the population with the abundant wealth that was following in.
Being the person that tried to restore sanity and imploring them to think of the long-term downstream consequences would’ve made you the party pooper or puritanical boomer of the previous generation. But the conclusion of all this wasn’t hard to see. A lot of what people complain about today and are writing I remember having the identical thoughts about in high school. And it’s not because I’m some sort of enlightened genius and everyone else is an idiot. I’m simply someone paying attention.
Well yeah I can actually sort of understand the logic there actually.
"Hey we've got this brand new drug that heightens sensory experiences but has seemingly zero side effects! Miraculous! And all these extremely talented musicians innovating genres with meaningful messages! And contraceptives so we can have the pleasure of sex without the risk! Truly this is an age of wonders, we can surely solve the world's problems if we just unite around something we all have in common!"
Then sprinkle some marxism in there. Can't forget to mention Jonestown where a bunch of self-professed Marxist-Communists got froggy and killed themselves along with a bunch of kids. That was later in the game, though.
Oh, and the Manson murders. 1969-1971 really killed any presumption of 'innocence' in this culture, didn't it?
The extra layer of weird spirituality that permeated much of the hippie era was a bit harder for me to understand. Lot of cults in that time period.
Whatever mindsets of the 60's has been repeated in the current era, it seems to be a firmly secular movement this time around, although most here can point out how "wokeism" is just a secular religion.
Back when I first came across Edward de Bono and thought he might have something worthwhile to say, I remember a section in the introduction to Practical Thinking about a transition from cause-and-effect thinking (this car goes because it has an engine and a drive-train inside which I could, in principle, hack on) to black-box thinking (this car goes because I pushed the "go" button). He was writing in 1971 about a transition he claimed had taken place in the previous decade or so.
It's a fine line between black-box thinking and cargo-cult thinking, and I wonder how much of things like the weird spirituality is that the Boomers were the first generation to enjoy technology-driven affluence that they hadn't earned by helping build it.
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The CHAOS book talks about it at length, but the cracks were already showing by '67 (one example he doesn't mention that I think is noteworthy is that Love's Forever Changes was recorded in summer-fall '67 and was already pointing out what a crock all the hippie stuff was). The LSD era gave way to the amphetamines and heroin era, but it took until Manson & Altamont for the fruits of that change to become apparent.
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That era was a mistake in a number of ways and now the excesses of it are running hard up against the wall.
This isn’t a product of some Marxist bogeyman though, although many similar aspects of it you can also find at home in the Marxist tradition.
Even the Nazis of all people recognized this problem under their own paradigm. Hitler wrote about it himself when he talked about the contrast of values he experienced in Munich and when he went into Vienna. He noticed that the cities and program of urbanization led into the production of a new system of social values that was individualistic, against the national community and that he saw as “degenerate.” That’s why his appointed ideologues beneath him like Walter Darre and others came up with notions like “blood and soil.” They viewed the peasantry as the ideal model for German society because of its community and family orientation towards society, and they wanted that adapted to big city life.
It’s also why when they went into Scandinavia, they viewed Oslo as “too American” and “socially degenerate” because of its big city and urban lifestyle. The big cities led to a “liberalizing of social values.” It was yet another example to them as reminder of why they envied the countryside. The Nazis actually disliked many aspects of German rural life and called their immigration into the cities “convoys of death.” But one thing they noticed in the 40’s was that the urban cities were producing less than half of the soldiery and births needed to sustain the war effort. The countryside on the other hand had something like a 13%-16% surplus it provided.
So whether it’s this extreme or that extreme, these lunatics or those lunatics, both ideologies ran into different varieties of the same problem. And no paradigm to date that I’ve seen has good solutions to these.
Not clear to me, looking WAY back in hindsight, how it could have gone differently, though.
Like, I can see how the 2000's could have gone differently if, for example
A) 9/11 never happened. Or
B) Our response to 9/11 was more measured but also reaffirmed our national commitment to not letting other countries fuck with us.
But things like the 2008 financial crisis seem baked into the cake given the incentives involved.
Not sure how to interpret the 1960's in terms of 'the forces of history.' Mistakes were made but seemingly made from a bit of ignorance and irrational exuberance and as you say, the guys trying to keep things sane must have looked like real spoilsports.
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Still buys into a hyper-agentic view of lecherous men and women as true sexual objects without desire or agency. If some top men plotted to give sexually inert women sexual freedom to satisfy their perverted male urges, it stands to reason that they also gave them the vote earlier, the right to vote and work, anti-harassment laws etc. If vague dissatisfaction with the current situation is evidence of failure, those things and more were all poison pills.
At no point did I claim that women have no agency. Quite the opposite; My view is that women happily pushed the movement forwards for as long as they thought it was good for them, and then changed course once they realised the issues with it. If anything, a point could be made that the women were the primary agents, while some men were passively enjoying the perks (which isn't even entirely wrong). Of course, all the later feminist waves are also introducing as many new problems as they are fixing.
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Agreed. A lot of women really enjoy having flings with high status men. Perhaps it's a poison pill in the sense that eating too many potato chips is a poison pill. But the same could be said about men who spend their days womanizing.
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A more controversial red-pill, even among the red-pilled, but one I believe to be true, is that men are actually the more romantic sex and deal worse with promiscuity. Yes, men find it more enjoyable to sample new women and sleep with a different women each week. But men perhaps deal worse with seeing the women they slept with sleep with someone else...especially if they enjoyed a special connection. And since most men are not lotharios who can take pride in notch counts, but most men have dealt with very traumatic break-ups, on net, the sexual revolution has been bad for most men.
I feel like Gay men and Lesbians somewhat disprove this. I think the possessiveness over women comes from scarcity and difficulty in accessing women.
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"Oh, I tell you, women are not the sensitive sex. That's one of the great delusions of literature. Men are the true romanticists."
I have that movie on-call, I really need to sit down and watch it for the full context of that quote one day.
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Byron had a different view of it, but then again he was Byron. From "Don Juan":
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart;
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.
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To an extent this is actually true. I’m a person that more easily gets attached after sex. I don’t like feeling used.
Psychologically there are just different types of people. It’s easy to just “discard” someone you have no investment in. I’ve always been a very monogamous person. I’ve had experiences in my late teenage years going into very early adulthood through my social group and the milieu I was in, and not out of genuine desire. I’ve never found it fulfilling or enjoyable when reflecting on it. The best I’ve always had was in romantic relationships and I have never had any desire to experience the former again, even though I’ve had the opportunities available to me from my original social group. It always makes me feel filthy, like I have to scrub the shit out of my body; and I’ve always been somewhat paranoid of diseases.
Man. Same way.
I've gotten to the point where I can justify a fling with a particular sort of partner who is clearly never going to be able to commit to someone, as a means of physically satiating the desire.
But I have to be so emotionally distant about it that it is simply unfulfilling.
Repeated sexual intercourse with someone you genuinely care for and know their ins and outs and exactly how they respond... its better in ways that you wouldn't even realize if you've only ever had short-term partners.
"Intimacy" is poorly understood and seemingly underrated as part of the experience. Of course, sometimes you just want the dopamine hit that comes with banging someone hot.
Indeed.
Some of the best sex I’ve ever had comes from caring about the pleasure of the person you’re with and seeing their emotion and excitement in it. Wanting to make them happy and fulfilled makes the experience much better. People that haven’t experienced that just won’t know. All they’ll ever think is being with someone is just a glorified way of jacking off and that you can do it with anyway.
I knew a ‘lot’ of women growing up. Peers, sisters of friends, friends of friends etc. We were all a group and I still know a good number of them. I was never lacking in opportunities for a fling. That was just never my thing.
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