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I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.
This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.
That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.
Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”
So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.
I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.
As you point out, even the Christians have folded on this. Catholics are not supposed to break the laws around sexual morality but of course the vast majority do because the culture now is "well yeah everyone has sex with their partner". I've seen the massive change on this in Ireland from the early 80s to today. We've updated to being a modern Western society with the same mores and morals.
So yes, the expectation there is "but you agreed to have sex with me, and there's no rule about this means commitment or a permanent relationship or anything of that nature anymore". We're stuck between two stools, as you doubtless have seen on here, all the criticism of women for sleeping around etc. whereas nobody is saying "men, too, should not be sleeping around". Indeed the argument is that women are not sleeping around enough, since "waaah, it's so unfair! women can get as much male attention as they want, just by existing, but guys can't even get a chance get a handjob on the third date, they can't even get a first date!"
It's not the fault of women that male sexuality is so easy it seems to be permanently turned on to "high" and just having boobs and ass means dick goes sproing! and guy wants to get dick wet.
Neither is it men's fault that women make stupid decisions and end up with the disaster guys. I've seen a court case in the papers right now that makes me want to scream. Oh, sure: the guy who came home drunk and threw the baby across the room is a "good father". The only hope there is that maybe this woman will finally get her and the kids out, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I think current mores have left everyone with the worst of both worlds; the old double standard is still floating around, but the sexual revolution has left the expectation that women and men will have sex outside of marriage, be that on a casual basis or within some kind of relationship. So men are feeling aggrieved at not getting the sexual access that they imagine the Chads and Alphas are getting, and blaming women for being simultaneously too promiscuous and too picky, and women are feeling aggrieved at providing the expected sexual access but not getting commitment in return (even the cases where "so me and my boyfriend have been living together for five/ten years, I'd love to get married, but he is making no move toward that/when I talk about it he shrugs it off that we're fine as we are" means "girl, he's never gonna propose, why would he? free milk without having to buy the cow!")
And we can't fix it by trying to turn the clock back because (to mix metaphors) that horse has bolted.
I am also pretty aggrieved that you basically can't tell a Christian from a secular person from their behavior anymore. I watched this guy talk about all the dates/sex he was having with all these different women and all the smooth lines and all the previous divorces and all the sex toys he owned and all the assplay that he enjoyed and all the tattoos he has, so I was very surprised to find out one day that he's actually Christian. And yet, his response to me was always "live a little, you're so Puritan". A Christian ought to hold Puritanism highly, I think.
I think men should also not be sleeping around before marriage. But it's difficult to criticize men for that kind of thing without coming across as salty that they're getting so much sex. I'd also guess the userbase here is composed of men, and they primarily want to focus on the opposite sex because that's who they need as romantic partners. Of course, sleeping with those same women before marriage is just making the problem worse. Ultimately, it's probably intractable... birth control and the information economy necessitating an extended adolescence means that pretty much no one is a virgin at the time of marriage anymore.
It wasn't necessary, but this failure is 100% on the traditionalists. You can see the echoes in "but no daughter of mine will be dating at 13".
They didn't understand the consequences of it at the time, and some of them are just operating on instinct and still don't- but "refuse to pursue the things you want because it's holy not to" in a time where the things you wanted became far more available (i.e. far less risky) had, and continues to have, massive downstream consequences.
In the face of this they insisted on "just do nothing" (rather than what they should have done, which was to accelerate life and the achievement of those milestones, not retard it), and when the youth walked away their persecution complex did the rest. And the youth that remained were more likely to have the same hatred of life within them, or the same development issues that cause them to be compatible with delaying life far past that normal range, so the problem persists.
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