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Notes -
The Sexual Revolution Goes To Hell
There was a conversation a month back about the Sexual Revolution and its (Lady) Discontents, probably highlighted by this later-QC'd @WhiningCoil post:
[cw: some links NSFW, albeit more in the sense of Comedy Central late-night comedy sense. Also some media spoilers.]
Apropos of nothing, has anyone here watched Helluva Boss? 'Adult' comedy, freely available on YouTube. It stars the Immediate Murder Professionals, a trio of imps who've gained access to the living world and have offered their services to
get revenge'resolve problems' there for damned sinners who can pay. Ostensibly, the show is about the trio's new business as marginally-competent assassins, with the moral and neurotic Moxie, joyful berserker Millie, and wacky boss Blitzø ("the o is silent") going into the world and slaughtering someone. In practice, this ends up more a framing device; many episodes don't involve paid murder, and those that do it's not the actual challenge.With a few exceptions most individual episodes instead focus more on relationships between the denizens of hell. The three main cast have that awkward mix of professional and casual common to small business (not helped by Blitz's clear desire to make a 'new family') sometimes jumping wholesale into stalking, Millie and Moxie have to juggle a marriage that's a lot more tender and reciprocal than either their parents nor Hell in general tolerates, so on.
That expands with the secondary cast. Blitz's access to the living world depends on a magical grimoire given in exchange for a transactual relationship with the demon prince Stolas, and for the first season neither are quite sure exactly how much emphasis goes on the 'relationship' in 'transactional relationship'. He also runs into a series of current or past
loverssexual partners with their complaints about him. Blitz's adopted adult daughter Loona is desperately looking for someplace to belong after a unpleasant childhood in Hell'spoundsorphanages but is unwilling to risk vulnerability. Moxie has... issues with his own Family and knows that he doesn't measure up by the standards of Millie's parents. Stolas' biological daughter Octavia is desperately looking for someplace to belong while her parents go through an unusually messy divorce. Eventually a number of the Seven Deadly Sins get involved, so on.There's a song spelling it out, diegetically as a drug trip..
As necessary disclaimer: it's gay. Really gay, even by furry-adjacent standards: there's one male/female active relationship among the main cast, and it's constantly going back to the same pegging joke. If you're a fan of the ladies, you're going to be stuck looking at fandom works or the not-on-YouTube sister show Hazbin Hotel, which does have a lesbian couple in focus. I don't know that I could call it good; while there's some decent comedic moments and fluid action scenes, there's sometimes too much emphasis on the cringe in cringe comedy, the musical numbers are hit-or-miss even if you can swing to their sometimes bizarre genre selections, and the characterization could stand to be more consistent. It's never quite Ren And Stimpy gross-out comedy, though some of the gorier fight scenes can get close, but neither is it exactly high-brow. The series as a whole has been trying to make a lot of commentary on economic and social class without serious introspection on its own assumptions, or even how that commentary it does present comes across.
((And I'm sure someone like @HlynkaCG can probably break down better about a Red Tribe take on the spirital ramifications of modern culture framing and worshipping literal demons as parallels for and paragons of modern society. Or of 'heaven' being paperwork and Minnesota Nice.))
Buuuuuuuuut because it's 'adult' and focused on relationships, a lot of it's about sex, and that part is very much written toward the id and superego of those "totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution". The show leads are the bisexual Vivienne Medrano and the gay Brandon Rogers, and the advertising and focus is very much down bad for exactly what you'd expect from that. That's not limited to sex -- one of the better musical numbers revolves around a two-minute long sequence of flipping the bird off to an abusive boss, culminating in a series of giant neon signs, including literal sign language for 'fuck off', the pilot has a particularly unsubtle joke about American healthcare provisioning -- but it's very much spread throughout the ethos. Of the main cast and the secondary cast, only one person (Millie) doesn't have Daddy Issues.
Helluva Boss is 'woke' in the sort of way that its authors would consider 'woke' to be a compliment. To its credit, that's at least sometimes subtle: we do some awkwardly-placed Deaf Culture-rep or a character awkwardly pointing out to his father that bisexual and gay are different things, but there's also a few trans characters (and Blitz-the-o-is-silent is probably meant as a deadnaming metaphor) or more subtle discussions about triggering trauma that you'd have to pay attention to catch. (It helps that the writers are willing to throw some on-the-nose jokes the other direction).
((It's worth spelling out that, where Hazbin Hotel discusses consent and undesired sexual violence with the characters Angel Dust and Valentino, it doesn't really feature among the reoccurring cast for Helluva Boss: the closest matters have been comedic and near-instantly resulted in violent response. Instead, the show portrays sexuality as a tool for the characters, either figuratively with many separate characters squicking out the villainous Striker to discomfort him, or in the more literal sense of skewering attackers through the skull with a motorized and pixelated dildo.))
There's actually a lot of discussion here about how modern (and thus post-sexual-revolution) norms are, in the story's setting, literally damning. "He's had four tongues inside him at once, which, like, good for him!... but he's giving off not-ok vibes" is the most clearly overt situation where the show can't quite disavow people who want to fill every hole they've got, but it can recognize that sex won't fill and often detracts from figurative ones. There's clear contradiction between more 'presentable' sexuality and less such (cw: lots of pixelated dildos, loud, se2 spoilers). STDs exist, in-universe. One of the last straws for that Two Minutes Notice song is the promotion of an entertainer as a sex object that is at best degrading and at worst invites or encourages aggressive stalkers, a topic of prolonged discourse in fandom spaces that's somewhat complicated by the number of people who literally get off from fascimiles of their body or their characters being 'used'. An early-season joke about fandom response to Loona is slightly awkward in contrast to around 15k not-always-on-model images over at e621 that I won't be linking. Though at least the character's explicitly in her twenties.
((The showrunners are probably not considering these conflicts solely as a theoretical exercise. The original voice actor for Stolas was dropped between the pilot and the first season, at the same time certain 'allegations' were going around of Totally Consensual But Also Bad things.))
A lot of the show's answer is to highlight and exaggerate the faults in 'traditional' sexual norms. Whatever sympathy the fandom came up with for Stolas' wife before her reveal -- after all, he was cheating on her! -- faltered when Stella actually appeared, lessbecause she'd wanted Stolas murdered , and more because thing was a loveless arraigned marriage between complete jerks: the extent each of the two hate each other more than they love their child is stated explicitly. While it's the worst of the arranged marriages, it's not the only one we're presented with, and that the others look marginally better only damns them with faint praise (one has the 'bride' tied up, gagged, a shotgun pointed at him). Even where couples are 'traditional' in the 1920s-1980s sense of Love, True Love, there's a lot of outside culture demanding response that doesn't actually fit, such as Millie's parents finding Moxie insufficiently manly or Hell's culture heavily stigmatizing interclass relationships (in this case, between higher-class princes or Sins and lower-class imps). In the setting, even literal cherubs can't really think of love as separate from a bunch of horny teenagers.
But Helluva Boss is struggling to create and draw together a healthy sexuality after the sexual revolution, and as a response to the sexual revolution rather than just those 'traditional' norms. A good number of those criticisms are very likely inspired by personal experiences, and many viewers see and relate to the show in that framework. A bit of that is drawing very heavily from Women's Fanfic Circles of Idealized Relationships, where everybody 'really' just needs sufficient support followed by Just Admitting Their Feelings And Letting People In (something something Found Family), or is disposable and untouchably evil (and there are a lot of disposable assholes). Other parts are more serious. If relationships are increasingly likely to touch between work and play, what extent can a transactional relationship or one with disparity of power be healthy, or can such a thing ever leave those fetters behind?
That's not to say the show has answers. It's not even clear that it's entirely grappled the scope of the questions: like a lot of shows with complicated romantic relationships, there's a fan-favorite solution that's almost impressive for how much it's joked about compared to how little it's presented in any serious sense, even if only to point out where and why it wouldn't work. Some few of the protagonist's flaws are their own, but there's little space or consideration for what would be necessary to grow beyond them, or to produce a next generation that could easily exceed them.
I think it's still relevant to say that they've noticed the skulls.
So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Fertility has fallen hugely, which is bad IMO. In addition to hundreds of millions of lives not lived, there are surely many discoveries and artistic products that were never made, because their creators were never born. I don't buy Malthusian logic, we could've used our resources more efficiently to sustain higher populations. Labour and brainpower is the most important economic input, more is better.
The advanced world is now below replacement rate, our civilization is literally unsustainable. A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope - I recall a statistic showing unmarried women in the 40-50 age group were hardest hit. Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
Anyway, the massive fall in fertility came just as the sexual revolution showed up, it's not like there was a massive plague or war at the same time. What other cause could there be?
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
People like playing and cuddling with kids, and if those people are women they also like dressing them up in cute outfits and taking pictures of them to post on instagram. People do not like disciplining kids, making them eat their vegetables, waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them, changing their diapers, etc. For obvious reasons for the vast majority of the population the two categories go together, but I think that the first category makes people happier than the second category annoys them.
This can be rough, but when you successfully soothe them and get them to sleep again, it feels really good. Compare the popularity of Dark Souls; there's something to be said for succeeding at a challenge.
This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.
It does seem like it's going to be a massive deal before you've done it though.
Only to PMC women who are afraid of dirt. Men are only afraid of it to the extent that they think it is emasculating. Traditional elite women learned to handle filth by mucking out stables as teenagers. (Old money will buy their daughter a pony, but never hire a groom for her). And working class women don't seem to have a problem with it either.
Aren't we talking about on the same level as making them eat vegetables or waking up at night to look after them? My point is about expectation childless people have of looking after kids vs the reality as understood by parents - expecting parents I talk to often seem to expect every second diaper change to look like tequila night at the burrito barn.
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Ever mucked out stables and barns? Horse, cow and chicken shit is not even close to as disgusting and rank as human shit. Pig is the only kind that is even in the same zip code.
There's also the element of the distribution of tasks not being equal in many relationships; trading off 50-50 is one thing but being the designated shit cleaner for years on end is a bit much. Thankfully Millennials seem much more fair about dividing up unpleasant tasks like that, compared to the stats on single digit percentages of baby boomer men having ever changed a diaper.
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I agree diaper changing is no big deal. Waking up in the middle of the night during the newborn stage is just awful. My littlest is two and I still haven't recovered from sleep deprivation.
I stay up pretty late by nature (generally to 2 or 3am), and my wife has done most of the nighttime wakeups when I wasn't already awake. Taking it in shifts, we mostly get by, but there have been a couple nights where at 4:30am, the baby's wide awake and cooing, and I want to cry... but holding them while they sleep is incredibly nice. My kiddo being especially wiggly and refusing to cuddle under most circumstances is probably also part of it.
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The point was throwing out the ‘work’ part in contrast to the ‘fun’ part.
sorry, was mostly reacting to the contrast between my own perceptions going in, and my perceptions now that I've had direct experience...
I can see how you’d react that way- and your point about getting them to go to sleep was genuinely a valuable contribution.
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FWIW I found hanging out with kids to be surprisingly fun/less gross than it seemed at a distance.
It is hard to explain, but at least personally I am very clean and germophobic, while also being a stand off-ish introvert who finds most people to be boring. Still had a hell of a time playing with my little cousin and his snot covered Legos.
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Even earlier in France - probably due to declining authority of the Church.
Seems like revolution is still at fault.
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That was a special circumstance. Think about what was happening in the US immediately prior to said baby boom.
Hunters offload much of the hard work in hunting with their guns, dogs, traps, tools, tactics... Yet they still enjoy it. Travellers offload much of the hard work of travelling onto planes, hotels, travel books. Just because you want to have more of the best parts of an experience and less of the worst parts, it doesn't follow that you don't enjoy said experience.
I'm not a parent myself but I'm inclined to believe the many parents who say they did enjoy having children on balance.
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I used to think that. I was very, very wrong.
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On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.
I don't like self-reports either. If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.
Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.
I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.
Selection effects will eventually solve the fertility problem. We might see some shrinking generations in between, but we won’t go extinct.
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I feel like you've dodged my argument. I have mentioned neither Russians nor peasants, the trend of more religious / conservative people having more children than secular / progressive ones is clear as day. We don't have to go full Amish (although - yes, they do have even higher birth rates).
Revealed preferences show that many people think modern society is not worth reproducing.
Thankfully we also have the option of just not listening to you, rejecting your worldview and your values, and reproducing the way we used to.
No one's forcing you to return to anything, you're free to believe that and act accordingly, but I don't see what gives you the right to speak in the name of all of humanity. For me, I'll happily embrace a pre-modern existence if that's the only option, and will wholeheartedly oppose any Frankensteinian invention like artificial wombs. Technology is there to serve us, not to reshape us according to the wants of those who own it.
Even among conservatives and the religious, fertility rates have been falling for decades and are barely at replacement. Even Utah is now below replacement. Only full on parallel societies like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be robustly reproducing and likely to keep it up for the foreseeable future.
I didn't claim to speak in the name of all humanity.
Technology serves us precisely by extending the production possibilities frontier and allowing us to get away with stuff that we couldn't in prior generations. Like hypothetically, allowing for the fertility rates of the 18th century without having to readopt any of the social mores or taboos.
Is that based on entire states like Utah, or levels of religiously / conservatism of specific groups. There's been increasing apostasy, and it's not news to me, but it only proves my point.
Well, if you want us all to go extinct, if we fail to endorse your Brave New World utopia, you kinda are.
My point is there is no "us" here, or if there is, it's a group vehemently opposed to my interests. In theory the Internet enables "us" to talk, organize, share, on a never before heard of scale. In practice, these conversations, organizing, and sharing is shaped by "them", while "we" are hounded on every step. At least when it comes to the Internet, it's impacts are limited to the black box in my room / pocket, with artificial wombs you are giving "them" total control over who will have how many of what kind children. From there, the assumption that humanity will even remain recognizably human for very long strikes me as extremely naive.
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It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?
Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out. Like this bus driver in Japan.
Don't then. If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.
Women see pregnancy as hitting pause (and in some high-powered careers, halt or rewind) on their carreer progression for a couple of years. Unless they are in a very secure position with their mate, it is a scary prospect. An artificial womb would shorten that pause to the time spent taking care of the newborn before it can be sent to daycare, time which could be more equitably split with the father than the time being pregnant could.
It sounds like some kind of subscription child-rental business would be more appropriate if the idea is to have other people handle the birthing and then ship them to daycare. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
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Absolutely, which is why all the vapouring about abortion rights and abortion is health care and we must pass an amendment to the state constitution to make and keep abortion legal.
See above about abortion. It's easy to have babies, but a lot of people don't want to have babies and will try very hard not to have babies. If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.
I don’t think ‘I’m afraid of sex’ is the main reason fertility rates are dropping, I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.
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But why want babies?
People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few. Is the concern coming from business owners who need cheap (preferably teenage) labor for fast food restaurants or janitor positions that cannot immediately be automated? Is it because we need able-bodied workers for care jobs in nursing homes?
The solutions are robots and deregulation. Let's just make it legally clear that if you drop your elderly relative that you don't care enough about to look after yourself in some kind of hospital or managed home, they may just end up dead for no reasonable reason. You sign on this or you take them home and you deal with them yourself.
There. No more liability, no more costly trainings and procedures to avoid liability, no more staffing issues...
Let's give the unloved elderly the same level of respect we afford unloved pre-birth children.
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Apparently it is.
Most of the high fertility subgroups are subsidized by larger, less fertile society. Color me skeptical of the 'Amish/Haredim will inherit the earth' scenarios.
I'm a sperm donor, so I'll have some descendants running around.
So you care about the future state of fertility out of care for your descendants but you don't care enough to actually help raise them?
What other scenarios do you have?
People who don't have kids are not suddenly going to muster the courage to because Elon Musk came out with an artificial womb. Innovations in social engineering so that if you have a kid and they just up and die for whatever reason like you were too busy watching Youtube shorts then it's no big deal would go a longer way I suppose.
There was that one incident of some scientist woman who was too wrapped up in her stressful and important duties that she forgot to take out a young child out of a car and ended up losing it. This is probably what's keeping a lot of more-educated people out of parenting.
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