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For what it's worth, I buck the Motte comment trend that you observed. I am nearly 100% in favor of the sexual revolution and I believe that, by the standard of my preferences (both selfish: I like having casual sex, and altruistic: I want women to be free), it has been a rousing success.
The only criticism of the sexual revolution that has any weight, as far as I am concerned, is that it may have contributed to the declining fertility of the West. Not that I care about fertility itself - the only problem as far as I am concerned is that a society with extremely low fertility might eventually be outcompeted by societies with higher ones.
However, I believe that ways can probably be found to solve this problem that do not involve undoing the sexual revolution. And I believe that we should pursue them.
I think the sexual revolution actually added more weight to the problems of the sexually/romantically unsuccessful. Previously, if you weren't getting sex outside of marriage, well, nobody was (or at least they weren't supposed to be, and those who did were held up as objects of disapproval). So while you might be a loser, whether male or female, it wasn't shoved in your face quite as hard. Spinster aunt? Bachelor uncle? Maybe you couldn't manage to find a marriage partner, and that wasn't great, but it was respectable enough to be single (at a certain age).
Now? Everybody's having sex, wild exciting amazing sex. Or at least, that's what we're given to believe, even if it's not really true. So if you're not having sex, then you're a failure. And if you're having sex but it's boring ordinary sex instead of whatever the newest Position of the Week is (what do you think will be mainstreamed after heterosexual anal intercourse?), then you're a failure. If you don't have enough partners in your sexual history (as a man) or too many partners (as a woman), you're a failure.
Leaving aside HIV/AIDS, there also seem to be newer types of STIs rising up or becoming prevalent. Again, another risk you don't want to run.
So it all seems a dreadful lot of bother, but most humans seem to want it š¤·āāļø
We already know the answer to that: BDSM/fetishes, "ethical non-monogamy", analingus, camming, sugar babying, and transgenderism and its associated tumblrisms. The question is what's left? Pedos, furries, unironic incest, cyber relationships with chat apps, and the clickbait of people who want to either marry themself or their favourite inanimate object. The consistently conspicuous-by-its-absence taboo seems to be celibacy, which has become half a by-word for school shooting lone wolf terrorism.
Oh, whoring - sorry, I should say 'sex work' - like camming and sugar babying etc. are practically mainstream, doesn't everyone have an OnlyFans account? Poly is just old-fashioned harems with a twist for the neurotic (sorry, any poly people on here, but that's the impression I get from the fawning articles in the media about how Tasha and Jason and Philomel live in bliss with their various boy and girl friends and secondary partners and making it all work because they're so free-spirited and adventurous).
Incest? Maybe, although even with occasional sympathetic treatments in movies and books, that still seems to be a bridge too far for most people.
Furry? Mmmm - still a bit too niche and likely to be confused with bestiality, which again is still a bridge too far.
Pedos? I could see that, with all the spadework being done right now around MAPs. After all, if we say 16 year olds are old enough to decide to have sex, can we really say they should only have sex with other 16 year olds and not a 30 year old? And if 16 and 30 are acceptable, what about 14 and 30? Constant dripping wears away the stone, although I think the really hard stuff about "why yes I do want to fuck 6 year olds" will always be very, very difficult to slip under the radar.
Once again, dissident right hammering on "optimal fertility age" and "men consistently pick 18 when 18 is the lowest age on the poll" is conspicuously ignored, while Janet showing your teens sterile corporate memphis tab A into slot B material is evidence of them wokes laying the spadework. Never mind that the groupie rockstar culture is dead since the 90s and today is more like "you're not adult nor ready to have sex with adults until 25, and even then more than 5 years of age gap is ew".
The dissident right is a very small group of people on the internet. I wonāt say they have no influence, but they do have much less influence over the normie or trumpy Republican establishment than wokes have over the DNC. Even very conservative republicans mostly think teen marriage is an unfortunate but sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options scenario.
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That's what I mean, half of those are already mainstream or bordering on it and the other half are either radioactive or some form of retreat or exhile from the whole arena of sex and relationships.
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Some of these things are not like the others.
In particular, expecting celibacy to show up on the hedonic treadmill is kind of missing the point. But fetish culture delivers; chastity and edging surely have their own devoted subcultures, not to mention the fad of cuckoldry.
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Low fertility can destroy Western civilization through population aging as well. The idea that democracy is unworkable because the poor will vote to eat the rich turned out not to be true in practice, but the old voting to eat the young seems to be a live issue.
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I would be a lot more pro sexual revolution in a world that had artificial wombs than one that didn't. I feel that the sexual revolution happened about a hundred years before it's time and that it's biggest failure are happening because we don't have the technology yet to mitigate them. Much like how a car machanic is a useful job for society in 1950 but a useless one in 1750, the sexual revolution has certain "prerequisites" to work well that aren't satisfied by the society of today, but will probably be done so in the next century.
For an example I have pretty much nothing against the sexual hedonism in Brave New World, over there it's perfectly fine and a good thing for the citizenry.
I was going to say that high quality robot prostitutes would be a good move.
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Artificial wombs seem like they will have a near-null effect on fertility because people are hesitant about raising kids, not bearing them.
Plenty of women don't want the damage pregnancy does to the human body.
Given feminist biopolitics, "I don't to gestate a kid" is a more socially acceptable line than "I don't want to raise a kid" because it riffs on the idea of women controlling their own bodies - but raising a child from birth to young adulthood is harder than gestating them from conception to birth and this is common knowledge in our culture. Hell, even if you only count the nine months after birth, a newborn is harder work than a pregnancy and any mother will tell you this. But most women who say they don't want to gestate a kid wouldn't want to raise it either.
I have met a very small number of women whose identity is wrapped up in their hotness but who are not party girls (motherhood is incompatible with a party lifestyle) for whom artificial wombs would reduce their anxiety around losing their looks due to pregnancy leaving them willing to have children. But the great majority of childfree-by-choice PMC women's true rejection of motherhood is that the time and energy commitment would ruin either their competitive-but-not-well-paid-enough-to-hire-a-nanny career in arts/journalism/NGO bullshit etc. or their hedonistic lifestyle.
Artificial wombs make single fatherhood by choice as available as single motherhood by choice is now (likely impact on overall fertility negligible as not many men will sign up), but the main impact would be that they dramatically reduce the cost and risk of babymaking for older couples with fertility issues.
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With artificial wombs you can get the state to rear children and tax the populace to fund it. Plus, right now there is a massive shortage of children to adopt with waiting lists over a decade in many places, which suggests that there is a shortage of children without parents who want to take care of them (which is what is primarily produced by artificial wombs, but produced not that much by natural wombs).
The people who want to adopt them would probably stuff them in daycares and schools asap.
They can always volunteer in daycares and schools which are currently under-staffed if they have such a desire to take care of other people's children.
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I cannot agree. Artificial wombs presumably don't pop children out automatically: you have to intend to have a child, unlike many a case with natural wombs. I would assume fewer people would back out of children they intended to have and raise than currently do out of whatever the distribution is between planned babies, surprise babies and oops babies.
Why would it be any easier to get the state to raise your kid just because it wasn't gestated inside your body?
Presumably in this scenario the state could take donor eggs and sperm and have and raise kids itself, was the suggestion.
And children from state run institutions turn out pretty badly, I think.
There's definitely a selection effect of being the offspring of parents who relegate their kids to being wards of the state, and don't have family who can raise them.
Sure, but not everything is selection effect and there is nothing we know about institutional/foster care child rearing which doesnāt point to it being incredibly bad at parenting.
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I suppose sometimes you have to run before you're able to walk, if you want to move at all.
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There are known differences between sperm cells with an X chromosome and those with a Y chromosome (Y chromosome cells swim faster but X chromosome cells live longer if I remember correctly). You can very easily change the natal gender ratio if you come up with a procedure or something that selectively kills those sperm cells with a Y chromosome.
By doing this you can e.g. change the societal gender ratio to something like 2 women for every man, and at that point the replacement rate drops from 2 to 1.5 children per woman.
No artificial wombs even needed!
While it might be an appealing fantasy - yes! men will be so scarce that women will be fighting over getting to be my concubine, even if I'm not the highest quality man out there! - I think in reality it will be more like "instead of 2 women for every man, it will be 6 women for the handsome rich guy, no women for the average guy or 1 average woman, which he will bitch about because he expected to get a nymphomaniac supermodel in this Brave New World as he was promised".
This sort of surplus of women to men happens after wars, but post-First World War and post-Second World War seem to have had different outcomes; after the First World War, there was the generation of Surplus Women, and the British government set up emigration schemes to have unmarried women migrate to the colonies where there was an imbalance of excess men, but after the Second World War marriage and employment rates for women seem to have gone up.
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I suspect that idea is fully-automated-luxury-space-communism-complete. Post sexual revolution, women choose single motherhood over being a 30th-percentile man's first wife, so I don't think they will be lining up to be a median-quality man's second wife either. Someone is going to be subsidising all those single mothers, and it won't be the married mothers.
Citation needed. Most 30th percentile men end up paired off with 30th percentile woman, regardless of whether or not they marry. Single motherhood is by no means the choice of a majority of women in any place I'm aware of.
Looking at the US, Census report saying that 27% of children are involved in a child support claim. (This includes divorced and never-married parents) Fairly standard data showing 40% non-marital childbirth. (This includes unmarried cohabiting parents)
Essentially all single motherhood is a choice by the woman (women control fertility in jurisdictions with legal contraception and abortion, and file the vast majority of divorces where children are involved in all no-fault-divorce jurisdictions).
So I am comfortable that c. 30% of American women are choosing single motherhood. (Figures in Western Europe are slightly less, but not much). And anecdotally most of them are doing so due to the poor quality of the men available to them.
This is what happens when you get rid of male privilege, the boys just can't keep up, smh.
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While the data isn't quite the same as what you claim, the figures are higher than I expected myself. Thank you for providing them.
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