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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?
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 🤷‍♀️
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 won’t 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.
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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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