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Notes -
In last week’s thread, @greyenlightenment made the following observation regarding the evergreen subject of the sex recession:
It's interesting how some on the right has shifted from decrying how there is too much promiscuity (pre-2021 or so), to now from a trad-perspective decrying how young people are not having enough sex and lowered fertility rates.
As far as I can tell, this almost counts as a recurring theme among online leftists (not that I consider @greyenlightenment to be one in particular), one that serves as an ideological cudgel and also as a short cautionary tale with a “careful what you wish for” message. But I certainly don’t think it’s baseless, which is the other reason I think it merits more discussion here.
I happen to have vague memories of various conservative arguments I encountered after discovering Townhall and other similar right-wing sites in the early 2000s, and one thing they definitely liked to address regarding sexual mores was the embarrassingly high teenage pregnancy rate in the US. Well, I’m no sociologist but I suspect this statistical anomaly was and is(?) largely explained by the presence of large African-American and Latino ethnic minorities, plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control, but of course mainstream conservatives were not going to point that out, opting instead to use this as a lame argument against encroaching sexual licentiousness or something.
Other than this, I’d not say it was too much promiscuity as such that conservatives decried, to the extent they even bothered, but the apparent push to normalize and sanitize female promiscuity in pop culture. I specifically remember the 2004 romantic comedy The Girl Next Door, for example, because multiple conservative commentators pointed out that its depiction of a supposedly average porn actress living the dream without suffering any social or psychological consequences of her career choice is misleading at best. There was also Sex in the City as well, obviously.
Anyway, this was all a long time ago, and I only brought up these two off the top of my head to encourage others here to bring up similar memories of their own.
On a different note, I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest. After all, yes, surely they are happy to see teenage pregnancy rates and STD rates falling, for example, but they also surely never wanted any of this to happen as a consequence of social atomization and the overall atrophy of socializing itself, which is something that clearly contradicts conservative ideals.
Also, let’s not forget that teenage delinquency in general was generally seen as a big problem back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and not just by conservatives. Back then it was obviously very difficult to foresee a future where average parents actually wished that their teenage children went outside and hanged out at the park, the mall or the arcade.
That's just because there were way more of them than there are today. Teens in the '80s and '90s were on the falling edge of the mid-century TFR peak of 3.0, so that would have been about the time the older population was starting to get tired of them and decided to just ban them from everything... because that's what you're allowed to do to people that aren't actually human beings yet, right?
It was certainly a course-correction, to be sure, but one fraught with moral hazard. Which is kind of the inherent problem with dehumanization in the first place; as KulakRevolt once put it, a world not dominated by the laughter of obnoxious young boys is one dominated by the hatred of angry old people, and only one of those outlooks has any future.
I'm sure that explains part of it, but not all of it. Social change also reached a point where casual sex and drug use became largely normalized, there was a crack cocaine epidemic, video arcades and MTV appeared, parental supervision in general decreased.
I'm under the impression that parental (or in loco parents) supervision of children has been more or less steadily increasing since at least the 1930s, hence why kids are driven everywhere, parents get arrested for letting their teenage kids play in the park I'm unsupervised and "free range parenting" hads emerged as an effort to counter this insanity.
At what point do you think supervision decreased?
At the point, I assume, when it became normal to leave children to pacify themselves by watching TV, playing video games, hanging out in arcades and attending house parties. Them being driven everywhere, as I'm certain you'll agree, is largely a consequence of suburban white flight, and hardly a case of parental supervision.
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I'm going to repeat my question from the last thread: Who has actually switched? From my perspective it looks like one group of people (including me) wants less promiscuity while another group (not including me) is worried about the "sex recession". "The right" is far too broad a brush, big coalitions will inherently contain contradictions (see also: US Muslims and US Jews both supporting Democrats).
I think the phenomenon is fundamentally real, but I'd rephrase it as such:
20-40 years ago, average middle-aged people of conservative temperament were concerned that teenagers were hanging out together too much, drinking, playing in arcades, hanging out in malls and parks, being up to no good, getting tempted into casual sex by raunchy stuff they see on the TV.
Today, those same people, now elderly, plus currently middle-aged people of the same basic conservative temperament, are concerned that teenagers aren't getting outside enough, don't hang out together, don't hit on each other, don't form romantic relationships, don't even party and generally spend way too much time online.
Humans are fickle like that.
Or they want something in the middle? They want young people to date, get married, and start a family. They don't want them to have unprotected sex with tons of strangers, or to be isolated at home with no contact. That seems pretty reasonable...
Pretty much, yes.
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Who's one person who was contained in both groups? Like, I'm not discounting that some people might have shifted, but I honestly can't think of even one.
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Not…exactly?
Data from here.
Everyone’s numbers went down, and at inconsistent rates. I don’t think you can point to any one population. These stats are 15-19, which is probably dominated by young married couples, but I’m tired of formatting markdown tables. Suffice to say that the Hispanic 15-17 pregnancy rate probably changes the least, but it’s still going down 30% between the 90s and 00s.
Notice also that the overall US birth rate climbs until the 2008 crash. The teen trend just keeps going down, but older, more competent groups have an inflection point.
For what it’s worth, my experience in the very white, very Christian Midwest was that bored teenagers in small towns were absolutely getting hitched based on their first or second teenage relationship. And there are a lot of them. So I don’t have a hard time believing that there were a bunch of kids born to these couples.
I'm assuming the numbers are birth rates per 1000 people
Doesn't the data provide some evidence for Botond's point though? Black and Hispanic teen birth rates were raising the average to 30-50% above the white birth rate. It also doesn't break down the white population any further, so while his hunch about the "presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control" isn't proven, it isn't disproven either.
We'd have to consider what would have been an acceptable rate for the birth rate to not be an "embarrassingly high" number for the early 2000s. Birth rates for teens have been on the overall decline since 1955 except for a bump from 1986 to 1991 and minor bump from 2005 to 2007. (The source for their data is the same source you linked). I don't know exactly what the early 2000s conservatives were arguing regarding the birth rate being too high for teens, since it has been declining. My guess is they were considering mostly the black and Hispanic population, considering it's 2-3x the white teen birth rate. Their numbers in 1991 seem to put them close to the national average rate in 1955, and the numbers from 2002 to 1965. Since the overall rate has been declining for decades, the rate would be only embarrassingly high if it was much higher compared to other modern first-world nations, or if they were talking about a specific group. We'd also have to consider if they were thinking about specific areas of the United States, like cities versus rural areas or specific states.
What Botond didn't mention but probably meant was that the concern in the early 2000s was more about out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy than just teenage pregnancy. If you look at the source I linked earlier it shows that by the early 2000s, more than 75% of births for teenagers were to unmarried mothers, and that the percentage is even higher the younger the age of the mother. That number has only gone up since then. That being said, the total number of births to unmarried mothers has declined even if the percentage of births that are to unmarried mothers has increased.
Could be. I guess I was parsing “largely explained” as referring to totals, because the rates are definitely concentrated in black and Hispanic populations.
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The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.
A world in which men can fuck boys and don’t want to is such a perversion, too. Which is to say not at all. Pederasty and teen sex drive are far from the “focused drive” you’re lionizing.
I think somewhere deep down in the human subconscious M/F sex is understood as the most essentially (pro-)creative act, mirroring in kind other forms of great human achievement. Any other kind of sex (that carries no risk of impregnation) is anti-creative or a nullification of creativity (sort of like the black nothingness in The Neverending Story).
I don’t buy it.
There are so, so many examples of non-procreative sex lionized in the manner you describe. Ancient Greek practices are the first that come to mind. Conversely, rape does not usually get the same treatment, and rightly so. Do you think that an opportunistic rapist cares about the artistic, generative achievement of his conquest? Or is he more invested in the base stimulus?
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IIRC the teen pregnancies among rural southern whites tend to be intentional because teenage girls who think they’re in love make considered but still quite bad decisions, and shotgun weddings are accepted practice. This is ‘teenaged decision making skills combining with local cultural practices to create foreseen consequences ’, not an impulse control issue.
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Don’t forget, the primary decrying was of unwed teenage mothers, “girls who got knocked up” with no intention of “tying the knot”. Teenagers (read: high school minors) shouldn’t be having sex, goes the thinking, but if they do, it should be after a youthful marriage on their honeymoon, or for the conservative liberals of the time, at least in the context of a serious relationship, not just a casual form of recreation.
In pro-life communities, then to abort the proof of extramarital sex would compound the sin with a worse one; have the grandparents raise it as a miracle baby in their old age if the father won’t do the responsible thing. This was an era when divorce was still seen as an epidemic rather than the norm it has become, and a child’s birthday less than nine months from their parents’ wedding was still scandalous. Nowadays, with sex and marriage almost entirely decoupled (pardon the pun), it’s hard to remember the sociopolitical nuances from when they were intimately intwined.
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In the dissident circles I travel in, I've seen the phrase "sex positive traditionalist" as an alternative to both progressive sexual attitudes and to sex-negative conservative attitudes. The sex-positive-traditionalist would rather men and women not be promiscuous, we would rather see people only have sex in marriage and to have children. However, this view differs from the "purity culture" conservatives of the 00's. That culture -- especially the more wordly moderately conservative Christians and the more worldy Catholics -- told teens to wait until marriage but then put their kids on the college->grad school->career track at the expense of the marriage track. They would also encourage very long engagements. Following such a plan forced adherents to either be very sex negative, they would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion. Whereas a "sex positive traditionalist" would prioritize early marriage over going to college.
Specifically in terms of Catholic pastoral care, "sex positive traditionalism" would mean giving long-dating or cohabitating couples a shotgun marriage and telling them to go forth and make babies, rather than telling them to move out of the same apartment and live chastely for a year as they go through a lengthy "pre-cana" process.
The sex-positive-traditionalist is also very pro sex within marriage, believing in that there is moral an obligation to perform the "marital act", even when one spouse perhaps has not been feeling it for a few days. Whereas the contemporary progressive is horrified at the idea that a married woman be pressured into sex or have some obligation to give sex.
I just want to point out that long engagements, and overly long periods of dating, are not seen positively within catholic moral doctrine. ‘Sex negative traditionalism’ wasn’t rooted in the religion.
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And, moreover, it meant that conservative Christians had to regard their sexuality (not just sex, but also masturbation, thinking about sex, being attracted to someone etc.) as dangerous for a large chunk of their lives - in the case of Catholic priests or monks/nuns, their whole lives. That naturally attracts people who tend to be frightened, ashamed, or otherwise maladjusted with their sexuality. They won't be all of the community, but they'll be a big chunk of it.
This reached an extreme in some cases (I have a gay ex-Catholic monk friend and he said that being in the Catholic clergy was a never-ending banquet of repressed or de facto open lovers for him; it was very hard for him to come across a straight monk) but it's an issue even in Christian youth groups, unless they go heavily down the early marriage route to provide an outlet for divinely approved sexual urges. The well-adjusted evangelicals/devout Catholics that I knew growing up were all married by the time that they left university at 22, even if they didn't have children until later.
I should hope so!
Glad to see that someone got the innuendo!
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I laughed out loud on the train platform, thanks.
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This is more or less how I hope to raise my own children. It'd be nice if there was a catchier name though.
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