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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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A couple weeks ago I had an argument with people on here about the Sexual Revolution, and its terrible effects on society, or lack thereof. Just about everyone except me was in agreement that the SR was a bad thing.

My thoughts and responses to objections were scattered throughout the thread, so I decided to collect them and make a brief and incomplete case as to why the SR, and the social revolution of the 60s in general was not a bad thing, and most of its purported deleterious impacts are overstated, wrongly attributed, or nonexistent.

Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?

Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?

But suicide rates have also been rising in the US for a long time, so it’s fair to say people becoming unhappier is a real phenomenon. The trend is actually worst among young-ish adults. Here’s a tweet from middling right-wing e-celeb Indian Bronson blaming this trend on the usual right-wing bogeymen.

The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally.

It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US.

Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.

Suicide rates back this up. Over the same time period that suicide rates have spiked among Americans, especially American youth, they’ve declined in western Europe

It seems that everybody being atomized gay atheists hasn’t made Europeans more depressed or suicidal.

What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.

Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.

If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce, people being gay, and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves, so from a conservative perspective, the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one. But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.

When I have this argument elsewhere someone always hits me with “oh so you think everything is great, huh? You think this degenerate feminist deracinated hellscape we inhabit is a paradise, don’t you?” People on here are not generally that abrasive but anyway, no, I don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.

All good things should be going up by default, as technology advances and more wealth is created. There's supposed to be more and better food, art, housing, more leisure time and so on. If life expectancy is plateauing (declining in the US presumably due to COVID), if people are getting fatter and more depressed, if murder rates are rising... that's a bad sign.

If good things are actually going down despite material improvements, then we're faced with a pretty confronting set of explanations:

  1. Are we dealing with social/political problems that are so powerful that they can overcome increasing material prosperity?
  2. Was economic growth since the 1970s mostly accounting tricks? Is prosperity actually declining?
  3. Is modernity and technological civilization actually a bad thing?

Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining. If that's not a disaster, what is? IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility. Hundreds of millions never born and a declining civilization is bad enough to condemn the Sexual Revolution, putting everything else to one side.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-gender-equality-lower-fertility

IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering.

Are you for real?

There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.

How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/

What explains TFR declines beginning in the 18th and certainly early 19th century in some countries then?

I said there were other causes like urbanization above. Wars and the economic situation also have an impact. It's not a monocausal thing.

Industrialization driving humans out of the farms and into the cities and removing the competitive advantage of having lots of kids as free labor.

Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.

Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.

I'd actually say the 1920s (from a modern lens) had extremely low TFR, more than the numbers would suggest. If the US had a TFR of 2.3 (2.0 in the 1930s) and was 50% rural, and rural areas were bringing up that average, then TFR in urban areas would have had to be somewhere around current South Korean birthrates.

I think we are, socioeconomically, simply returning to those conditions (even though rural areas still have more kids these days, modern TFR is by and large functionally just urban TFR, but older TFR numbers very much aren't).

Man, the graph has been going down steadily for 200 years barring the post war bump.

Can you guess what it has gone down in inversed tandem with? It is not female labour participation.

The same thing goes for Japan. The fertility collapse predates liberalisation and workforce participation.

Also, why did Swedens ferility rate recover in the late 80s/90s and again in the 10s? I assure you that women didn't get less liberalised or educated, and it's not because of immigration either.

The status of women was advancing all throughout the 19th century in the US plus there are other factors involved.

The same thing goes for Japan. The fertility collapse predates liberalisation and workforce participation.

No it doesn't, go look at the graph. There's a brief fall due to the chaos of the Meiji Restoration then fertility goes back up. A fall with the Great Depression and WW2, as you (or at least I) would expect. Then it nose-dives after equality of the sexes is introduced. Same story in South Korea - static for decades under Japanese rule, then legal equality of the sexes, then straight down as the effects of that decision become clear. At the same time of course, South Korea is urbanizing. But it's not like urbanization started in 1950, that there was no urbanization from 1900-1950.

why did Swedens ferility rate recover in the late 80s/90s and again in the 10s?

At no point did I say that 100% of fertility was determined by female empowerment. There are other factors involved, the state of the economy, politics, cultural quirks and so on. What I am saying is that female empowerment lowers fertility. Speaking broadly, Sweden has empowered women and low, sub-replacement fertility, it's not a hole in my argument.

In 2022, the total fertility rate was close to the lowest observed, 1.52 children per woman.