If there’s one drum I’ve been beating for a minute now, it’s that I believe the pendulum with sexuality is going to swing, big time. And seriously, if you guys remember me for anything, have it be this.
Mark my words: Next financial crisis, we’re diving headlong into something that’s been simmering in the background since 2013-2014… sex negativity.
I believe these attitudes will be anchored in the middle and upper middle class, just like sex positivity is a middle/upper middle class issue. There are exceptions to this rule, but I mean in general.
Younger millennial women (b. 1992-1995) are going to be scrambling to have kids, but we’re also going to be hit with a cottage industry of Gen Z women advertising their “wisdom” vis-a-vis marriage/traditional gender norms.
Many of these women will be making it up as they go along, but others will come from coherent, intact cultures that exist adjacent to the mainstream. That is, women who feel that tension.
Likely not Mormons or Evangelical women because their media is for and by their own communities, and they also tend to work/go to university within their own communities. But possibly Jewish women, women of different diasporas—women who already know what it means to be part of a culture but are just out of touch enough to think following in the footsteps of what has always been expected of them is a form of rebellion because they’re caught between two worlds.
This is as much a problem of community as anything else. Eroded relationships have a lot to do with the fact that most middle and upper middle class people in the West lack any sort of identity, inclusion to a group they believe in in a real sense, and connections.
This will be as much a rebellion against the pod as it is anything else. People do not want to be atomized. They do not want to be neutered. Sex dolls are unsustainable. Nobody wants this dystopia. It WILL be painted as anti-tech but it is not necessarily “about” tech. THIS IS THE REAL CULTURE WAR.
Expect lawsuits against any and everything that contains endocrine disrupting chemicals and big, big scandals to start coming out. Many people will realize that as much as they want to rebel, they can’t rebel—there’s something wrong with them physiologically and it has everything to do with what’s in the water, what our mattresses are being made with, what’s in our food and clothes, etc.
Kiss your BBLs and fillers goodbye. Skepticism of obvious cosmetic surgery.
The complete and total death of the girl boss archetype.
People are going to rediscover the power of boundaries. You cannot define yourself against something forever, eventually your identity has to be rooted in the present tense, in what you are. To that end…
What I have been calling “reactionary childbearing” is going to become a thing—I’m not sure if this is net negative or net positive. It is going to be a trend to have kids earlier rather than later and more kids than these same people might have had they been born 10-15 years earlier. Again, remember I foresee this as being localized in the upper middle and middle classes, so it will feel like a form of rebellion. I am pro-natalist. When I use words like “reactionary” I am describing the mindset of the people engaging in these activities, rather than passing judgment on a specific behavior.
The lack of honesty surrounding all manner of sexual and gender issues, but particularly sex work, is going to bite us in the ass with an overcorrection. We are going to have a generation or more of women who feel incredible shame about their sexual histories and experiences. They may boomerang or they may stay the same and cope. But the “end the stigma” while silencing anyone who has anything negative to say? Great work! We’ve created a tinder box.
As I have been tracking on Twitter, women like ProfitFromTrauma will become more and more common. We have been lying and have been lied to about the realities of things like sex work.
More people are going to be open about romanticizing “wholesome” American cultures like LDS, Amish, etc. It is also about having a tradition to carry over, wisdom to bring from generation to generation.
Kiss the millennial obsession with getting as far away from your parents and family as possible goodbye! The more diaspora influencers we have who have real or imagined relationships with their extended family, the more mimetic this behavior will become.
New life will be breathed into traditional gender norms. The esoteric right wing lifter is not a sideshow attraction, it is a glimpse into something that is going to become a lot more common. Expect to see more people like Bronze Age Pervert (in the sense he encourages masculinity, not that he is “trad”). Teen Vogues will be replaced with more Evie Magazines.
Fertility tech will explode.
Who’s to say if Justin Murphy’s arranged marriage service will take off, but someone will do it. It’s not simply about bringing back matchmakers. It’s about reimagining traditional culture and refitting it for a modern audience.
It doesn’t matter what the truth is, or why things are the way they are or why things were the way they were. It’s not that trad LARPers will inherit the earth. It’s that they’re the canaries in the coal mine. This is a movement that’s been simmering for a long time now. The pot is about to boil over.
I have so much more to say about this, but I was going nuts keeping this all in. More to come…?
Now that it’s been a few years since you wrote this let’s look back on the predictions that were wrong, since the majority of your predictions were prescient.
2. Younger millennial women (b. 1992-1995) are going to be scrambling to have kids
&
9. What I have been calling “reactionary childbearing” is going to become a thing
This didn’t happen. Divorce rape is still a problem. I personally find marriage under U.S. law to be a non-starter, even to a foreign woman. I’m definitely not the only one.
13. Kiss the millennial obsession with getting as far away from your parents
Boomers are still horrible, they’re getting worse and still refuse to grow up. And their entitlement is getting more obnoxious.
12. [sorry out of order] romanticizing “wholesome” American cultures like LDS, Amish
Yeah… but LDS is kind of disappointing when you actually try to practice it. Very feminist and they took out polygamy which makes it much less appealing. I wouldn’t say this was “wrong,” more of a “maybe.” What do you think?
Bumble put up billboards begging women not to be celibate (and took them down after outrage). The 4B Movement (both in Asia and Stateside) and #DeCentering Men are working.
You describe Hell. If women are stupid enough to go back to the misery that we lived before feminism, then women deserve to become their husbands’ punching bags/ doormats like we were before.
It's unfortunate that what I perceive to be your own emotional baggage- as real and as painful as it is- is what is causing you to jump to asinine conclusions, taking it from 0 to 1000. It's almost as if there is a range of possibilities to a more modest future. Can you imagine a future where sexual boundaries are uplifted, men and women didn't have to sell their bodies for transacational attention, and *get this* where structures are in place to prevent domestic violence? Let us imagine and work towards it together
Sex negativity is definitely happening but not in the way this writer thinks it is. The 4B Movement and #De-Centering Men are what's having the dating apps scrambling to figure out "where all the women at?"
You must be illiterate if that was what all that you gleaned from this article.
Either way, seeing as you seem to be blindly opposed to practices conducive to forming healthy families, I hope you aren't counting on Social Security to pay out for your retirement in the future. With short-sighted ideologues like you running around, there aren't going to be enough young, economically productive tax payers born to keep paying into the ponzi scheme that keeps the old and infirm from perishing of the host of complex medical issues they are plagued by.
But hey, anything for some fleeting, momentary self-indulgence, eh?
Do you think Taylor marrying Travis will cause an uptick in matrimony? I read that somewhere online and found it to be an interesting take...especially when you consider how "hetero" he is.
I can't remember who but someone argued that she had transcended music and become a cultural symbol. So, if she married Travis (who is literally and figuratively a "man's man") it would mean something on a deeper level than the usual celebrity marriage because of what they both represented.
Idk! It's a stretch but the idea of her symbolizing something is interesting to me, even if the marriage argument isn't very sturdy.
Lol I had a similar thought, that after jumping around from man to man and exploring different romantic timelines she settled with the small-town Americana story. In a sense, going back to her roots. The" quarterback and the cheerleader" vibes. I can see it as a refreshing pattern that will subconsciously influence the choices of young girls who look up to her.
"Likely not Mormons or Evangelical women because their media is for and by their own communities, and they also tend to work/go to university within their own communities. But possibly Jewish women, women of different diasporas—women who already know what it means to be part of a culture but are just out of touch enough to think following in the footsteps of what has always been expected of them is a form of rebellion because they’re caught between two worlds."
--- Muslimahs are all over social media with their "hijab journey".
"It doesn’t matter what the truth is, or why things are the way they are or why things were the way they were. It’s not that trad LARPers will inherit the earth. It’s that they’re the canaries in the coal mine. This is a movement that’s been simmering for a long time now. The pot is about to boil over."
--- It will remain a subculture though. No many people are into corny "traditional" gender role stereotypes or even having kids (or can afford to do so).
I believe you're correct in that most people will by-far look primarily towards their own self-indulgence, and explicit pro-natal rhetoric will remain a periphery social development. You've even unintentionally hinted at a common issue nowadays with the common "can't afford kids" cope. It's only true in the sense that the two individuals starting a family nowadays tend to have several issues levelled against them:
A) They have unrealistic expectations of how much child-rearing truly costs, imo due to fear-mongering from the media.
B) Are unwilling to cut back on wholly unnecessary luxuries that they deem to be "needs" instead of wants; by extension, they project these 'needs' unto their hypothetical future children, and deduce that they wouldn't be able to comfortably afford them.
I don't know about selfish indulgence. All humans are selfish to some degree and people have children for selfish reasons so I don't accept this "selfish!' accusation levied at people who foregor having kids. There are many reasons why people may not have kids. Some people just don't have that desire, is one. Some think it's selfish to have them. Anyway it's their business.
You are correct, in that it's more nuanced. There are plenty of people who've only sired children due to their own sexual irresponsibility, or perhaps due to some misguided beliefs coupled with an utter lack of parenting skills.
However, when I refer to "selfish" people, what I refer to in particular is purely indulgent individuals who conduct their lives on a primarily reactionary basis. Those who tend to outsource much of their critical thinking faculties to third parties as a means of avoiding the burden of adult responsibility. An easy example would be people using climate change as a means of justifying their desire to remain childless. All without either bothering to look into the studies, or giving consideration to the fact that there are dozens of nations in which the fertility rate is north of 4, rendering their 'sacrifice' useless in the long term, and only deepening the unsustainability of the modern industrialized societies that they wholly take for granted.
It's one thing to not want to have children for a well established set of thought-out reasons. It's quite another to use vague, ill-defined, abstract periphery issues whose extent is undefined as an excuse to continue leading an unsustainable, consumerist lifestyle. I just think it's intellectually dishonest, and it bothers me that such people have the opportunity to plant the seeds of wilful juvenile ignorance in others who might be on the fence, for entirely different reasons.
It is certainly their own, individual business... for now, while the societal cost of keeping these people materialistically comfortable and employed in the service economy is affordable. Eventually, there won't be enough young, economically productive taxpayers around to be able to subsidize their existence once such people are old and infirm. Then it'll be a far different story as to whose business it is, once they are gripped with life-threatening ailments that need to be treated around the clock.
The bottom line for me is simply that there's a cost to everything, childbirth and lack thereof. I do not believe the majority of people today are informed as to the broad structural cost that comes with the latter choice. We're currently doing a great job of kicking the can down the road, but eventually, the end of the road will be reached. It doesn't seem that society will be adequately prepared to pay the piper once the realities of demographic collapse begin to bubble to the surface.
Don't mean to burden you with anything here, just wanted to elaborate on my thoughts.
".... as an excuse to continue leading an unsustainable, consumerist lifestyle. "
--- If they're leading a consumerist lifestyle as a single, just imagine the consumerism with kids!
The people using climate change as an "excuse" for not having kids simply don't want kids and feel they need to give a reason. Someone who really desires children isn't going to let climate change stop them.
Consumerism with children is not self-indulgent consumerism, it is a recurring investment in the continued existence of the industrialized society you benefit from.
No children, no future workers, no future market participants and taxpayers to subsidize your complex, industrialized medical system, let alone all the consumer items we take for granted otherwise. What do you think would occur if the old and sickly made up 30% of the population? Would it be possible to provide them the same standard of medical care we have today? Would it be possible if this situation was occurring in every modern industrialized nation? Obviously not, it would result in total demographic collapse.
It would, generally speaking, be in the average person's best long-term self interest to have at least two children. Many do not understand this, and will not understand it until the consequences impact their immediate material reality.
"The people using climate change as an "excuse" for not having kids simply don't want kids and feel they need to give a reason. Someone who really desires children isn't going to let climate change stop them."
>You are correct, that is essentially my point. It is dishonest, and perverts legitimate geological crises to serve one's own myopic, unsustainable interests.
"No children, no future workers, no future market participants and taxpayers to subsidize your complex, industrialized medical system, let alone all the consumer items we take for granted otherwise. "
Selfish. So people should have kids to serve consumerist markets?
This is all but a natural civilizatory reaction to the low birth rates of Western society ... Self-preservation when faced with the looming, existential threat a diminishing population ... When push comes to shove, no matter which wing of the political spectrum the Western man adheres to, he inherently thinks of the West as superior to other civilizations ...
That would be nice. As long as its our choice. And not forced on us. Which is what red states are doing. Even to the point of carrying around in bellies the deadums. But I dont believe in any new baby boom. Myself. Because of climate change. I am a liberal. Because I want freedom. Not be hung by my cunt by guys who run the churches. Also the transgender thing right now is huge, in the young, they are testing and exploiting who they are, or why they even want to be alive, on this frigging planet. I disagree. I think the young people want freedom and modern medicine. Tho I do think the birth rate is going to go up in red states. Thats fine, red states have empty spaces and houses to fill. But here out in blue lands, we are the world. My city is dynamic, charged, a diversity that represents the world. It is full and vibrant and glorious. That said, I love the mountains small towns in mountains just as much. I really do.
Sex is a choice with potential consequences, nothing is being forced upon women by red states except for 'responsibility'. Though I suppose that would be too much to ask for.
They're more than free to do as they please, until demographic collapse strips everyone of the unprecedented economic prosperity we've been living in thus far, with all the personal freedoms and opportunities that come with it It is then that people will learn to become pragmatic again, out of necessity.
We won't have to worry about that for a long time since migrants are currently taking up the jobs Americans refuse to do now. But yeah, at some point everything ends. That's the nature of reality. Nothing lasts forever.
not always. and the amount to which it is being applied has nothing to do with actual pregnancy experience. what pregnant women are going through in texas -- being forced to carry to term, regardless of the dangers. the way in which this being applied has nothing to do with reality of pregnancy. in missouri there were 6000 pregnancies by rape its estimated.... is that a choice, ohhhh its gods choice. not my god.
I read that women who have miscarried and getting sick are now being airlifted from red states to blue states to save their lives. I never dreamed my own country would ever hate women this much. I just can't understand it.
I concur, Ms. Dee. The last time the atmosphere was full of so many markers was the early 1980s, which was followed by the most recent previous wave of sex negativity, during which right-wing fundamentalists and left-wing feminists found common cause to declare the majority of heterosexual behavior evil -- even those proclaiming all heterosexual sex to be rape were taken relatively seriously.
The avalanche is headed our way, and, as you hint in what you've written, it will be driven not just by gravity but by the hordes of young women who've been hypnotized into believing that cash payouts and potential status are enough to justify trading in (a)(i) the potential of lifelong pair-bonding for (ii) what essentially amounts to irreversible public sex prostitution, and/or (b)(i) the blessing of parenthood locking one into the web of humanity for (ii) justifying feticide in the process of elevating convenience over connection. Some will make millions and some will have tremendous careers with which motherhood would have interfered, but most will just lose the lottery.
And, because we are fallible humans, collectively we're unlikely to come to the proper conclusions and will instead blame the correlations instead of the causations.
The most identifiable correlation will be sexuality itself.
Nah. The future is the 4B Movement. Bumble had to put up billboards begging women not to be celibate (and then take them down due to outrage). Women are de-centering men and it's hurting the dating industry's bottom line.
Best laugh of my day. The only future for anything like the 4B Movement will be the same one that awaited the Shakers: self-extinction.
Also, this and other feminist 'solutions' suffer from another ultimately fatal flaw. Until the world on which women depend figures it all out, they will get away with treating men as disposable, but without saying so they also expect men to continue to make the world run. Men and women are dependent on each other for sex and reproduction, but women are dependent (directly AND indirectly) on men for everything else.
Women pretend to be independent at their own individual and collective peril. As their generalized lack of appreciation for how dependent they are on men becomes sufficiently obvious to men, men are going to stop providing all the nonreciprocal husband chores that women simply couldn't provide for themselves and each other.
As someone who considers themselves progressive, if wildly out of step with what the current actual political organizations for someone like me look like, talk about, think like, I regularly have to lie down thinking about the debt to be paid off wracked up by 2007-2018 liberals.
Do not worry about THAT debt.... The fiat system is based on printing endless money which buys less and less actual goods and services (which are thus extracted from the productive people of all classes who make them) There is no trajectory other then a reset shuffle where those in the know do their best to grab as much real wealth as possible and most people go back to being poor.
I believe that the book "The Great Taking" elaborates on the specific economic realities, historical precedent(s), as well as particular, named legislative powers that would enable such a 'reset shuffle' that you describe on behalf and to the benefit of the managerial class.
God I hope we have some space for talking about the importance of slowness and presence in sex. Hopefully there will be a huge backlash against the porn industry too, especially hard-core stuff
While I agree with your sentiments, I unfortunately believe that pornography is one of those 'industries' that has enough of an institutional stranglehold to avoid being readily displaced, one way or another. Fundamentally, it's an extremely insidious industry that preys upon one of, if not the most basic human instinct, then warps it for it's own machinations, many of which have nothing to do with profit-seeking.
> Hopefully there will be a huge backlash against the porn industry too, especially hard-core stuff
How would that even work? I mean, even if you stop adults from filming themselves somehow & uploading it, there's got to be petabytes of data already produced. In any case, enough material to train whatever neural nets we want. Porn just won't be dependent on real human bodies anymore.
I'm not saying stop supply. Hopefully there will be a cultural movement around recognizing and treating porn addiction. The backlash must be from the demand side. Trying to do anything from the supply side would be futile like you said and against my values
The porn industry itself has gotta carry this weight. Horrid, abusive, debasing defilement has become the norm. Check out the 5-second preview ads to see where all of this is going. I will never find that category for my sons called 'Ways People Can Help Each Other Feel Great thru Sex.'
What about becoming a bhikkhu or bhikkhuni(meditator-male/female) as a lay practitioner(vipassana) or monk/nun (monastic) with foundation of sila(5/8/or more for monastics)precepts including (abstaining) from sexual misconduct(however one wants to define that-at any given moment)
I could not agree more, and when I was a single mom with 2 teen sons, I tried to instill in them that they don't want to get involved in casual sex either--they could fall in love with the wrong woman, who has no intention of fidelity, and sexually transmitted diseases aren't to be taken lightly. Their father, a man who I discovered ideated that he's a woman in 1992, when they were one and four, was no help whatsoever. I promoted the idea that sexual relationships are fuller and deeper if you go slow, and I was just not that cool mom. The Not Cool Mom was my identity after I told my husband that I'm not cool enough to stay with you through your "transition," after the two years of deceit.
I am very thankful for your voice, Ms. Dee.
Ute Heggen, author of In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse. 2022)
Who knew? Our sex lives and marriages are shaped by Federal Reserve policy and obscure chemicals in plastics. Lots of younger people have been misled and lied to.
Come the time, I will remember this article, Katherine. Thank you.
On the left I don't think there is sex-negativity per se, there are, however, beliefs about sex, power, and consent that as a consequence reduce sex because they make it, in practice, basically impossible to have sex in a way that upholds them.
I.e "enthusiastic consent" is so vaguely defined now nobody is sure what constitutes rape, which means everybody is afraid of a rape accusation, which means they have to be really sure that their partner won't make a rape accusation/believe themselves to be raped. This makes casual sex harder. Or even friendship sex. Also, there is this new awareness of power dynamics, and now the left doesn't seem to want them, like any relationship that is not between peers or that can be construed as having a power imbalance now has this taint of immorality.
However, life is complicated, and every relationship has some sort of power imbalance, which means every relationship becomes illicit! Or even worse, we have a de facto caste system for relationships. Only rich people can marry rich people, only smart can marry smart, etc.
This means everybody becomes ashamed about their relationships and casual sex again, just for different reasons. This is bad because now we can't use reason to talk about them in an intelligent way imho.
If you think about it, "enthusiastic consent" is actually quite pornographic in nature, fundamentally speaking. The idea essentially being that your partner --generally being the woman in particular in these scenarios-- has to look and sound like she 'wants it', explicitly and repeatedly so.
It's really quite a perverse and degrading standard to uphold someone to.
"The idea essentially being that your partner --generally being the woman in particular in these scenarios-- has to look and sound like she 'wants it', explicitly and repeatedly so."
People usually DO look and sound like they want it - when they actually do.
You're merely pointing out the problem. 'Looking like you want it' is not a quantifiable, definable metric. It differs between people, because everyone responds differently. There is no objective plurality in response to sexual pleasure that can be used as a baseline. "When they actually do", on the other hand, is definable. It is simply one consenting to sex.
Those who believe in "enthusiastic consent" objectify women as pornographic objects, because how else are you supposed to show enthusiastic consent if not through a pornographic caricature? It's repulsive, and strips people of personal authentic expression.
You're only proving my point by crudely insulting me. It's quite sad how you're unable to conceive of pornography in an abstract, philosophical manner.
Either show an objective measure of what it means to 'want it', or don't bother replying to me. You obviously cannot, since no such standard exists that applies to all people.
Everyone enjoys sex in their own way, so-called "enthusiastic consent" forces women to behave in a particular, inauthentic manner that objectifies them. You consent to sex initially, and request to "stop" if it becomes uncomfortable or undesirable. Everything in between is up to the individual.
I don't want to argue about this at this moment. I just want to put a consideration in your head; it is one based on a 69-year lifetime that includes having spent the middle half of it as a leftist: sex-negativity is PREDOMINANTLY a leftist activity. Don't argue against this; just sit with it, and see if you don't start to notice it everywhere, because it's just under the surface of loud promotion of superficial hedonism intended to prevent proper pair-bonding that is less susceptible to extrinsic control from centralized entities.
there's also the Western reality created by sexuality functioning as an existential framework. it's a flimsy house of cards (at best) backed by billions of dollars and a lot of cultural peer pressure. imo, this will reach its limit relatively soon and either go down in a rainbow blaze of glory or vanish in a rainbow puff of smoke.
A return to beehive hair-dos, gas-guzzling muscle cars, and analog AM-FM radios therein. Working my 2016 car's audio system required me to sign up for technical training. Car audio, not to speak of sex, shouldn't be this hard.
I've mused for many decades that arranged marriages are not such a bad idea. I think that making the decision about who to spend THE REST OF YOUR LIFE with should not be made while in a hormone/ endorphin induced haze.
To be serious for a moment: my father used to say that to me. The next closest thing, my dad said, is, not to have a matchmaker, but to think like one. The next closest thing after that is meeting someone in a community you're already in. That means there's a congruence of values and backgrounds.
More sex negative than today?! Please no! I'm astonished on a regular basis that this prissy little Western culture imagines itself to be 'sexually enlightened'. I suspect we're more relaxed about sex than during the Victorian age, but I still can't walk into a room of my dearest friends and just start talking out of the clear blue sky about my last masturbation session, or my first threesome. My dearest friends! Unlike any other ordinary human experience, it's still strangely taboo to talk openly about ordinary sexual experiences, never mind the really racy stuff. Help!
It has less to do with people being prissy and prudish, and more to do with you being obnoxious, crude, and sorely lacking in the level of self-awareness required to read the room.
I mean, if my roommate walked into my room and started talking about the massive deuce they just dropped in the shared bathroom, I would be pretty disgusted by it. Just because a biological function or need is common doesn't mean I want to or need to hear about it.
Those that refuse to have children will, when they are old, have no one to advocate for them when grifters try to hustle them and the State brings the final, unwelcome, jab.
I think a lot of people take Social Security for granted. They're going to be in for the surprise of their lives once their current societal material reality dictates that the state can no longer continue to subsidize the continued existence of the old and unproductive.
Social Security exists in the first place because it's demographically affordable... for now. The state cannot continue to subsidize economic welfare towards unproductive, medically compromised demographics if there aren't enough current and future productive workers being born and properly raised to feed the scheme in the first place through their participation in the workforce.
As it happens, they wouldn't necessarily be wrong to "gut" it, either. Those who believe the US armed forces budget is overly inflated should have a gander at how much the federal government spends on civil entitlements, Medicare being an example. Whatever sum the military receives for maintenance and expansion pales in comparison to welfare spending, which itself is overwhelmingly the reason for which the US finds itself in endless deficit spending, now and for the foreseeable future.
One can either gut entitlements, or raise taxation to an absurd level. Either way, it's currently economically unsustainable.
I don't see how foreign aid is particularly relevant, however Israel, relatively speaking, receives a significant bit of subsidization on a recurring annual basis.
I would argue it could be far better spent domestically, the government is far too 'generous' to the Israelis (although, that would imply they have any autonomy to make decisions in this regard in the first place; they don't).
This is the cost of the most powerful lobby in Washington being the Jewish ethno-centric lobby, by far. That is a reality of contemporary American politics.
Nothings going to "collapse" in any of our lifetimes. Of course at some point all civilizations die. That's the nature of reality. Nothing lasts forever. Get over it.
Correct and succinct analysis. Most people need to touch the stove to learn that it's hot. That's the price of taking unprecedented comfort, luxury, and opportunity for granted.
I find this persuasive but think egalitarian moralism will play a greater role in mediating these dissatisfactions than maybe you give it here in these notes. Sex positivity flew in on the wings of egalitarian resentment at traditional constraints on desire, and the backlash so far, or the part of it that comes from the center to the left, is likewise filtered through that lens. (Sex positivity is bad because of misogyny and patriarchy, they say, not because of any psychological need for boundaries and connection that might smack of the old limits.) There can only be one villain, and that's perceived hierarchy. People will live with increasing trauma before they question this. The symptoms that you predict (the trad rebirth and the lurch toward new old community) fall in line with existing movements on the right, including some unfortunate ones (integral illiberalism among a few, a glib indifference to "classic" liberal norms more generally). On the left, the search for community has already taken the form of partisan solidarity, including various attempts at allyship, which is seen by pretty much everyone as transparently vicarious and suspect. That this is unsatisfying can be seen in the degree to which indignation is pursued as an opiate. On the left, the pot boiling over is probably going to mean a more intense search for systemic evils. The backlash on the left runs counter to the backlash on the right, so the culture war as currently understood is likely to remain the mask for the deeper troubles you've put your finger on. And it means that one side effect will be increasingly dangerous political polarization. At the heart of all this unhappiness, IMHO, is not only sexual psychology but a fundamental tension between the cosmopolitanism of liberalism and the longing for community, for which there is no resolution, only management. Have you read Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind? His brush strokes are broad sometimes but it has some good lines on all this.
I want to be clear though that I think your writing on this is incredibly timely and valuable, and I'm really looking forward to reading to what you have to say. Just adding my $.02
A lot of this reaction will come from the failures of the current sex-positivity movements. Millennials that have bought intro his movement have developed serious mental health issues and are craving stability. Some will get it from the sources you mention, but others won’t be able to stomach such a shift and will simply become increasingly dysfunctional. Look for a rise in homelessness, addiction, and incarceration as a result.
I love my parents. But they didn't give me many boxes to fit into. I think that's a really high skill cap way to play the game of life. I'm not sure how well it worked for my brother that is 30 and lives at home.
I'm grateful for thinking freely, and had a phenomenal education, but there's a total lack of community and shared values. I did learn to be kind, and while I'd like to want to have children, I really don't. My partner doesn't either. I think it has more to do with not wanting to fuck up than anything else. Navigating a LTR in this age is so difficult.
I wish I thought you were wrong. Mix up the details sure but social justice is being fueled by guilt and convenience, not truly radical compassion. So much hatefulness veiled in the allyship (I hate that word).
The idea that people belong to one larger, human box, has kind of been lost. So tribalism it is.
I really like my folks. If I had kids I'd totally want them around. Maybe even in the same neighborhood, but I think they're less neurotic than most.
I waited until i was 29 to reproduce, glad i waited. Financially more stable, emotionally more willing to put his needs first. People will have children just because it feels like a proper next step logically, but it may just be a month you didnt have the car payment you expected and feel rich.
It's a matter of waiting for when you're more stable and ready, but also of not letting that period in your life fly by with ridiculous distractions. Here's the real problem with our post-modern life.
A world without sex work would lead to more violence and stupidity on the part of some men. If you don't like the term sex work you can say "sex surrogates", but there probably does need to be a vehicle for "incels" and adulterers to get their fix in an easy and safe way.
But that seems a bad thing, to me. It's like you said with your old piece on Onlyfans, it shouldn't be treated as something any woman can and should do to make some money. But normalizing it in the sense of making it an institution instead of criminal is better for everyone, I think. I disagree with libertarians a lot, the problem with synthetic chemicals you mentioned can be laid at their feet more than anyone else's, but I think the libertarian perspective on sex work is probably pretty accurate. It would need to be more regulated than they would probably want it to be, but if it's legal there's more of a chance of protecting the women involved. Also, I think maybe it would help the incel types be less screwed up if there was somewhere they could learn more about sex, though of course it won't help them with being socially awkward. Anyway, apologies for the long message, but I wanted to clarify what I was trying to say. "ProfitFromTrauma" seems to be downright Dworkin-esque in her view of sex work, and I'm not sure that perspective is a positive one in any sense.
I see what you're saying and appreciate your perspective, however these are predictions not judgments.
My personal opinion is that it we should do what we can to de-glamorize sex work while still creating space for outliers (e.g. Aella), who do thrive in that environment, to fill a necessary and tricky role. I don't think what we have now is working, and I don't think the reaction is going to be much better.
Yeah, I agree it shouldn't be glamorized. I think that's a problem with a lot of things in our culture these days, that instead of simply being compassionate and empathetic to everyone, we treat being "different" as a cool, interesting thing so young people try to adopt that in some way for clout. Sometimes "normie" behavior has become that because it does work best for most people, and our current cultural milieu(excuse the pretentiousness) valorizes and glamorizes being counter to that too much.
I dunno. We've been through worse as far as environmental contaminants go. I'm more of the belief that low mortality rates and having children at older ages would be more likely to cause lower sperm counts, etc. The Romans made drinks in lead pots because the lead gave it a nice taste. About a century ago we had dirty factories and no concept of health or safety regs. In China and India its bad and that contributes a lot. Our consumption habits and microplastics can't be great though.
I am of the opinion that it is our low fat high carb diets that make us more vulnerable to environmental hormone pollution. Healthy animal fats are necessary for building the cholesterol we need to have healthy hormone levels. When we take away fats, we reduce our natural levels, that makes us more vulnerable to hormones from the environment, which leads to hormonal confusion.
While spiteful mutant theory (the name given by Dr Edward Dutton to explain biological degeneration due to lower mortality rates since the industrial revolution) could indeed account for a lot of the fall in sperm counts and other fertility problems, environmental endocrine disruption still plays a significant role behind things like the transgender craze. A lot of people experiencing gender dysphoria would probably benefit more from hormone supplimentation rather than cross sex hormone replacement. Unfortunately in many places, such as Illinois, it is easier for a male to be prescribed estrogen than testosterone.
This may contain some truth for some trans people, but why call it a craze if it does? There’s no point in estranging or punishing people who are either happy as they are (with an impulse to transition) or happy as they can be with a therapy. Similarly, being disrespectful would push more people away from having contact with other medical or social supports they may benefit from.
There would be nothing wrong with adding same-sex HRT to a list of common treatments for people found to need and desire it if this theory were to hold, but why enforce that there’s a right or wrong way to live for the small minority of people who are seriously affected by the issue you’re identifying?
I think there will be a backlash of some sort. It's hard to know what it will look like. People having kids younger seems unlikely as the economy is bad and no one wants to start a family while still living with their own parents.
My guess is that the backlash against "sex positivity" and the growth of the Latino community will end up happening at roughly the same time and we'll see a lot more Latin culture going mainstream. (which is fine for me, I'm not a Trumpist.)
DF restricted her analysis to the UMC and MC (I think it'll be a UMC one moreso than even MC) so economic factors will be less salient to this group.
This has been commented on in anon 'mommy blog' forums like DC Urban Moms where once in a while you'll see posts pop up about truly wealthy Catholic Gen Z women from the DC area (think the kavanaugh set) are marrying and having kids earlier than the previous generation.
In this decade, you'll see that mindset flow from the truly wealthy to the 'dream hoarders' (coined by Richard reeves) class IMO.
as for the lower 80% of society, I'm not sure what will occur
I find this all very fascinating and think you may be proven right, to some extent. However, I feel like the term “sex negativity” always has a lot to unpack. From what I’ve seen, those who promote sex positivity these days often do so only nominally. They claim to be positive but their entire affect surrounding sex is contrary to that. They focus on assault, bad dates, sexual dissatisfaction, etc. Their views on relationships (at least hetero) are super cynical. So it seems we’ve already had sex negativity for a while now, though maybe not the kind you discuss here.
I'm hopeful the pendulum will swing back toward tradition in education, as well. More parents seem to be homeschooling or finding charter schools. There is some truly bonkers stuff being taught (telling preschoolers to disavow their whiteness, etc.) which will probably contribute to the coming reversal. This matters to me since I work in education and see how bad even straight-A students at renowned private schools can be at basic skills like reading, writing, and critical thinking.
Homeschooling, unschooling, charter schools, charter cities-- all of these are going to become more widespread until we live in a libertarian hellscape. Not to be so negative!
Interracial relationships, or more specifically white female black male relationships, are significantly more prone to domestic violence than traditional cisracial relationships for either race.
Probably interracial couples or their children thereof will kind of band together as minorities and start dating more amongst one another. In South Africa, they've kind of compartmentalized in this way where it's Black, White, and 'Coloureds' (as they refer to themselves). This is already kind of happening with Hapas. Hapas are happening.
Everywhere there is significant black-white interracial dating there is much AIDS. Seth Efrika and American South are good examples of this phenomenon.
You make many good points. In addition to your idea about Catholics and the suggestion from the other commenter that people from Asian and Jewish backgrounds could successfully have interracial relationships with some "trad" leanings, I think that conservative Protestants could do the same. Evangelicalism is increasingly popular in Latin America. Many Koreans are also Protestant, and I presume they have a conservative bent. Black churches may not be as popular as they once were, and there were historic fault lines between black and white Protestants, but I could see a Zoomer raised in a black church dating an evangelical of another race.
On the racial fault lines in Evangelical churches, the racialism is built in, not exclusively a product of racism, in baptists. There are exclusively Korean, Hmong and mestizo/Mexican baptist churches, which are centered around and will only accept members of a certain race. This informed (and still does) much of the anti-miscegenation of black baptists, who supported anti-race mixing laws as or more strongly than whites, which is why it took a Supreme Court decision to end them; popular support was firmly in favor of the laws across all races in baptist-dominated areas. It’s an interpretation of Old Testament with the tribes of Judea needing to remain separate and unmixed and transferring this into the universality of Christianity to mean tribes=races.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I was raised Catholic, and my childhood church had members of many races as well as families with parents of different races, so churches that sharply divided by race are a bit foreign to me.
I live in a Catholic dominated area of the South. We have separate majority white/black Catholic Churches. These are a holdover from segregation laws but anyone is free to visit either, and they do (I have attended both). The have the same mass of course but different songs, traditions, and congregations. Forcibly merging them into a watered-down (bi-directionally) monoculture would seem destructive to me. Culture breeds in isolation, regardless of the source.
These are great points. Surprisingly, the only church I have attended which has members of all races together is LDS. Otherwise there is some self-selection as you mentioned.
These are all great questions & frankly things I believe will remain blindspots. DV is one close to my heart and I often encourage feminists to remember it. It’s very telling how far removed from reality feminism has come that dv is an afterthought for many
Sorry, just to clarify, I see both predictions above as valid but a lot of the current discourse (don’t get married early, don’t have kids early or you’re trapped) seems to have swung so far in one direction that one doesn’t necessarily need to be trad of Catholic to take an approach that counters this
Just wanted to chime in that this may not necessarily come to pass. I’m first-gen Asian-American, my partner is Jewish, and we’re both secular but have more “traditional” views about family (having lots of kids, no nursing homes, no inappropriate shows for kids). I think Default Friend is right but a backlash against current views on sex/family doesn’t *necesarily* have to tie into ethnocentrism or religion, although it of course could
Reform Jewish, East Asian, and Indian diaspora cultures in the west or all intents in purposes in 2021 aren't really split apart. It's all part of 'triple package cultures' as defined by Amy Chua. Under DF's rubrik, I don't see a receding of these three to go back into strict endogamy in the US.
Wow no mention of a revolt against the pornification of your kids.
Now that it’s been a few years since you wrote this let’s look back on the predictions that were wrong, since the majority of your predictions were prescient.
2. Younger millennial women (b. 1992-1995) are going to be scrambling to have kids
&
9. What I have been calling “reactionary childbearing” is going to become a thing
This didn’t happen. Divorce rape is still a problem. I personally find marriage under U.S. law to be a non-starter, even to a foreign woman. I’m definitely not the only one.
13. Kiss the millennial obsession with getting as far away from your parents
Boomers are still horrible, they’re getting worse and still refuse to grow up. And their entitlement is getting more obnoxious.
12. [sorry out of order] romanticizing “wholesome” American cultures like LDS, Amish
Yeah… but LDS is kind of disappointing when you actually try to practice it. Very feminist and they took out polygamy which makes it much less appealing. I wouldn’t say this was “wrong,” more of a “maybe.” What do you think?
Bumble put up billboards begging women not to be celibate (and took them down after outrage). The 4B Movement (both in Asia and Stateside) and #DeCentering Men are working.
You describe Hell. If women are stupid enough to go back to the misery that we lived before feminism, then women deserve to become their husbands’ punching bags/ doormats like we were before.
It's unfortunate that what I perceive to be your own emotional baggage- as real and as painful as it is- is what is causing you to jump to asinine conclusions, taking it from 0 to 1000. It's almost as if there is a range of possibilities to a more modest future. Can you imagine a future where sexual boundaries are uplifted, men and women didn't have to sell their bodies for transacational attention, and *get this* where structures are in place to prevent domestic violence? Let us imagine and work towards it together
Sex negativity is definitely happening but not in the way this writer thinks it is. The 4B Movement and #De-Centering Men are what's having the dating apps scrambling to figure out "where all the women at?"
You must be illiterate if that was what all that you gleaned from this article.
Either way, seeing as you seem to be blindly opposed to practices conducive to forming healthy families, I hope you aren't counting on Social Security to pay out for your retirement in the future. With short-sighted ideologues like you running around, there aren't going to be enough young, economically productive tax payers born to keep paying into the ponzi scheme that keeps the old and infirm from perishing of the host of complex medical issues they are plagued by.
But hey, anything for some fleeting, momentary self-indulgence, eh?
Do you think Taylor marrying Travis will cause an uptick in matrimony? I read that somewhere online and found it to be an interesting take...especially when you consider how "hetero" he is.
Nah. It's unclear to me why people think that
I can't remember who but someone argued that she had transcended music and become a cultural symbol. So, if she married Travis (who is literally and figuratively a "man's man") it would mean something on a deeper level than the usual celebrity marriage because of what they both represented.
Idk! It's a stretch but the idea of her symbolizing something is interesting to me, even if the marriage argument isn't very sturdy.
Lol I had a similar thought, that after jumping around from man to man and exploring different romantic timelines she settled with the small-town Americana story. In a sense, going back to her roots. The" quarterback and the cheerleader" vibes. I can see it as a refreshing pattern that will subconsciously influence the choices of young girls who look up to her.
Exactly, Raymond! In essence, she's potentially going to embody her older songs, which I think is interesting on many different levels.
Please tell me that thumbnail was specifically the Mario 2 cherries.
I’m an aesthetic nightmare
I hope one day people realize this was the real / first vibe shift prediction piece …
"Likely not Mormons or Evangelical women because their media is for and by their own communities, and they also tend to work/go to university within their own communities. But possibly Jewish women, women of different diasporas—women who already know what it means to be part of a culture but are just out of touch enough to think following in the footsteps of what has always been expected of them is a form of rebellion because they’re caught between two worlds."
--- Muslimahs are all over social media with their "hijab journey".
"It doesn’t matter what the truth is, or why things are the way they are or why things were the way they were. It’s not that trad LARPers will inherit the earth. It’s that they’re the canaries in the coal mine. This is a movement that’s been simmering for a long time now. The pot is about to boil over."
--- It will remain a subculture though. No many people are into corny "traditional" gender role stereotypes or even having kids (or can afford to do so).
I believe you're correct in that most people will by-far look primarily towards their own self-indulgence, and explicit pro-natal rhetoric will remain a periphery social development. You've even unintentionally hinted at a common issue nowadays with the common "can't afford kids" cope. It's only true in the sense that the two individuals starting a family nowadays tend to have several issues levelled against them:
A) They have unrealistic expectations of how much child-rearing truly costs, imo due to fear-mongering from the media.
B) Are unwilling to cut back on wholly unnecessary luxuries that they deem to be "needs" instead of wants; by extension, they project these 'needs' unto their hypothetical future children, and deduce that they wouldn't be able to comfortably afford them.
I don't know about selfish indulgence. All humans are selfish to some degree and people have children for selfish reasons so I don't accept this "selfish!' accusation levied at people who foregor having kids. There are many reasons why people may not have kids. Some people just don't have that desire, is one. Some think it's selfish to have them. Anyway it's their business.
You are correct, in that it's more nuanced. There are plenty of people who've only sired children due to their own sexual irresponsibility, or perhaps due to some misguided beliefs coupled with an utter lack of parenting skills.
However, when I refer to "selfish" people, what I refer to in particular is purely indulgent individuals who conduct their lives on a primarily reactionary basis. Those who tend to outsource much of their critical thinking faculties to third parties as a means of avoiding the burden of adult responsibility. An easy example would be people using climate change as a means of justifying their desire to remain childless. All without either bothering to look into the studies, or giving consideration to the fact that there are dozens of nations in which the fertility rate is north of 4, rendering their 'sacrifice' useless in the long term, and only deepening the unsustainability of the modern industrialized societies that they wholly take for granted.
It's one thing to not want to have children for a well established set of thought-out reasons. It's quite another to use vague, ill-defined, abstract periphery issues whose extent is undefined as an excuse to continue leading an unsustainable, consumerist lifestyle. I just think it's intellectually dishonest, and it bothers me that such people have the opportunity to plant the seeds of wilful juvenile ignorance in others who might be on the fence, for entirely different reasons.
It is certainly their own, individual business... for now, while the societal cost of keeping these people materialistically comfortable and employed in the service economy is affordable. Eventually, there won't be enough young, economically productive taxpayers around to be able to subsidize their existence once such people are old and infirm. Then it'll be a far different story as to whose business it is, once they are gripped with life-threatening ailments that need to be treated around the clock.
The bottom line for me is simply that there's a cost to everything, childbirth and lack thereof. I do not believe the majority of people today are informed as to the broad structural cost that comes with the latter choice. We're currently doing a great job of kicking the can down the road, but eventually, the end of the road will be reached. It doesn't seem that society will be adequately prepared to pay the piper once the realities of demographic collapse begin to bubble to the surface.
Don't mean to burden you with anything here, just wanted to elaborate on my thoughts.
".... as an excuse to continue leading an unsustainable, consumerist lifestyle. "
--- If they're leading a consumerist lifestyle as a single, just imagine the consumerism with kids!
The people using climate change as an "excuse" for not having kids simply don't want kids and feel they need to give a reason. Someone who really desires children isn't going to let climate change stop them.
Consumerism with children is not self-indulgent consumerism, it is a recurring investment in the continued existence of the industrialized society you benefit from.
No children, no future workers, no future market participants and taxpayers to subsidize your complex, industrialized medical system, let alone all the consumer items we take for granted otherwise. What do you think would occur if the old and sickly made up 30% of the population? Would it be possible to provide them the same standard of medical care we have today? Would it be possible if this situation was occurring in every modern industrialized nation? Obviously not, it would result in total demographic collapse.
It would, generally speaking, be in the average person's best long-term self interest to have at least two children. Many do not understand this, and will not understand it until the consequences impact their immediate material reality.
"The people using climate change as an "excuse" for not having kids simply don't want kids and feel they need to give a reason. Someone who really desires children isn't going to let climate change stop them."
>You are correct, that is essentially my point. It is dishonest, and perverts legitimate geological crises to serve one's own myopic, unsustainable interests.
"No children, no future workers, no future market participants and taxpayers to subsidize your complex, industrialized medical system, let alone all the consumer items we take for granted otherwise. "
Selfish. So people should have kids to serve consumerist markets?
This is all but a natural civilizatory reaction to the low birth rates of Western society ... Self-preservation when faced with the looming, existential threat a diminishing population ... When push comes to shove, no matter which wing of the political spectrum the Western man adheres to, he inherently thinks of the West as superior to other civilizations ...
That would be nice. As long as its our choice. And not forced on us. Which is what red states are doing. Even to the point of carrying around in bellies the deadums. But I dont believe in any new baby boom. Myself. Because of climate change. I am a liberal. Because I want freedom. Not be hung by my cunt by guys who run the churches. Also the transgender thing right now is huge, in the young, they are testing and exploiting who they are, or why they even want to be alive, on this frigging planet. I disagree. I think the young people want freedom and modern medicine. Tho I do think the birth rate is going to go up in red states. Thats fine, red states have empty spaces and houses to fill. But here out in blue lands, we are the world. My city is dynamic, charged, a diversity that represents the world. It is full and vibrant and glorious. That said, I love the mountains small towns in mountains just as much. I really do.
Sex is a choice with potential consequences, nothing is being forced upon women by red states except for 'responsibility'. Though I suppose that would be too much to ask for.
More and more women are choosing the 4B Movement and #DeCentering Men
They're more than free to do as they please, until demographic collapse strips everyone of the unprecedented economic prosperity we've been living in thus far, with all the personal freedoms and opportunities that come with it It is then that people will learn to become pragmatic again, out of necessity.
We won't have to worry about that for a long time since migrants are currently taking up the jobs Americans refuse to do now. But yeah, at some point everything ends. That's the nature of reality. Nothing lasts forever.
not always. and the amount to which it is being applied has nothing to do with actual pregnancy experience. what pregnant women are going through in texas -- being forced to carry to term, regardless of the dangers. the way in which this being applied has nothing to do with reality of pregnancy. in missouri there were 6000 pregnancies by rape its estimated.... is that a choice, ohhhh its gods choice. not my god.
I read that women who have miscarried and getting sick are now being airlifted from red states to blue states to save their lives. I never dreamed my own country would ever hate women this much. I just can't understand it.
I concur, Ms. Dee. The last time the atmosphere was full of so many markers was the early 1980s, which was followed by the most recent previous wave of sex negativity, during which right-wing fundamentalists and left-wing feminists found common cause to declare the majority of heterosexual behavior evil -- even those proclaiming all heterosexual sex to be rape were taken relatively seriously.
The avalanche is headed our way, and, as you hint in what you've written, it will be driven not just by gravity but by the hordes of young women who've been hypnotized into believing that cash payouts and potential status are enough to justify trading in (a)(i) the potential of lifelong pair-bonding for (ii) what essentially amounts to irreversible public sex prostitution, and/or (b)(i) the blessing of parenthood locking one into the web of humanity for (ii) justifying feticide in the process of elevating convenience over connection. Some will make millions and some will have tremendous careers with which motherhood would have interfered, but most will just lose the lottery.
And, because we are fallible humans, collectively we're unlikely to come to the proper conclusions and will instead blame the correlations instead of the causations.
The most identifiable correlation will be sexuality itself.
Nah. The future is the 4B Movement. Bumble had to put up billboards begging women not to be celibate (and then take them down due to outrage). Women are de-centering men and it's hurting the dating industry's bottom line.
Best laugh of my day. The only future for anything like the 4B Movement will be the same one that awaited the Shakers: self-extinction.
Also, this and other feminist 'solutions' suffer from another ultimately fatal flaw. Until the world on which women depend figures it all out, they will get away with treating men as disposable, but without saying so they also expect men to continue to make the world run. Men and women are dependent on each other for sex and reproduction, but women are dependent (directly AND indirectly) on men for everything else.
Women pretend to be independent at their own individual and collective peril. As their generalized lack of appreciation for how dependent they are on men becomes sufficiently obvious to men, men are going to stop providing all the nonreciprocal husband chores that women simply couldn't provide for themselves and each other.
"The only future for anything like the 4B Movement will be the same one that awaited the Shakers: self-extinction."
Everybody has to die. Every civilization has to fall. Nothing lasts forever.
Even cliche
you have a typo! "form rebellion," rather than "form of rebellion"
So we can start to request scenarios that have affection and consent, without the humiliations?
As someone who considers themselves progressive, if wildly out of step with what the current actual political organizations for someone like me look like, talk about, think like, I regularly have to lie down thinking about the debt to be paid off wracked up by 2007-2018 liberals.
Do not worry about THAT debt.... The fiat system is based on printing endless money which buys less and less actual goods and services (which are thus extracted from the productive people of all classes who make them) There is no trajectory other then a reset shuffle where those in the know do their best to grab as much real wealth as possible and most people go back to being poor.
I believe that the book "The Great Taking" elaborates on the specific economic realities, historical precedent(s), as well as particular, named legislative powers that would enable such a 'reset shuffle' that you describe on behalf and to the benefit of the managerial class.
God I hope we have some space for talking about the importance of slowness and presence in sex. Hopefully there will be a huge backlash against the porn industry too, especially hard-core stuff
While I agree with your sentiments, I unfortunately believe that pornography is one of those 'industries' that has enough of an institutional stranglehold to avoid being readily displaced, one way or another. Fundamentally, it's an extremely insidious industry that preys upon one of, if not the most basic human instinct, then warps it for it's own machinations, many of which have nothing to do with profit-seeking.
> Hopefully there will be a huge backlash against the porn industry too, especially hard-core stuff
How would that even work? I mean, even if you stop adults from filming themselves somehow & uploading it, there's got to be petabytes of data already produced. In any case, enough material to train whatever neural nets we want. Porn just won't be dependent on real human bodies anymore.
I'm not saying stop supply. Hopefully there will be a cultural movement around recognizing and treating porn addiction. The backlash must be from the demand side. Trying to do anything from the supply side would be futile like you said and against my values
The porn industry itself has gotta carry this weight. Horrid, abusive, debasing defilement has become the norm. Check out the 5-second preview ads to see where all of this is going. I will never find that category for my sons called 'Ways People Can Help Each Other Feel Great thru Sex.'
But then that category does not exist.
What about becoming a bhikkhu or bhikkhuni(meditator-male/female) as a lay practitioner(vipassana) or monk/nun (monastic) with foundation of sila(5/8/or more for monastics)precepts including (abstaining) from sexual misconduct(however one wants to define that-at any given moment)
I could not agree more, and when I was a single mom with 2 teen sons, I tried to instill in them that they don't want to get involved in casual sex either--they could fall in love with the wrong woman, who has no intention of fidelity, and sexually transmitted diseases aren't to be taken lightly. Their father, a man who I discovered ideated that he's a woman in 1992, when they were one and four, was no help whatsoever. I promoted the idea that sexual relationships are fuller and deeper if you go slow, and I was just not that cool mom. The Not Cool Mom was my identity after I told my husband that I'm not cool enough to stay with you through your "transition," after the two years of deceit.
I am very thankful for your voice, Ms. Dee.
Ute Heggen, author of In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse. 2022)
uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Who knew? Our sex lives and marriages are shaped by Federal Reserve policy and obscure chemicals in plastics. Lots of younger people have been misled and lied to.
Come the time, I will remember this article, Katherine. Thank you.
It's always a question of which flavour of social engineering the managerial class decides to employ.
Good.
On the left I don't think there is sex-negativity per se, there are, however, beliefs about sex, power, and consent that as a consequence reduce sex because they make it, in practice, basically impossible to have sex in a way that upholds them.
I.e "enthusiastic consent" is so vaguely defined now nobody is sure what constitutes rape, which means everybody is afraid of a rape accusation, which means they have to be really sure that their partner won't make a rape accusation/believe themselves to be raped. This makes casual sex harder. Or even friendship sex. Also, there is this new awareness of power dynamics, and now the left doesn't seem to want them, like any relationship that is not between peers or that can be construed as having a power imbalance now has this taint of immorality.
However, life is complicated, and every relationship has some sort of power imbalance, which means every relationship becomes illicit! Or even worse, we have a de facto caste system for relationships. Only rich people can marry rich people, only smart can marry smart, etc.
This means everybody becomes ashamed about their relationships and casual sex again, just for different reasons. This is bad because now we can't use reason to talk about them in an intelligent way imho.
If you think about it, "enthusiastic consent" is actually quite pornographic in nature, fundamentally speaking. The idea essentially being that your partner --generally being the woman in particular in these scenarios-- has to look and sound like she 'wants it', explicitly and repeatedly so.
It's really quite a perverse and degrading standard to uphold someone to.
"The idea essentially being that your partner --generally being the woman in particular in these scenarios-- has to look and sound like she 'wants it', explicitly and repeatedly so."
People usually DO look and sound like they want it - when they actually do.
You're merely pointing out the problem. 'Looking like you want it' is not a quantifiable, definable metric. It differs between people, because everyone responds differently. There is no objective plurality in response to sexual pleasure that can be used as a baseline. "When they actually do", on the other hand, is definable. It is simply one consenting to sex.
Those who believe in "enthusiastic consent" objectify women as pornographic objects, because how else are you supposed to show enthusiastic consent if not through a pornographic caricature? It's repulsive, and strips people of personal authentic expression.
"how else are you supposed to show enthusiastic consent if not through a pornographic caricature?"
--- The porn-adled brain can't think of "how else".
" It is simply one consenting to sex."
--- Sex changes throughout so continuous communication is needed throughout.
"The porn-adled brain can't think of "how else"."
You're only proving my point by crudely insulting me. It's quite sad how you're unable to conceive of pornography in an abstract, philosophical manner.
Either show an objective measure of what it means to 'want it', or don't bother replying to me. You obviously cannot, since no such standard exists that applies to all people.
Everyone enjoys sex in their own way, so-called "enthusiastic consent" forces women to behave in a particular, inauthentic manner that objectifies them. You consent to sex initially, and request to "stop" if it becomes uncomfortable or undesirable. Everything in between is up to the individual.
Come on now. People have to ask their partners along the way, not just slip a finger or something else in his butt and then wait for the "no"..
I don't want to argue about this at this moment. I just want to put a consideration in your head; it is one based on a 69-year lifetime that includes having spent the middle half of it as a leftist: sex-negativity is PREDOMINANTLY a leftist activity. Don't argue against this; just sit with it, and see if you don't start to notice it everywhere, because it's just under the surface of loud promotion of superficial hedonism intended to prevent proper pair-bonding that is less susceptible to extrinsic control from centralized entities.
there's also the Western reality created by sexuality functioning as an existential framework. it's a flimsy house of cards (at best) backed by billions of dollars and a lot of cultural peer pressure. imo, this will reach its limit relatively soon and either go down in a rainbow blaze of glory or vanish in a rainbow puff of smoke.
what do you mean by sexuality functioning as an existential framework?
sexual identity, as a general principle
talking about a trad 1960’s here
A return to beehive hair-dos, gas-guzzling muscle cars, and analog AM-FM radios therein. Working my 2016 car's audio system required me to sign up for technical training. Car audio, not to speak of sex, shouldn't be this hard.
I've mused for many decades that arranged marriages are not such a bad idea. I think that making the decision about who to spend THE REST OF YOUR LIFE with should not be made while in a hormone/ endorphin induced haze.
Depends on who's doing the arranging and who they are arranging you to.
To be serious for a moment: my father used to say that to me. The next closest thing, my dad said, is, not to have a matchmaker, but to think like one. The next closest thing after that is meeting someone in a community you're already in. That means there's a congruence of values and backgrounds.
Have you heard of the Hajnal line?
Yes
More sex negative than today?! Please no! I'm astonished on a regular basis that this prissy little Western culture imagines itself to be 'sexually enlightened'. I suspect we're more relaxed about sex than during the Victorian age, but I still can't walk into a room of my dearest friends and just start talking out of the clear blue sky about my last masturbation session, or my first threesome. My dearest friends! Unlike any other ordinary human experience, it's still strangely taboo to talk openly about ordinary sexual experiences, never mind the really racy stuff. Help!
It has less to do with people being prissy and prudish, and more to do with you being obnoxious, crude, and sorely lacking in the level of self-awareness required to read the room.
I mean, if my roommate walked into my room and started talking about the massive deuce they just dropped in the shared bathroom, I would be pretty disgusted by it. Just because a biological function or need is common doesn't mean I want to or need to hear about it.
^ underrated comment
Huh?
Those that refuse to have children will, when they are old, have no one to advocate for them when grifters try to hustle them and the State brings the final, unwelcome, jab.
Bring it on.
That is essentially what it boils down to.
I think a lot of people take Social Security for granted. They're going to be in for the surprise of their lives once their current societal material reality dictates that the state can no longer continue to subsidize the continued existence of the old and unproductive.
The Republicans have been trying for years to gut Social Security.
Social Security exists in the first place because it's demographically affordable... for now. The state cannot continue to subsidize economic welfare towards unproductive, medically compromised demographics if there aren't enough current and future productive workers being born and properly raised to feed the scheme in the first place through their participation in the workforce.
As it happens, they wouldn't necessarily be wrong to "gut" it, either. Those who believe the US armed forces budget is overly inflated should have a gander at how much the federal government spends on civil entitlements, Medicare being an example. Whatever sum the military receives for maintenance and expansion pales in comparison to welfare spending, which itself is overwhelmingly the reason for which the US finds itself in endless deficit spending, now and for the foreseeable future.
One can either gut entitlements, or raise taxation to an absurd level. Either way, it's currently economically unsustainable.
How much has Israel gotten?
I don't see how foreign aid is particularly relevant, however Israel, relatively speaking, receives a significant bit of subsidization on a recurring annual basis.
I would argue it could be far better spent domestically, the government is far too 'generous' to the Israelis (although, that would imply they have any autonomy to make decisions in this regard in the first place; they don't).
This is the cost of the most powerful lobby in Washington being the Jewish ethno-centric lobby, by far. That is a reality of contemporary American politics.
of course people will start having children earlier-- after the collapse
Nothings going to "collapse" in any of our lifetimes. Of course at some point all civilizations die. That's the nature of reality. Nothing lasts forever. Get over it.
Correct and succinct analysis. Most people need to touch the stove to learn that it's hot. That's the price of taking unprecedented comfort, luxury, and opportunity for granted.
I find this persuasive but think egalitarian moralism will play a greater role in mediating these dissatisfactions than maybe you give it here in these notes. Sex positivity flew in on the wings of egalitarian resentment at traditional constraints on desire, and the backlash so far, or the part of it that comes from the center to the left, is likewise filtered through that lens. (Sex positivity is bad because of misogyny and patriarchy, they say, not because of any psychological need for boundaries and connection that might smack of the old limits.) There can only be one villain, and that's perceived hierarchy. People will live with increasing trauma before they question this. The symptoms that you predict (the trad rebirth and the lurch toward new old community) fall in line with existing movements on the right, including some unfortunate ones (integral illiberalism among a few, a glib indifference to "classic" liberal norms more generally). On the left, the search for community has already taken the form of partisan solidarity, including various attempts at allyship, which is seen by pretty much everyone as transparently vicarious and suspect. That this is unsatisfying can be seen in the degree to which indignation is pursued as an opiate. On the left, the pot boiling over is probably going to mean a more intense search for systemic evils. The backlash on the left runs counter to the backlash on the right, so the culture war as currently understood is likely to remain the mask for the deeper troubles you've put your finger on. And it means that one side effect will be increasingly dangerous political polarization. At the heart of all this unhappiness, IMHO, is not only sexual psychology but a fundamental tension between the cosmopolitanism of liberalism and the longing for community, for which there is no resolution, only management. Have you read Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind? His brush strokes are broad sometimes but it has some good lines on all this.
What a prophetic book CotAM was.
I want to be clear though that I think your writing on this is incredibly timely and valuable, and I'm really looking forward to reading to what you have to say. Just adding my $.02
A lot of this reaction will come from the failures of the current sex-positivity movements. Millennials that have bought intro his movement have developed serious mental health issues and are craving stability. Some will get it from the sources you mention, but others won’t be able to stomach such a shift and will simply become increasingly dysfunctional. Look for a rise in homelessness, addiction, and incarceration as a result.
I got 7 paragraphs down and still had no idea what sex negativity, and thus all 7 points made absolutely no sense lol.
Sex negativity has been around for years, decades, even. Ask Camille Paglia or Maggie McNeill.
I love my parents. But they didn't give me many boxes to fit into. I think that's a really high skill cap way to play the game of life. I'm not sure how well it worked for my brother that is 30 and lives at home.
I'm grateful for thinking freely, and had a phenomenal education, but there's a total lack of community and shared values. I did learn to be kind, and while I'd like to want to have children, I really don't. My partner doesn't either. I think it has more to do with not wanting to fuck up than anything else. Navigating a LTR in this age is so difficult.
I wish I thought you were wrong. Mix up the details sure but social justice is being fueled by guilt and convenience, not truly radical compassion. So much hatefulness veiled in the allyship (I hate that word).
The idea that people belong to one larger, human box, has kind of been lost. So tribalism it is.
I really like my folks. If I had kids I'd totally want them around. Maybe even in the same neighborhood, but I think they're less neurotic than most.
I waited until i was 29 to reproduce, glad i waited. Financially more stable, emotionally more willing to put his needs first. People will have children just because it feels like a proper next step logically, but it may just be a month you didnt have the car payment you expected and feel rich.
It's a matter of waiting for when you're more stable and ready, but also of not letting that period in your life fly by with ridiculous distractions. Here's the real problem with our post-modern life.
Sounds like a white pill OD to me.
A backlash might be hard as long as dating apps are popular I think.
I think I more traditional romantic culture for young people would have to go hand in hand in a decline in the usage of dating apps.
The illusion of limitless choice they give to their users deranged everything.
A world without sex work would lead to more violence and stupidity on the part of some men. If you don't like the term sex work you can say "sex surrogates", but there probably does need to be a vehicle for "incels" and adulterers to get their fix in an easy and safe way.
I don’t think that’s where we’re headed. There’s no ending sex work nor should it end. However it won’t be as normalized
But that seems a bad thing, to me. It's like you said with your old piece on Onlyfans, it shouldn't be treated as something any woman can and should do to make some money. But normalizing it in the sense of making it an institution instead of criminal is better for everyone, I think. I disagree with libertarians a lot, the problem with synthetic chemicals you mentioned can be laid at their feet more than anyone else's, but I think the libertarian perspective on sex work is probably pretty accurate. It would need to be more regulated than they would probably want it to be, but if it's legal there's more of a chance of protecting the women involved. Also, I think maybe it would help the incel types be less screwed up if there was somewhere they could learn more about sex, though of course it won't help them with being socially awkward. Anyway, apologies for the long message, but I wanted to clarify what I was trying to say. "ProfitFromTrauma" seems to be downright Dworkin-esque in her view of sex work, and I'm not sure that perspective is a positive one in any sense.
I see what you're saying and appreciate your perspective, however these are predictions not judgments.
My personal opinion is that it we should do what we can to de-glamorize sex work while still creating space for outliers (e.g. Aella), who do thrive in that environment, to fill a necessary and tricky role. I don't think what we have now is working, and I don't think the reaction is going to be much better.
Yeah, I agree it shouldn't be glamorized. I think that's a problem with a lot of things in our culture these days, that instead of simply being compassionate and empathetic to everyone, we treat being "different" as a cool, interesting thing so young people try to adopt that in some way for clout. Sometimes "normie" behavior has become that because it does work best for most people, and our current cultural milieu(excuse the pretentiousness) valorizes and glamorizes being counter to that too much.
👶 👶 👶 *** F E R T I L I T Y -- R E P A R A T I O N S *** 👶 👶 👶
What a cool idea
TFW you try but the chemicals in the water sterilized u
:( How common is this?
Read the book Count Down
I dunno. We've been through worse as far as environmental contaminants go. I'm more of the belief that low mortality rates and having children at older ages would be more likely to cause lower sperm counts, etc. The Romans made drinks in lead pots because the lead gave it a nice taste. About a century ago we had dirty factories and no concept of health or safety regs. In China and India its bad and that contributes a lot. Our consumption habits and microplastics can't be great though.
I am of the opinion that it is our low fat high carb diets that make us more vulnerable to environmental hormone pollution. Healthy animal fats are necessary for building the cholesterol we need to have healthy hormone levels. When we take away fats, we reduce our natural levels, that makes us more vulnerable to hormones from the environment, which leads to hormonal confusion.
While spiteful mutant theory (the name given by Dr Edward Dutton to explain biological degeneration due to lower mortality rates since the industrial revolution) could indeed account for a lot of the fall in sperm counts and other fertility problems, environmental endocrine disruption still plays a significant role behind things like the transgender craze. A lot of people experiencing gender dysphoria would probably benefit more from hormone supplimentation rather than cross sex hormone replacement. Unfortunately in many places, such as Illinois, it is easier for a male to be prescribed estrogen than testosterone.
This may contain some truth for some trans people, but why call it a craze if it does? There’s no point in estranging or punishing people who are either happy as they are (with an impulse to transition) or happy as they can be with a therapy. Similarly, being disrespectful would push more people away from having contact with other medical or social supports they may benefit from.
There would be nothing wrong with adding same-sex HRT to a list of common treatments for people found to need and desire it if this theory were to hold, but why enforce that there’s a right or wrong way to live for the small minority of people who are seriously affected by the issue you’re identifying?
This is congruent to the seminal piece written in 2010 on the misandry bubble. https://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
Penetrating, as well as seminal
Thank you for this! I'll check it out now.
It's a pile of horse manure. Be forewarned.
I'm glad your criticism was specific and insightful. Oh, wait...
I am not buying the necessity for shame and sex-negativity to get earlier matching and natalism to rise because they go sex-positive just fine.
If they went sex-positive fine, there wouldn't be a plurality of unsustainable fertility rates throughout industrialized societies internationally.
Regardless of sex positivity or sex negativity, it will be feminist.
I think there will be a backlash of some sort. It's hard to know what it will look like. People having kids younger seems unlikely as the economy is bad and no one wants to start a family while still living with their own parents.
My guess is that the backlash against "sex positivity" and the growth of the Latino community will end up happening at roughly the same time and we'll see a lot more Latin culture going mainstream. (which is fine for me, I'm not a Trumpist.)
Having kids while living with parents means not having to drive long distances to see their grandparents. Could work.
DF restricted her analysis to the UMC and MC (I think it'll be a UMC one moreso than even MC) so economic factors will be less salient to this group.
This has been commented on in anon 'mommy blog' forums like DC Urban Moms where once in a while you'll see posts pop up about truly wealthy Catholic Gen Z women from the DC area (think the kavanaugh set) are marrying and having kids earlier than the previous generation.
In this decade, you'll see that mindset flow from the truly wealthy to the 'dream hoarders' (coined by Richard reeves) class IMO.
as for the lower 80% of society, I'm not sure what will occur
As I know some of these people, “more than the previous generation” means… having kids at all.
I think this kind of behavior will lead to a backlash rather than imitation.
I find this all very fascinating and think you may be proven right, to some extent. However, I feel like the term “sex negativity” always has a lot to unpack. From what I’ve seen, those who promote sex positivity these days often do so only nominally. They claim to be positive but their entire affect surrounding sex is contrary to that. They focus on assault, bad dates, sexual dissatisfaction, etc. Their views on relationships (at least hetero) are super cynical. So it seems we’ve already had sex negativity for a while now, though maybe not the kind you discuss here.
I miss you on twitter
Ty Nico. I always come back, I just don't love the platform or energy there.
Great thread! I hope you're correct in your analysis :)
I'm hopeful the pendulum will swing back toward tradition in education, as well. More parents seem to be homeschooling or finding charter schools. There is some truly bonkers stuff being taught (telling preschoolers to disavow their whiteness, etc.) which will probably contribute to the coming reversal. This matters to me since I work in education and see how bad even straight-A students at renowned private schools can be at basic skills like reading, writing, and critical thinking.
Homeschooling, unschooling, charter schools, charter cities-- all of these are going to become more widespread until we live in a libertarian hellscape. Not to be so negative!
I don't trust the institution but I sure as hell don't trust individuals.
Who says it has to be individuals? Why not an alternative institution?
Not a bad point, considering estrogen is a stress hormone. https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20031203/estrogen-is-involved-in-stress-response
Black American culture isn’t the caricature that BET portrays.
Black culture is religious music, barbecue, ladies’ church hats, fraternal orders, Sunday dinner, and tight knit families.
Not sure about queer culture since that wasn’t a thing when I was younger.
Catholicism is a minority religion in America. You mean Evangelical.
Agree with you. A big part of my thesis is that the media narrative layer is what is most fluid and what impacts our perception
Interracial relationships, or more specifically white female black male relationships, are significantly more prone to domestic violence than traditional cisracial relationships for either race.
Probably interracial couples or their children thereof will kind of band together as minorities and start dating more amongst one another. In South Africa, they've kind of compartmentalized in this way where it's Black, White, and 'Coloureds' (as they refer to themselves). This is already kind of happening with Hapas. Hapas are happening.
Everywhere there is significant black-white interracial dating there is much AIDS. Seth Efrika and American South are good examples of this phenomenon.
You make many good points. In addition to your idea about Catholics and the suggestion from the other commenter that people from Asian and Jewish backgrounds could successfully have interracial relationships with some "trad" leanings, I think that conservative Protestants could do the same. Evangelicalism is increasingly popular in Latin America. Many Koreans are also Protestant, and I presume they have a conservative bent. Black churches may not be as popular as they once were, and there were historic fault lines between black and white Protestants, but I could see a Zoomer raised in a black church dating an evangelical of another race.
That’s just the Jewish need to find a new host. Those families really aren’t that functional.
On the racial fault lines in Evangelical churches, the racialism is built in, not exclusively a product of racism, in baptists. There are exclusively Korean, Hmong and mestizo/Mexican baptist churches, which are centered around and will only accept members of a certain race. This informed (and still does) much of the anti-miscegenation of black baptists, who supported anti-race mixing laws as or more strongly than whites, which is why it took a Supreme Court decision to end them; popular support was firmly in favor of the laws across all races in baptist-dominated areas. It’s an interpretation of Old Testament with the tribes of Judea needing to remain separate and unmixed and transferring this into the universality of Christianity to mean tribes=races.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I was raised Catholic, and my childhood church had members of many races as well as families with parents of different races, so churches that sharply divided by race are a bit foreign to me.
I live in a Catholic dominated area of the South. We have separate majority white/black Catholic Churches. These are a holdover from segregation laws but anyone is free to visit either, and they do (I have attended both). The have the same mass of course but different songs, traditions, and congregations. Forcibly merging them into a watered-down (bi-directionally) monoculture would seem destructive to me. Culture breeds in isolation, regardless of the source.
These are great points. Surprisingly, the only church I have attended which has members of all races together is LDS. Otherwise there is some self-selection as you mentioned.
These are all great questions & frankly things I believe will remain blindspots. DV is one close to my heart and I often encourage feminists to remember it. It’s very telling how far removed from reality feminism has come that dv is an afterthought for many
What is “dv”?
Sorry, just to clarify, I see both predictions above as valid but a lot of the current discourse (don’t get married early, don’t have kids early or you’re trapped) seems to have swung so far in one direction that one doesn’t necessarily need to be trad of Catholic to take an approach that counters this
Just wanted to chime in that this may not necessarily come to pass. I’m first-gen Asian-American, my partner is Jewish, and we’re both secular but have more “traditional” views about family (having lots of kids, no nursing homes, no inappropriate shows for kids). I think Default Friend is right but a backlash against current views on sex/family doesn’t *necesarily* have to tie into ethnocentrism or religion, although it of course could
Reform Jewish, East Asian, and Indian diaspora cultures in the west or all intents in purposes in 2021 aren't really split apart. It's all part of 'triple package cultures' as defined by Amy Chua. Under DF's rubrik, I don't see a receding of these three to go back into strict endogamy in the US.
That’s pure cope by Amy Chua to justify her own relationship which seems to be very abusive toward her children.
I don’t agree with her at all. I have both East Asian and Jewish ancestry.