Corners of the Internet #3
Katherine Dee on the "Sex Great Depression", Caplan on "born this way", Peterson on guiding principles, Hanania on having kids, Levin on government initiatives, Douthat blast from the past
A friend and early blog reader once told me I seemed to know all the interesting corners of the internet. In the spirit of that compliment, COTI is a loose format for sharing what I find in these corners.
In 2020, most singles in the United States reported being dissatisfied with their dating lives, 67 percent of people think their dating lives “aren’t going well at all,” and 47 percent of them say it’s harder to date today than it was 10 years ago. The share of adults ages 25 to 54 living without a spouse or partner has risen 29 percent since 1990. Americans are having fewer children. Women are not only marrying later, many are not marrying at all. We are in the midst of a sex recession that may be turning into a “Sex Great Depression.”
She also notes a fair amount of inequality in modern dating—a third of men on dating apps have not been on a single date.
Never one for social desirability bias, Bryan Caplan writes,
While almost all studies find that genetics matters, virtually none asserts that the heritability of sexual orientation is even close to 100%. Ergo, homosexuality must, to some extent, be “acquired.” While that hardly implies that any specific mechanism - such "recruitment" or "media depictions" - works, the idea that homosexuality can be spread is the unheralded scientific consensus.
In a Cambridge Q&A, Jordan Peterson says,
There’s a fair bit of fluidity in human sexuality and people have to come to terms with that. . . you might say as a rule of thumb, and I think this is true, that your life is going to be a lot simpler if you adopt something approximating traditional sexual rules and so you step outside of those confines at your peril. But it might also be your necessity. Who’s to say?
At a recent Peterson event I attended, what impressed me most was how effectively he addressed the complexity of family relationships while still speaking authoritatively on behalf of guiding ideals. Too often on these topics, the speaker undercuts their own arguments with anodyne and detracting caveats.
In the bluntly titled “You Should Have Kids”, Richard Hanania writes,
Hertz argues that since people are having smaller families, we need to ask ourselves how to replace the meaning they used to find in children, siblings, and cousins by encouraging them to find ways “to care for people who are not necessarily linked to them by blood.” To me, this sounds like asking “how can we enjoy eating in a world where we have dulled our sense of taste?” or “how can we enjoy sexual pleasure after we’ve castrated ourselves?”
Blood relations, and the pair bonds that help create them, are not one form of social connectedness we can just exchange for something else once we don’t want to bother with the hassle of getting married and making babies anymore. Procreation and family formation are the evolutionary reasons love exists in the first place, and there is little to suggest that we can replace these things through government sponsored initiatives that seek to connect us to those we are not either having sex with or related to.
In a podcast conversation with Bari Weiss, Yuval Levin offers compelling reason to doubt government initiatives.
I think it’s enormously important to acknowledge, in a humble way, the difficulties confronting anyone who wants to improve things on this front. It’s not as though we haven’t tried. . .
I worked in the George W. Bush administration where we tried in probably the most concerted way in American history to see what public policy could do to help marriage and family, in ways that would produce some data in ways that could be looked at and learned from. And we did learn from it—we learned that nothing that we tried made a difference.
Of course, government may still be capable of making things worse.
Writing in 2015, Ross Douthat observed,
Since the ’90s, approval of divorce, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock childbearing have climbed steadily, and the belief that children are “very important” to marriage has collapsed. Kennedy’s ruling argues that the right to marry is essential, in part, because the institution “safeguards children and families.” But the changing cultural attitudes that justify his jurisprudence increasingly treat this safeguard as inessential, a potentially nice but hardly necessary thing.
That was then, this is now?
Corners of the Internet #3
The "Sex Great Depression" can be adequately explained with people simultaneous distain for arranged marriages in the middle east, and the mixture of polygamy and celibacy (sexual hierarchies) since eras of agrarian eras of human history. The freedom of choice must imply the responsibility of accepting a sub-par offer, since not every offer is sharable amongst multiple people. https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
In the "Gender Attraction Differential" video, Colttaine noted that divorce can be adequately explained as a biological construct of difference in attraction or "mate value". Discounting the whole PUA and FDS argument for what constitutes as "high value", there is always a male variability effect, where there will be more successes AND radical failures in men than in women. Therefore in most relationships by any metric (e.g. attractiveness, social status, intelligence), the average woman will feel as if they got an unfair deal compared to their peers, or the bigraph equivalent of the Friendship Paradox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vqRbScCIPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
> homosexuality must, to some extent, be “acquired.”
Here be hypothesis: (a) most men are biologically barred from reproduction due to sexual selection since the birth of the homonids (b) these biological barriers extended to social phenomena such as polygamy, fratricide, pedophilia, misogyny, and "homosexuality" (celibacy) (c) environmental stress such as economic inequality and loss of wellbeing, accelerates these behaviors (d) these behaviors self-regulates as it changes the socio-economic environment in a predictable but non-exploitable manner https://archive.ph/qiPHq
For Fratricide, it is good to refer to Peter Turchin's thesis on "Elite Overproduction", "Elite Fratricide", and "Cliodynamics", or that inequality caused by social advancements, will displace people into civil wars and criminality. This can lead to population decrease that disproportionately affects men. Side note however is that "age at marriage" is part of the indicators of wellbeing. https://archive.ph/tuJKY https://archive.ph/ZEksV
For homosexuality, it is more likely that it is a biological "off-switch", as conservative-leaning queers are more likely to uphold the social order, with similar effects to the celibacy movement, and thus can be "turned on" once social cohesion improves. A contemporary example is the "true felt loneliness" (TFL) camp regressing towards transgenderism for social integration (e.g. "transmaxxing" and "trad boywife"). https://archive.ph/vvoRw https://www.piratewires.com/p/transmaxxing
The converse case are those with high sociosexuality (SOI as shorthand for promiscuity) who obsess over women ala "pick up artists" and political puritans. Although these behaviors are somewhat contradictory, they can be packed under the umbrella of "verbal tilt" that includes creative and liberal thinking, and along with that mental health problems and a desire to engage in activism. It is not known however if it is tied to pedophilia (conservative woes of "drag queen story hour" and "elite pedophile conspiracy") or trans aggression against women (TERF's claims about "transbians"), as much is speculation. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-model