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Fake Realism on Sex
The other day I read our own @rachellu’s review of the new book by Mark Regnerus, provocatively and moralistically called Cheap Sex. The review is a balm upon the heart, so go read it. The book itself is receiving more praise then I can catalog here — it’s science and it’s reassuring for conservatives. The facts are in and they’re what you’d expect: liberated America is a sexual marketplace, and that’s a wasteland.
I’ll skip the topographical survey of the wasteland. Writer and reviewer both agree with most among us that we’re long on problems and short on solutions; and most — but not all — our predictions are grim. We’re shamelessly theoretical about our catalogs of facts — no prudes we! And then we’re hopelessly impractical about doing anything about all this stuff we think we know. Am I the only one to find this hilarious, that we’re hard at work, most earnestly and morally, to prove that knowledge is a source of impotence? This is not to say anything against either author. They didn’t cause this mismatch between the power of our science and the impotence of our politics.
Let’s talk about the problems with our science, because that’s where we seem to turn to ask for knowledge that works, that helps us out. We can call it political science or social science or psychology or evolutionary biology. What we want to get out of it is knowledge about ourselves as human beings. The problem here is that we ourselves are split between theory and practice.* You might say that theory is a talking brain like Stephen Hawking, trying to know the cosmos, and practice is back on Earth, him turning his wife into a nurse and then a nurse into a wife, because someone has to care for the body while the mind is roaming. But let’s not start with our healthcare crisis…
The discussions we have as educated people somehow betray us. We’re not theoretical enough to study human nature; we’re not practical enough to learn to improve things by learning how we actually live. We’re not ourselves, but we’re not escaping human limits either. We are imprudent. In our discussion of the sexual market, we cannot tolerate a fully scientific or impious analysis of ourselves. But we’re not willing to think about the political requirements for the decent lives we want, either.
So we end up with a morality play in the guise of science: Look at what we have unleashed! But we never dare say: We have to put the leash back on! This is very strange. Are we not manly enough to draw the conclusions from our science? Is “just the facts, ma’am” turning into a fearful attitude, not to discover the truth but to endlessly delay it? The answer seems to me tied up with something we all now believe: The ancient violent punishment of adultery is gone forever.
Unhappiness, misery, suffering, horrible deaths may all follow on adultery or even refusing to marry in our society. But not the punishment of the law. We have not repealed human nature — we have repealed authority. This is a very important thing to think about because we can often say about misery, it’s other people in other social classes suffering. It’s their fault, or at least their problem. But the destruction of authority is everyone’s fault and everyone’s problem.
This is the first thing to learn. We have abandoned law and justice, which cannot exist without punishment. All our intellectuals are forever trying to tell us what we dearly wish to hear: the free market might deal with it. Incentives and disincentives, policies that are implemented — but never laws that are enforced. Truth to tell, our education has made such cowards of the educated that we’re gradually finding the words hard to utter: Government is too furiously manly — we’re trying hard to replace it by the friendly, womanly governance.
The second thing to learn is that we should go through with our economic analysis of being human, to see the consequences of leaving behind law and authority. This book is a very good start of showing us how we act in absence of legal punishment. The review does a good job of arguing in favor of economics as a basic form of rationality: don’t ask yourself what’s pious, ask yourself what’s advantageous to you. Neither our young men nor our young women want to marry. Piety or reverence for the old might drive them there — but that’s not the game we’re playing now. Not that boys and girls are dedicating themselves to chastity, but neither is America an endless sexual orgy.
Science tells us that the married have more sex than the unmarried; that’s probably not in need of explanations. But also that sex creates an aristocracy of desire. There are worshiped men and women; everyone else, well, is revealed to be damn near worthless. So this should become obvious for people. The next step is to belabor the obvious, to get to the real question: why does enforcing a principle of equality with respect to sex create an oligarchy? Does democracy mean what we have now or a situation where pretty much everyone has sex?
The third thing we should learn is why things are this way with us. This is where we are stuck. We have no self-knowledge in our public lives, which I think is hilarious. I noticed that the review says, men and women are not equal in the sexual marketplace because all the risks are on one side. This implies, with our ruthless economics, that mutually advantageous agreements would favor men — they would not create equality with women within marriage either. So we get into more trouble: does democracy mean everyone gets to marry or that people are, though men and women, essentially equals? We apparently cannot have both.
But our ruthless economists are strangely silent about the causes of this situation. What is it about our nature that makes of our lives a wasteland? What is it about how we live that makes us impotent to improve things? So also with our moralists, who want to say we’re persons, not just negotiated desires. They are strangely silent about the source of the laws and the place of justice in our lives.
So probably this should be the next Regnerus book or Lu essay; or perhaps their successors. We cannot fault people who give us so much to think about for not giving us more. We can only ask them to give us more later. What strikes me is that we are split between the ultimately legal authority of marriage and the ultimately trans-legal rationalism about sex. We’re split in ways that now prove catastrophic. We either should not be split, or find less catastrophic ways of dealing with the split within us.
My conclusion after reading the review is that we need to ask the fundamental questions about our nature, if we cannot stop with our discussions. The lack of self-knowledge, however, can only have two causes. Either our intellectuals are cretins, which seems impossible! Or our science is worthless. So much for our theoretical crisis; practically, we need to look at our situation and start from what it offers — abandoning our unfortunate hopes that some application of a theoretical science hobbled by its own crisis will fix our crisis without our involvement. Like it or not, we all consent to the destruction of authority.
If you aren’t having sex you aren’t in a relationship; You are just paying for another person’s dinner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMWZYFN45WA
She is having sex with someone. If its not you……. well the writing is on the wall there bud.
There are a number of problems with these types of analyses
1.) Men will have sex with women not desirable enough to have a relationship with. This creates a anchoring bias in the lady’s mind. (women consider 80% of men to be below average)
2.) Women are delaying marriage which results in an average yearly reduction in search costs, to keep the total search cost around the same.
3.) Women delaying marriage also clearly makes about 10 years of dating not about finding a partner, but about filling time, which results in further minimal investment.
4.) 3-4 generations of women being faithless in marriage makes marriage an untenable institution in the first place.
So yeah, if you completely ignore the feast and famine nature of the sexual market place, the WACC (weighted average cost of commitment), rapidly escalating search costs, and a complete breakdown in information brokers, well sure absolutely its about market alternatives.
The fact that women are often pressured into sex by men they date is not really the problem; young single men have always tried to persuade young single women to whom they were not married to have sex. In the past, they usually didn’t succeed, or at least, they failed a lot more often than they do now. The real problem is that in many cases, young women are being pressured into premarital sex by their own parents, and every other person they know. When every single person you know including your own parents are telling you that you should be having sex with somebody-anybody-whether you are married to them or not, and the only people preaching a different message are dismissed as Nazis and white supremacists and religious fanatics, it really isn’t surprising how we got here.
Its almost like we are trying to recreate stuff that was already written in an ancient book of, what some think is, myths.
Oh what fools we, thinking we could play god.
which translation? because many bible committees are quietly translating away anything that might offend modern sensibilities.
Science is the process for finding truth, but the problem with the sciences that you mention, is that they are generally more speculative than testable. So, that turns the gaining of knowledge about ourselves as human beings into a perpetual quest. I’d suggest there are insights and answers already to be found in that widely published, time-tested collection of stories, myths, anecdotes and legends from antiquity, which covers all aspects of the human condition, with much emphasis on the relationship between men and women. And some even say it’s divinely inspired!
Our intellectuals have corrupted our science with the notion that science must not take spiritual matters into account.
Our questions about our nature lead to blind alleys because the functional definition of ‘human nature’ that is being explored by our scientists and our social scientists is defective.
The Scholastics were on the right track; they were exploring an underlying ‘human nature,’ by which they meant the original perfect nature of mankind, before the Fall, according to our Creation by G-d.
Modern explorations of ‘human nature’ only care about the nature of mankind in our fallen state, but they have jettisoned entirely the postulate that we have been corrupted by sin and are not as we ought to be.
It’s not hard.
Avoid premarital sex unless/until in a truly loving and committed relationship.
Always be monogamous.
Marry for love, before you procreate.
Marry for life.
Be faithful to your spouse, your God and your children.
This has worked twice for me.
It’s not hard.
Evidently it is, or there would be more happy couples and fewer unhappy singles.
Its hard when no one is telling you the recipe and society (feminists) are giving you all the wrong ingredients.
Well, some version of that is how we got all the powers now on display everywhere. It’s how we might destroy ourselves or our world; it’s how we’ve saved ourselves so far.
It’s not right to equate society with feminists. We scapegoat feminists for everything to do with sex or romance, partly because they brag so much. As though everything that happens in a society is the achievement of whoever claims it.
There are more conservatives than feminists in America; more observant Christians than feminists;–there just aren’t that many extremists. Yet after the catastrophes the Sixties unleashed, no part of America chose to go back; or to find someway to retrieve a version of the way things were.
The fault for the way the majority lives cannot ultimately lie with a small minority; except in a kind of tyranny-
Not to dispute your assertion, but that’s really troubling to this old patriarch – could you please explain how you know that?
The Bible thought it was hard; Shakespeare thought it was hard; who ever thought this was not hard?–Moreover, notice that you leave chance completely out of account.
Yup. We should admit, Americans weren’t better people when it came to love & sex & marriage two generations back; they just had better habits, which really depended on educating the young & on social use of shame & even the police power of the state. Public authority to punish collapsed; private authority to educate children also collapsed.
It does seem like nowadays, the only thing an 18-year-old is never taught to think about is marriage. American materialism of the sex-is-fun, sex-is-healthy variety then completes the job by lying to not very thoughtful kids about what they’re getting themselves into. It’s a kind of regime were sexual diseases might be talked about, but not heartbreak.
Well, I am almost 50, and this has been going on and getting worse for a while. My own parents taught me well, but I was shocked when I went off to college to find that the parents of many of my friends took it for granted that their kids would have sex before marriage with multiple different people, and made it easy for them to do so. From what I observe, that has only become more common, not less so since I was in college.
Teenage sex is dropping. But at the same time, the opinion that sex & marriage have nothing to do with each other has become the American view.
You’re right. When I was told that I was the only one, that we would get married “soon” and that it was truly committed, it was totally my fault for not following “The Rules” as laid out above.
What was I thinking.
Of course, he was able to move on no problem.
This is so sad but very true. And the reason parents are so sanguine about what this does to the kids is because they want their kids to Love them and to like them. Plus they grew up in such a permissive age that too many of them don’t understand the damage that is being done. I wish I knew the answer.
What do you mean by this?
The thing about what feminism did is that it subverted. Even people who don’t think they are feminists have subverted their other values to it. A daughter who wants to be a wife and mother is told to go to an expensive private school because the father’s sense of the practical has been subverted by feminist values of career before marriage. As a consequence, there is monstrous debt associated with the daughter. If he promotes marriage instead of education, he is oppressive.
The church has the same problem. Just look at The Right Nurse’s comment! If you dare teach scriptural sexuality, the bitterness and anger from those who bought the feminist ideal of sexual autonomy or consequenceless sex threatens to shut down and be unreachable. The church has a money problem in that most of its money comes from women. To alienate a large percentage of women by teaching male headship, sexuality, and female roles in the church, their money would dry up because the values of society have been corrupted by feminist thought.
Now you are right that feminism isn’t solely to blame. It is a church who more readily conforms to this world rather than scripture and a corruption of the world by sin. I don’t really know what else to say about it, because this feels like spiritual warfare – an insidious cultural movement that marginalizes the church and promotes every anti-christian ideal you could think of.
I just read Elmer Gantry. (Yuh, embarrassing, but I DKY, that’s about the only Sinclair Lewis novel I didn’t read as a teenager.).
It’s set in the 1920s, when rabid evangelists roamed our land and most Americans posed, at least, as Bible-thumping Protestants. And this guy rises to the top of that world–in spite of being, inter alia, an utter cad vis à vis the ladies, getting plenty o’ sex ( though not from his less than amorous wife) along the way. As Himmelfarb famously wrote of the Victorians, maybe it’s better to at least have standards, even if you’re hypocritical about them! –but my point is, this gent is not deprived.
He marries, largely because a clergyman is expected to do so, and pretty much only for that reason. He treats the lady like garbage. Is that kinda marriage the only “advantage” of the good ol’ days? Meaning: the days when men had to pay for sex, either in cash or in a bargain to give the woman a home?
Presumably, most marriages were not like that. Most men were not Elmer Gantry. That novel seems to be about how you could abuse respectability because the people who wanted respectability were neither that clearheaded nor that dedicated to a common good.
Not to say that Lewis wasn’t also a nasty guy looking for revenge in words; but he points out some real problems…
Surprising that anyone could steamroller over the “twice” line.
Nicely done, Dr.
Here’s my experience: we parents were told, from the time these kids entered middle school, that they were having sex with each other, doing blow jobs, etc., nobody could stop them–and if we as parents didn’t believe that, we were just kidding ourselves. My daughter’s pediatrician wanted to foist that (potentially toxic) Gardasil injection on my kid at 11. The idea of telling them not to do it was regarded as hopelessly unrealistic by their schools. Just hand out the condoms.
And a lot of parents, not wanting to seem “out of touch”, probably told their kids the same thing: C’mon, we’re cool! we know you’re doing it, so just be “safe”. And we’ll provide the condoms and the Gardasil. There! Now, go to it, you lusty young’uns!
There was no distinction made then between boys and girls. (Maybe because girls are often bigger than boys, at that age?) it was just a big writhing morass of polymorphous perversity.
Yes, I agree: this did amount to “pressure” to engage in sexual acts at an inappropriate age.
Bur here’s the funny part: when these same kids got to college, at 18, the age of consent
these same kids who could not be prevented from having sex at 11, 12, 13, who were pretty much exhorted to do it! —
suddenly they required training in avoiding date rape; they required protection from the reality of their ( now age appropriate) sexual urges. They are now expected to live in co-ed dorms, (no one would think of the obvious step of re-segregating the dormitories) sleeping and bathing in close proximity with the opposite sex,
yet never, never to transgress the politically correct boundaries established by academe!
Girls, who in middle school were assumed to be just as likely to initiate sexual activity as their male peers,
revert at the age of consent to their pre-sexual-revolutionary status as innocent, powerless victims of male aggression.
Boys, who in middle school were told: it’s OK that you’re ejaculating in girls’ mouths, we get that!
Become, at the age of consent, monsters, not even permitted to kiss a girl without negotiating a thicket of sexual etiquette–upon penalty of expulsion and obloquy.
Oh yuh. Parents pressured their kids because they were pressured.
Grt back to telling the kids (as I did mine) :
Sex is a wonderful thing! but it is not for people who are 11,12,13.
Everybody re-read Sinclair Lewis! “Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day!”, etc., etc.,
idk Titus, the literature of that period is full of unhappy marriages, even among the UN-respectable–look at Fitzgerald.
I know. I was going to comment, is that like “giving up smoking is easy; I’ve done it many times”– but maybe the good doctor is a re-married widower…? Or maybe it’s just that the fact that a marriage does not last forever does not mean it wasn’t a good thing while it lasted.
All mortal enterprise is a failure, if judged only by the fact that it has an end.
( The serially-married John Updike quoted that ; I’m not sure who first said it. )
Well, literature by default is full of unhappy marriages, even in Jane Austen novels!
If the society after two generations of Liberation isn’t showing serious signs of change, maybe it’s time to stop blaming the feminists. If people were looking for alternatives only to be stopped by a feminist conspiracy, I might reconsider.
As it is, maybe it’s time to think that this is an American problem Americans need to deal with…
Americans were within living memory super-public about their Christianity & angry with people who dissented. That’s gone in most parts of the country, & yet America isn’t really more sinful than before, if you exclude sexual promiscuity. Things seem to have settled down even with sexual mores; there is a new situation Americans seem to tolerate. It’s not getting worse; it’s been getting measurably less bad over the last two decades, starting in the late Nineties.
But Americans are not asking for an escape from some hell. Nor is the situation degenerating.
I have often seen this number cited, but the only research that I can find justifying it is based on an on-line dating service study in which the only thing the women had to go on in evaluating attractiveness was the photographs….obviously, IRL there are a lot of other attractiveness factors ranging from behavior to tone of voice to subconsciously-perceived pheromones.
Have you (or anyone) seen studies that look at this more broadly?
What you say about men & women seems plausible, so far as I’ve read about America. I think Regnerus says pretty much the same… You’ll have to explain what that bias means, however.
Are you saying that men are looking to marry at 18 or 22, but women refuse umpteen proposals? That doesn’t sound plausible. Certainly, nothing like this has been found by researchers like Regnerus, or anyone else I know. Who do you read on this?
Again, this would have to be proved rather than assumed. If it turns out
What’s on your mind here: adultery? Divorce? Both? Something else?–Is it that you think that women were faithless in marriage, but men faithful? Or that you think both were faithless, but it’s primarily female faithlessness that counts?
I don’t see how this relates to anything I’ve written. Do you maybe want to elaborate? Is your argument that you cannot have functioning markets? Have you considered maybe making an entire post?
I feel like you’re being rather unfair, Titus, to both Regnerus and my review. It feels like you’re dead-on determined to find a gaping core of emptiness at the heart of all educated and intellectual discussion… so much so that you’re willing to overlook the (many!) things we actually do say about the Big Questions you regard as so important. For instance, neither Regnerus or I are uncritical or unreflective about the limits of science. Regnerus, as a sociologist, has to keep his scholarly work within certain methodological boundaries, but he’s quite aware of them and their limitations and discusses this in the book. I know him a little bit personally and don’t find him to be at all naive about this; he is certainly capable of (and interested in) reflecting on all these larger questions. Meanwhile, I’m not bound by the sociologist’s limitations.. and accordingly, stepping out of those boundaries and saying something about the real meaning of romantic love and sex is in fact a major theme of the review! You can agree with my position there or not, but saying that I “argue in favor of” an economics of sex and am “strangely silent” about deeper questions of purpose just seems to me like a gross mischaracterization of what I wrote.
Now, all the stuff about manly law and womanly governance seems to me like it’s trending towards the claim that if we really cared about anything, we would eagerly seize the tools of illiberalism to force everyone to live in accord with true human nature. If we aren’t willing to do that, we’re “abandoning law and justice” and settling for the thin gruel of materialistic science and empty proceduralism.
Quite a lot of people are thinking this way nowadays, frankly. On the left and the right. Let’s just say, it’s problematic. Conservatives shouldn’t be the ones to forget that there can be genuinely good reasons (and I’m not counting cowardice or commitment to moral relativism in that bracket) for not forcing everyone to do what we think they should do. If you want to argue for laws against adultery, then fine, argue for that. But I don’t think these vague-yet-sweeping indictments are doing any of us credit.