No Love Is Free

 

One of my Chinese students, by chance, brought up another problem with birth control and the current sexual climate that did not occur to me yesterday. He has no desire to spend any time with his classmates, or those of his own age generally, because all they are interested in is hooking up. And this, he rightly sees, is selfish. “Free love” is ultimately profoundly selfish. Aside from taking no thought for possible or eventual children, it sees the partner as an object, no more than a tasty cut of meat. One loves them no more than one loves the cow. It is insensitive to the emotional universe, and deadens the heart within.

As a result, sensitive and intelligent kids like him are left socially isolated. There are no good partners.

Others have also noticed that, given the difference between men and women, “free love” means that women will have sex whenever they want it, but with only about 20% of the men—the most attractive 20%. Who will in turn have little incentive to ever marry and give up this constant attention. So most men get no sex, and most women get no family. Nobody gets companionship.

The Price of "Free Love"

 

I heard a suggestion recently that the birth control pill is causing serious health issues for women. Moreover, this source argued that it disrupts women’s emotional health by interfering with their hormones. 

So how about banning the birth control pill?

It does seem, after all, that the pill and the “sexual revolution” it inspired have turned out to be disastrous on a social level. People have stopped having children. To compensate and just to keep systems and structures going, governments have turned to mass immigration. Mass immigration has begun to cause serious social problems. Not to mention, it will cause the eventual disappearance of the culture, as efficiently as any genocide. Marriages no longer stay together, causing endless grief and financial ruin to many individuals, parents and children, and tremendous expense to society as a whole. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, and the risk of some new epidemic like AIDs is high. People crave crazier and crazier, riskier and riskier sexual thrills. Sex for pleasure turns out to be a dangerous addiction: you want more and more and get less and less out of it. Sexual assault and sexual blackmail is everywhere, as the sexes mingle now in daily life and there are no firm rules or boundaries. Trying to prosecute is always “he said/she said.” Injustice is inevitable, and lives are ruined.

Is it time to reconnect sex firmly to childbearing?

Ban the pill, ban abortion. End no-fault divorce. Make adultery illegal.

We are so eager for social experiments; here’s one to try.

The Sexual Devolution

 

I don't agree with Jordan Peterson on everything, but he's making some important points. The sexual revolution was a dumb mistake.

We need to grow up.

Sex and the Deep State

The Sixties

A friend sends along this link from American Thinker. A lot of great insights here. Some stuff that had never occurred to me. 

“Our divorce regime is a unilateral divorce regime. Anyone who wants a divorce gets to have one: The State always takes sides with the party who wants the marriage the least. The State incentivizes disloyalty and infidelity between spouses.”

“The injustices of the unilateral divorce regime have been known for a long time. The Deep State could, at any time, enact divorce by mutual consent. Yet, they do not.”

“Delaying childbearing has become the cost of entering the professions. That means many of our most successful and visible and influential people have used contraception or abortion. They literally cannot imagine what their lives would be without it. Journalists, lawyers, foundation officers, business executives, and politicians all join hands to protect the Abortion Industry from skeptics like David Daleiden.”

I do disagree, though, with the basic premise, that the Sexual Revolution was imposed from above by elites in order to seize more power.

I think it came from all of us, and it was far simpler. The attraction was the promise of sex on demand and without consequences. Couldn’t be clearer, really: “free love!”

To make it work, you then had to kill the traditional sex roles and make men and women interchangeable; the traditional roles required that women and men worked in tandem in a family unit. You had to subvert the family generally. Family, commitment to one partner and to children, went directly counter to random access to sex. It became the enemy. 

You also had to go for unrestricted abortion, and then—hey, if murder is okay, where are the limits?

Instead of sin being condemned, now it was “conventional morality,” or any appeal to morality, that was condemned. The whole gay and trans thing has been an attempt to discredit conventional morality as “discriminatory.” So, for that matter, is the overall attack on “Western civilization,” as though it were a blight upon human history. The target is the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

This rejection of morality was simply more dangerous when embraced by the elites. If morality is no longer a constraint, the elites are free to pursue pure self-interest. They can just go for power and possessions.

It is also in their self-interest, now, to destroy the family, and religious authority, and even thinking for oneself, as rival power centres.

And so here we are.

Take This Simple Nazi Test

A classic narcissist lie.

In listing the signs you are dealing with a bad person, one of Jesus’s “goats,” I left out one obvious indication.

8. They will want often to shut down conversation.

This is a sure sign of a guilty conscience: someone wants to stop others talking if they know they are in the wrong.

Which brings up, in turn, the reflection that we are obviously now in the midst of an upsurge of evil. Hence the growing wave of censorship.

We are also, tellingly enough, seeing an upsurge in antisemitism, postmodern relativism, anti-religious sentiment, and ecofascism. It all suggests a lot of people with a guilty conscience, and determined not to repent.

I trace it all back to the “sexual revolution,” and more specifically to legalized abortion.

And I see a chilling parallel.

Back when Victoria died, at the turn of the 19th century, there was a similar period of libertinage, the “Edwardian Era.” This earlier sexual revolution extended into the 20s, and was especially a hallmark of Weimar Germany.

And where did that lead us?

Where did that lead Germany?

Into brazen, undisguised evil on the mass level. Nazism was a popular melding of anti-semitism, ecofascism, moral relativism, and anti-religious sentiment. And murderous on an industrial scale.

Is that where this ends?

Or are we already there?

You might have wondered, if you are an honest sort, where you really would have stood had you been alive in Nazi Germany. Would you really have been a Schindler? Or would you have been a “good German” and just gone along? Or even a Nazi?

There is an easy test.

What is your stance on abortion?

The Playboy of the Western World

Hugh Hefner died last week. It is time to say a few words about Hugh Hefner.

Obits seem to have been mostly laudatory: he is credited with launching the sexual revolution.

I find that shocking: that anyone, in 2017, would still believe the “sexual revolution” was a good thing.

The sexual revolution has destroyed the family, and through this, countless lives. It has brought us free, legal, and frequent abortion, a holocaust that trumps anything Hitler did every few weeks. It has caused a demographic collapse that looks as though it will end Western civilization. AIDS and other venereal diseases are the least of it. Treating other people as objects for your pleasure, like a steak or a lobster, are the worst of it.

Yay, sexual revolution.

And Hefner himself was always an absurd figure, an embarrassment to himself and to anyone who took him seriously. Really: silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket, and a yachting cap with crossed anchors? The man lived his life as a cartoon. No doubt he had to, for business reasons. But it hardly amounts to an exemplary life. He was an eight-year-old boy’s fantasy of what it would be like to be grown up. Stay in bed all day. Party every night. Drink alcohol, smoke a pipe, and listen to cool jazz. Have your own pad! So sophisticated!

It’s not about the pornography, or, if you prefer, “erotica.” That I can see a justification for. It’s the lying about it. It’s the “philosophy.” I can forgive him only if he did it all for the money. But that still does not make him admirable.

The world is not a better place because Hugh Hefner was in it.

Stalin in Drag

Writer Mary Eberstadt has apparently written a book comparing the sexual revolution with the adventure of Communism in Eastern Europe, in terms of its disastrous consequences. Rings true to me. A writer for National Review objects that nobody wants to flee the sexual revolution the way many did Eastern Europe. True; while the results of the sexual revolution may be disastrous for society, and indeed for millions of individuals, almost all of us can also see the obvious payoff of lots of sex. Stalinism never had an inducement like that.

But, on the other hand, for anyone who wants to flee the sexual revolution, there is a problem not faced by those who opposed Stalinism: where can they go? The sexual revolution's triumph is so complete that there really are very few jurisdictions it does not yet fully control; and those few that do exist, like Saudi Arabia, are more or less under siege.

Sometimes it seems the only way to escape is in the pages of old books. In the last few days, re-united with my book collection, I have read to my son Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Speckled Band,” and taken up Great Expectations.

In the Sherlock Holmes story, a woman comes to ask Holmes for help. But before she does so, the author notes, she lifts her veil. 

The Speckled Band: proper black dress and veil of a Victorian lady.

Yep. London, 140 years ago—no respectable woman would go into the streets without her face covered.

In the Dickens novel, Pip is being raised by his sister, who physically abuses both him and her husband, the blacksmith. 

Pip and the abusive Mrs. Joe.

Yep. In England 150 years ago, everyone was aware that a woman was just as likely as a man to physically abuse either children or spouse.

Since then, of course, the world has gone mad. Sexual revolution.

May it all collapse one day soon like the Berlin Wall.

A Brief and Sad History of the Modern Left

1950s through 1960s – The Sexual Revolution. With the advent of what used to be called The Pill, many believed that everything had changed. Sex was no longer tied to childbirth, and could be purely recreational. For obvious reasons, this idea was attractive, regardless of its innate pausibility. In order to make this happen, of course, "conventional morality" could and should be changed. Feminism too emerged from this notion, along with its milder masculine equivalent, "the Playboy philosophy"—women were now "freed" from men and children and into the world of work.

1970s through 1980s – The Right to Choose. For whatever reason, darn it, women continued to get pregnant. Nature was not cooperating. Rather than abandon the "sexual revolution"—too many people had too much invested in it now—unrestricted abortion became necessary to keep the dream alive. This was an important watershed—it now because necessary, in order to stay on the left, to dismiss not just "conventional morality," but morality plain and straight up. Here is where  the left split with the religious generally, and became openly anti-religious. Homosexual rights emerged at this time, mostly as a stick with which to beat
"conventional morality" as "prejudiced."

1980s through 1990s – Postmodernism. Though it became well-known as a specific, named, doctrine only circa the 1990s, "postmodernism" appeared almost immediately and concurrent with the move to permit abortion, as its necessary justification. I remember hearing it espoused already in the early seventies, and specifically as a justification for abortion. In a nutshell, the doctrine is this: there is no truth, and there is no right and wrong. One chooses to believe what is convenient. At this point, the left became, not just explicitly immoral, but also, for all intents and purposes, insane. It turned its back on reality.

1990s through 2010 – The Culture Wars. Postmodernism ended all chance at dialogue. When there is no possibility of appealing to conscience, evidence, or reason, a raw struggle for power is all that is possible. By embracing postmodernism, the ruling professional elite and those in power also generally removed all moral restraints and restraints of conscience on their own actions--an attractive thing in itself, for them. Postmodern thought therefore systematically and intentionally destroyed all ethical traditions, at least for those who bought in to postmodernism, leaving in academics, politics, and the professions, in places of power generally, only the reckless exercise of narrow self-interest and power for its own sake. This is crucial--ruling elites must be bound by a strong ethical tradition, or all hell breaks loose.

The present – The Tea Party. The great mass of the people are partly shielded from the intellectual currents of the day by class prejudice, ignorance (not stupidity) and lack of interest. Unschooled human nature, happily including basic conscience and common sense, is stronger here. This can be a good thing, when the intellectual elite has gone bizarro. To the average man, the left and the professions, inevitably, are progressively now revealing themselves—largely thanks to the new light and improved communication of the internet-- to be by and large both immoral and insane. This is also a matter of some immediate practical interest. When those in power are visibly incompetent and acting selfishly, the common man has every reason out of sheer self-interest to rebel. 

Meanwhile, having rejected dialog and debate, contact with reality, and all tests of reason and evidence, the left and their client professions have systematically stripped themselves of any tools they would need to respond sensibly or to defend their position. They can only jabber nonsense.

This is interesting, if sad, as history; I think it is also interesting as a model of how insanity probably develops in an individual as well. A false premise leads one into sinful acts (the sexual revolution). Rather than repenting and returning to the path, one tries to cover up and to rationalize (abortion). This inevitably leads in the end to turning one's back on all objective checks—on God (postmodernism). One loses all touch with reality. Madness ensues.