Thank you for writing this in such clear and thoughtful language. I have been interested in the subjects you touched on in this essay for a while, and I have been following Scott Alexander's arguments for a while.
I believe you have nailed down the fundamental truth of the origin of marriage as an institution developed for, amongst others, the purpose of optimizing security for women, reducing paternal uncertainty in men, and providing structures conducive to the sustenance of new life.
Your thoughts on prostitution were very interesting to me. As a young man who has used pornography in the past to take the pressure off my lusting eyes and bulging balls, the description of porn as a private substitute for prostitution rings true. I've always wondered what society would be like without prostitutes. You helped me see clearly what that might be.
I like how your arguments are rooted in reality and pragmatism, no unnecessary appeals to nebulous ideas around absolutel "moral worth." I can trust your arguments because they're not trying to impose an ideal that is based on extra-human contexts, or that is alien to how we've come to organize and understand ourselves as a species.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for such a lovely comment. I was literally in bed in agony from a pulled muscle, and your comment put a big smile on my face.
My $0.04 (inflation): Good relationships require pretty much the same core qualities (trust, respect, compassion, affection, etc.) regardless of poly, mono, or in between. Similarly, all relationship architectures can be used by bad actors to justify their selfish behavior. And all too often, the proponents of one approach will compare their good actors the the bad actors of the other architecture. Always a pain when I read those.
The first real difference, in my observation, is the amount of community support. If a given architecture is "mainstream" then there are more resources and more people who can provide support. In alternative communities, the smallness means that it's at risk of "none of us know what to do."
But that difference would be manageable if not for the second common human problem, which is "to feel good about my lifestyle choices, I'm going to insist that everyone else follow my lifestyle." I don't have a solution to that one.
I agree, until the "first real difference" thing. In my experience community support is also increasingly broken where I live, both mainstream-wise (whatever Greece has to offer) and sub-community-wise (social circles and sub-cultures I've been a part of). I get the impression that this is also an international mess, especially in western urbanized societies.
The "bad actors" have increasingly become just too many, too bold and encouraged/indoctrinated through mainstream culture as well. My latest writing is, among other things, a half-assed attempt at describing this issue, if anyone is interested.
It's a weird position to be in, to be old enough to remember a relatively high-trust society and to look around and realize that the trust is gone.
In my forthcoming book The Art of Agency, I argue at length that the devolution of trust is not an accident. It's at least a second-tier effect of other social forces long at work, and may well have been an intended means-to-an-end (I actually think the latter is true, but cannot prove it to my own satisfaction enough to include the point in the book).
I'm just old enough to remember changes in Greek society during the 90s and 00s. Libertinage (which I'm not necessarily against) was heavily pushed through TV and magazines (and later online equivalents), while cheating (which I find one of the worst forms of disrespect) was being normalized through the same wave of propaganda.
When taken in account together with the identity politics push that followed and intertwined with this, and the events of the last few years, it's hard for me to explain it in any other way than being "an intended means-to-an-end". I'll agree though that such things are hard to prove in a clearly defined way.
You just caused me to have a realization about some experiences in my 26 year marriage. You don't get this far without real trust, respect, and ultimate goals and outcomes while also experimenting with new ideas throughout your marriage. Marriage has many phases because we are many different ages throughout. Also, monogamy nor polyamory should start to count towards anything until you are in a committed marriage or relationship where promises are made. Anything before that point shouldn't count in these discussions. That's just my opinion. I seem to have one about everything. Haha.
One goal of this discussion is to evaluate things on the level of the society, not the individual. So when you say they shouldn’t count, are you saying that it makes no difference whatsoever to a society what people do before they’re involved in a committed marriage?
Not at all. I spent last night thinking about this question. The idea of monogamy from birth to death is definitely one concept and I know someone people who've gone by that idea. So now, I feel like there's monogamy A and monogamy B. As a concept. In other words, I was wrong in yesterday's quick thinking because I was thinking about promises made at a specific time to be monogamous. I was thinking more on an individual level rather than as a society. Thank you for the question. It made me think more deeply.
A good paradigm to look at for Contract Marriages is ethnographic studies about longhouse tribes. In this form of social pair-bonding, the woman's family is the "father" in terms of both material support and in terms of male role-modeling, and the pair-bonds between men and women tend to last around 4 years, the length of time it takes a baby to become quasi-independent and start running most of the time with the other kids in a hunter-gatherer culture.
I like "contract marriage." Relationship for life would be sleeping with one person throughout life, like we were advised to do in Biblical teaching. However, I think that is rare. I don't think it's good that it's rare, but it is. So, that's why I'm trying to distinguish because most of society wouldn't think of themselves as poly if they didn't cheat or add partners during the "contract marriage." This is a linguistic issue mostly because we have lost the ability to have the same definitions when we talk about topics in society.
An interesting read, but the idea of WWII soldiers sharing their wives, do you have any data on that? I have never heard of such a thing.
As for marriage and monogamy, this cannot be saved until the family courts un-fuck themselves and stop allowing their man hatred to color their rulings. Right now, less and less men value marriage because there is no familial stability, only risk. This is why groups like MGTOW exists and whatever the feminine equivalent is.
Long term, I don't think harems or polygamy/swinging is the answer. This tends to create societies where the vast majority of men cannot find a woman. This leaves them with no buy-in to society and nothing to lose. A dangerous combo, I suspect. The old adage comes to mind, 'the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." We are approaching that society now and only abating it with imported third world labor. This is a death spiral solution and can't last forever.
Anyway, a thoughtful post and I am glad you shared it!
It was pilots, particularly. I first learned about it through a footnote in Sex at Dawn (an uneven book in its arguments, but well-footnoted), and found it so interesting I chased it down and verified it. I unfortunately don't have my library built yet, thus most of my deep research books are in storage, so I can't dig the footnote out right now, but that's where you can chase it down yourself.
As for the rest, I won't make an extensive argument here (saving it for a book which I may or may not write), but I will say this much:
So long as birth control and material prosperity exist, I don't think you'll see a return to anything like the nuclear family as the norm. There are FAR too many downsides in that setup for men and for women, regardless of what the courts are doing.
Nonetheless, I am convinced that the the current state of affairs is transitory (I say this because it is unsustainable on its own)--the question is, transitory to "what"? I see a few possibilities, some of which conservatives will LOVE and a couple of which they'd hate, and all of which will transform the way our culture functions in the long run.
One of the perils of writing in the midst of great change is that it's not possible to be confident that one sees all the factors in play. Prophecy is a mug's game, which is why people like me write science fiction and why some of the less ethical science fiction authors start religions ;-)
So where do you think we end up? If things don't change, I would not be surprised if we see a re-birth of Mormon style harems where the top men get everything. It will be fine, for a bit, until it isn't and then the unattached men will revolt and the yo-yo of life will continue ad nauseum.
Historically, stable non-aristocratic family arrangements are:
Clan marriage (between 1-3 wives, embedded in a clan structure)
Agrarian polygamy
Agrarian mongamy (with clan support either de facto or de jure)
Urban monogamy (with legal support)
Longhouse tribal communalism
All of these almost always supported by prostitution and frequently also supported and/or enforced by slavery of one sort or another
Harem building is always and only ever an aristocratic activity, and concentrating on that is not useful for predicting or understanding where we might go from here. Aristocrats (if you'll forgive me for being shamelessly elitist for a moment) understand that stability and inheritance make a family work, and generally don't worry about sex. The hoi polloi are the hoi polloi partly because they can't effectively make the distinction.
This is why harems have the whiff of "decadence" about them--because they are a hobby of the wealthy. However, the wealthy *always* do this, not just in times of decadence (literally: social decay).
So, anyway, back to the hoi polloi:
The one thing that's allowed "monogamy" (as a social institution) to persist despite the removal of all but the most rudimentary legal supports is the risk of pregnancy. That is now no longer a dependable risk, and a great deal of the social confusion over the last three generations is down to our customs and culture being inadequate to deal with the fact that women now have (and enjoy) sexual freedom to the same degree that men have always done. This unbundles sex from family life in a pretty profound way, and so women are free to pursue romance in the same way that men have always pursued mistresses and hookers.
To put that djinn back in the bottle you'd have to not only get rid of all birth control, you'd also have to erase two centuries of study on human reproduction (since it has allowed us to so sharply define fertility risk that the rhythm method, when properly practiced, has the SAME rates of reliability as does the pill or an IUD).
The underlying difference in bonding patterns between men and women, however, still persists.
This means that technology has created a gap that culture must, and eventually will solve for, but it hasn't yet.
So what do I expect?
I don't expect we'll wind up forming a consensus. Instead, I suspect we'll see a distributive sorting of subcultures, whereby women who want to be kept tend towards more conservative subcultures, and women who don't want to be kept will form other subcultures, some of which will be childless as the norm, and others of which won't.
What does that do to men?
It puts men in a situation of assortative mating, where those who are least flexible and/or moderately alpha-ish wind up in conservative subcultures, while those who are both most dominant and least dominant wind up in more exotic situations. In all cases, microcultures are gonna be the order of the day (things have been trending this way for quite a while now).
As far as who shall inherit the earth?
That's gonna be down to the fertility cults.
Catholics, Aimsh, pronatalist secularists, and old-line pagan fertility cults are gonna wind up out-breeding everyone except, perhaps, for the underclasses, who will continue on just as they've always done, taking things one day at a time and doing what seems right in the moment.
>>whereby women who want to be kept tend towards more conservative subcultures, and women who don't want to be kept will form other subcultures, some of which will be childless as the norm, and others of which won't.
Given that it is not just the binary (childless or not) but a sliding scale (how many children) the one group of women (conservative) will outbreed the other.
>> every culture that didn’t literally keep women under guard has had customs around female adultery that are tacitly honored even when publicly condemned.
I think this sentence is grammatically problematic. I think, what it means is:
1) Adultery was publicly condemned
2) Adultery had rules which were honored for the most part and
3) Women who committed adultery but followed the rules were only condemned in a pro forma sort of way.
The way it is written could seem to mean that the rules themselves were tacitly honoured while being publicly condemend. Which would lead one to think that the society was saying 'there should be no rules to adultery!' As opposed to saying, "There should be no adultery (but if you are going to fool around, at least follow the rules!!).
I would be interested in hearing of the rules of a given society vis a vis female adultery.
It's a good idea, but the open/closed vs. the one/many axes look quite confused when it comes to where you put "dating." Also, there's two kinds of "openness" that are salient: the emotional and the sexual (men and women react differently to each when lines are crossed, which reveals its salience).
More or less, yes. That dichotomy is a consistent recurring theme in marriage counselling--women (again, talking trends, because there are outliers in any group) are much more likely to be upset by extra-pair emotional attachments, while men are much more upset by extra-pair sexual dalliances. Therefore, when considering openness/closedness of a relationship, differentiating the two is useful for understanding more fully what kind of compromises are being made.
Again, I'm not a modern, but what kind of comprimises are being made? Isn't the idea "You are in love with me, you have sex with me, any violation of either of those is a problem" even when 'But having sex with another guy is MORE of a problem than falling in love with him" OR (which I don't really believe any woman would say) "But falling in love that other girl is MORE of a problem than having sex with her."
Not sure why 'dating' is confusing. I will admit I am not in the modern dating scene but...
"I went out with Susan on Monday, Jill on Tuesday, and Rosemary on Wednesday..."
IE he went out with only one woman at a time, probably slept with them, but none of them though of themselves as excusively his. They might have slept with someone else on other nights.
Vs what we used to call 'going steady', which was One + Closed... "I am only going out with him, and I would be upset if I found out he was going out with other girls."
I may also be out of date on terminology, but it seems to be an ambiguous term. "I'm dating again" after a breakup means "on the market" and "I'm dating Bob" means that the relationship is established enough to demand social recognition.
Ok, so to clarify: what I meant by 'dating' here was the phase of life. As in, dating, going steady, living together, engaged, married...
During the 'dating' phase I believe that most Americans, at least, only have sex with one partner at a time, and that partner is not sexually active with his other partners. Thus it is, "Have sex with one person, then have sex with another person, etc."
Just a quick question. Shouldn't it be polygamy instead of polyamory? Polygamy is loosely defined as one man or woman, many mates. Think of the Mormons of old, one man four wives.
Second, bonding: Women and men’s baseline sexual responses are almost at odds with one another. Women generally become touch-receptive as the result of bonding, and sexually-receptive as the result of certain flavors of bonding, whereas men generally become receptive to bonding as a result of touch (including, but not limited, to sexual touch).
What do you suppose happens when the touch is one way, say from the man to woman, but the woman never reciprocates? What does is say when the woman goes to great pains to avoid touching her mate. When shes watched TV and plays on her phone until midnight, then goes to bed and sleeps on the far side of the mattress? When she wakes up in the morning and never speaks to her mate.
On the first point, the confusion is coloquial vs fomal. Since the most common and durable form of polygamy involves many wives, that's usually what laymen think about when using the term. Formally, though, polygamy is "many spouses" and includes polygyny (many women) polyandry (mamy men) and various sorts of group marriages. Polyamory is a group mating strategy that includes so many variations on protocols, ethics, amd customs that nailing it down would be like talking about the One True God of Hinduism, but it does at the least include always the simultaneous, socially sanctioned maintenance of multiple pair-bonds. Hence why I stick polygamy as a subset of the polyamory master set.
On the second point, when touch worls like you describe, that's grounds for divorce. It is exactly as much a form of cheating as is one spouse secretly maintaining a second family. What happens in such situations? Depends on the relationship, but in all cases except those in which the man has a refusal kink the pair-bond decays and the relationship dies, regardless of whether the couple splits or not.
Forgive me for not being impressed. The author, like the researcher he sites, is looking in the wrong place and at the wrong things, and is begging several questions in the bargain. The author of the piece-as-written is also flat wrong on several matters of fact, such as the significance (or lack thereof) of the 60s sexual revolution--hard to blame him given the propaganda on the subject, but nevertheless.
The problems with our culture lie much further upstream than any of this stuff.
To be fair to the author of the article, he acknowledges that possibility, but he doesn't seem to take it seriously.
Certain kinds of sexuality dysfunctions (esp the rapid and ubiquitous emergence of transgenderism) reliably materialize at a certain point in cultural decay--but they are neither the cause of the decay nor can addressing them effect any meaningful change. And, frankly, before surgeries and hormones, there was little about such trends that was worrisome in-and-of-themselves.
What sources can you recommend for the history of changes in the expression of sexuality that accompany different stages of the life of a culture? I have read in passing that norms of sexual identity shifted during the decline of Rome in ways we might find familiar, but I have not encountered a source with good references or a geographically and chronologically broad treatment, both of which I value highly in my history.
The closest I've come to a good comprehensive study is Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, which looks at the expression of sex and sociosexuality through the lens of the extant art of ancient civilizations, and does so in dialogue with relevant historical sources. Not exactly what you're looking for, but it puts you on the right track. Everything else I've picked up over forty+ years of reading specific histories about different eras/cultures which deal with sex as part of the whole picture of the culture.
An interesting article and worth reading. End left me a bit cold, because, like so much of the commentary on the subject, it stops short of where it obviously is heading.
Where do you see it heading? I often have the same feeling... like the author stopped half way to their destination. Perhaps the Overton window is a problem?
Probably. It looked to me like it was obviously pointing at the hard-wall that small-l liberals (among whom I count myself) run into in situations like this. It's *not quite* an Overton window problem, but more an orthogonality issue.
Basically, much of our world is, in my estimation, deranged in its conversation because in the late 19th century "liberalism" became a moral system instead of a game theoretical one (I touch on this in Neo-Trads and the End of the World: https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/neo-trads-and-the-end-of-the-world). Solutions to the problem are actually pretty simple if you start looking at it in game theoretical terms, but the moralistic gloss on it means that everyone keeps looking for "what should society do to make women happier" or something similar. They're looking at the wrong problem--or, to quote Raiders of the Lost Ark, "They're digging in the wrong place."
Thank you for writing this in such clear and thoughtful language. I have been interested in the subjects you touched on in this essay for a while, and I have been following Scott Alexander's arguments for a while.
I believe you have nailed down the fundamental truth of the origin of marriage as an institution developed for, amongst others, the purpose of optimizing security for women, reducing paternal uncertainty in men, and providing structures conducive to the sustenance of new life.
Your thoughts on prostitution were very interesting to me. As a young man who has used pornography in the past to take the pressure off my lusting eyes and bulging balls, the description of porn as a private substitute for prostitution rings true. I've always wondered what society would be like without prostitutes. You helped me see clearly what that might be.
I like how your arguments are rooted in reality and pragmatism, no unnecessary appeals to nebulous ideas around absolutel "moral worth." I can trust your arguments because they're not trying to impose an ideal that is based on extra-human contexts, or that is alien to how we've come to organize and understand ourselves as a species.
Again, thank you.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for such a lovely comment. I was literally in bed in agony from a pulled muscle, and your comment put a big smile on my face.
My $0.04 (inflation): Good relationships require pretty much the same core qualities (trust, respect, compassion, affection, etc.) regardless of poly, mono, or in between. Similarly, all relationship architectures can be used by bad actors to justify their selfish behavior. And all too often, the proponents of one approach will compare their good actors the the bad actors of the other architecture. Always a pain when I read those.
The first real difference, in my observation, is the amount of community support. If a given architecture is "mainstream" then there are more resources and more people who can provide support. In alternative communities, the smallness means that it's at risk of "none of us know what to do."
But that difference would be manageable if not for the second common human problem, which is "to feel good about my lifestyle choices, I'm going to insist that everyone else follow my lifestyle." I don't have a solution to that one.
Couldn't agree more if you paid me. Especially on that last point.
I agree, until the "first real difference" thing. In my experience community support is also increasingly broken where I live, both mainstream-wise (whatever Greece has to offer) and sub-community-wise (social circles and sub-cultures I've been a part of). I get the impression that this is also an international mess, especially in western urbanized societies.
The "bad actors" have increasingly become just too many, too bold and encouraged/indoctrinated through mainstream culture as well. My latest writing is, among other things, a half-assed attempt at describing this issue, if anyone is interested.
Many useful thoughts by JDS by the way.
It's a weird position to be in, to be old enough to remember a relatively high-trust society and to look around and realize that the trust is gone.
In my forthcoming book The Art of Agency, I argue at length that the devolution of trust is not an accident. It's at least a second-tier effect of other social forces long at work, and may well have been an intended means-to-an-end (I actually think the latter is true, but cannot prove it to my own satisfaction enough to include the point in the book).
I'm just old enough to remember changes in Greek society during the 90s and 00s. Libertinage (which I'm not necessarily against) was heavily pushed through TV and magazines (and later online equivalents), while cheating (which I find one of the worst forms of disrespect) was being normalized through the same wave of propaganda.
When taken in account together with the identity politics push that followed and intertwined with this, and the events of the last few years, it's hard for me to explain it in any other way than being "an intended means-to-an-end". I'll agree though that such things are hard to prove in a clearly defined way.
You just caused me to have a realization about some experiences in my 26 year marriage. You don't get this far without real trust, respect, and ultimate goals and outcomes while also experimenting with new ideas throughout your marriage. Marriage has many phases because we are many different ages throughout. Also, monogamy nor polyamory should start to count towards anything until you are in a committed marriage or relationship where promises are made. Anything before that point shouldn't count in these discussions. That's just my opinion. I seem to have one about everything. Haha.
The importance of one's word (and the bi-directional nature of the contract when knitting lives together) can't be overstated.
Glad you found value in the post!
Also, congrats on 26 years!
One goal of this discussion is to evaluate things on the level of the society, not the individual. So when you say they shouldn’t count, are you saying that it makes no difference whatsoever to a society what people do before they’re involved in a committed marriage?
Not that you asked me, but this might be a good topic for a future pair of installments in our exchange.
Well, it is certainly part of what I envision for this exchange!
Not at all. I spent last night thinking about this question. The idea of monogamy from birth to death is definitely one concept and I know someone people who've gone by that idea. So now, I feel like there's monogamy A and monogamy B. As a concept. In other words, I was wrong in yesterday's quick thinking because I was thinking about promises made at a specific time to be monogamous. I was thinking more on an individual level rather than as a society. Thank you for the question. It made me think more deeply.
So how would you define your monogamy an and monogamy B?
Monogamy A - 1 single partner from birth to death
Monogamy B - upholding a vow to another to be monagamist throughout relationship
Relationship for life? Or a short term contract idea?
I am experimenting with 'contract marriage' in one of my fictions.
A good paradigm to look at for Contract Marriages is ethnographic studies about longhouse tribes. In this form of social pair-bonding, the woman's family is the "father" in terms of both material support and in terms of male role-modeling, and the pair-bonds between men and women tend to last around 4 years, the length of time it takes a baby to become quasi-independent and start running most of the time with the other kids in a hunter-gatherer culture.
I like "contract marriage." Relationship for life would be sleeping with one person throughout life, like we were advised to do in Biblical teaching. However, I think that is rare. I don't think it's good that it's rare, but it is. So, that's why I'm trying to distinguish because most of society wouldn't think of themselves as poly if they didn't cheat or add partners during the "contract marriage." This is a linguistic issue mostly because we have lost the ability to have the same definitions when we talk about topics in society.
An interesting read, but the idea of WWII soldiers sharing their wives, do you have any data on that? I have never heard of such a thing.
As for marriage and monogamy, this cannot be saved until the family courts un-fuck themselves and stop allowing their man hatred to color their rulings. Right now, less and less men value marriage because there is no familial stability, only risk. This is why groups like MGTOW exists and whatever the feminine equivalent is.
Long term, I don't think harems or polygamy/swinging is the answer. This tends to create societies where the vast majority of men cannot find a woman. This leaves them with no buy-in to society and nothing to lose. A dangerous combo, I suspect. The old adage comes to mind, 'the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." We are approaching that society now and only abating it with imported third world labor. This is a death spiral solution and can't last forever.
Anyway, a thoughtful post and I am glad you shared it!
It was pilots, particularly. I first learned about it through a footnote in Sex at Dawn (an uneven book in its arguments, but well-footnoted), and found it so interesting I chased it down and verified it. I unfortunately don't have my library built yet, thus most of my deep research books are in storage, so I can't dig the footnote out right now, but that's where you can chase it down yourself.
As for the rest, I won't make an extensive argument here (saving it for a book which I may or may not write), but I will say this much:
So long as birth control and material prosperity exist, I don't think you'll see a return to anything like the nuclear family as the norm. There are FAR too many downsides in that setup for men and for women, regardless of what the courts are doing.
Nonetheless, I am convinced that the the current state of affairs is transitory (I say this because it is unsustainable on its own)--the question is, transitory to "what"? I see a few possibilities, some of which conservatives will LOVE and a couple of which they'd hate, and all of which will transform the way our culture functions in the long run.
One of the perils of writing in the midst of great change is that it's not possible to be confident that one sees all the factors in play. Prophecy is a mug's game, which is why people like me write science fiction and why some of the less ethical science fiction authors start religions ;-)
So where do you think we end up? If things don't change, I would not be surprised if we see a re-birth of Mormon style harems where the top men get everything. It will be fine, for a bit, until it isn't and then the unattached men will revolt and the yo-yo of life will continue ad nauseum.
In the end there are only two macro-states:
The stable and the transitory.
Historically, stable non-aristocratic family arrangements are:
Clan marriage (between 1-3 wives, embedded in a clan structure)
Agrarian polygamy
Agrarian mongamy (with clan support either de facto or de jure)
Urban monogamy (with legal support)
Longhouse tribal communalism
All of these almost always supported by prostitution and frequently also supported and/or enforced by slavery of one sort or another
Harem building is always and only ever an aristocratic activity, and concentrating on that is not useful for predicting or understanding where we might go from here. Aristocrats (if you'll forgive me for being shamelessly elitist for a moment) understand that stability and inheritance make a family work, and generally don't worry about sex. The hoi polloi are the hoi polloi partly because they can't effectively make the distinction.
This is why harems have the whiff of "decadence" about them--because they are a hobby of the wealthy. However, the wealthy *always* do this, not just in times of decadence (literally: social decay).
So, anyway, back to the hoi polloi:
The one thing that's allowed "monogamy" (as a social institution) to persist despite the removal of all but the most rudimentary legal supports is the risk of pregnancy. That is now no longer a dependable risk, and a great deal of the social confusion over the last three generations is down to our customs and culture being inadequate to deal with the fact that women now have (and enjoy) sexual freedom to the same degree that men have always done. This unbundles sex from family life in a pretty profound way, and so women are free to pursue romance in the same way that men have always pursued mistresses and hookers.
To put that djinn back in the bottle you'd have to not only get rid of all birth control, you'd also have to erase two centuries of study on human reproduction (since it has allowed us to so sharply define fertility risk that the rhythm method, when properly practiced, has the SAME rates of reliability as does the pill or an IUD).
The underlying difference in bonding patterns between men and women, however, still persists.
This means that technology has created a gap that culture must, and eventually will solve for, but it hasn't yet.
So what do I expect?
I don't expect we'll wind up forming a consensus. Instead, I suspect we'll see a distributive sorting of subcultures, whereby women who want to be kept tend towards more conservative subcultures, and women who don't want to be kept will form other subcultures, some of which will be childless as the norm, and others of which won't.
What does that do to men?
It puts men in a situation of assortative mating, where those who are least flexible and/or moderately alpha-ish wind up in conservative subcultures, while those who are both most dominant and least dominant wind up in more exotic situations. In all cases, microcultures are gonna be the order of the day (things have been trending this way for quite a while now).
As far as who shall inherit the earth?
That's gonna be down to the fertility cults.
Catholics, Aimsh, pronatalist secularists, and old-line pagan fertility cults are gonna wind up out-breeding everyone except, perhaps, for the underclasses, who will continue on just as they've always done, taking things one day at a time and doing what seems right in the moment.
>>whereby women who want to be kept tend towards more conservative subcultures, and women who don't want to be kept will form other subcultures, some of which will be childless as the norm, and others of which won't.
Given that it is not just the binary (childless or not) but a sliding scale (how many children) the one group of women (conservative) will outbreed the other.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/28276/did-ww2-pilots-lead-a-swingers-lifestyle-to-ensure-that-their-friends-would-tak
Thank you, I was skeptical too, so this was interesting to read.
BTW, the link in the beginning to my previous article seems to be broken. Here it is: https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/the-death-of-monogamy-the-definition
>> every culture that didn’t literally keep women under guard has had customs around female adultery that are tacitly honored even when publicly condemned.
I think this sentence is grammatically problematic. I think, what it means is:
1) Adultery was publicly condemned
2) Adultery had rules which were honored for the most part and
3) Women who committed adultery but followed the rules were only condemned in a pro forma sort of way.
The way it is written could seem to mean that the rules themselves were tacitly honoured while being publicly condemend. Which would lead one to think that the society was saying 'there should be no rules to adultery!' As opposed to saying, "There should be no adultery (but if you are going to fool around, at least follow the rules!!).
I would be interested in hearing of the rules of a given society vis a vis female adultery.
So, as far as polygamy vs monogamy vs others... does this chart help? Please excuse the format, if it turns out to be helpful I will prettyify it:https://substack.com/profile/10674706-von/note/c-51062387?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=6csnm
It's a good idea, but the open/closed vs. the one/many axes look quite confused when it comes to where you put "dating." Also, there's two kinds of "openness" that are salient: the emotional and the sexual (men and women react differently to each when lines are crossed, which reveals its salience).
So... by 'emotional and sexual' being different, and men and women being different... what are your conclusions:
Man: I don't mind that you are in love with him, but I'll be upset if you have sex with him.
Woman: I don't mind that the two of you have sex, but I would mind if you were in love with her?
???
More or less, yes. That dichotomy is a consistent recurring theme in marriage counselling--women (again, talking trends, because there are outliers in any group) are much more likely to be upset by extra-pair emotional attachments, while men are much more upset by extra-pair sexual dalliances. Therefore, when considering openness/closedness of a relationship, differentiating the two is useful for understanding more fully what kind of compromises are being made.
Again, I'm not a modern, but what kind of comprimises are being made? Isn't the idea "You are in love with me, you have sex with me, any violation of either of those is a problem" even when 'But having sex with another guy is MORE of a problem than falling in love with him" OR (which I don't really believe any woman would say) "But falling in love that other girl is MORE of a problem than having sex with her."
Not sure why 'dating' is confusing. I will admit I am not in the modern dating scene but...
"I went out with Susan on Monday, Jill on Tuesday, and Rosemary on Wednesday..."
IE he went out with only one woman at a time, probably slept with them, but none of them though of themselves as excusively his. They might have slept with someone else on other nights.
Vs what we used to call 'going steady', which was One + Closed... "I am only going out with him, and I would be upset if I found out he was going out with other girls."
I may also be out of date on terminology, but it seems to be an ambiguous term. "I'm dating again" after a breakup means "on the market" and "I'm dating Bob" means that the relationship is established enough to demand social recognition.
Ok, so to clarify: what I meant by 'dating' here was the phase of life. As in, dating, going steady, living together, engaged, married...
During the 'dating' phase I believe that most Americans, at least, only have sex with one partner at a time, and that partner is not sexually active with his other partners. Thus it is, "Have sex with one person, then have sex with another person, etc."
Just a quick question. Shouldn't it be polygamy instead of polyamory? Polygamy is loosely defined as one man or woman, many mates. Think of the Mormons of old, one man four wives.
Second, bonding: Women and men’s baseline sexual responses are almost at odds with one another. Women generally become touch-receptive as the result of bonding, and sexually-receptive as the result of certain flavors of bonding, whereas men generally become receptive to bonding as a result of touch (including, but not limited, to sexual touch).
What do you suppose happens when the touch is one way, say from the man to woman, but the woman never reciprocates? What does is say when the woman goes to great pains to avoid touching her mate. When shes watched TV and plays on her phone until midnight, then goes to bed and sleeps on the far side of the mattress? When she wakes up in the morning and never speaks to her mate.
What does this say about the Marriage?
On the first point, the confusion is coloquial vs fomal. Since the most common and durable form of polygamy involves many wives, that's usually what laymen think about when using the term. Formally, though, polygamy is "many spouses" and includes polygyny (many women) polyandry (mamy men) and various sorts of group marriages. Polyamory is a group mating strategy that includes so many variations on protocols, ethics, amd customs that nailing it down would be like talking about the One True God of Hinduism, but it does at the least include always the simultaneous, socially sanctioned maintenance of multiple pair-bonds. Hence why I stick polygamy as a subset of the polyamory master set.
On the second point, when touch worls like you describe, that's grounds for divorce. It is exactly as much a form of cheating as is one spouse secretly maintaining a second family. What happens in such situations? Depends on the relationship, but in all cases except those in which the man has a refusal kink the pair-bond decays and the relationship dies, regardless of whether the couple splits or not.
https://open.substack.com/pub/movingtorussia/p/sexual-restraint-helps-cultures-flourish?r=6csnm&utm_medium=ios
Forgive me for not being impressed. The author, like the researcher he sites, is looking in the wrong place and at the wrong things, and is begging several questions in the bargain. The author of the piece-as-written is also flat wrong on several matters of fact, such as the significance (or lack thereof) of the 60s sexual revolution--hard to blame him given the propaganda on the subject, but nevertheless.
The problems with our culture lie much further upstream than any of this stuff.
To be fair to the author of the article, he acknowledges that possibility, but he doesn't seem to take it seriously.
Certain kinds of sexuality dysfunctions (esp the rapid and ubiquitous emergence of transgenderism) reliably materialize at a certain point in cultural decay--but they are neither the cause of the decay nor can addressing them effect any meaningful change. And, frankly, before surgeries and hormones, there was little about such trends that was worrisome in-and-of-themselves.
What sources can you recommend for the history of changes in the expression of sexuality that accompany different stages of the life of a culture? I have read in passing that norms of sexual identity shifted during the decline of Rome in ways we might find familiar, but I have not encountered a source with good references or a geographically and chronologically broad treatment, both of which I value highly in my history.
The closest I've come to a good comprehensive study is Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, which looks at the expression of sex and sociosexuality through the lens of the extant art of ancient civilizations, and does so in dialogue with relevant historical sources. Not exactly what you're looking for, but it puts you on the right track. Everything else I've picked up over forty+ years of reading specific histories about different eras/cultures which deal with sex as part of the whole picture of the culture.
https://open.substack.com/pub/fiamengofile/p/are-women-the-biggest-losers-of-the?r=6csnm&utm_medium=ios
An interesting article and worth reading. End left me a bit cold, because, like so much of the commentary on the subject, it stops short of where it obviously is heading.
Where do you see it heading? I often have the same feeling... like the author stopped half way to their destination. Perhaps the Overton window is a problem?
Probably. It looked to me like it was obviously pointing at the hard-wall that small-l liberals (among whom I count myself) run into in situations like this. It's *not quite* an Overton window problem, but more an orthogonality issue.
Basically, much of our world is, in my estimation, deranged in its conversation because in the late 19th century "liberalism" became a moral system instead of a game theoretical one (I touch on this in Neo-Trads and the End of the World: https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/neo-trads-and-the-end-of-the-world). Solutions to the problem are actually pretty simple if you start looking at it in game theoretical terms, but the moralistic gloss on it means that everyone keeps looking for "what should society do to make women happier" or something similar. They're looking at the wrong problem--or, to quote Raiders of the Lost Ark, "They're digging in the wrong place."
And my next post is up! It was up this morning, but I was busy :)
https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/the-death-of-monogamy-definitions
My response is almost done... maybe Saturday, probably Tuesday, maybe Thursday if I get really bogged down. But in the meantime, does this chart work?
https://substack.com/profile/10674706-von/note/c-51230407?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=6csnm
Looks intelligible enough to be a useful reference to me.