Five Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Note that in this article Mary Eberstadt is not writing about the Women's Rights movement from the nineteenth century up through the 1950's, but as the title says the Sexual Revolution that really took off in the '60's. Eventually, we are going to have to recognize the damage we've inflicted on ourselves and do something about it.

    Academics vary about their definitions of the sexual revolution, but here’s one straightforward, uncontroversial formula. The “revolution” refers to the changes in sexual behavior and mores following the widespread adoption and approval of reliable contraception over a half-century ago. The first accelerant here is the birth control pill, approved by the FDA in 1963, and widely dispersed in the population thereafter. The second accelerant is the legalization of abortion on demand in 1973 via Roe v. Wade – a development that approval of the Pill made all but inevitable. Modern contraception and legalized abortion changed not only behavior but also attitudes. Around the world, social tolerance of non-marital sex in all its forms has risen alongside these other changes, for logical reasons that I’ve talked about elsewhere, including in my book Adam and Eve after the Pill.

    Except for the Internet, it’s hard to think of any other single phenomenon since the 1960s that has re-shaped humanity around the world as profoundly as this particular revolution. Some of the resulting record is very well known indeed: four years ago, on the 50th anniversary of approval of the birth control pill, there was an outpouring of commentary and reflection, most of it in a positive vein. The revolution, it was claimed – and acclaimed – by TIME magazine and most other secular sources, had leveled the playing field in the economic marketplace between women and men for the first time in history; it had conferred freedom on women such as they’d never known before.

    All true, so far as it goes. But there’s another side of the record that’s been mostly ignored by a mainstream society saturated with the revolution’s pleasures. With every passing year, more evidence accumulates that must someday change that predominant, happy storyline. Towards that end, I would like to discuss five ways in which the revolution has re-configured human reality as we know it, five seeming paradoxes that point to the revolution’s power – in particular, to its awe-inspiring destructive power.

    Let’s start with a little story that captures the scale of change. I grew up in a series of small towns scattered across beautiful and forbidding upstate New York – north of the Hudson River Valley, a planet away from New York City, in the area known as the Leatherstocking Region because author James Fenimore Cooper set his classic American stories there. This was, and still is, rural, blue-collar country. It was the kind of place where more local boys in the Sixties went to Vietnam than to college. In many ways, a lot about this area is still the same – with one massive exception, which we’ll call the family thing.

    In the 1960s, most men in this area worked as manual laborers, mainly on farms or in local copper and silver mills. Many women, if married, stayed home. Most families were still intact – religious and non-religious alike. This was not a particularly observant area; the majority of residents were Mainline Protestants, less than 10 percent were Catholic, and the local churches weren’t noticeably overflowing on Sundays.

    One of my enduring memories from those years: In 1972, just months before the legalization of abortion, a teenage girl down the street became pregnant. The baby’s father was a young soldier, newly returned from the war. The town gossips were up in arms – because he didn’t plan to marry the girl. In those days, that was considered shocking. Although pregnant brides were hardly unknown, even teenaged brides, men who didn’t marry pregnant girlfriends were objects of opprobrium. So tongues wagged, and not in a good way.

    Eventually, this girl had the baby somewhere else, where adoption followed. She came back and finished high school – to my knowledge, without social stigma. But the stigma that does remain memorable was the other one: against her boyfriend. The idea that he should have taken responsibility, which the majority of adults in that era and place believed, is an idea that’s vanished into the wind of the revolution.

    Now fast-forward some twenty years. In the early 1990s, I went back, and met with a former teacher. She estimated that among that year’s 200 high-school seniors, around one-third of the girls were pregnant. Not one was married. And doubtless there were other pregnancies besides the visible ones; various girls were also rumored to have gotten abortions.

    Here’s the take-away. From one scandalous pregnancy in a rural public high school in the 1970s, to many non-scandalous pregnancies in that same school by the 1990s: that’s one snapshot showing how the sexual revolution has transformed the world.

    Which leads us to the first of several paradoxes about that revolution:

    Paradox One: If the foundation of the revolution was the availability of cheap, reliable birth control, why the unprecedented rise in both abortions and pregnancies outside of marriage?

    This is a profoundly important question. After all, when contraception became commonplace, many people of good will defended it precisely because they thought it would render abortion obsolete. Margaret Sanger is one prominent example. She called abortion “barbaric” and argued that contraception would put abortion out of business. Planned Parenthood has gone on to claim her as its patron saint. She was making what might seem like a commonsense point: reliable contraception would prevent abortion. A great many people, both before and after the Sixties, have believed something similar.

    But the empirical record since the 1960s shows their logic to be wrong: rates of contraception, abortion, and out-of-wedlock births all exploded simultaneously.

    Over twenty years ago, a group of economists spelled out the dynamics of these simultaneous explosions with admirable clarity:

      Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. “If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception,” the man can reason, “why should I sacrifice myself to get married?” By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

    In other words, contraception led to more pregnancy and more abortion because it eroded the so-called shotgun wedding, or the idea that men had equal responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy.

    Another interesting theory about why contraception failed to prevent abortion comes from Scott Lloyd, writing in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. Using studies and statistics from the abortion industry itself, he (like others) argues that contraception leads to abortion – not inevitably in individual cases, of course, but repeatedly and reliably as twinned social phenomena:

      The bottom line is this: contraceptives do not work as advertised, and their failure is at the heart of the demand for abortion. Contraception enables sexual encounters and relationships that would not have happened without it. In other words, when couples use contraception, they agree to sex when pregnancy would be a problem. This leads to a desire for abortion.

    There are other efforts within social science, and elsewhere, to explain this same paradox; but the larger point stands: contrary to what a majority would likely have guessed in the Sixties, abortion and unplanned pregnancies have both proliferated, despite contraception.

    Many people present at the creation of the revolution couldn’t have anticipated its paradoxical consequences. Many, operating in good faith, hoped that humanity would master these new technologies and that they’d prove to be social goods. But those of us alive today, by stark contrast, possess a wealth of empirical evidence accumulated for decades now. And we can see through perfectly secular social science that the revolution’s story took a darker turn.

    Paradox Two: The sexual revolution was supposed to liberate women. Yet simultaneously, it has become harder to have what most women say they want: marriage and a family.

    This is not a biased way of phrasing the point. Women from across the political spectrum agree that marrying and mating for life has become more difficult than it used to be. This is one reason why we have commercial surrogacy and egg-freezing now – in the case of egg freezing, with the enthusiastic endorsement of corporate America. The purpose of these innovations – besides corporate profit from uninterrupted careerism – is to extend the horizon of natural fertility, so that women are freer to stay in the workplace and have time to find husband and family. The purported idea – like the idea behind widespread contraception and abortion on demand – is to empower women, put them in control.

    Yet paradoxically, many women find themselves less able than ever to get married, stay married, and have a family – all of which the vast majority of women still describe as their highest goals. This preoccupation echoes across media and social media, in headlines like “Eight Reasons Why New York Women Can’t Find a Husband” (New York Post); or “Why College-Educated Women Can’t Find Love” (The Daily Beast); or many other stories worrying about today’s women and the marriage question.

    Economists have uncovered the reality behind these apprehensions, all further fallout from the revolution. In his book Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, sociologist Mark Regnerus has used the tools of economics to explain the post-revolutionary sexual market, aided by a formidable supply of new data.

    The essence of his argument is this:

      To plenty of women, it appears that men have a fear of commitment. But men, on average, are not afraid of commitment. The story is that men are in the drivers’ seat in the marriage market and are optimally positioned to navigate it in a way that privileges their (sexual) interests and preferences.

    In other words, the same force that eroded the shotgun wedding has gone on to empower men, not women.

    One of the economists cited by Mark Regnerus, Timothy Reichert, wrote a similar analysis of the revolution, “Bitter Pill,” in First Things. Reichert argued using data from the 1960s onward that the “revolution has resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men.” He specifies further: “More technically, artificial contraception sets up what economists call a ‘prisoner’s-dilemma’ game, in which each woman is induced to make decisions rationally that ultimately make her, and all women, worse off.”

    Obviously, we’re not speaking here of the deliberately countercultural movements and communities that have banded together to oppose the revolution since the Sixties. The focus instead is on the going cultural narrative in non-religious precincts – the kinds of places where the revolution isn’t regarded as problematic. (Yet.)

    A third paradox has become the dominant social media soap opera of our time, a story that goes like this: The revolution was supposed to empower women. Instead, it ushered in the secular sex scandals of 2017 etc., and the #MeToo movement. In addition to the fact that it made marriage harder for many women to achieve, it also licensed sexual predation on a scale not seen outside of conquering armies.

    Take Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, who died last year. His commercial empire was founded, of course, on pornographic photos of a great many women. He made himself an exemplar of his own supposed philosophy – the Playboy philosophy of sophisticated drinks and music and, naturally, easy sex. It was an idea that caught on quickly, and it seems safe to guess that most people didn’t know the sordid truth, which would later emerge from the Playboy mansion and elsewhere, about the exploitation behind the slick advertising.

    Nonetheless, when Hefner died, many progressives, including self-styled feminists, glowed with praise for the apostle of the revolution. Why? Because he cloaked his predatory designs in the language of sexual progressivism. As a Forbes writer summarized the record, “Playboy published its first article supporting the legalization of abortion in 1965, eight years before the Roe v. Wade decision that permitted the practice – and even before the feminist movement had latched onto the cause. It also published the numbers of hotlines that women could call and get safe abortions.”

    In other words, Hefner’s support for these causes appears inextricably tied up with his desire to live in a way that exploited women. This same Siamese twinning joins many of the secular sex scandals that have been exploding in the news. The Weinstein etc. stories revealed the same strategic role occupied by abortion for numerous men who objectify women and disdain monogamy. Without the backup plan of fetal liquidation, where would such men be? In court, of course, and paying lots of child support.

    More and more thinkers, even outside the religious sphere, have come to the same conclusion. The sexual revolution did not deliver on its promises to women; instead, it further enabled men – especially men without the best of intentions. Francis Fukuyama, a non-religious social scientist, wrote almost twenty years in his 1999 book The Great Disruption: “One of the greatest frauds perpetrated during the Great Disruption was the notion that the sexual revolution was gender-neutral, benefiting women and men equally. . . . In fact the sexual revolution served the interests of men, and in the end put sharp limits on the gains that women might otherwise have expected from their liberation from traditional roles.”

    With that observation, Fukuyama joins a long and growing list of non-religious thinkers who can now grasp more clearly, in retrospect, what some religious leaders have been saying all along. The revolution effectively democratized sexual predation. No longer did one have to be a king, or a master of the universe in some other realm, to sexually abuse or harass women in unrelenting, serial fashion. One only needed a world in which many women would be assumed to use contraception, and would further be deprived of male protectors. In other words, all one needed was the world delivered by the revolution.

    A fourth paradox has barely been studied, at least not systematically, and needs to be: the effect of the revolution on Christianity itself. To look back over the decades is to understand that the revolution has been, simultaneously, polarizing the churches within, and creating tighter ties among some different denominations than ever before.

    For decades now, commentators have argued over what “the Sixties” meant for the churches. Some have welcomed the innovations of Vatican II, for example; others have hailed the radical theological transformations of Mainline Protestantism. Still others deplored these changes. Wherever they have stood, though, observers of Christianity today have come to find one central fact unavoidable. The sexual revolution is the single most divisive issue now afflicting faith itself.

    And this is true whether one’s Catholic or Protestant. In 2004, A Church at War, by Stephen Bates, a book about the Anglican Communion, summarized the argument on its back cover: “Will the politics of sex tear Anglicans and Episcopalians apart?” A few years later, writing of the same subject in Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity, William Murchison concluded with this observations: “For Episcopalians, as for large numbers of other Christians, the paramount issues are sex and sexual expression, neither viewed by the culture as means to a larger end but as the end.”

    In his 2015 book Onward, Russell Moore reflected on the tension between evangelical progressives and traditionalists thus: “when it comes to religion in America at the moment, progress always boils down to sex.”

    As in our other examples, it seems safe to say that today’s divisiveness wasn’t anything that Christians of the 1960s wanted to embrace. Those voices within the churches decades ago who just wanted Christianity to “loosen up” didn’t know what they were starting, which is today’s figurative civil war, across denominations, within the faith itself.

    A fifth, and for now, final paradox: The sexual revolution didn’t stop at sex. What many people thought would be a private transformation of relations between individuals has gone on to radically reconfigure not only family life, but life, period.

    Perhaps the least understood of the revolution’s effects are what might be called the macrocosmic implications – the way in which it continues to transform and deform not only individuals, but society and politics as well.

    Some of these changes are demographic: across much of the developed world, families are smaller and more splintered from within than ever before in history.

    Some effects are political: Smaller and more fractured families have put unprecedented pressure on the welfare states of the West, by reducing the tax base required to sustain it.

    There are also social effects that are only beginning to be mapped, like the sharp rise in people living alone, or reporting greatly reduced human contact, or in other measures that make up the burgeoning field of “loneliness studies” – and this too takes place across the countries of the West.

    Then there’s the spiritual fallout, which also couldn’t have been foreseen in the Sixties – especially by those arguing that something about a changed moral paradigm for Christians would somehow help them to be better Christians.

    I have argued elsewhere that the revolution has also given rise to a new secularist, quasi-religious faith – the most potent such body of rival beliefs since Marxism-Leninism. According to this new faith, sexual pleasure is the highest good, and there is no clear moral standard beyond consenting adults and whatever they choose to do with one another. Whether they are conscious of it or not, many modern people treat the sexual revolution as religious bedrock – off-limits for revision, no matter what consequences it has wrought.

    These are just some examples of the new world that needs mapping, and that will absorb intellectual attention for a long time to come. We should be hopeful about those future efforts. After all, it’s taken over fifty years for opinion to re-align about just some of the revolution’s negative legacy. It may take fifty more, or a hundred, for a full and honest empirical and intellectual accounting. Revisionist thinking about the revolution’s effects in the world has only just begun.

    In summary, one parting thought. The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was once sent out by a journal to report back on what happened in a local slaughterhouse. What he saw there moved him deeply. His subsequent description included an immortal line that I think applies widely to us today. After relaying the facts, Tolstoy observed with devastating simplicity, “We cannot pretend we don’t know these things.”

    That is exactly where humanity is in 2018 with respect to the sexual revolution. We can no longer pretend we don’t know these things – these things that the revolution has done.

    In the heady 1960s, many could plead ignorance, in good faith, about the fallout to come. Few could have suspected how many millions of children in coming generations would grow up without fathers in the home, say; or how many more millions would be aborted; or how many men and women alike from fractured homes would go on to suffer in diverse ways, such as turning to drugs – surely there’s more going on in the opioid epidemic than mere marketing – and other self-destructive behaviors.

    Many people, just half a century ago, hoped that the revolution would incur no collateral human damage. And in fairness to them: who, back then, could have foreseen the library of social science created over the fifty years since, demonstrating just some of the human damage out there among men, women, and children of the revolution?

    Some people fifty years ago even hoped that the new freedoms, and technological controls, would stabilize marriage itself. The 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which also reaches its 50th anniversary this year, went on to become widely despised across the decades precisely for predicting otherwise – precisely for insisting that the revolution would hurt romance and family, and end up licensing predatory men and malignant governments.

    It is a paradox within a paradox right now that a great many people, including inside the Catholic Church itself, have ferociously resisted Humanae Vitae’s rejection of the revolution – or for that matter, any rejection of the revolution – despite all this evidence, even in some pretty high places.

    By 2018, can any of us really, in good faith, pretend we don’t know these things that empiricism itself has documented? The answer has to be no.

    In 1953, when the first issue of Playboy arrived on newsstands, many people might have wanted to believe its hype about enhancing the sophistication and urbanity of American men. By 2018, we can’t pretend that the mainstreaming of pornography has been anything but a disaster for romance, and a prime mover of today’s divorces and other breakups.

    In 1973, even supporters of Roe vs. Wade could not have imagined the evidence to come: some 58 million never-born micro-humans in the United States; and gender-cide, or the selective killing of micro-girls for being girls, in various nations around the world, also numbering in the millions. Nor could supporters back then have imagined the technological leap that would unveil the truth about abortion once and for all: the sonogram.

    Can today’s advocates for Roe possibly claim the same unknowing?

    To face facts squarely, and use them to tell a truthful story, is not merely to deliver a jeremiad: it is to empower. To reject living under the falsehoods about the revolution, even if they have become the dominant narrative of the age, is to embrace the freedom to write a new narrative – and a truer one.

    Just one step is needed toward revising the revolution’s legacy in the direction of truth: ceasing to pretend that we don’t know the empirical and historical record, when every year just reveals it both to science and human reason, more and more.
    And in that world, which is now the cultural mainstream, the fact that a lot of men aren’t settling down, marrying, and starting families is a constant, fretful preoccupation. It’s why the phrase “Peter Pan syndrome” was coined in the Eighties. It’s why “failure to launch” is common shorthand today. It’s why “manolescent” became a noun in Urban Dictionary.

    All of these additions to the vernacular have the same origin, which is a diminished incentive for men to marry, due to the flooded sexual marketplace of potential partners – “cheap sex,” as the title has it. This outcome, too, is not one that people who cheered the revolution on in the Sixties foresaw. And there were others.
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Another good paradox is that the people who were loudest in their opposition to the sexual revolution voted in their millions for a thrice-married serial adulterer with a crush on his own daughter to represent them. :lol:
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Paradox One: This is interesting, because it alleviated men of responsibility more so than empowering women. I don't think women saw the burden on men in taking care of them financially, putting a roof over their heads, etc. The biggest failure of this paradox has been to almost singularly destroy the black family. The overwhelming majority of blacks are bastard children.

Paradox Two: See Paradox One. I never got married or had children, precisely because I didn't think I'd stay married and I didn't want to have kids growing up in a broken home. I saw how my father was treated in a divorce situation, and wanted none of that for myself. At 50, financially I'm sitting pretty. Men who have married and divorced are rebuilding their lives while trying to pay for two houses, two cars and some shit head living in what used to be his house fucking what used to be his wife. That's not for me. I see that as a very legitimate reason to have an AR-15.

Paradox Three: This is why liberals should just not be believed in general. They don't understand gender roles and have an extremely ideological idea of egalitarianism, which is not manifested in nature. It is a comical aspect of the Sexual Revolution that it championed male predators while leaving responsible men disempowered.

Paradox Four: A few things in the last few years have struck me differently from the conclusions here. Tucker Carlson often has a mainline Protestant pastor on his show, who espouses left wing rubbish and has another of the half empty Protestant churches. Anecdoctally, I live in an exurb of huge houses and a lot of Christian folks whose churches aren't mainstream anything, and they're big. They're buiding another big one not too far from my house. Anyway, I got another nail in my tire (fuck!) and had to go get it changed. So I'm sitting in America's Tire center towards the back of the waiting room. I'm listening to what sounds like a mainstream pop ballad, "I need you in my life" and so on. Then, I start hearing "Jesus" and so on. There are a lot of fairly decent-sized businesses that are owned by Christians that advance Christianity--sometimes boldly, sometimes discreetly--in their businesses. It was a local Christian radio broadcast. What struck me is how well produced and how closely it mirrored the music of mainstream pop. Yet, the message was entirely Christian.

As the mainline Protestants got infected with left wing politics, they have imploded like the NFL is starting to now. The insidiousness of the left knows no bounds, but it's efforts aren't having quite the desired effect. As they infiltrate the mainline Protestant churches, they aren't transforming Christians into communists. They are emptying out traditional Protestant churches and witnessing the explosion of non-affiliated mega churches, of which there is one and soon to be two in my area. Christianity in the US is simply decentralizing into cells (like Al Qaeda?).

I see this continuing. For example, we have a relatively inexpensive, but better than McDonalds, fast food chain called In-N-Out in California. It's very popular. It is also owned by a Christian family. If you turn your empty drink cup upside down, you'll see something like John 3:16 printed on the underside edge (like Tim Tebow used to put on below his eye before they ran him out of the NFL). I was also at Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a "My Pillow" for a new twin sleeper I bought for my office--they advertise incessantly on FoxNews, and I find it a little weird. When I pulled it out of its packing, they also had something like John 3:16 and a message about Jesus.

Christianity was historically and underground movement in the Roman Empire, and it's taking on that quality in the United States now too.


Paradox Five: It is counter-intuitive, in my opinion, because we are not created equal. Whereas, some people have made the welfare state the cornerstone of their lives, others are making Church and religion the cornerstone of their lives. The people who go religious seem to do better than those who depend on the welfare state.

Some effects are political: Smaller and more fractured families have put unprecedented pressure on the welfare states of the West, by reducing the tax base required to sustain it.

The political left contains the seeds of its own destruction. It's not going to be easy going, as Venezuela illustrates. It's not going to simply disappear either, because it seems hard-wired in the brains of some people. However, despite its adherents, it cannot succeed.

I have argued elsewhere that the revolution has also given rise to a new secularist, quasi-religious faith – the most potent such body of rival beliefs since Marxism-Leninism. According to this new faith, sexual pleasure is the highest good, and there is no clear moral standard beyond consenting adults and whatever they choose to do with one another. Whether they are conscious of it or not, many modern people treat the sexual revolution as religious bedrock – off-limits for revision, no matter what consequences it has wrought.

I don't think it matters that much in a long-term sense. Yes, these people have an ability to proselytize a political message over mass media. However, look how it turned out for homosexuals: 35M people died from HIV/AIDS since the 1980s. In other words, death of biblical proportions. In poorer countries, once again, people that revert to traditional religion prevail and those who adopt mindless hedonism suffer. That's probably part of why we end up with radical groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

I think we need to be a little more aggressive against them. For example: Transgender wrestler Mack Beggs finishes high school career with another UIL state title amid boos, criticism and questions We should step this up. Men should call themselves women and demand Title IX funding, women's basketball scholarships and the like. Since they are really men, they will easily out-compete the women in aerobic endurance. We need to start sending men to the Olympics on the women's teams. We need to force the whole thing to implode so we don't have to deal with this any longer. We also need to start considering stripping people of their right to vote and committing them to mental health asylums where they can work as farmers in lieu of illegal aliens.
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I never subscribed to the so-called 'sexual revolution' of 'free' love without cost, after all, there is no such thing as a 'free lunch'.
For those advocates that followed the above course, in the main, it was a socio-political decision born out the 'hippie' delusion that everyone can live in a world of their own choosing outside of the orthodox position between individuals & the state of orthodoxy dictated by the economic order.

In truth there is a 'price' to be paid, not just individually , but socially, both in the family structure & the wider 'socially' diminishing order of unity.

I never thought that contraception was correct for my wife or other women, for that reason I undertook personal vasectomy, so that she could avoid taking a pill everyday.
We all use 'contraception' even if merely making a decision as to whether or not, given the opportunity, we want coitus or not.

The question facing women on wanting a child is no different to that of a man, it is an imperative choice, either you want to pass your genes on, or you do not.
I would never, ever vote 'Liberal' or 'Labour', for one very good reason, well more actually, but each is linked to the politics of how the address the gender issues.

'Liberal'\'Labour' policy is to UNDERMINE THE FAMILY STRUCTURE OF TWO MALE-FEMALE PARENTS, THEY WOULD RATHER A WOMAN UNDERTAKE A TEST TUBE 'BIRTH', A 'LESBIAN' OR 'HOMOSEXUAL 'PARENTING' MODEL RATHER THAN A HETEROSEXUAL MALE-FEMALE FAMILY CONSTRUCT, ALL IN THE DESIRE TO CREATE AN ALTERNATIVELY 'FALSE' 'EQUALITY' DYNAMIC.

These 'liberal'\'Socialist' types HATE the traditional family structure , they want the above, they also want this female ONLY control of women's lives that are PAID FOR BY THE STATE THROUGH TAXPAYERS MONEY IN THE FORM OF 'BENEFITS'.

You talk about a 'revolution' for women since the 1960's,that is as I have said, that there is no 'free lunch', you make 'CHOICES'.
The 'LABOUR PARTY' HATE men, that 'party' is riddled with dystopian haters, male & females that know nothing of reason.
Those parties have lost the support of 'normal' people, they appeal only to the dregs of society.

What sort of world is it, where male-male or female-female's want to form a pseudo-family of 'mummy's-daddy's', calling their 'partners' , 'my husband' or my 'wife', if that isn't some sick recognition of the existence of 'REAL' families with 'REAL' genetically identified parents, I don't know what isn't.

Anyone that says 'NO', I do not want children, has my support, that is a choice, homosexuals or Lesbians by volition make their 'choices' just like everyone else to not want to have children, I support that, BUT, I draw the line there, I will NEVER agree that such people, be supported by the state to create an 'alt' family structure based on personal lifestyle choices.

I look at contraception in the sole context of POPULATION growth-levels ONLY, if people base their choices on that, it is to the good of the rest of us.
'FEMINIST are men haters, they are the same as misogynist, haters of the opposite sex.
It is an 'active' hatred' that misogynist have, devoid of the ability to feel love or empathise with females, a sickening emotion if there was one in human life.

These 'ALT' groups above, although always in existence, have become entrenched in the politics of our countries since the 1960's & are a major cause of voter apathy, along with the other factors that grate with the electorate.

ALL 'revolutions' have a 'counter' or 'pushback', in the UK , those in politics that propagate the 'ALT' culture should be aware, the 'pushback' is underway.
#14891773
It seems worth noting that the author starts eliding statistics about 'outside marriage' and 'in general', and then ends up stating crap like "contraception led to more pregnancy and more abortion". Here are some figures (for the USA, because that's all she's talked about):

Image
(source: http://slideplayer.com/slide/8544848/ )

To see the teen birth rate further back, try https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/c ... slides.pdf page 7 - the rate was over 90 per 1000 in the late 50s, and then declined steadily to roughly 60 in the early 70s, as we see above. By 2015 it had declined to 22.3. And note that the abortion rate, after the initial increase as it became widely available during the 70s, has steadily declined since the late 80s.

So the school with a third of seniors known to be pregnant is a truly strange one. I think the author has not really tried to find out what the facts are. Her 'paradoxes' may not really exist.
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Prosthetic Conscience wrote:It seems worth noting that the author starts eliding statistics about 'outside marriage' and 'in general', and then ends up stating crap like "contraception led to more pregnancy and more abortion"....

So the school with a third of seniors known to be pregnant is a truly strange one. I think the author has not really tried to find out what the facts are. Her 'paradoxes' may not really exist.

First for the school, note this description of the small town: "In the 1960s, most men in this area worked as manual laborers, mainly on farms or in local copper and silver mills." This isn't a wealthy town or even middle-class, this is working poor. And these problems have always been worse for the poor than the rest, especially the White middle class and wealthy who, when it comes to waiting until marriage tend to walk the walk even if they don't talk the talk. (Except that when the young men actually married the girls they got pregnant -- might well have intended to marry them anyway and so just moved the date up -- it wasn't much of a problem.) So yes, I think that "1/3 of senior girls pregnant out of wedlock" is plausible if not verifiable.

And when Eberstadt get's into the meat of her article in the list of paradoxes, she focuses in out-of-wedlock births and doesn't mention teenagers at all. For the stats on out-of-wedlock births, check out this pdf: Marriage and Poverty in the U.S.: By the Numbers
#14891853
There may be somewhere in the USA with that rate of teen pregnancy, but the point is that it's abnormal, and thus not worth putting forward as evidence for how the country as a whole has changed.

Whether births are "out-of-wedlock" is quite a different matter from if contraception is cutting down on pregnancies. That brings in social attitudes about what marriage is for, whether it is respectable to live together without being married, and so on. The Heritage Foundation's claim that "marriage cuts poverty" is a classic bit of confusing, on purpose, correlation and causation. Couples get wealthier as they get older, and that also means there's more time for them to decide to get married. They may also postpone getting married - a commitment for life, in theory, until they feel secure in their jobs and lifestyle. Their use of figures to claim that just getting married helps cure poverty is misleading, and they know it.
#14891869
Academics vary about their definitions of the sexual revolution, but here’s one straightforward, uncontroversial formula. The “revolution” refers to the changes in sexual behavior and mores following the widespread adoption and approval of reliable contraception over a half-century ago. The first accelerant here is the birth control pill, approved by the FDA in 1963, and widely dispersed in the population thereafter. The second accelerant is the legalization of abortion on demand in 1973 via Roe v. Wade – a development that approval of the Pill made all but inevitable. Modern contraception and legalized abortion changed not only behavior but also attitudes. Around the world, social tolerance of non-marital sex in all its forms has risen alongside these other changes, for logical reasons that I’ve talked about elsewhere, including in my book Adam and Eve after the Pill.


Stopped reading here. She says this is "uncontroversial". It most certainly is not. It is preposterous to link the so-called sexual revolution to birth control. It is like linking the fall of slavery to bolt cutters.

To the extent that we have had a sexual revolution at all, it is clear that it was based on far more than some fear of getting pregnant. If one studies history they might call to mind Berlin in the years leading up to the second world war and the "roaring twenties" right here in the US. Sexual behaviors not in those times would make a modern woman blush and they occurred in the absence of birth control pills and legalized abortion.

So I reject her premise out of hand.

For the record, there has always been abortion on demand in most countries. Though not legal it is largely available. But wait my misinformed woman. Here is what the world health organization says:

ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.


Did you hear that crash. It was the basis of her argument crashing to the floor.

I read pieces like this all of the time and I am certain that she caused a great many Christian conservatives to sagely nod their heads. But they were wrong. Just wrong.

She goes on to offer a whole lot of shit-with-a-ribbon including this:

In 1953, when the first issue of Playboy arrived on newsstands, many people might have wanted to believe its hype about enhancing the sophistication and urbanity of American men. By 2018, we can’t pretend that the mainstreaming of pornography has been anything but a disaster for romance, and a prime mover of today’s divorces and other breakups.


But is it true? Of course not. How do we know? Well. These silly things called facts. It turns out that of the 10 countries which consume the most porn:

1. Pakistan
2. Egypt
3. Vietnam
4. Iran
5. Morocco
6. India
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Turkey
9. Philippines
10. Poland

...not a one is in the top 10 countries for high divorce rates. Indeed our #3 most frequent left-handed internet browsing country, Vietnam, has the second lowest divorce rate in the world! (13 times lower than ours in the US not to put to fine a point on it and we are only 10th on the divorce hit parade.

Silly woman.

It would be fun to just shoot down all of her garbage but I won't. I am a conservative and I am a Christian. I find that people like this ditz do more harm than good. They really do. Now if we are really concerned about the morals of our womenfolk perhaps we would be better off starting with the truth. Quite an unpopular concept, I find.
#14891873
Doug64 wrote:Paradox One: If the foundation of the revolution was the availability of cheap, reliable birth control, why the unprecedented rise in both abortions and pregnancies outside of marriage?

This is a profoundly important question. After all, when contraception became commonplace, many people of good will defended it precisely because they thought it would render abortion obsolete. Margaret Sanger is one prominent example. She called abortion “barbaric” and argued that contraception would put abortion out of business. Planned Parenthood has gone on to claim her as its patron saint. She was making what might seem like a commonsense point: reliable contraception would prevent abortion. A great many people, both before and after the Sixties, have believed something similar.

But the empirical record since the 1960s shows their logic to be wrong: rates of contraception, abortion, and out-of-wedlock births all exploded simultaneously.

Over twenty years ago, a group of economists spelled out the dynamics of these simultaneous explosions with admirable clarity:

    Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. “If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception,” the man can reason, “why should I sacrifice myself to get married?” By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

In other words, contraception led to more pregnancy and more abortion because it eroded the so-called shotgun wedding, or the idea that men had equal responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy.

Another interesting theory about why contraception failed to prevent abortion comes from Scott Lloyd, writing in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. Using studies and statistics from the abortion industry itself, he (like others) argues that contraception leads to abortion – not inevitably in individual cases, of course, but repeatedly and reliably as twinned social phenomena:

    The bottom line is this: contraceptives do not work as advertised, and their failure is at the heart of the demand for abortion. Contraception enables sexual encounters and relationships that would not have happened without it. In other words, when couples use contraception, they agree to sex when pregnancy would be a problem. This leads to a desire for abortion.

There are other efforts within social science, and elsewhere, to explain this same paradox; but the larger point stands: contrary to what a majority would likely have guessed in the Sixties, abortion and unplanned pregnancies have both proliferated, despite contraception.

Many people present at the creation of the revolution couldn’t have anticipated its paradoxical consequences. Many, operating in good faith, hoped that humanity would master these new technologies and that they’d prove to be social goods. But those of us alive today, by stark contrast, possess a wealth of empirical evidence accumulated for decades now. And we can see through perfectly secular social science that the revolution’s story took a darker turn.

This is interesting and I wouldn't say it is wrong exactly but it is missing something pretty huge:

The sexual revolution was not enabled that much either by better contraception or by better or legal abortions, what really enabled it was actually effective anti-biotics for STDs. Promiscuous sex before penicillin was like playing russian roulette, sooner or later you catch an incurable pox and then you die prematurely in agony. The wages of sin was really death. Penicillin turned that on its head and opened the gates to hedonism without consequence.

It is now thought that the reign of anti-bioitics may be short lived as hostile bacteria increasingly develop immunity to them and with that the return of incurable STDs... Once again sexual hygiene will be the order of the day to manage that hazard.
#14891890
Drlee wrote:Stopped reading here. She says this is "uncontroversial". It most certainly is not. It is preposterous to link the so-called sexual revolution to birth control. It is like linking the fall of slavery to bolt cutters.

Your analogy is ridiculous, you want to try again?

To the extent that we have had a sexual revolution at all, it is clear that it was based on far more than some fear of getting pregnant. If one studies history they might call to mind Berlin in the years leading up to the second world war and the "roaring twenties" right here in the US. Sexual behaviors not in those times would make a modern woman blush and they occurred in the absence of birth control pills and legalized abortion.

Unless you can demonstrate that the out-of-wedlock birthrates for the Roaring Twenties and Weimar Germany were even worse than ours now (not having the Pill), I'd say neither was anywhere close to as sex-saturated as our own from the '60's onward.

Here is what the world health organization says:

Do you want to provide a link for that?

She goes on to offer a whole lot of shit-with-a-ribbon including this:

    In 1953, when the first issue of Playboy arrived on newsstands, many people might have wanted to believe its hype about enhancing the sophistication and urbanity of American men. By 2018, we can’t pretend that the mainstreaming of pornography has been anything but a disaster for romance, and a prime mover of today’s divorces and other breakups.

But is it true? Of course not. How do we know? Well. These silly things called facts. It turns out that of the 10 countries which consume the most porn:

1. Pakistan
2. Egypt
3. Vietnam
4. Iran
5. Morocco
6. India
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Turkey
9. Philippines
10. Poland

...not a one is in the top 10 countries for high divorce rates. Indeed our #3 most frequent left-handed internet browsing country, Vietnam, has the second lowest divorce rate in the world! (13 times lower than ours in the US not to put to fine a point on it and we are only 10th on the divorce hit parade.

And how many of these countries allow no-fault divorce for both parties at the drop of a hat? For the Islamic countries especially, I don't think that women can initiate divorce at all. They are not us and cannot be compared to us. For the effects of pornography on marriage here in the US, there is this: Divorce rates double when people start watching porn

    Analyzing the data, Perry and his OU colleague Cyrus Schleifer found that people who started watching porn were more likely to split with their partners during the course of the survey [2006-2014]. For men, the chance of divorce went from 5% to 10%. For women, that number jumped from 6% to 18%.

Pull your head out of the sand and take a look around, you'll be horrified by what you see.

SolarCross wrote:This is interesting and I wouldn't say it is wrong exactly but it is missing something pretty huge:

The sexual revolution was not enabled that much either by better contraception or by better or legal abortions, what really enabled it was actually effective anti-biotics for STDs. Promiscuous sex before penicillin was like playing russian roulette, sooner or later you catch an incurable pox and then you die prematurely in agony. The wages of sin was really death. Penicillin turned that on its head and opened the gates to hedonism without consequence.

It is now thought that the reign of anti-bioitics may be short lived as hostile bacteria increasingly develop immunity to them and with that the return of incurable STDs... Once again sexual hygiene will be the order of the day to manage that hazard.

There could be some truth to this, considering the impact that AIDS may have had: THE ECONOMICS OF SEXUALITY: THE EFFECT OF HIV/AIDS ON SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN THE UNITED STATES

    "The empirical results validate the economics of sexuality. I find that AIDS causes people to shift from less safe sexual activities to safer ones. I find that AIDS causes men to shift from homosexual to heterosexual behavior, desire, and identity, whereas AIDS causes women to shift from heterosexual to homosexual desire. Neither genetic nor hormonal theories of sexual orientation can explain these findings. Therefore, biology is not the sole determinant of sexual behavior, desire, and identity. Both biology and economics shape sexual orientation."

OTOH, STDs are actually some of the most difficult of diseases to catch, requiring much more intimate contact than practically anything else. The fact that they have been so widespread throughout our history would indicate that men haven't had all that much of a problem with eventually catching one disease or another and taking them home to their wives. Don't forget that what was revolutionary about the Sexual Revolution was that women started behaving like men have been behaving all along.
#14891981
Do you want to provide a link for that?


I gave you the source. If you think I am a liar look it up yourself. I think you know this post is true. I also think you can see that most of these countries have no problem with divorce.

This this preposterous shit was posted:

I find that AIDS causes men to shift from homosexual to heterosexual behavior, desire, and identity, whereas AIDS causes women to shift from heterosexual to homosexual desire.


Yea.....no. No need to even read this link. Just to note that it is the work of a PhD candidate in economics.....
#14891992
Drlee wrote:Yea.....no. No need to even read this link. Just to note that it is the work of a PhD candidate in economics.....

Which means he should be well trained in statistical analysis of human interactions.
#14899056
Doug64 wrote: Paradox One: If the foundation of the revolution was the availability of cheap, reliable birth control, why the unprecedented rise in both abortions and pregnancies outside of marriage?

Quite frankly I find these "paradoxes" quite underwhelming in their scope. This sounds very much like argueing about how many angels fit on the tip of a pin.

Oh, it gets "harder" to marry. Totally important ! Because you couldnt marry anymore after 1968. No wait, you still could and you still can. Heck, its even a friggin human right that you can marry and nobody can take that away from you, EVER. So what the heck are we talking about, again ? Some kind of virtual mental state issue. A total luxury problem. We dont have to marry anymore ! And so some people dont ! Waaaaa !

Besides, 1968 wasnt about equal rights for women just yet. That came in the 1970s. In 1968, women who wanted equal rights still got told their problems would be a minor conflict that would be resolved automatically if the big conflicts would be resolved. That alone makes most of these "paradoxes" collapse already because the 1968s didnt promised that (not directly, anyway).



Heisenberg wrote:Another good paradox is that the people who were loudest in their opposition to the sexual revolution voted in their millions for a thrice-married serial adulterer with a crush on his own daughter to represent them. :lol:

Oh I thought judging by Hollywood movies fathers are basically required to have a (platonic but really weird) crush on their daugther. :eek:



Doug64 wrote:
    Analyzing the data, Perry and his OU colleague Cyrus Schleifer found that people who started watching porn were more likely to split with their partners during the course of the survey [2006-2014]. For men, the chance of divorce went from 5% to 10%. For women, that number jumped from 6% to 18%.

The problem I have with this line of argument is simple: are you sure that actually watching porn causes the split ? Not that watching porn was an effect of an already failing marriage ?
#14899097
Enjoyable read, even if it was insufficient in its analysis to some degree.

Just a few comments.

Doug64 wrote:Paradox One: If the foundation of the revolution was the availability of cheap, reliable birth control, why the unprecedented rise in both abortions and pregnancies outside of marriage?


I think the feminists were duplicitous in their espousing of contraception being, originally, a medical issue, which is ultimately how they were able to get it legalized in the first place.

That being said, Margaret Sanger was rather explicit, especially in her earlier years, that the patriarchal Christian family was the greatest hindrance to socialism, which she articulated in the publication "No Gods, No Masters."

Doug64 wrote:Paradox Two: The sexual revolution was supposed to liberate women. Yet simultaneously, it has become harder to have what most women say they want: marriage and a family.


This is just the case of having your cake and eating it too. At the same time, the liberation of women was not possible without the expansion of government involvement, first by the expansion of democracy itself (via an expansion of political enfranchisement) and then by regulating outcomes. Social security and welfare should be included in this as well, as such are disproportionately supported by women as compared to men, which would further encourage government to support feminist causes as it legitimizes the expansion of public holdings by the government.

The implications of this are simple, public programs increase personal time-preference among the the populace and de-incentivizes both long-term financial responsibility and familial investment.

As was noted by @blackjack21, President Johnson's programs more-or-less destroyed the black family, if you want to encourage a behavior and see it increase, throw money at it.

Johnson made it financially more beneficial to be a single mother than to be married, so we saw an increase in single-motherhood because the government made such to be financially prudent (conversely, see Hitler's marriage and childbearing program and its almost instantaneous results, which further demonstrates the same point).

Social security, earlier on, destroyed inter-generational cooperation and cohesion. The concept of teenage rebellion was not nearly as pronounced prior to this, and this is because without social security, a person's children were their retirement, especially if they were not rich or could not save an extraordinary amount of money. Without social security, people were more likely to have more children and to invest in their children's behavioral attitudes and work to help insure their children's independent financial success, as they were the ones who would care for you in your old age (not the government).

By devaluing such behavior with social security, childhood and infantilization was prolonged as investing in the behavior of progeny was no longer necessary, with such programs that are akin to social security increasing, we see the problem getting worse: i.e., increasingly radical counter-cultural teen rebellion, increasing childlessness, and prolonged adolescence etc.

Thus, the problem is clearly a lot bigger than feminism, and I would argue it goes all the way back to Locke, but if you expand on the concept of public ownership beginning with the social contract and democracy, it has a natural socializing tendency, the evolution of which, requires increasing a voter base and the dependency thereof on the collective-whole. Feminism was promoted and used because it aided in this progress towards collectivist centralization. It was predictable and useful.

We must also note, that women wanting a marriage and a family merely because of the "instinctual nagging" in their minds and genitals is entirely different from having a familial outlook, just as a "professed belief in God," is hardly a measure of religiosity. So there may be some equivocation here on the part of the author of this article.

Doug64 wrote:A third paradox has become the dominant social media soap opera of our time, a story that goes like this: The revolution was supposed to empower women. Instead, it ushered in the secular sex scandals of 2017 etc., and the #MeToo movement. In addition to the fact that it made marriage harder for many women to achieve, it also licensed sexual predation on a scale not seen outside of conquering armies.


I think some on the Left would argue that the sexual revolution is far from over and these issues are just part of the "growing pains."

At the same time, if you make it financially more beneficial for men to be licentious, promiscuous, and predatory, that behavior will increase. Sex-positive feminism absolutely did this, but as I said above, such legal expansions of government are a "bigger" issue here than feminism. Feminism is the symptom, not the disease.

Furthermore, just to illustrate this point, if it becomes economically more difficult to have wives and children and to be prosperous, the rates of such will invariable drop. MGTOW is not an accident of history and it is not merely a misogynist support-group, it is a symptom of a legitimate trend to opt out of the family for legal and financial reasons (even if hateful and extreme) and it is just as indicative of social decay as progressive millennials who put toy stores out of business because they would rather have three cats and a dog (once again, what incentive is there to have children in our current society?)

Doug64 wrote:A fourth paradox has barely been studied, at least not systematically, and needs to be: the effect of the revolution on Christianity itself. To look back over the decades is to understand that the revolution has been, simultaneously, polarizing the churches within, and creating tighter ties among some different denominations than ever before.


Anecdotally, I find this absolutely true. This is still arguably the biggest point of issue within ALL churches. Scripture is pretty explicit on gender (patriarchal) and balancing this message with trying to "stay relevant," combined with a systematic failure among Christians to consistently distinguish between decay and progress has also lead to much confusion. I also think as @blackjack21, has mentioned, this has forced traditionalist Christians of all stripes to become unaffiliated or join together into micro-denominations and as the political culture becomes even more radically egalitarian and anti-Christian this trend will accelerate and affiliations between traditional groups that once fought each other over the finer points of doctrine will increasingly find themselves allies.

Doug64 wrote:A fifth, and for now, final paradox: The sexual revolution didn’t stop at sex. What many people thought would be a private transformation of relations between individuals has gone on to radically reconfigure not only family life, but life, period.


I don't think this is a paradox, I think this is a mis-characterization of the movement's intentions. The second-wave feminists knew that the revolution was about more than sex; however, they believed that the society they would create would be invariably better because of their tacit assumption that government-guaranteed equality and rights over-and-against natural hierarchy and natural rights, is somehow a definite guarantee of happiness. This is manifestly untrue.

Emile Durkheim, arguably the father of modern sociology, more-or-less exposed this fact (though he falsely attributed it to capitalism) in that he found that traditional landed peoples whose existence was defined by hereditary expectations, once un-tethered, become unhappy and unfulfilled. For example, in medieval society, if you were born to a peasant family, you would have been expected to fulfill the role of your father as a peasant and there were no other realistic options. This defined your life, you knew, from a very young age, what you were to do (occupation) and who you were(identity), this being so much the case that many of the surnames of peoples today originate in their ancient family occupation: (e.g. Millers milled and Smiths smithed, that was not only what you did, but who you were). This applied to all classes and was further delineated according to the roles of the sexes.

When this system started to disintegrate with the democratic erosion of private-property absolutism, people had more "opportunity" and "political equality," but they were not happier. This is Durkheim's conclusion.

Similarly, feminism promoted the idea that greater equality and political enfranchisement, as guaranteed by democratic governments, would invariably lead to greater happiness. The sexual revolution was only necessary as a means (according to Feminism) for accomplishing such an end for it was the sexual norms of the day, as enshrined in certain laws, that guaranteed a social structure that feminists believed resulted in unhappiness as it limited the "lifestyle options," "political access" and "capital access" of women. This may have been true, to some degree; however, as it was with the peasantry in Durkheim's analysis, knowing one's destiny and purpose in life as being "set" is often a great provider of peace and happiness. Women are not happier post-feminism and they cannot be, they no longer have a predefined existence to give them rest, rather, everyone (men included) of all classes, are rootless and are lost trying to find a way to define themselves. Historically, women (even more than men) had a predefined role and purpose, this is what made them, ultimately happy. The same is true for men. The more rootless and "self-determining" a people, the less happy they will be.

The problem is that warring against preset definitions imputed to you from without will not make you happy, it will only lead to more neurosis. Indeed, transgenderism, transablism, etc, etc., are symptomatic of this same trend. People do not want to be defined according to their class, race, sex, gender, etc, etc...

This cycle will continue until it wears itself out. Government will continue to expand as it grows both in enfranchisement of peoples and the provision and protection thereof, and the relative happiness, health, and prosperity of the society will continue to decrease.

Such an outcome is inevitable given certain economic axioms. Mark my words.

However, rest assured, the reassertion of the natural order is also an inevitability.

Imagevia Imgflip Meme Generator
#14899118
At first glance, it seems that the author is blaming the rise in abortion on access to contraceptives.

Why is the author ignoring the fact that anortion was illegal before 1973 in the USA? The legalisation of abortion would also have a significant impact on the rise of abortions, and yet this clear and simple fact is absent from the analysis.
#14899371
Johnson made it financially more beneficial to be a single mother than to be married, so we saw an increase in single-motherhood because the government made such to be financially prudent (conversely, see Hitler's marriage and childbearing program and its almost instantaneous results, which further demonstrates the same point).


When one begins with a racist viewpoint one naturally arrives at the above. Notice how nicely he not only makes a ridiculous statement that is not supported by the facts and works Hitler into the bargain.

I have seen this argument time and again. It is simply not supported by the facts. There are problems in the black community. They are not caused by welfare payments and will not be solved by removing them.
#14899512
Victorious Spolia wrote:As was noted by @blackjack21, President Johnson's programs more-or-less destroyed the black family, if you want to encourage a behavior and see it increase, throw money at it.

Johnson made it financially more beneficial to be a single mother than to be married, so we saw an increase in single-motherhood because the government made such to be financially prudent (conversely, see Hitler's marriage and childbearing program and its almost instantaneous results, which further demonstrates the same point).

That is exactly correct. What's interesting is that Drlee--who purports to be among the 70M smartest people in a world of 7B people--immediately dismisses the point. Drlee admits to working on Barry Goldwater's campaign--who was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964--along with his political fellow traveller Hillary Clinton back in the day when they both were very young. Yet, when US statistics are compared with welfare states and developing countries around the world, the US is a statistical outlier when it comes to broken families especially among blacks. If this analysis were wrong, the US wouldn't be such an anomaly. It is very clearly a policy experiment, not unlike the Tuskeegee Experiment.

Victorious Spolia wrote: I also think as @blackjack21, has mentioned, this has forced traditionalist Christians of all stripes to become unaffiliated or join together into micro-denominations and as the political culture becomes even more radically egalitarian and anti-Christian this trend will accelerate and affiliations between traditional groups that once fought each other over the finer points of doctrine will increasingly find themselves allies.

Yeah, I really find it amazing to be around all these oldline Protestant churches that are empty, while these one-off mega churches grow. The Catholics here in California are full, mostly because 20% of the Mexican population seems to live here. When I was a kid, all masses were in English. In my parish (I can hardly call myself a Catholic), there are two English masses on Sundays, two Spanish masses, and one in Latin (reviving, because of the influx of Hispanics). It seems that the Protestant denominations threw in with the social democrats or were infiltrated by them, but the change they were hoping for didn't completely materialize.

Victorious Spolia wrote: The second-wave feminists knew that the revolution was about more than sex; however, they believed that the society they would create would be invariably better because of their tacit assumption that government-guaranteed equality and rights over-and-against natural hierarchy and natural rights, is somehow a definite guarantee of happiness. This is manifestly untrue.

And it's the women who are unhappy with it. I just lost my Czech co-worker to maternity leave. They can get up to two years now and still return to the job. In high tech, we have little choice but to accomodate high IQ workers wherever they might live. Yet, 40 years ago, women were demanding to be part of the workforce, and now they are demanding to come and go as they please with added job security--something men would never have even dreamed of demanding for themselves. Egalitarianism is practically a self-parody at this point.

Drlee wrote:When one begins with a racist viewpoint one naturally arrives at the above.

There are so many statistically relevant studies at this point, that there is really no rational basis for arguing that opposition to US welfare policies is racist. Johnson himself said the Democrats would have the black vote for 100 years, and we have seen what has happened for almost 60 years of that now. Blacks don't seem to be any the wiser that they are the subjects of a social experiment that is far more brutal than anything the Tuskeegee Experiment or Jim Crow would envisage. It is not quite as brutal as slavery itself, but it is pretty shocking the things that welfare statists justify.

Drlee wrote:Notice how nicely he not only makes a ridiculous statement that is not supported by the facts and works Hitler into the bargain.

Hitler was fighting communism, and also trying to expand the birth rate of so-called "Aryans" while killing off the weaker populations per his Darwinian/Galtonian views (who were English, not German by the way). The US did this sort of thing too; although, the US white washes its history. Hitler got a lot of his ideas from Anglo-American eugenics ideology.

Drlee wrote:There are problems in the black community. They are not caused by welfare payments and will not be solved by removing them.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan had already identified the problem 50 years ago. The inaction isn't based on the lack of a problem, but on the denying racism whilst experimenting on population groups.
#14899539
If there was one person responsible for the sexual revolution it was James Watt. The industrial revolution was the death-knell for Agrarian culture and in particular for agrarian patriarchy. Agrarian social relations were founded on women's massive disadvantage in food production, the dominate form of production in pre industrial agrarian societies. As this industrial revolution has unfolded, the advantages of men in production has been continually eroded. In so many jobs and professions women can be as good as men. In some cases the fact that women are less egotistical on average than men actually gives them an advantage. For example women fund managers seem to perform better than men because they churn their porfolios less.

In agrarian patriarchy women are reduced to possessions, for very good and fundamental economic reasons. The term Mrs is just a contraction of Mr's. Having sex with another man's wife is a form of theft. Patriarchal societies must therefore ruthlessly control women's sexuality. As heterosexual sex is so tightly controlled and restricted, homosexuality, pederasty, paedophilia and even bestially are endemic to agrarian patriarchal societies. Sexual abuse is endemic founded on massive power inequalities between classes, between men and women, between adults and children and between ethnic / religious in-groups and out groups. But the extreme moralistic control of heterosexuality means that overt displays of homosexuality are usually condemned and often punished.

The sexual mores of the 1950s which Conservatives look back to were a culture in transition. Freezing that 1950s cultural system was an impossibility. The so called 60s sexual revolution was merely a phase in an ongoing sexual revolution, first heralded by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792. Heralded but not initatiated. As I stated the this was an economically based revolution. Intellectual cheers leaders whether of the 1790s, the suffragettes or the 1960s feminists were neither the heroines nor villaines of this story.
#14899773
Drlee wrote:When one begins with a racist viewpoint one naturally arrives at the above.


1. Please demonstrate how examining correlations between government policy of an economic nature and consequent social outcomes that disproportionately effect certain demographics is ipso facto racist. :eh:

2. The correlation between family decline and welfare programs that clearly incentivizes such behavior is as obvious as the logic would seem to preclude.

I am only pointing out that if you want more of a certain behavior in society, all that you need to do is throw money at it. This is irrespective of race; however, that the black family has been disproportionately damaged by this is almost common knowledge.

Image

Image

Keep in mind that the Moynihan Report of 1965 largely made it obvious that economic factors were responsible for the dissolution of the black family.

While writing The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, Moynihan was employed in a political appointee position at the US Department of Labor, hired to help develop policy for the Johnson administration in its War on Poverty. In the course of analyzing statistics related to black poverty, Moynihan noticed something unusual:[3] Rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, instead of running parallel as they always had, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors."[4]

When Moynihan published his report in 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25 percent, much higher than that of whites.....

Moynihan concluded, "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States."[


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro ... nal_Action

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... on/404632/

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