A number of years ago, I read about J.D. Unwin’s 1934 work, Sex and Culture. In it, he studied the historical effects of relaxing the strictness of sexual morality in 86 different cultures across the world.
What he found was that relaxing sexual restraint–especially with respect to fornication prior to marriage–led to a society regressing from being rationally guided and forward-thinking to inert and focused only on the day-to-day wants of life. He also found that it took three generations (roughly 100 years by his reckoning) for these effects to come to fruition. It would be the grandchildren of the first reprobates who would ultimately pay the price.
Nevertheless, though these associations were empirically undeniable, Unwin never found a solid explanation for the mechanisms by which it happened. He hypothesized that it might be a matter of energy being put into sex rather than building society, but made no hard claim to its veracity.
Sadly, Americans now have the misfortune of front row seats to the phenomenon. We directly experience the mechanisms by which fornication tears society apart. The grandchildren of the Boomers who fought to break the “shackles” of chastity are now coming of age in a society in which the basic human desire of having a home and family feels distant at best. By now, the role fornication plays in this destruction is already coming into focus.
The ruination wrought by illicit sex really does start with women–or at least its effects on women. As it turns out, “damaged goods” was an offensive phrase precisely because of the truth involved, for there is a frightfully long list of damage.
Broken Attraction
That list begins with fornication breaking a woman’s sense of attraction. It’s pretty common to hear the claim that women naturally seek commitment and monogamy, but unfortunately, there are just no good men around for her to find. The problem is that this usually describes a woman in her 30’s who has already spent her youth avoiding commitment and monogamy. And that’s really where the breakdown happens.
It should be obvious enough that a woman looking for a husband and father for her children will seek different traits than a woman looking for a fling. The marriage-minded woman will look more carefully for what would provide strength and stability for her future children. A woman who spends her youth on flings trains herself to look for the wrong things–if she even looks for anything at all besides immediate chemistry.
For example, women generally find male confidence attractive–a fair enough standard to have. However, there are at least two different traits which produce confidence in a man: competence and stupidity. A woman looking for a husband will try and discern between the two; and she will be able to tell the difference as they get to know each other. A woman looking for a hookup, however, will not–at least not until well after the fact. The same could be said of a great many other traits as well. Does he have a commanding presence or is he abusive? Are his ambitions plans or fantasies? Does he resist social pressure because he’s self-assured in what he wants or because he’s an irresponsible man-child?
And so a woman will keep fornicating with men she eventually discovers to be fools, abusers, and cheaters. From her perspective, it’s first just a matter of bad luck and eventually a matter of all men being monsters. But that’s because it doesn’t occur to her that she’s actually pre-selecting that sort of man as she pursues fornication.
And it’s not just her negative perceptions that get skewed, but her positive ones as well. Women whose sexuality has never been properly disciplined will always pursue hypergamy–the desire to trade up to the most desirable man available. Consider any male traits she finds most desirable: height, build, sense of humor, money, sexual prowess, etc. For any given trait, her standard of what she believes she deserves and can attain will rise to the best she’s ever had. So the more men she fornicates with, the more her standards will become laughably optimistic to the point of describing men who don’t really exist–and would find her far beneath them if they did.
Exacerbating this process is a difference between how men and women fornicate. Generally, men lower their standards of attractiveness for fornication (compared to marriage) while women raise theirs. A male 8 or 9 will fornicate with a female 5 for trivial reasons like convenience or variety, but he would never settle for marrying one. In contrast, many woman will eventually “settle” and marry a more average man when they’re done having fun, but they’ll only fornicate with guys they find particularly attractive. As a result, women (unknowingly) hook up with guys who are way out of their league for marriage. From her perspective, men just won’t commit. In reality, she chooses men for fornication who would never commit to her and considers men who would offer her commitment to be beneath her.
This is why women rate 80% of men as below average. This is why you end up with average-looking women pushing 40 who are still holding out for a tall, fit, handsome doctor their age with a great personality who will pamper them. But marriage-minded men like that have their pick of far more desirable women than her. And the woman who gives up and settles in her 30s will marry a man who she feels is far beneath her. She’ll simply use him for children, money, or for being able to say she finally got that ring; and she’ll expect him to be grateful for the “opportunity.” This sets them both up for misery because she resents her husband for being inferior while he despairs over knowing she gave her best to other men but would never give it to him.
Delayed Marriage and Family
Because fornication breaks women’s attraction so thoroughly, it inhibits men and women alike from finding suitable matches in a reasonable timeframe. But here, the problems begin to compound. Fornication also reduces even the incentive to find suitable matches. Just as hunger exists to compel us to eat, God gave us our sex drives so that we would seek marriage. Fornication defuses that drive by satisfying it without marriage. People would not be putting off marriage until their 30’s if they weren’t fornicating beforehand.
To make matters worse, marriage itself begins to look undesirable to both men and women who fornicate. As we’ve already discussed, a woman’s habit of picking bad men for fornication lowers her opinion of men in general. And while this is because of her total failure to vet him before sleeping with him, it feels to her like men just suddenly becomes evil out of nowhere after having sex. So the more she fornicates, the more marriage will feel like a reckless roll of the dice. In her mind, it carries the high risk of being stuck with an evil man forever. This, in turn, feeds our culture’s divorce machinery by which mostly women terminate up to half of marriages. After all, they “need” an escape hatch in case he suddenly becomes a monster.
Meanwhile, a typical man who fornicates (or wishes he could) likewise begins to see marriage as an increasingly bad deal for him. When most women fornicate, he knows he’ll end up with a wife of at least somewhat poor character when that character is really all he has to ensure her future faithfulness. On top of that, he’ll begin to dread the possibility of ending up with a run-through woman who sees him as beneath her. He’ll see more and more stories of sexless marriages and the disrespectful manner in which broken women treat husbands for whom they settle, and he will want none of it. As with women, marriage will look more to him like a gamble in which he might lose everything in a messy divorce, and even tying the knot could make his sex life far worse.
Added onto this growing fear of marriage is a growing fear of having children. After all, when one is fornicating, children become something to avoid at all costs. Rather than a blessing, they are seen as anchors which weigh you down and prevent you from enjoying life. So fornicators jump through countless hoops to try and make sex sterile. When those methods fail, the unwanted children are simply murdered before they can interrupt the lives of the parents.
When one has cultivated this toxic attitude through decades of fornication, it cannot be dropped overnight even should one actually marry. Raising children takes effort. There is no world in which parents do not sacrifice for their children or in which their lives remain mostly the same as before. But instead of welcoming children and the changes that accompany them, fornication trains people to see them as burdensome. This means people will both have fewer children and feel more resentment towards those they do have.
Undermining civilization
And so, whereas marriage and family is normally what ordinary men and women aspire to, fornication transforms them into objects of trepidation. The work of creating the next generation becomes an inconvenience. As we can already observe, fornication means the birth rate drops considerably, which would be bad enough. However, the consequences of people cutting themselves off from the future en masse hardly stop there.
Without marriage and family to look forward to, men begin checking out of society. If a man is simply living for his own personal comfort, he doesn’t need much. Most, therefore, will not produce much. Civilization depends on men producing more than they consume for themselves. But the masculine ambition to build and advance walks hand-in-hand with his devotion to his family who needs it. Take away the latter, and you lose the former. Indeed, we have already been seeing men increasingly decline participation in higher education, career advancement, and so forth.
What’s more, the lack of marriage and family in one’s life tends to make both men and women quite shallow. Ordinarily, people don’t truly finish growing up until they raise children of their own. (Yes, there are exceptions to this; no, you’re probably not one of them.) Giving us helpless infants who depend on our constant attention for survival is one of the ways that God trains us for things like sacrificial love and responsibility.
But more and more, you instead have adults taking up the mantle of the child who says “you’re not the boss of me!” Many talk about a childfree lifestyle where personal enjoyment, exotic food and travel replace love for someone else. Others will go further and object to parents & children being anywhere near them in public because it interferes with their hedonism. Instead of passing on the world to the next generation, they strive to swallow it whole before they die.
Even concepts like hierarchy or obedience which any parent recognizes as necessary & good begin to look evil & repressive to those who never finish growing up. Parents know why “because I said so” is an entirely appropriate answer sometimes. Issues like manners and curfews are arbitrary in many respects, but parents understand why they must sometimes hold the line even on arbitrary matters.
A dearth of understanding on these topics even ends up affecting theology as well. God the Father Himself can become a mystery to one who never thinks deeply about fatherhood. A childless man might, for example, wonder why an omniscient God asked Adam things like “where are you” and “what have you done” in the Garden; but the answer is obvious to a father. Reddit-tier atheism is primarily an absence of fatherhood.
Fornication is also a danger to our nation’s broader political circumstances. Consider how frightfully quickly the West went from “we have too many children!” to “we need to import foreigners because we’re not having enough children!” With respect to fertility, they are indeed doing the jobs Americans won’t do. Being dispossessed by foreigners is an Old Testament curse, and it’s happening to us as a direct result of our sinful fornication. But those who reject family don’t even recognize it as such. A righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children; others simply put America’s national inheritance up for grabs and see nothing wrong with that.
If it ever seems impossible to stop America’s ride into Hell on a handcart, perhaps it’s because we’re trying to do so without giving up on the fornication pulling us down.
Can We Recover?
Is it possible for our civilization to recover? It is, for Unwin’s book also details that imposing sexual restraint on a society results in its advancement just as removing those restraints causes decline. The question is how to go about it, and the answer is particularly unappealing to the modern mind:
Women’s sexual appetites need to be disciplined by men.
If there’s ever going to be a return to chastity–to directing our sexuality towards marriage & family–men are going to be the ones to put it into practice. A woman can certainly exercise self-restraint, but the last hundred years have made it clear that women cannot.
When it comes to discipline, women respond primarily to social pressure and shame–a fear of what people will think of her. This is why they circle the wagons against shame whenever they’re confronted with an expectation of sexual morality. But that only means men will need to be the ones to apply that social pressure. In short, men need to return to slut-shaming.
To be clear, I don’t mean malicious personal bullying; but men do need to freely express the “ew” we already experience when a woman is unchaste. This mostly needs to be done by fathers, whose love for his daughters means that his interests are already aligned with hers. He needs to be the one to both protect her from unwanted sexual attention and teach her to equate unwanted attention with unchaste attention. Good men from the community will also need to support and encourage him in this because he will usually face severe pushback from his wife, her friends, and male white knights.
“But what about the men?” Yes, men will also need to be disciplined towards chastity and learn to direct their sexuality appropriately. But it will not look the same because men and women are not the same. Whereas sexually barbaric women tend towards hypergamy, sexually barbaric men tend towards polygamy. These are different problems with different consequences.
These differences mean that focusing on men has diminishing returns. Social discipline is never perfect. Let’s say you’re wildly successful on disciplining men. Well, if you rein in 95% of men but leave women to their hypergamous inclinations, most of them will still try to sleep with that 5% of men, and this whole mess will continue.
In contrast, if you rein in even 50% of women, then at least that half will be suitable wives & mothers. And men will still desire to marry them rather than the other 50%, because unlike undisciplined women, even undisciplined men are naturally repulsed at the idea of marrying the village bicycle.
This, in turn, lays a foundation for reining in more than that initial half of women in the next generation while simultaneously giving men an incentive for reining in themselves and each other. Fathers who value their daughters’ chastity will make sure that happens because they want good husbands for their daughters and will restrict access to her.
This approach will annoy women to no end, and Satan has proven quite adept at whipping them up into a frenzy to fear chastity and male authority alike. But it can also work because it has actually worked in the past. Good men will just have to get used to shrugging off female irritation instead of seeing every case of pique as a problem to be fixed.
It will take time, but this mess can be salvaged. It just needs to start by resuming what previous generations of men abandoned: telling women “no.”
