Though
ostensibly about the horrors of the contemporary dating scene, this Weekly Standard article by Charlotte Allen is a good synopsis on the negative
consequences of the ‘new morality’ ushered in by the sixties. Though worth
reading though in its entirety, it is quite long so let me provide you with a
Readers Digest summary.
According
to Allen, the history of dating and marriage can be summed up as consisting of
three phases:
1. the prehistoric phase,
2. the civilized phase, where
premarital sex was frowned upon, marriage was for life and polygamy banned,
3.the modern phase that first became
popular in the sixties.
The central
thesis is that the modern phase is a return to the prehistoric phase, to the
detriment of western civilization.
Of the
primitive phase, she has this to say:
Evolutionary psychologists
postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern
humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are
naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status
than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence
of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more
accurate description of women’s natural inclinations.
Of the
middle, civilized, phase:
Long-term monogamy—one spouse
for one person at one time—may be the most desirable condition for ensuring
personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an
artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of
many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men
nor women.
In other
words, even though it is the best deal for the most people, monogamous marriage
requires social constraints to maintain it, restraints that are currently
corroding away.
Of the
modern phase, she says this:
Welcome to
the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices
have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons
once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every
minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears
trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of
courtship as a prelude to sex.
And also:
In The
Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Our ancestors
probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual
maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying
durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted
no more than a few days. Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But
each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. Males
may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended
them from other men, but anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as
courtship effort than paternal investment.
That’s a
pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the
meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill
and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s
prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is
us.
Of course, sexual
liberation wasn’t supposed to end up this way. It was sold as a way to liberate
ourselves from the stuffy constraints of civilization, to capture the essence
of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, but like most romantic notions
swirling about our primitive past, it is rubbish, based on nothing but the
imaginings of the overcivilized. Feminists were and still are one of the
cheerleaders of the sexual revolution. As Allen relates:
On top of it all is the
feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s
“loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their
sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer
Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.
Wolf devoted her 1997 book Promiscuities
to trying to remove the stigma from promiscuity. On the one hand, she decried the double-standard
unfairness of labeling a girl who fools around with too many boys a “slut,”
and, on the other, she lionized “the Slut” (her capitalization) as the enviable
epitome of feminist freedom and feminist transgression against puritanical
social norms. Wolf’s point of view is today mainstream. It’s the underlying
theme of Eve Ensler’s girls-talk-dirty Vagina Monologues, performed
every year on Valentine’s Day on college campuses across the country. A chapter
from Promiscuities titled “Sluts” has made so many women’s studies
reading lists that term-paper mills sell canned essays purporting to dissect
it. A group calling itself the Women’s Direct Action Collective issued a
manifesto in 2007 titled Sluts Against Rape insisting that “a woman
should have the right to be sexual in any way she chooses” and that easy
availability was “a positive assertion of sexual identity.” In other words, if
people call you a whore because you, say, fall into bed with someone whose name
you can’t quite remember, that’s their problem.
Sounds like a
teenage boy’s utopia. And it would be, except that the only a small portion of
men can enjoy its fruits. The cruel fact is that the only winners of the new
scene are alpha males. Everybody else – beta males, and all women –lose.
The whole point of the sexual and feminist
revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood
in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much
more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form:
wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining
marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a
supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare
fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman,
alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha
and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that
those traits are predictors of marital fidelity... . And every aspect of New
Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on
both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and
civilization.
The reason beta
males lose is because:
Evolutionary
psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave
dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a
socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out
assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially
beneficial.
Another bad
development is what it has also done to our alpha males:
His post for the last D-Day
anniversary, titled “Then and Now,” consisted of two photographs demonstrating
women’s changing perception of what constituted an alpha male: a tough and
battle-weary GI circa 1944 who looked as though he had just scaled the cliffs
of the Pointe du Hoc and a particularly epicene-looking Mystery from his VH1
show, “peacocking” with eyeliner, soul patch, and goggles on top of his head.
Do I think
that things are generally this bad? No. Partly because articles like this focus
on the anti-social extremes, they tend to make things sound much worse than
they really. Thousands of years of custom and tradition are impossible to
eradicate in a generation and most westerners have not bought into this sexual
liberation stuff, yet. Nevertheless, it’s not from the lack of trying by some
people, who are working tirelessly at destroying our traditions and
institutions.
As I said
before, read the whole article if you can. Allen makes many other excellent
points I have skipped over (most of the best stuff is near the end of the
article).