Amerika

Most stories about civilization decline begin with the phrase, “We were told,” as in, “We were told that the famine was the fault of the kings, and that the new regime would ensure that there was always plenty,” and then launch into a description of how human wishful thinking did not match reality much at all, leading to horrors. This is why all revolutions fail.

Revolutions, after all, are based on human conjecture about what might be true, and since we like the thought of that, what should be true, but they rely on the “excluded middles” — the points between extremes — filled out by all the other details that are not part of the explanation. Secondary effects, implications and unintended consequences spring up like demons.

As with all ideas, we ask ourselves whether the argument is for an actual purpose, or simply a pretext or rationalization designed to explain how people want to feel about life, instead of what they see as its actual parameters. Since most people seem discontented, and can reliably be counted on to blame others for their own failings, it looks more like justification than purposeful action.

The sexual revolution fits this pattern as well despite being a cultural change brought about by a loose coalition of Leftist believers instead of purely a State action. We were told that we could keep living as we had, but that this way, people would not face the consequences for relatively “innocent” behavior. Instead we got the utter destruction of the family.

While many blame the Pill, the broader move toward the sexual revolution was present even a century before when women’s rights advocates demanded the ability to have sex outside of marriage, and Bohemians back into the 1600s endorsed polyamory and extra-marital sex. With the 1940s, it became a possibility since women had jobs and were living alone in big anonymous cities.

As with all things Leftist, the goal of sexual liberation was to avoid having the individual lose rank for bad behavior, or otherwise be less included because of the consequences of her or his actions. But fifty plus years later, we can see that whatever intentions, desires, or fantasies were behind the sexual revolution, it ended in horrors.

First, the family has been replaced by the single mother, in emulation of third world patterns:

Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families.

In fact, this emulation has led to a decline in first world breeding habits, which not surprisingly will have dysgenic effect:

Over the same period the white out-of-wedlock birth ratio experienced yet faster growth- albeit from a lower-level-more then quintupling, from 3.1 percent to 18 percent.

Not surprising, many of these babies are unwanted, which led to a massive surge in abortions until checked by Republican laws making access more difficult:

In 2011, the U.S. abortion rate was 16.9 abortions per every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the lowest it’s been since abortion was legalized in 1973.

Between 2008 and 2010, 44 laws related to abortion were implemented in 18 states, according to the report. Most did not likely have an effect on the abortion rate, the study authors say, but a few may have. For example, a new law in Missouri that requires a woman to attend an in-person counseling session 24 hours before an abortion may have attributed to the state’s 17% decline.

Until the 1960s, abortion — the disposal of unwanted children who were mostly produced by casual sex — was relatively unknown in America, where now it is a commonplace event.

At the same time, while teen pregnancy has slowed of late, it has risen massively since the 1940s, resulting in its creation as a fixture of our social landscape:

Fewer babies were born to teenagers in 2010 than in any year since 1946.

How does this shatter the family? In addition to the replacement of the family with the single-parent home, those who have more sex are the least likely to form lifelong bonds, meaning that they may reproduce, but will then end up alone and possibly with their children in one-parent homes or the dreaded parent plus significant other unstable relationship which seems to often end in molestation or violence:

‘The highest five-year divorce rates of all are associated with marrying in the 2000s and having 10 or more premarital sex partners: 33 percent,’ he wrote in the report.

And women who were virgins on their wedding night were the least likely to get divorced, according to the study.

It is not surprising, then, that fewer people are getting married and are doing so later in life:

According to census data cited in the report, barely half of adults ages 18 and older are married — 51% in 2010, compared with 72% in 1960. This decline is especially notable for young adults: 20% of 18- to 29-year-olds were married in 2010, compared with 59% in 1960.

…In 2011, the median age at first marriage is an estimated 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women. That means half of men don’t marry until at least about age 29, and half of women don’t marry until at least about age 27. In 1960, the median age at first marriage for both men and women was in the early 20s.

…Although 39% of Americans say they agree that marriage is becoming obsolete, most people who have never married say they would like to marry someday (including many who agree that marriage is becoming obsolete).

This is why divorce rates are falling:

The divorce surge is over. (Or most people believe it is: this paper offers an alternate take.) In truth, the rise in divorce has been over for 20 years. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president and the Internet was only a mite in the eye of wierdos hanging out in California garages.

…The younger generation, whether they know divorce is declining or not, believes that marriage is on the rocks. From their vantage point, they’re right. While fewer American adults have been divorcing over the past decades, a growing number of people in their own cohort have grown up apart from one parent, almost always their fathers.

…How can divorce be declining but at the same time more children growing up with single parents? Because—and this is the story that Miller underplays—so many parents never marry in the first place. A little history is in order here: When divorce rates skyrocketed in the 1970s, American were not simply suddenly looking at their spouses and deciding en masse that they couldn’t take it anymore. They were reacting to a changing understanding about what marriage meant. Instead of an arrangement largely centered around providing for and rearing the next generation, it was becoming an adult-centric union based on love and shared happiness, which as an upper middle class grew in size, became closely linked to granite countered kitchens, European and spa vacations, and weddings with 200 guests.

…If marriage and childbearing were no longer tightly linked but rather discreet—even unrelated—life events, and if they were not earning enough to enjoy the middle class status objects enjoyed by their more educated peers, then why marry at all? Why not just have kids without getting married?

This fits with the data about children being born out of wedlock. The Left replaced the family with the individual, part of a process called “atomization” which separates society into individual and State, and so now people simply reproduce, then abandon those children to day care, public schools, and jobs, and only wonder about whether this was a good idea when they get dropped off at nursing homes and abandoned.

As it becomes clear that the new Leftist method leads to misery, people are waiting out the casual sex carousel and finding family-oriented partners with whom to reproduce, but this does not offer the bond of affection and trust that the family did back when we had those.

The carnage of the sexual revolution is just beginning to reveal itself. The “Greatest Generation” experienced the first of it, the Baby Boomers lived it, and Generation X reacted to it, with the lockstep ideologues indoctrinated at public schools from the millennials embracing it as long as it was “safe sex,” but Generation Z finds itself looking back over the carnage and wanting away. It will take another few generations for us to see secondary effects such as lower transfer of social capital, greater neurosis, inability to attach, alienation, and other effects on kids who lack the benefits of a stable, family-oriented home situation.

Perhaps the sexual revolution will then be known as just another revolution: a fantasy, applied with violence, that destroyed its host and left behind a wandering, cultureless, and isolated herd of individuals who could not recall a life before everything became grey and meaningless.

Tags: abortion, divorce, feminism, out-of-wedlock births, sexual liberation, sexual revolution