This concerns easy sex and societal impacts. Is it really a “bad” thing to have easy access to sex? We can satisfy our primal urges but, for the good of society? This article says no.
I do agree with this position. For society, easy sex is not good. Sex is the greatest motivator.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Chappelle
If a man could fuck a women in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house.
Hypothesis: Why should I even bother doing anything but the bare minimum if I can easily get my most primal urge met?
I’m interested in knowing what you think of this.
Why Marriage and Morality are Important for Society:
In a monogamous marriage system, each person is allowed one sex partner for life. This arrangement is highly unnatural and opposes many of our deepest instinctual human desires. However, this arrangement also promotes civility, cooperation and productivity within society. It’s no coincidence that all of today’s major civilizations arose under monogamous systems. Today, however, the widely accepted view is that singles should freely enjoy sex without social repercussions. The men who succeed in bedding the greatest number women are admired. Women are told that good sex is necessary for a fulfilling, exciting life. The media shows premarital and extramarital sex as normal and common. Those who aren’t having sex are the odd ones.
Few people are questioning whether today’s rampant promiscuity is having a positive or negative effect on society. Most young people think that premarital sex is natural and enjoyable, and that only religious zealots want a return to monogamy. Despite this conventional wisdom, there are rational reasons to support monogamy. Promiscuity does have real, negative social consequences. A thriving society must promote intelligence, cooperation and investment in future generations. The monogamous system did this. The promiscuous system does not.
The Consequences of Promiscuous Society:
An increasing proportion of children raised in broken homes - Increases in premarital sex have led to increased numbers of children being born out of wedlock. Illegitimacy rates have increased dramatically from 5% in 1960 to 64% in 2012 (National Marriage Project). High divorce rates also lead to an increasing number of children being raised by single parents. Single parents are overwhelmingly women, and men are investing much less in the upbringing of their children than they did when a lifelong commitment was required. This lack of investment from fathers results in children who are more likely to commit crime, less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to be teen parents and more likely to have low incomes than children raised in two-parent households. Children raised in single-parent households are less successful by virtually every measure (The Fatherless Family).
Successful people having fewer children - Ironically, as promiscuity has increased, the people who are best able to support and raise children are in fact having fewer children. Successful, well-educated people have access to birth control and abortion which allows them to put off pregnancy indefinitely. At the same time, a promiscuous society makes it much more difficult to find a marriage partner. (See There is No Longer Someone for Everyone) Because successful people are far less likely to have children outside of marriage, the birthrate among those who would make the best parents drops even further. On the other hand, the poor and uneducated are now able to practice promiscuous behaviors despite being unable to afford or effectively use contraception. Because of this, the people least capable of supporting children are more likely to get pregnant at a young age, without a stable family structure, and without adequate financial resources.
More time and effort pursuing sex partners, less time and effort spent raising children - Men and women now spend more of their 20’s and 30’s dating and seeking sex partners. Today’s single twentysomethings spend their incomes on expensive clothes, cars and other items to impress members of the opposite sex. They also spend a lot of time and money in bars, nightclubs and on dating services in attempts to meet new partners. In prior generations, by the time men and women reached their mid-twenties, they were married and spending their time and resources providing for families. From a societal standpoint, resources spent on children are a much better investment than resources spent in the pursuit of sex.
Objectification of women, less respect for women - Writing about birth control in 1968, Pope Paul VI wrote:
“Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men–especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point–have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anticonceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.”
The Pope correctly anticipated the effects of contraception. Men pursuing women solely for short-term sexual pleasure primarily value physical appearance. Personality, goodness, intelligence and the other qualities that are valuable in a long-term partner are ignored. (Note: This site is absolutely non-religious, but in this case, the Pope had a good point.)
The better a man is for society, the less successful he is with women - Men who are nice and hard-working do not provide the kind of sexy, exciting, emotional pull that today’s women are looking for. (See The Rise of Players and the Decline of Providers.) As women discourage “nice guys” and reward “bad boys” with sexual attention, more and more men are choosing to adopt aggressive, arrogant, chauvinistic attitudes. In addition, women who no longer require the financial support of men put less value on intelligence and education. In the past, women seeking marriage were looking for stable, solid men who made a good living. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, engineers, accountants and scientists were respected and sought as husbands. Math and science were highly emphasized in schools. Now, women pursue the sexiest men instead. More men are choosing to pursue entertainment careers that attract women, like sports, acting and music. These kinds of careers don’t require education, and the number of men pursuing engineering, math and science degrees is falling each year. Even the percentage of men attending college has fallen significantly. Some of this shift is likely due to women’s changing preferences. Men adapt their behavior to women’s desires, and as women ignore stable men and pursue antisocial men, men have changed. As women reduce the value they put on intelligence, education and the ability to provide, men have also altered their choices.
Morality and the Social Good
A society will be much more successful if its citizens value honesty, productivity, intelligence, cooperation and other civilized virtues. Monogamous society promotes men and women with these kinds of qualities because it promotes attributes that are important in a long-term committed relationship over short-term, physical and emotional attraction. The majority of women who would like to get married and have families also benefit (See Women, Marriage and Morality). “Nice guys” become more desirable as partners because they’re more capable and willing to provide for their families. All of this benefits children, who grow up in more stable two-parent families with greater parental and financial resources. When the children in a society are better off, and when nice, hard-working and intelligent men and women in a society are better off, society as a whole is much improved.
The Rise of Players and the Decline of Providers:
Why is it that “bad boys” are generally much more sexually successful than “nice guys” are? Intelligent, hard-working men who contribute to society in formerly respectable careers like engineering, accounting or science are now looked down upon by women. Athletes, rockers, rappers and actors don’t work to improve society, yet many women desire sex with them. There is no longer a connection between a man’s contribution to society, his options with women and his social status. Further, a man’s ability and willingness to provide for a wife and children has little impact on his ability to attract women. This was not always the case.
How Women Choose Men
Women’s attraction has shifted from dependable, nice provider men to exciting, unpredictable “bad boys.” In order to understand this phenonmenon, one must understand how women choose men and how the process of mate selection evolved.
Millions of years ago, when our primate ancestors lived in small bands, the males who were the strongest, most aggressive fighters dominated the group. Because of the differential in male and female parental investment (Discussed in There is No Longer Someone for Everyone), competition among males was a winner-take-all affair. The winners, the alpha males, were able to monopolize sexual access to the females and have many offspring. The beta males were rarely able to have sex and rarely able to pass on their genes. Females thus developed an instinctual attraction to the physically strong “alpha” males because alpha male offspring were consistently more successful in the reproductive game. These instincts evolved over millions of years and still exist in today’s women even though the attributes that made a winning fighter in primitive Africa are counterproductive to success in modern society. (For more information on sex and evolutionary psychology, see Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen, Jared Diamond’s Why is Sex Fun? and Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal.)
Fighting is no longer a part of daily life, yet today’s women still have an instinctual attraction to strong, muscular men. Aggressive, unpredictable men are exciting and attractive to today’s women, even though in the information age, the ability to cooperate and work with others in an quiet office environment is more useful to one’s career success. Women are also attracted to indicators of high testosterone, like square jaws and broad shoulders. Evolution instilled these instinctual desires over millions of years, while civilization has existed for only a tiny fraction of evolutionary time. At an unconscious level, today’s women are still deeply attracted to alpha male characteristics.
For men, sexual attraction has also been irrationally shaped by evolution. In primitive times, one of the most common threats to a man’s offspring was infant mortality during childbirth. Because of this, men developed an instinctual attraction to women with wide, child-bearing hips. In modern society, infant mortality is rare, but men still have a vestigial attraction to women with the ideal waist-hip ratio. Men also have an attraction to women with large breasts since infant malnourishment was a problem in distant evolutionary times. In the developed countries of today, few infants starve, and many women don’t breastfeed at all. The male obession with physical attributes is an evolutionary relic. However, because attractive prehistoric females did not have the same destructive behavior as our male ancestors, men do not have the same irrational attraction to physicality and aggression that women do.
The Development of the Provider
So, if women are attracted to physically dominant alpha male types, then how could geeky-looking, physically weak men ever evolve? The development of the “provider” type came about because of the development of intelligence within our human ancestry. As the predecessors of homo sapiens evolved greater intelligence, human babies were born less mature, and the time required to raise a human child required increasingly more time and resources. In most animal species, babies are born nearly self-sufficient. Within a few months, most other animal species can live independently of their parents. In contrast, a human baby is completely dependent for food and defense for at least five years after birth, and requires education and resources for many years after that.
As human babies took longer to raise, females found that they alone could not provide the resources necessary to support their children into adulthood. They needed help, and they found ways to get help. Beta males who were not physically strong enough to dominate the other males found that by providing food and other resources to females in the group, they could bargain for sex from those females.
Interestingly, the same high testosterone that provided alpha males with greater physical strength and natural aggressiveness worked against them as providers. Studies have shown that men with high testosterone have lower intelligence and less ability to concentrate on mental tasks. High-testosterone men are less likely to hold white-collar jobs, more likely to hold jobs that require manual labor, and are more likely to commit crime. (See Heroes, Rogues and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior.) Thus a spectrum of men emerged. Strong, aggressive, dominating men existed on one side of the spectrum and intelligent, nice, cooperative men existed on the other.
Eventually as civilization developed and intelligence and financial success became more important than physical strength, females who chose males with “provider” characteristics produced more successful offspring than those who chose alpha males. Over time, there was a reduction in the proportion of high-testosterone males. Social and religious customs like the monogamous marriage system further increased the proportion of providers. Women looking for lifelong commitment and wanting to avoid a lifetime of unhappy marriage put a higher priority on companions with agreeable personalities and financial resources and a lower priority on looks and alpha maleness. In the last forty years, however, that trend has been reversed. (Note: Men making a lifelong commitment under the monogamous system were also more likely to value a woman’s companionship and personality than men who are pursuing short-term sex, where physical appearance is of primary importance.)
The Pill, the Provider and the Alpha Male
In recent years, the nice provider personality has become decidedly unpopular, while the aggressive alpha male personality types are celebrated and envied. Professional athletes, rock bands, and hip hop musicians have eclipsed doctors, lawyers and engineers in social status. “Players” who take advantage of the weaknesses in women’s sexual instincts are celebrated while faithful providers are not.
Over the last forty years, birth control has removed the practical reasons for a woman to choose a provider male (See The Pill and the Decline of Dating and Marriage). Women unafraid of pregnancy can have sex with the sexiest men and fulfill their instinctual desires without apparent consequence. They can “follow their hearts,” even when the emotions they perceive as love or passion are irrational vestiges from the evolutionary past. Providers are also devalued because financially self-sufficient women no longer need a man to provide resources for them.
Because women no longer put a high value on providers, the social position of those men has fallen while the player/alpha male personality type has begun to dominate society and culture. As women encourage more “bad boy” behavior by their sexual choices, men and society are becoming less considerate, less cooperative and less civilized.