A Sexual Counter-Revolution?

At party some months ago, a bachelor friend remarked how charming and rare it was that my wife and I had a traditional marriage with five kids and such. For me, this is just a normal aspect of a life well lived. But for many, it is as out of reach as a cottage in the Hamptons, as weird as being in a Bay Area sex cult, and as niche a hobby as painting minifigures. Has something gone wrong here? It seems wrong to me. My immediate thought was "none of you are going to make it" and then later "some of you guys are alright, don't go to sodom tomorrow".

San Francisco has the lowest fertility among US cities at less than 1.5 children per woman. Vancouver is less than 1.0, the lowest in the western hemisphere. Among people I know in these cities, fertility is even less. Once they actually get and stay married they do alright having 2-3 children, but most people don't get there. It seems we have a "mating crisis".

I could roast all the 'cels endlessly for individually bad values. I think most proximally it is about individual values. If you really want it, you go get it. But values have their own material genealogy and it's not lectures about bootstraps. I suspect the best analysis is at the level of the social fabric that creates and implements the values. What kind of social fabric creates life, and what do we have instead?

My hypothesis is that the key missing piece is social infrastructure visibly dominated by couples and parents. If being a parent is easy, visible, and respected, it will be desirable.

This used to be provided by church and more broadly the social dominance of parents. When everyone checks in with the local parish every week, gets taught the holistic life wisdom, and interacts with functional families who help each other out in the quest for love, and all the institutions and social fabric are dominated by those same values, it's much easier to get the idea that you should overcome practical barriers to have children. Communities who still do this have high fertility, and those who don't do not.

There are a few reasons this is no longer the thing: the first is that few really believe in Jesus "that way" since Nietzsche and Darwin, removing the big intrinsic motivator to keep it all going. The second is that the dominant worldview in most institutions since the post-war revolution of 1945-1975 is anti-western crypto-marxism which is opposed to the traditional family and its infrastructure. I believe all the internet-driven atomization is downstream of these.

In some communities, there is now effectively zero social fabric dominated by heteronormative sexuality. Everything is free love polyamorous dating culture sex work, even when people don't think about it that way. The lasting legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution is that when opinionated parents encounter "that", they just check out and leave. They don't want to associate with it, and they don't feel the social authority or desire to fight it. It's understandable at least; parents just spent the last 100 years getting pushed out of every sexual and social authority, and getting a bayonet in the back when they refuse to go. We're well trained at this point. The result is the mating crisis, with the unmarried singles having zero guidance and the married parents having zero infrastructure.

The one exception is that some schools remain dominated by parents, but this doesn't help young singles who don't interact with them, and schools are also rapidly becoming more expensive and hostile than they already were.

The post-war revolution is now failing at the political level though, so it's a good time to fight it at the sexual level, by rebuilding the social infrastructure of high fertility as a counterculture. Could it be done? What would it take?

"There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women"
- LKY

Being "culturally conservative" or rather revolutionary, as the default is now anything but actual monogamous relationships for the sake of posterity, doesn't really help. You need legal coercion or endogamous norms such that the result resembles de facto legal coercion. I am unfamiliar with any counterexamples. People like to bring up Israel, but as far as I'm aware the fertility among secular ashkies continues to drop.

So your social infrastructure better look like a radical revolutionary organization with strong norm enforcement, or else it will just look like the country of Georgia. Liberalism but we get to keep the customs and standards from pre-liberal society doesn't work, for obvious reasons. You can probably hack something together as an individual, but trying to build anything like this without separating your group seems equivalent to trying to cool down a house using air conditioning while leaving the windows and doors open. Entropy wants in, you have to pay the price to sealing it out.

In my experience, there are high-fertility subcultures, or at least higher-fertility, and they aren’t really all or maybe even mostly motivated by religious reasons.* For some people who have lots of kids and go to church, I don’t think they have lots of kids because they go to church, but rather, they go to church because they have lots of kids. These people aren’t overlapping with your "free love polyamorous dating culture sex work" communities, because they want a good community for their kids (other kids for them to be around) and there is little utility in hanging out with childless libertines. They mostly don’t live in the places childless libertines do (i.e., the urban core of cities), because, certain outlier families notwithstanding, revealed preferences indicate it sucks raising lots of kids in small spaces with few other children in the community for them to play with and no opportunities for kids to be outside unsupervised.

Maybe what you’re really asking is: how do I get people in my childless libertine communities to want to get married. You want to make getting married and having kids more alluring to them, or at least more visible. Or alternatively, and to the “more visible” point, maybe you want more people who are married with kids to opt into your childless libertine subcultures.

In the latter case, simply there being more places for them to physically live in those cities with kids that isn’t unpleasant without having tens of millions of dollars might help. (In Primates of Park Avenue, the author describes a high-fertility subculture in the UES, and the thing they have in common is extreme wealth — 4+ kids is a status symbol. See also: “the Atherton four”.) You have to be able to afford space. This is well-trod and frankly boring territory.

The former case is maybe what you’re really asking, how do we make more people like me, who are parents, but still occupy these childless libertine subcultures for some reason, primarily by converting the childless libertines into parents, rather than than trying to entice people for whom the “benefits” of being in an urban area dominated by childless libertines does not outweigh the costs to their family (which is the above case). So what “social infrastructure” would make these people want to get married? Maybe they see that if they did get married, they feel they’d have to move, and they don’t want that, thus reducing the problem to the first case. Maybe the right thing to do is ask why are you the outlier — a large-family man living among the zero-fertility city dwellers. What do you find so compelling about occupying the intersection of these two circles by yourself? Why not just go ahead and move to the places where what you want (high-fertility subcultures that aren’t particularly religious) is already the norm and studying the difference? Conversely, why try to save people who do not want to be saved?

* I live in a neighborhood where 3 kids is normal, 4 is not uncommon, and a large fraction have 5 or more. Some in that community are religious to varying degrees, but some aren't. Those that are, aren't all the same religion, and they don't go to the same churches. It's a high-end neighborhood with million-dollar homes in it. The parents are highly educated and high-earning. Sometimes the wives work (usually something like interior design or philanthropy) but often they don't. I’ve spent time in other neighborhoods where parents dominate but the norm is more like 1-2 kids. Most of the people I know from grad school and work are married with 2 kids. One thing most of these people have in common is that they’re in places with single family homes with varying degrees of space, and many of these places are either unaffordable for most people, or in places the city-dweller disdains.

>>5501
Agreed. I think this topic is sometimes over-intellectualized? We want young men to have status and owned space. I'd blame gerontocracy more than feminism, but one could make the case for a bunch of things. And then also becoming a 'patriarch' should be viewed as the culmination of a life well lived for those young men who succeed. This is already a natural instinct (for both men to aspire to and for women in who they choose to marry) and its happening to some extent as you point out.