Sexual Relations

During the 1960's and 1970's, sexual relations in the USA bifurcated between Traditionalists (traditional catholics, evangelicals, orthodox and conservative jews, muslims, amish) and Moderns.

Prior to 1960, most US women were housewives.  By 1980, most US women were wage earners (or more correctly, wage slaves).  But traditionally conservative religious groups at least partly (for the well heeled faithful) kept on with the old way, and their relative numbers multiplied rapidly (despite adulthood regressions back to secularism) because of their higher birth rates.

Along with the avoidance of marital serfdom, predictably modern women became more socially independent, and developing no particular desire to find a husband as had been a near universal preoccupation among unmarried women prior to 1960.

This change was accompanied by cultural changes (second wave feminism and the equal rights movement) but may have actually been driven more by material factors, including possibility and necessity:

1) Household appliances made it possible to accomplish washing clothes and other chores in less time, so modestly affluent households no longer needed a full time homemaker.  

2) Labor needs increased during World War II, when many former housewives and otherwise soon-to-be housewives began working outside their homes the first time.  (My own mother was in this generation. She had been independently supporting herself before the war and before her marriage.  But had there not been a generational push in this era for women to work, she might have remained a housewife after marriage--as she was for a year or two before the new outside opportunities beckoned--and then she decided she needed to have a set of fine china, her own car, and then there was no end to it all, she kept working despite my frugal father's solid middle class job, and even established her own remote household in a more temperate climate, partly with his assistance.  Growing up in the 50's and 60's in such a separated family, I may have had some advance preview, though less unpleasant, of what many more would experience in later years in the rising numbers of broken families.  Only 1 out of 20 of my childhood friends had such a situation, most of them had housewife mothers.)

3) Stagnating wages became a big factor late in this shift during the mid 1970's and from there on.  The stagnating wages were themselves partly enabled and/or driven by the massive increase in labor force participation of women, as well as the Baby Boom, falling labor union participation, and supply factors such as the Oil Embargoes (amidst a pre-Fracking domestic peak oil situation that was only slowly relieved by the new Alaskan oil pipelines). 

4) Greater materialism.  Capitalism had built an incredible capacity to make more stuff and needed ways to sell more stuff.  Conveniently, broadcasting and inexpensive quality printing made it possible to advertise more stuff using techniques first developed in the 1920's.  So people loaded up not just on the new home appliances, but also on entertainment electronics, including TV's, audio systems, and later computers and smartphones.  While these things were optional at first, they later became necessities because you were nobody if you didn't keep up with the latest TV shows, music, and so on.  Because of planned obsolescence, whatever you bought the first time would need to be upgraded or replaced in just a few years.  Cars got much bigger, more powerful, more deluxe, and likewise what had first been optional became essential, including the bigger sizes and power, automatic transmissions and air conditioning.  Families also had to have one car for every adult or teenage member.  Homes moved out to the suburbs were they expanded to much larger sizes and featured far more amenities.   Being out in the suburbs further made it necessary to have a car for every adult and teenage family member.   The choice was made, whether everyone wanted it or not, to embrace much higher material living standards, and not much more or any free or leisure time.  It became less and less possible to imagine having even one adult family member not working outside the home.

5) Exploding higher education and healthcare costs.  During the 1950's, many states including California envisioned making public higher education completely free, because it would benefit society to have more educated people.  But the drive was squelched during the 1970's for political and other reasons.  Since about then, minimum higher education costs have increased tenfold or more, becoming both a way of pricing poor people out of admission to the middle class, and attaching lifetime debts to those who try to rise to or even stay within the middle class.  Healthcare costs also exploded.  Corporate greed, enabled by changes in law and cultural factors, also drove this.

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A Modern leaning man (liberal, leftist, atheist, etc) would be much less able to attract women by dangling the potential of support or even a marriage contract.  In fact, among Moderns, marriage was largely vilified, though some carried on anyway, with either both partners as wage slaves or one as wage slave and one as self-employed (which could be better if the self-employment were home based).

This essay is primarily about the effect such an arrangements have on developing sexual relations in the first place.   If that kind of relationship is all that is on offer, there's basically no material need for sexual relations.  (Children are not a material need as such, and even if they were, the need for fertilization could be achieved with artificial insemination.)  Though in passing, I'll note that not having one partner dedicated to raising children in the case where children are being raised most likely comes at a significant cost in the quality of child rearing (which isn't really possible without daycare), and even if children are not being raised, the lack of a partner dedicated to the home work may also come at significant cost to the quality of home life and love making, except in cases where any army of servants take up the responsibilities for housekeeping and food making.  Quite often, in the supposedly modern family, those responsibilities still fall to wives as a matter of expectation and motivation, so as is sometimes said, nowadays wives work two jobs, one outside the home and one inside the home, while husbands still only work one.  In this scenario, one would be surprised if wives still had and time and energy for love making or even just being nice.   Such independent and supposedly equal partner relationships would not even have been possible without modern household appliances, which in some cases (such as dishwashers and clothes dryers) not all wives embrace, making the second in-home job even more time consuming.

Three of the hardest love crushes during my young adulthood were very independent modern women, all also very outspoken feminists.  None were self-identified Lesbians at the time (a word I didn't even learn until my late 30's in 1992...watching Northern Exposure).  But they either weren't much interested in dates, or had strong aversions to any physical contact.  Generally, when I dated conservative women, the were right there from the first moment.  Conservative women are comparatively easy (except in cases of great religiosity, and perhaps even then).  Modern liberal feminist women are more likely to be impossible.  But my problems with conservative women occurred later due to the intense political polarization of our times.  I had to choose between sex or compatible thinking, and after much personal struggle I decided compatible thinking was the most important for me.

I've known atheistic guys who've joined conservative Catholic and Christian churches, and feigned belief to perfection (as many ministers do) because that's where the available (and willing) women are.

(In the TV drama Northern Exposure, almost all the key Modern characters live alone--seeming much like my own circle of friends.  Among the other Tribal characters, few live alone.  When Maggie lost her last husband in the second year, an Indian family nearby immediately offered a spare guy from their family.  But she turned them down.)

There's an underlying dynamic in mammalian sexual relations which should not be overlooked.  Because child bearing and rearing is very costly in maternal time and resources, the female sex drive is to be selective and resistive.  Meanwhile, since in principle males could have infinite children, males have a strong desire to seek mates.  Females don't naturally have that drive, except in heat, and even then they might not give in without a very serious fight (such as with cats).   Males need sex more, and this is especially true of men.  (The character Holling on Northern Exposure, who apparently didn't consider masturbation, described the pain of not having sex for one day, two days, and three days maximum--by that time he'd go mad.)

Within the small tribes that humans originated from, an evolving set of rituals and practices were developed to bring men and women together despite their varying proclivities.   Traditionalists continue with expectations, specializations, and practices that achieve the same function today.  

Moderns have little like that...there is no straightforward way for a Modern man to bribe a Modern woman into your life.  She isn't looking for a man to feed her.  She won't even allow a man to pay her bill.  (Feeding is the way we adopt animals that are quite different from us, and it works.)

If you share the values and beliefs of a Modern woman, you can work along side her, say in feminist marches, and eventually, maybe, you might get somewhere sexually.  Or maybe not, if she later decides she is a Lesbian after all.

The Traditional approach to ideology was that generally the men were allowed to do politics and religion by themselves.  That was a male domain.  So wives would be expected to bear and humor even husbands having views they very much hated at first.  Over time, they'd find ways to harmonize their views, or even become very much like them if not moreso.

Among Moderns, in principle everyone can freely develop and express their own views.  But if one side has a needs to humor the other side, more and more allowances might be made.  So a similar effect is accomplished, but in reverse.  Now men, who are much more desirous of sexual relationships, are driven to harmonize their views with the women they court and marry, in order to continue and develop the relationship.

Older friends don't seem to grasp the many difficulties (I've only mentioned a few) that I am speaking of.  They have largely been the beneficiaries of the old rules, before they completely faded out during the 1970's in the coastal and urban liberal areas, and only to persist in countryside and small towns that make up the Republican base.

All this has created ever greater personal alienation and political weakness on the lefter side of the political spectrum, and especially the far left, than for the blatant hypocrites and sexists on the right, whereas you might have thought or hoped the opposite would have occurred.  Misogynistic right wing nuts are more likely to benefit from at least some kind of sexual togetherness, perhaps even families, instead of the complete atomization the lefter side experiences more often--living alone with your smartphone.  

Strangely, the adoption of smartphones seems to have coincided with a vast decline in mental health measures.  It may just be coincidence, the late 2000's were also catastrophic.  But no recovery has occurred.  I could not live without my smartphone (and computer), I'd be utterly disconnected.  I'm completely dependent on electronic devices now.  But might I have sought different, more immediate relations if I had never gotten started with them?  It's hard to imagine that now, and pointless, though it's not clear if when society collapses such things will still be viable.

(One might ask similar questions about porn, at least if one had no concept of the stress lack of ejaculation has on men.  Porn is not a spur, it helps offers release, much like sedative and/or psychoactive drugs, of which the safest is marijuana.  It's a violence reducer, and given the impossible nature of human society, such things have become necessary.  There's simply no way a guy is going to get enough sex, unless he has four concubines or more.  Guys who really have everything have always had those, and probably don't even need them because they have everything else too.)

Perhaps if you're lucky as a liberal guy, you can find that you have sufficient attraction to the same sex, and work with that.  (Actually, by nature, most mammals including humans are bi-sexual.)  I sometimes wished my childhood conditioning hadn't precluded such a thing.  In general, the same barriers that exist for heterosexual relationships do not exist for homosexual relationships.  It's less of a struggle to find a willing and able partner.   No social catalyst is required.  You start right out from the same space.

I heard from one former lesbian (but later bisexual) that heterosexual relationships are much harder to develop, but ultimately more satisfying--if you can get a good one anyway.

So it's not surprising at all that LGBTQ is more and more popular among the left.  Something is better than nothing.

Even after observing all this, I would not call for a restoration of mandatory traditional sexual relationships.  I believe we do need to move forward.  But progress is unlikely to come from creating more genders.  Progress is more likely to come from changes in material relations.

Along with freeing women from semi-mandatory marital serfdom, men also needed to be freed from the illiberal shackles prohibiting (at least in theory) masturbation, pornography, legal sexual services, and legal sexual clubs.  But the corporate economic imperative (turn everyone into wage slaves) only had a need to abolish easy marriage for liberals.  It was fine (from the standpoint of rich imperial capitalists) that heterosexuality for liberals be destroyed, while simultaneously boosting heterosexuality (and reproduction) of conservatives, because conservatives are less threatening to the capitalist imperialist system, and their excess reproduction compensates for those few who break away (to become liberals) and helps staff the military and police forces.  It also remains a wedge to drive the lost children back to conservatism.

So the full liberalization of sexuality was not done, and even many on the (faux) ultra left were quite happy with that.  One of my very modern girlfriends, influenced by Robert Jensen and others, was strongly opposed to any kind of pornography.  She felt that any photograph or even drawing of a woman (real or not, naked or not) represented Objectification that would turn men into sexual monsters.*  Many famous feminists had similar views, including Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Gloria Steinem.  US states were on the verge of passing laws enabling anyone who suffered a sexual assault could sue any producer of pornographic images, even if no connection could be established between the two, simply because of the alleged sexual violence inducing effects of pornography.  

(Somehow these antiporn Femimists always overlook the elephant in the room: an imperial society dominating the world with violence.  In fact, antiporn Feminism was a CIA operation from the get go, when Gloria Steinem, a US intelligence asset who had just finished gathering the names of communists at a youth socialist conference in Europe, got a job under false pretenses at the Playboy Club in Chicago in order to disparage Hugh Hefner, who had just published an expose by Seymour Hersh on the Mai Lai Massacre.  She was barely known to feminism, but after writing a book she instantly became a celebrity and the go-to "Feminist" in the USA, also sometimes as the go-to "Socialist," but curiously not pushing for equality for all people as much as for the equal advancement of women into the the existing upper tiers of a very unfair hierarchical system. Bill Clinton was a similar name taking CIA asset during his world tour of the Vietnam peace movement, in which he also mysteriously moved from being a nobody from nowhere to a top dog.  That is how being a CIA asset works.  All US presidents--and most major candidates--since at least Nixon have been CIA assets or affiliated beforehand--and Eisenhower was personally drafted by Allen Dulles.  Also, significant media personalities and celebrities.  Sometimes it doesn't end well.  Epstein himself was such an asset, who was allowed to profit from a crooked arrangement to get started.  Then he had a lifetime of schmoozing with and entertaining the elite--and satisfying their sexual needs in illegal and embarrassing ways--while gathering compromat for US and Israeli intelligence.  Then when he became inconvenient, he was Epsteined.  Makes me wonder what really happened to Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, two other cultural figures who had meteoric rises.)

Ultimately, the still fairly liberal Supreme Court ended the adoption of such antiporn laws in the US in the 1980's.  The were adopted in Sweden, which has also de-liberalized sexuality with great enthusiasm so that the buyers (but not sellers) of sexual services face very harsh penalties.  (It was in this environment that Julian Assange was charged with rape for not wearing a condom--even though his Swedish one night stand partner--likely connected to western intelligence--insisted that he not wear a condom.)

When one side is liberalized (freeing women from expected marital serfdom) but the other side is not (porn and services and clubs for men are still or even more harshly penalized), you have created a sexual culture that is fundamentally misandric.  And it may be just as much be misogynistic at the same time!  This is all fine as far as the capitalist and imperialist masters are concerned as it does nothing but increase their control over a more fractured and fragmented society, grows the conservative side they like with more births, and devastates the lefty side they hate.

But I also believe that something like the old traditional marriage would help Moderns.  A non-sexist version would advocate that at least one partner (of either sex or gender) withdraw from wage slavery and be the full time homemaker.

In fact, that sort of thing already happens, mostly involving women, who temporarily withdraw from wage slavery to raise families.  Then, if they go back to work later, they find their earnings are significantly lower because of lack-of-continuous-employment-experience.  Studies have suggested this is the #1 cause of the wage gap between men and women.

What we need, then, is full equality in employment, decent wages and treatment for all, along with guaranteed employment for anyone seeking it.  So any former house partner can just jump back into wage slavery, along with the other traditional protections (alimony, etc) in marriage, which should not depend on one's biological sex, or gender, or child rearing status, but only one's state of dependence.

Many of the women I've met have often hated their jobs.  Much of what they want to talk about is how they are being stressed and overworked at work.  Often having to work unexpected overtime or do training on weekends and cancelling dates for that reason.  The most demanding and unrelenting managers for women are often other women.  No matter what you do, they want more.  Men as managers are more often softies--at least so long as they think they need you, anyway, they aren't going to push too hard.

I pretty much loved all my jobs and rarely talked about them much with dates.  Only a handful of times in my entire career did I need to work on weekends.   None of the guys I've known have ever complained about their jobs, and many bragged about them.  If I needed extra time off for a date or helping out a girlfriend during weekdays, I was always able to take it.

It has always seemed to me like work was the easy thing in my life.  Work rarely caused me any grief.  Meanwhile, sexual relations were so hard as to most often be impossible, and often led to depression and anxiety.

People I've known who are married don't seem better in any way.  They either seem like they're from an older generation (even if they aren't) or at least partly incompetent.  They seem like people who could could not live by themselves very well.  They seem like they couldn't perform all the functions needed to maintain a decent home by themselves.  But because they are together, they may well feel less loneliness, depression, and anxiety than singles.  Perhaps it's better to be incompetent.

Meanwhile, every American has to own a pet, or perhaps several.   I now have two cats.  Humans are social animals, but somehow we've constructed such an atomized society that the only kind of society we can maintain to satisfy our needs for the closest companionship, physical contact, and warmth, is with some other species.  Other mammal species groom each other, which also shows love and affection.   We groom our pets, and they groom us back.  Meanwhile, we shout or text at other humans.

While nurturing our lonely needy souls on a daily basis, pets can also form an impediment to creating and/or maintaining human sexual relationships.  Any person you are not living with cannot simply cannot spend the night for personal and sexual explorations, even on a weekend night.  Instead, they must go home to feed, walk, and/or provide companionship for their pet.  Likewise, trips, which is the way human pairs often come closest together, are complicated, and may just never happen.

Routinely cars drive by with loud thumping bass that penetrates houses.  Little tiny motorcycles with no mufflers scream so loud you can hear them miles away.  These have got to be guys, their pent up sex drive making them advertise themselves in these foolish and dystopian ways, and others.

People long to hear other people's voices.  So more and more, they listen all day to talk or news, or TV of some kind.  I remember in the 60's when radio was mostly music, especially on FM.*  NPR was one of the first to feature talk, and more talk.  Spoken drama in addition to news, but then it was all "news."  By this means, people are made to endlessly swallow corporate and deep state propaganda.  Consent for war is manufactured.  Consent for endless political divisions is manufactured too, for the purposes of creating a an overton window of opinion so long as it doesn't threaten the military industrial complex either way.

(*AM was at least half talk, which was mostly promotions and advertising, in between mostly popular music.  Popular music is propaganda too.  Anything with words.  You cannot trust any "channel."  It's not safe to leave anything on except pure music, or serious movies you have selected.  Whenever you are being shown something you didn't select, you are submitting to the consent manufacturing system, and it will choose what will best move you forwards in the mind programming regime, as well as waste much of your mental energy and ability to concentrate on real world problems, which would inevitably involve major changes to the system that props up the wealthy who profit from all things involved, the destruction, the repair, the interest, the rent, corruption, and buying up stuff cheap in the aftermath.)

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Footnotes

(*This friend of mine later accused her (mostly gay) husband of sexual assault for playing with her daughter in the bathtub, reminiscent of the fake alleged sex crimes prosecuted by Janet Reno before becoming Attorney General, and the false accusations leveled by Mia Farrow against Woody Allen.  I had become very suspicious before this after she asked me to give some toys to her daughter in the bathroom, and found an excuse to avoid doing so.  

This essay is not meant to be representative of my own close relationships.  I have had at least 5 wonderful relationships with liberal or left girlfriends.  But the bad interactions I touch on here had a profoundly depressing and chilling effect on my life for many years.  It was very hard to find the good relationships with liberal and left girlfriends after graduating from college.  Very few friends or institutions were of much help.  My family did not help--my mother never introduced me to anyone at all, and was profoundly critical--perhaps properly so--of all the girls I found anyway.  A handful of friends and one teacher tried to help by introducing me to promising women, and I honor them for that.  One friend of mine probably never would have been married except for the extensive work of his parents behind the scenes.  Now he's on his third marriage, and I've had none.

I can imagine many men lacking the good upbringing and good fortune I've had otherwise turning criminal, such into mass shooters.

The one institution which works best in US society for finding compatible life partners is church.  I would encourage other seekers to find a church which is actually compatible with their political and philosophical views.  For me that has been the Unitarian Universalist church, but similar ones include Quakers and Mennonites.  If you don't like some kind of church, you may find it virtually impossible to find a compatible mate.  That's simply the way that western society is organized.

In principle social and political clubs could be helpful.  But in my experience not so much.  They tend not to bring people together in ways that facilitate the development of sexual relationships, or even somewhat suppress them.  Clubs also tend not to be big enough or diverse enough (and nowadays seem mostly filled with old farts like me).  The same is true of workplaces, which may even have rules against fraternization.    It seems to me the pressures and difficulties that young and other single men face is simply not appreciated much in western society.  We properly obsess over women who face sexual harassment and the suffering it may cause, but simply ignore (or even blame)  the young men who face strong sexual desires with no possible resolution which can lead to decades of isolation and depression.  It is my belief that every social institution that wants to survive should have programs to bring single people together, in the way that churches do very explicitly.  Churches know how growing the congregation is done.  But you'll have to get involved in endless church activities for it to work.

Bars of course are useless, as are dance bars where the music is inevitably too loud to have a conversation.  Dance clubs are promising, and I've dated women from dance clubs (especially square dance clubs) but they have most often not had a compatible political alignment.  Clubs generally are very much preferable to commercial establishments, but still tend not to be as helpful to singles as church.  Commercial venues such as concert halls in US are useless--it's all about the show and collecting your money and then you can just go back home alone.  I was pleasantly surprised in UK when after a great concert (at the Royal Albert Hall) they opened the bar afterwards.  Why isn't it like that in the US?  It seems like the US establishment only wants serious church goers to reproduce, the rest can just hang themselves.

Sex clubs, even ones that utilize minors, are fine for the rich and powerful.  But for the rest of us, it's probably not even possible to have sex clubs of consenting adults, depending on where you live.  "Civilization" is fundamentally about controlling people by controlling (limiting) their sexual relations, with the intent of directing all human efforts into increasing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, and never particularly for satisfying human needs.

Gender reassignment surgery has always sounded pretty scary to me.  I have so far avoided even as much invasive surgery as dental implants because of concern of creating future problems, and despite very high claimed success rates, I've met a few people with terrible complications.  I can easily imagine most elective surgery is oversold, like anything that costs a lot of money.  It seems to me the important thing about gender is what kind of mate you want.  If you have male stuff and you want to mate someone who also has male stuff--congratulations you can be a male homosexual, there's already quite an establishment to support that.  No one has more clubs than gay men, and partners are easy to find.  And likewise for female homosexuals.  If you want to avoid any attachment, that's usually not too hard either.    Avoid pick up bars, don't look interested, and just say no.  (But why would you?)  Even "gender" is ambiguous about what kind of mate you want, and if you've already satisfied that need or not.   Though it might not be bad to extend our typical titles (Mr Miss Mrs Dr) in such a way as to indicate such a thing, or standardize different color pins or symbols.  But people who have ventured into such areas as reassignment should not face discrimination regardless.  And there's nothing wrong with Drag Shows.  I also don't see a problem with anyone stylizing themselves as they want--that's the way it's always been, and it doesn't require any risky surgery.  I've never met anyone whose pronouns surprised me regarding He/Him or She/Her, and the injury from mistake doesn't seem so great either, so I don't see the need for ritual pronoun identification.  I'm a CIS male who dresses as such, my short stature and long hair has often led clerks seeing just my head to call me 'mam.'  I'm flattered because women generally look nicer and quite often rule.  Bathroom assignment at least following presence-of-penis-rule seems reasonable, or sex-at-birth, or single person bathrooms.  Sports should probably follow sex-at-birth.  Some who is a trans female should not offended if they are identified as just that when it's important.  Of course all such things have exceptional cases, like hermaphrodites, and not everyone even has XX or XY chromosomes, but such cases are very rare.

For more details about all the personal stories I mention to in this essay, you'll have to wait for my forthcoming autobiography.)