There is a way out of this conundrum and it is absolutely not to double down on traditional gender roles or to throw our hands in the air and say "it's evolution!". That way is to embrace and encourage sex work, to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements, deprogram ourselves from all of our subtle and not-so-subtle slut-shaming, stop pretending the naked body is illegal and sex is bad or dirty, stop dramatizing and fear-mongering over the impact of STDs, and just generally embrace a broader, vaster and more open perspective on sex and romance and intimacy.
This is partially because of a good thing, that less people die from AIDS than they used to. Mainly it's because HIV can't be cured though, which means you live your entire life with a weakened immune system.
We need more STD awareness, not less. Especially not dismiss STD awareness as "fear-mongering". Especially if you want to explore society models with less monogamy.
OP might have attended school in a conservative state where STD misinformation was used as part of an abstinence-only propaganda machine in high school health courses. That sort of STD fear-mongering is in fact unhelpful (because it's exactly that: fear-mongering without actionable advice).
But you're right. As you move away from monogamy, sexual health becomes more important rather than less.
When monogamous, you can kind of address the question of health once and mostly forget about it for the duration of the relationship (modulo a few exceptions -- HSV-1 and Hep are transmissible outside of sex, any sort of blood-blood contact should be thought of as roughly equivalent to unprotected sex, etc; you get the point, though).
When non-monogamous, you have to think about STDs more like COVID in 2020 -- constant masking and regular testing as the default, and if you want to let your guard down it requires some special effort.
That's a fair point. What GP said came across a bit wrongly though, almost sounding like a covid denier just for STDs. STDs are a real thing, and they have profoundly negative impacts upon society.
As to those teaching practices, they are horrible. Yes, in theory, "in the lab", abstinence does prevent STDs. But this doesn't work in real life. It can't ever inform the STD avoidance strategy taught to pupils, as enough people will have sex no matter what is taught to them. If they don't know how to reduce STDs when having sex, they will spread them more.
The reaction should not be to discard STD avoidance though, but to do it properly. Which is sadly tougher in places in which promiscuous behaviour is shamed, as they usually have less availability for STD testing, buying protections, and people might feel ashamed or even be ostracized to seek out such places.
It's not going to work. Even in a perfectly open society, people won't have sex with just anyone. They will choose their partners. This means value judgement which implies hierarchies which establishes power structures. Inequality is inherent. There will be highly promiscuous people at the top and involuntary celibates at the bottom.
This is roughly how actual polyamorous dating pools work. If anything, the bottom of the distribution has a more difficult time in polyamorous settings.
That’s a nice idea but how do you do credit assignment for childrearing purposes? Sadly even in modern society, sex is not entirely unliked from reproduction and we still expect, often legally demand, fathers invest resources in their children. I thought part of the deal with monogamy came from ensuring stable male parental investment and a good way to achieve this is through monogamy as a proxy for fatherhood.
Birth control is what holds the whole thing together, that's the implied part that's not usually mentioned. I grant that IQ 145 people can get together and subconsciously arrange an equitable polycule childcare system, and they don't realize why that would be a problem for anyone else. Moving away from exceptional cases, you have what are more or less roomates, and they manage to stay roomates through birth control.
If you're wondering, "what happens to people that have a good gut feeling for fairness, but who aren't smart enough to subconsciously work out how 5 people are going to take care of a child, and who want kids," then the answer is, they are the vast majority of the population and they're not going to fit the non-monogamous system unless massive inequality (see bronze age) forces them there.
You are promoting your own ability to reason over hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated evolutionary and cultural wisdom. I doubt you'll come out on top.
There are good reasons for stigmatizing nakedness, fearing STDs, conceptualizing sex as something that should exist in monogamous, emotionally close relationships, and so on. That's not to say tradition is infallible, only that dismissing it altogether is a mistake.
That history and cultural wisdom was based entirely on the oppression and subjugation of women. So, of course many straight men will be swayed by those arguments. But objectively speaking, all of this collective wisdom has created a situation where women still suffer constantly at the hands of men, and men aren't happy either, and are arguably increasingly unhappy! If you want to continue down that path, good luck.
I think you meant "subjectively speaking". I don't agree with the way you conceptualize human history as gender struggle. It seems incorrect to me.
I don't think we have any option than continuing down the path. Reforms and changes are necessary but we aren't going to create a better way of living by abandoning the past. Our ability to meaningfully critique tradition depends on our treating it as a series of intricate answers to complicated problems, which is what it is.
> to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements
The "males have a hard time finding dates/sex" is just as much a thing in poly communities. In fact, I consistently have a harder time dating women when I have a steady partner than when I'm single. If anything, ENM makes the lives of men who struggle in singles dating pools even more difficult.
The basic problem I've seen, over and over and over, is that many men don't know how to form normal relationships with women. Even in situations where sex is... more liberated, for lack of a better term... those men still have a really hard time getting past first dates. Unsurprisingly.
There's also a strong overlap between this cohort and men who don't have female friends.
I think there's probably something deeper than "women don't want sex" going on here. There's a big cohort of men who aren't desirable as sexual partners and want to blame society instead of changing themselves. Non-monogamy doesn't solve that problem. Hell, I'm not even sure that legalizing sex work could solve that problem.
That's what we've done, isn't it? Marriage rates are declining and non traditional arrangements are increasing. Traditional gender roles have been pretty firmly condemned, at least people who advocate for them. There are few places in public where advocating for them wouldn't be considered sexist. This really isn't anecdotal, you can see it with data that traditional gender roles and marriages are generally declining.
Do you have any proof that the imbalances described have been decreasing as either belief in traditional gender roles and marriage rates have declined?
The picture I was trying to paint is much more radical than that. There are emergent phenomenon that come from less judgement and more openness that I would argue can subvert the paradigm you're describing. But yeah, part of the idea is that if we remove the endless barriers we have embraced that deny us sex and intimacy, we will all have access to more sex and intimacy. We may also find that we want more and different kinds of sex and intimacy, which may in many cases lead to a reduced demand for straight sex.
The radical-ness of this doesn’t stem from the moral implications, it stems from how reality-denying it is. Young people have discarded the taboo of sexual promiscuity for at least a few generations already. But you need more from relationships than just sex, which is why we have the concept of “settling down” eventually to have a long-term, committed partnership.
Sexual compulsions are very influential, but people almost universally find relationships revolving primarily around sex to be completely unfulfilling (eventually).
> Because women supposedly would be giving out more "sex favors"
Yeah, supposedly in such a society people would no longer be discriminating when it comes to sexual partners. They will have sex with anyone and everyone. It's a fantasy.
I've even seen feminists arguing this. "Feminism is good for men too, they get more sex!" Except the unattractive men are never invited to the party.
I find it kind of amusing because I tend to use sexual attraction as an example for when communism will fail - because it is unrealistic to assign everybody a mate of equal attractiveness. You can give everybody the same shitty house and roughly the same shitty job, but unless you clone people, they will not be equally attractive.
Amusing, because the communists actually thought of it, and come up with this solution: that everybody should just be willingly give sex to everybody (or another variant, that everybody should just considered to be equally attractive).
For example here in Germany there was the famous "Kommune 1" in the 60ies, and they had the mantra "Wer zweimal mit derselben pennt, gehört schon zum Establishment" - meaning if you have sex with the same woman twice, you are already the enemy.
I don't think that is the "freeing of women" that its proponents claim it is. Quite the opposite, it is the ultimate "utilization" of women who lose the rights over their bodies.
Amusing concept, isn't it? Sex and reproduction as resources. Inevitably the issue of fair redistribution comes up. I saw articles talking about this posted on HN once:
Capitalism doesn't escape this either. The notion that you'll find a good wife if you work hard and become successful is ingrained into men since early childhood. It's magical thinking, of course. No such guarantee exists.
>There is a way out of this conundrum and it is absolutely not to double down on traditional gender role
In my comment I touched on traditional gender roles vs egalitarianism. I too agree that we should absolutely not revert the changes. But one must admit that the traditional gender roles had an appropriate balance.
>or to throw our hands in the air and say "it's evolution!".
That's difficult to change though. The bell is ringing and there's no unringing.
>That way is to embrace and encourage sex work, to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements, deprogram ourselves from all of our subtle and not-so-subtle slut-shaming, stop pretending the naked body is illegal and sex is bad or dirty, stop dramatizing and fear-mongering over the impact of STDs, and just generally embrace a broader, vaster and more open perspective on sex and romance and intimacy.
Very long sentence lol. The majority of the world criminalizes sex work as well as even porn. Yet ironically those places are also far worse off. Japan is clearly a prime example.
STDs are certainly a complicated subject. Each individually represent a small percentage of risk but together isnt addition, it's multiplication of risk. It's compounding interest as it were.
I think we are looking at it incorrectly. This is outside real control, in fact efforts to control will always result in the opposite result as expected. This is kind of something jordan peterson goes over, in an attempt to fix gender inequality has resulted in greater gender inequality.
We likely can only measure and monitor what's happening. Where does this balance go now that the balance broke. Men are going to benefit greatly here. Is that what we want? Is that a good thing? I suspect not.
Pretty sure an anthropologist would disagree with you there. Humans for the most part have not been monogamous until recently. There are many historical examples of men who have sex with multiple women in the tribe and many examples of women who have sex with other men besides their partner. And yes, my language was intentional to point out that historically it was expected that a woman had one partner but a man could have many.
Not all societies today even value monogamy. In France some consider the President weak if he doesn't have at least one mistress. And in fact the same thing in America.
This is still monogamy - its just social monogamy rather than genetic. Many animals are socially monogamous, especially among primates and some monkeys are even genetically monogamous.
Let's be honest you're trying to use a nature to excuse behavior most find unacceptable - there's risk residue if Christianity in that. I see this a lot in these appeals - you're essentially arguing that if you can show someone thing is natural it's beyond question. However, anthropologists admit that most human societies have developed monogamy of one form or another, with exceptions only for rulers.
Worked for who exactly? An entire gender that has, for almost all of history in almost every society, been ignored, oppressed, controlled and frequently raped by men? Hardly.
For almost all of history in almost every society both man and women have been ignored, oppressed, controlled. Things have drastically changed in Western world. Not sure we need to impose a Brave New World style "utopia".
I'm not sure we should assign monogamy as the culprit for the bad things that have happened to women. There are plenty of men who don't ignore, oppress, control or frequently rape women who are happy to be monogamous, and women seem to prefer it if you haven't noticed.
We're not out here trying to convince men that being able to have sex with multiple partners throughout their lives is a good idea -- that part comes naturally to us.
Whereas men have simply been killed in droves. Are you sure women had the worse part throughout history, or do you just not care about the fate of men?
If the overriding concern is placing blame, it is probably better for it to be mostly self-directed so as to adjust standards of behaviour. Rationalizing why an out-group is responsible for all the sufferings of the in-group becomes easier the more one engages with it.
What is the point of this comment? The topic that was being discussed was
>I’m betting on monogamy since that has worked for thousands of years.
The reply asked worked for who? Then out of nowhere you're talking about men being killed in droves. Are you saying that monogamy didn't work for either gender (one that lost their freedom and and the other that lost their lives)?
See, your comment makes sense and is a valid point. I do agree that the world was a more violent place and I don't think monogamy is the reason that women had it bad (most likely has to do with a patriarchal culture and an uneducated population).
Theirs is a borderline flame bait comment that added nothing to the discussion.
