Was blessed to have a really great barn dancing culture in my early 20’s. Usually the dances were vaguely red America coded and much easier to interact with women than the baseline culture which I had zero interest in. That would be an easy way for a community to try to revive natural places to meat people
There is, of course, another way to see all this. One that I believe is determiative. Mother nature does not care how beautiful or Leftist Utopian our culture is. If we can’t reproduce ourselves, we’ll be replaced by a culture that does. Social Darwinism.
Our sophisticates and middle class and underclass might all hate it - racist, sexist, rigid, etc. No matter. The replacement might be fast or slow, easy or painful. The new society might prove incapable of sustaining a high-tech civilization. But Demography is destiny.
All evidence suggests imports decline faster. We are somewhat immunized against Western liberalism unlike most other cultures. British-born Muslim women have fewer children than whites, for example.
Also, birth rates are declining everywhere, so it is not just a problem for here. Both India and China are below replacement levels.
The problem will still remain. We must find some way to rekindle things. Everyone must do so.
A key issue here is our failure to grapple with the reality that most young people are psychologically puritanical, while dealing with raging hormones and desire at the same time. Especially boys and young men.
Puritanism is not the result of brainwashing; it’s inherent in the young. Notice their fanatical hatred of cheating and rejection and promiscuity, and pathological contempt for young and arranged marriage. Even as they embrace an “anything goes as long as there’s consent” mantra.
The issue is, that’s not how the mystic of romance and sex has ever worked.
It’s ideology over reality.
In truth- we’ve imposed the profane on the realm of the sacred and it’s driven our young insane. What a colossal failure of spiritual leadership. The likes of Scott Galloway and Richard V. Reeves are completely lost. Even Teal Swan could take those knuckleheads to school.
The mass media propaganda of porn as “no big deal” is a perfect illustration. That’s psychotic. AI porn and sex robots and dating apps will never have an iota of the disillusioning impact of the first wave of internet pornography. Jordan Peterson gets this wrong. The damage is done. I learned about sex through conversation, speculation and Dave Matthews songs along with slow and painful experimentation.
These kids live in a blasphemous dystopian nightmare, plus they’re gaslit into oblivion by the loudest voices in the culture. We abandoned them. We told them it’s all good baby. I can’t even convince women that men hate porn; or men that women aren’t perverts. They’ve all swallowed the liberal ideology that has everything backwards.
Of course the smarmiest, most cynical types who have good looks, money or talent can afford to be cavalier. But the acceptance of the sexual revolution and pornography by liberals and most feminists (check the record) was always based on nothing more than a profound spite of their political enemies. But it’s the final boss of luxury beliefs. Everyone knows now that third wave feminism cut off its nose to spite its face.
We threw all our nice kids into the terrifying maw of the most spiteful, hate-filled, contemptuous people on earth: pornographers.
And no one wants to name it. It’s very politically inconvenient to admit that you were wrong. Like the parents of “trans kids”, we’re stuck. Admitting to this extent and depth of this failure is tantamount to confessing to a sex crime against an entire generation.
Excellent essay on a serious problem people generally refuse to take seriously. Even though people have been saturated with online pornography, thus removing the mystery and allure of sex, our wider culture is strangely sexless. Where are the models for romance? Do Zoomers even think to associate sex and romance? Seems like the two have been segregated in the modern imagination.
I also totally agree with the pre-marriage programs. This whole approach to keeping engaged couples together has completely backfired, with couples now marrying (and divorcing) outside the Church more often than not.
I think you're getting to the same conclusions I reached in an essay on this topic (see the link below). It takes a village to make a marriage. That means it takes school dances, community gatherings, dinner parties, and yes, romantic comedies in the movie theaters. It also means that parents are actively trying to introduce their children to suitable partners from respectable families. In many ways, this is more important than make sure they get good grades and go to college.
We're reaching a point where young people today wish to have prearranged marriages again. The hassle of courtship and dating and the lack of guardrails all throughout stresses them out. I don't blame them, but it's kinda sad.
Anyway, here's my essay on this. You might like it:
I think the separation of the two long predates modernity, and is probably even at the root of many of our problems. The idea most people have of “romance” is roughly analogous to “gender” — some sort of ambiguous, amorphous purely mental or platonic equivalent to sexuality which in reality doesn’t exist, just as “gender” is some sort of ambiguous, amorphous, purely mental or platonic equivalent to biological sex. And just as with “gender” the mental abstract eventually took precedence over the reality and became conceived of as totally separable from it. In that sense, ideas of being “in love” sexlessly is roughly the marital or sexual equivalent of “transgenderism.”
Does anyone even know what “romantic love” is, separate from sexual chemistry or love? I don’t mean in the way that everyone thinks they know what “gender” is separate from sex, but really what is genuinely being talked about.
It’s a whole misconceived psychology and anti-anthropology. No wonder that when marriage was sleight-of-handed to be about “love” (as in this amorphous thing called “romantic love”) instead of sex it eventually culminated in a culture where people are wholly unaware that marriage and sex have any intrinsic relationship at all, and both marriage and sex have been totally degraded.
I would argue the plummet in romance culture goes hand in hand with the explosion of anti-depressant use. Nothing seems to annihilate the desire in the young for ANY kind of experience than having their serotonin artificially tanked so they do not attempt suicide. In that context, people's priorities seem to have shifted from having a "fun time" to just trying to not die by their own hand.
In Georgia (the country) where I'm at, ''ცოლი გყავს?'' - 'Do you have a wife?' is like the third question I'm asked by many people after I tell them I'm American and in my early 20s. They frequently offer to mind me one. This is weird and uncomfortable for me, but it's probably a reflection of them having a somewhat more normal society than the one I come from.
The problem of lack of Eros in modern life is deeply unsettling to me, almost as if someone took away all the food and told us to live on cold porridge. It's an under-examined phenomenon that Gen X and Millenials will have to solve if there is to be a future for non-Sub-Saharans. Perhaps you intend LARPing as a joke, but I always thought girls at Rennaissance festivals looked rather fetching in a way that encouraged unfeigned sensations. AI tells me that it's not too gauche for me to share my own silly take on the issue: https://simeonsanchez.substack.com/p/on-flirtation?r=2d0wo4
As Zippy put it in his usual incisive way: for most, intercourse is now nothing more than the use of a sexual toilet. Fundamentally that is how most now think of it, an outlet or utility for the disposal of natural urges.
And how romantic is going to the toilet? More importantly, how good does it feel to BE someone else’s toilet? Or a public toilet?
I can. I could write a book on it. Oh, wait, I did write a book on it !
But as far as trying to lay the whole thing out in a single comment: not so much. But I'll give a really brief summary:
Purity culture invented a whole lot of unBiblical rules, and used them to prevent marriages. They promoted a gnostic, anti-body heresy, which then came home to roost in delayed marriages, denied marriages, and cold, paranoid marriages. And divorces. The Song of Solomon, Proverbs 5, I Cor 7:9 were not just ignored, but were contradicted. The young women were held up as princess (I have the book on my shelf), and the young men as unworthy barbarians. Fathers in the church were rejecting nine young men from their church, including sons of elders and deacons... and a lot of those young men still aren't married. They taught the young men they were never could enough, and the young women that no man could ever be good enough.
Wonderful essay, brilliantly put. I had a very similar thought when attending a regency ball last month. I was thinking to my self just how easy and organic it made interacting with new people and the theoretically potential partners as well.
Such social structures will indeed need to be rebuilt to a large extent. Though from what I’ve seen, most of the people attending these events, at least in urban areas in the Northeast, are the opposite of who you’d expect or want to rebuild society.
Though I haven’t been to a barn dance, I’m familiar with Contra dances, but I’ll have to see if there’s a barn dance near me.
That woman who wasn’t sure she was raped. I feel as if the idea was that women didn’t have sexual desire or agency. That almost seems… sexist. The only other acceptable behavior is “Call her daddy” game, so… act like a man… either way… is feminine sexuality punished?
I think a realistic rule of thumb for younger folks is "don't fuck anyone you wouldn't want to have a kid with." It's a lot cooler to acknowledge that condoms are gay than to try to re-institute purity culture onto people who have already been around the block a few times. It doesn't pretend moral perfection nor does it pretend that there's any substitute for the real thing; the "risk" itself is not just exciting, but also emphasizes the gravity of sex and finding a partner.
As for dating and meeting people, there's not as much interest in activities with the prevalence of screens in kids' lives, but I think the screens double as a shelter for the insecure. It's especially easy to fuck around online instead of going out into the world when you don't feel all that great about your odds in the world to begin with. This isn't a great articulation of the phenomenon, but a lot of zoomers and even millennials lack not just the social and romantic skills you mention, but also the various sorts of skills that would make them confident in the world in general.
Back in the far-off days of 2012, I warned about precisely this, the inevitable frigidity of the virginis aeternis; got attacked harshly for it, by those who didn’t want to admit that their solution was as doomed as the problem it was attempting to solve.
I don’t blame them, it’s a common human fallacy. The drunk looking for his keys under the street light. Just be aware of it, so that you don’t go and get defensive about whatever non-solution you yourself are holding dear to your heart.
Instead of blackpilling more, we can get creative with this and look for possible solutions.
A revolution in fashion, personal health and beauty standards might help a lot. There is an ongoing trend towards healthy eating and exercise amongst the younger generations but it’s not quite mainstream yet. I think Millennials and Gen Z, despite being poorer than their parents, will lead healthier lives overall and have fewer health-related issues later on in life. The Boomer lifestyle has been proven without a doubt to be toxic to the body and there’s definitely a backlash, a retvrn, to leading simpler, healthier lifestyles. Looksmaxxing can go too far, yes, but the impetus behind it supports an increased importance on beauty standards.
If you go out and see people who look like shit, dress like shit, have no sense of etiquette or even basic social skills (sorry Zoomers, but I’m looking at you), don’t you think that’s going to have a net negative effect on people’s ability to connect and eventually pair off?
Also, it might not hurt to bring back 18th-century necklines in women’s dress. A way to eroticize without devolving in exhibitionism. That’s what fascinates me so much about older, pre-21st/20th century fashion styles—how they manage to at times be erotic while still retaining a sense of decorum.
Was blessed to have a really great barn dancing culture in my early 20’s. Usually the dances were vaguely red America coded and much easier to interact with women than the baseline culture which I had zero interest in. That would be an easy way for a community to try to revive natural places to meat people
... an easy way for a community to try to revive natural places to MEAT people
===
Certainly beats virtual people. Presumably a Freudian slip by the poster?
And we could all do with some red-coded spaces to meat the ladies 🤠
There is, of course, another way to see all this. One that I believe is determiative. Mother nature does not care how beautiful or Leftist Utopian our culture is. If we can’t reproduce ourselves, we’ll be replaced by a culture that does. Social Darwinism.
Our sophisticates and middle class and underclass might all hate it - racist, sexist, rigid, etc. No matter. The replacement might be fast or slow, easy or painful. The new society might prove incapable of sustaining a high-tech civilization. But Demography is destiny.
All evidence suggests imports decline faster. We are somewhat immunized against Western liberalism unlike most other cultures. British-born Muslim women have fewer children than whites, for example.
Also, birth rates are declining everywhere, so it is not just a problem for here. Both India and China are below replacement levels.
The problem will still remain. We must find some way to rekindle things. Everyone must do so.
Neither God, nor Darwin, will permit survival to those who won't defend themselves or reproduce.
The future belongs to those who show up for it.
A key issue here is our failure to grapple with the reality that most young people are psychologically puritanical, while dealing with raging hormones and desire at the same time. Especially boys and young men.
Puritanism is not the result of brainwashing; it’s inherent in the young. Notice their fanatical hatred of cheating and rejection and promiscuity, and pathological contempt for young and arranged marriage. Even as they embrace an “anything goes as long as there’s consent” mantra.
The issue is, that’s not how the mystic of romance and sex has ever worked.
It’s ideology over reality.
In truth- we’ve imposed the profane on the realm of the sacred and it’s driven our young insane. What a colossal failure of spiritual leadership. The likes of Scott Galloway and Richard V. Reeves are completely lost. Even Teal Swan could take those knuckleheads to school.
The mass media propaganda of porn as “no big deal” is a perfect illustration. That’s psychotic. AI porn and sex robots and dating apps will never have an iota of the disillusioning impact of the first wave of internet pornography. Jordan Peterson gets this wrong. The damage is done. I learned about sex through conversation, speculation and Dave Matthews songs along with slow and painful experimentation.
These kids live in a blasphemous dystopian nightmare, plus they’re gaslit into oblivion by the loudest voices in the culture. We abandoned them. We told them it’s all good baby. I can’t even convince women that men hate porn; or men that women aren’t perverts. They’ve all swallowed the liberal ideology that has everything backwards.
Of course the smarmiest, most cynical types who have good looks, money or talent can afford to be cavalier. But the acceptance of the sexual revolution and pornography by liberals and most feminists (check the record) was always based on nothing more than a profound spite of their political enemies. But it’s the final boss of luxury beliefs. Everyone knows now that third wave feminism cut off its nose to spite its face.
We threw all our nice kids into the terrifying maw of the most spiteful, hate-filled, contemptuous people on earth: pornographers.
And no one wants to name it. It’s very politically inconvenient to admit that you were wrong. Like the parents of “trans kids”, we’re stuck. Admitting to this extent and depth of this failure is tantamount to confessing to a sex crime against an entire generation.
Excellent essay on a serious problem people generally refuse to take seriously. Even though people have been saturated with online pornography, thus removing the mystery and allure of sex, our wider culture is strangely sexless. Where are the models for romance? Do Zoomers even think to associate sex and romance? Seems like the two have been segregated in the modern imagination.
I also totally agree with the pre-marriage programs. This whole approach to keeping engaged couples together has completely backfired, with couples now marrying (and divorcing) outside the Church more often than not.
I think you're getting to the same conclusions I reached in an essay on this topic (see the link below). It takes a village to make a marriage. That means it takes school dances, community gatherings, dinner parties, and yes, romantic comedies in the movie theaters. It also means that parents are actively trying to introduce their children to suitable partners from respectable families. In many ways, this is more important than make sure they get good grades and go to college.
We're reaching a point where young people today wish to have prearranged marriages again. The hassle of courtship and dating and the lack of guardrails all throughout stresses them out. I don't blame them, but it's kinda sad.
Anyway, here's my essay on this. You might like it:
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/recovering-love-and-marriage-in-a-loveless-and-divided-culture
I think the separation of the two long predates modernity, and is probably even at the root of many of our problems. The idea most people have of “romance” is roughly analogous to “gender” — some sort of ambiguous, amorphous purely mental or platonic equivalent to sexuality which in reality doesn’t exist, just as “gender” is some sort of ambiguous, amorphous, purely mental or platonic equivalent to biological sex. And just as with “gender” the mental abstract eventually took precedence over the reality and became conceived of as totally separable from it. In that sense, ideas of being “in love” sexlessly is roughly the marital or sexual equivalent of “transgenderism.”
Does anyone even know what “romantic love” is, separate from sexual chemistry or love? I don’t mean in the way that everyone thinks they know what “gender” is separate from sex, but really what is genuinely being talked about.
It’s a whole misconceived psychology and anti-anthropology. No wonder that when marriage was sleight-of-handed to be about “love” (as in this amorphous thing called “romantic love”) instead of sex it eventually culminated in a culture where people are wholly unaware that marriage and sex have any intrinsic relationship at all, and both marriage and sex have been totally degraded.
It's not sexless, it's romanceless. Because of “sex positivity” culture
I would argue the plummet in romance culture goes hand in hand with the explosion of anti-depressant use. Nothing seems to annihilate the desire in the young for ANY kind of experience than having their serotonin artificially tanked so they do not attempt suicide. In that context, people's priorities seem to have shifted from having a "fun time" to just trying to not die by their own hand.
We being born in Egypt must Larp in the desert for forty years in preparation for a promised land our generation will not see.
Love this comment, and true
In Georgia (the country) where I'm at, ''ცოლი გყავს?'' - 'Do you have a wife?' is like the third question I'm asked by many people after I tell them I'm American and in my early 20s. They frequently offer to mind me one. This is weird and uncomfortable for me, but it's probably a reflection of them having a somewhat more normal society than the one I come from.
I should visit Georgia
The problem of lack of Eros in modern life is deeply unsettling to me, almost as if someone took away all the food and told us to live on cold porridge. It's an under-examined phenomenon that Gen X and Millenials will have to solve if there is to be a future for non-Sub-Saharans. Perhaps you intend LARPing as a joke, but I always thought girls at Rennaissance festivals looked rather fetching in a way that encouraged unfeigned sensations. AI tells me that it's not too gauche for me to share my own silly take on the issue: https://simeonsanchez.substack.com/p/on-flirtation?r=2d0wo4
As Zippy put it in his usual incisive way: for most, intercourse is now nothing more than the use of a sexual toilet. Fundamentally that is how most now think of it, an outlet or utility for the disposal of natural urges.
And how romantic is going to the toilet? More importantly, how good does it feel to BE someone else’s toilet? Or a public toilet?
May his soul rest in peace. A lot of my intellectual development happened reading his blog.
The purity culture was not a mistake about purity, it was a mistake about marriage.
Could you expand on this?
I can. I could write a book on it. Oh, wait, I did write a book on it !
But as far as trying to lay the whole thing out in a single comment: not so much. But I'll give a really brief summary:
Purity culture invented a whole lot of unBiblical rules, and used them to prevent marriages. They promoted a gnostic, anti-body heresy, which then came home to roost in delayed marriages, denied marriages, and cold, paranoid marriages. And divorces. The Song of Solomon, Proverbs 5, I Cor 7:9 were not just ignored, but were contradicted. The young women were held up as princess (I have the book on my shelf), and the young men as unworthy barbarians. Fathers in the church were rejecting nine young men from their church, including sons of elders and deacons... and a lot of those young men still aren't married. They taught the young men they were never could enough, and the young women that no man could ever be good enough.
It was anti-Scriptural heresy.
Wonderful essay, brilliantly put. I had a very similar thought when attending a regency ball last month. I was thinking to my self just how easy and organic it made interacting with new people and the theoretically potential partners as well.
Such social structures will indeed need to be rebuilt to a large extent. Though from what I’ve seen, most of the people attending these events, at least in urban areas in the Northeast, are the opposite of who you’d expect or want to rebuild society.
Though I haven’t been to a barn dance, I’m familiar with Contra dances, but I’ll have to see if there’s a barn dance near me.
Among other things, one of the big goals I have as a parent is to teach my children to dance - even just a basic waltz.
That woman who wasn’t sure she was raped. I feel as if the idea was that women didn’t have sexual desire or agency. That almost seems… sexist. The only other acceptable behavior is “Call her daddy” game, so… act like a man… either way… is feminine sexuality punished?
I think a realistic rule of thumb for younger folks is "don't fuck anyone you wouldn't want to have a kid with." It's a lot cooler to acknowledge that condoms are gay than to try to re-institute purity culture onto people who have already been around the block a few times. It doesn't pretend moral perfection nor does it pretend that there's any substitute for the real thing; the "risk" itself is not just exciting, but also emphasizes the gravity of sex and finding a partner.
As for dating and meeting people, there's not as much interest in activities with the prevalence of screens in kids' lives, but I think the screens double as a shelter for the insecure. It's especially easy to fuck around online instead of going out into the world when you don't feel all that great about your odds in the world to begin with. This isn't a great articulation of the phenomenon, but a lot of zoomers and even millennials lack not just the social and romantic skills you mention, but also the various sorts of skills that would make them confident in the world in general.
Back in the far-off days of 2012, I warned about precisely this, the inevitable frigidity of the virginis aeternis; got attacked harshly for it, by those who didn’t want to admit that their solution was as doomed as the problem it was attempting to solve.
I don’t blame them, it’s a common human fallacy. The drunk looking for his keys under the street light. Just be aware of it, so that you don’t go and get defensive about whatever non-solution you yourself are holding dear to your heart.
Instead of blackpilling more, we can get creative with this and look for possible solutions.
A revolution in fashion, personal health and beauty standards might help a lot. There is an ongoing trend towards healthy eating and exercise amongst the younger generations but it’s not quite mainstream yet. I think Millennials and Gen Z, despite being poorer than their parents, will lead healthier lives overall and have fewer health-related issues later on in life. The Boomer lifestyle has been proven without a doubt to be toxic to the body and there’s definitely a backlash, a retvrn, to leading simpler, healthier lifestyles. Looksmaxxing can go too far, yes, but the impetus behind it supports an increased importance on beauty standards.
If you go out and see people who look like shit, dress like shit, have no sense of etiquette or even basic social skills (sorry Zoomers, but I’m looking at you), don’t you think that’s going to have a net negative effect on people’s ability to connect and eventually pair off?
Also, it might not hurt to bring back 18th-century necklines in women’s dress. A way to eroticize without devolving in exhibitionism. That’s what fascinates me so much about older, pre-21st/20th century fashion styles—how they manage to at times be erotic while still retaining a sense of decorum.