Who Can Make Sex Great Again?

Learn to Love the LARP

Millennials or late gen-Xers in protestant circles likely remember the age of purity culture. As the 90’s and 2000’s accelerated the sexual licentiousness of the revolution that started in the 1960’s, it was designed to be a positive alternative to mass culture inundated with sleazy advertisements, video pornography, and acceptance of one-night-stands. The was an entire industry around it, with purity rings, chastity pledges, a plethora of public speakers, books galore, and a glossy advertising campaign. This, along with Praise and Worship music to counter radio’s nihilism, was an attempt at a positive counterculture.

Fast forward to now, and no one thinks the campaign was a success. Its main spokesman, Joshua Harris of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” fame lost his religion and got a divorce. Almost like you shouldn’t base complex social relationships on an inexperienced 21-year-old. The attempt to change dating into a nebulously defined courtship fell to the wayside. Worse still, even for those who stayed chaste through their entire single life, a slew of frustrated men found out that years of purity pledges turned their brides into sexually frigid shrews. After all the years of saving sex for the beauty of marriage and a large amount of strong repression, they now saw sex as gross. Women found out that the man she thought was “strong” for not going too far while dating was actually gay.

Pictured: Naivete

Still, for all the failures of purity culture, secular culture is in worse straits. Fewer people are in relationships now, pornography is rampant, marriage is declining, birthrates are plummeting, and what was once a lively sexual market has become a minefield of taboos where even cold approaching is considered uncouth. Secular culture is learning consent as their only basis of morality is unwieldy in dealing with sexual relations.

I remember reading a post where a woman was asking for advice. She went on a date with a guy and agreed to go inside his house afterward. She sat on the couch with him and said she didn’t want sex. The guy, as guys are wont to do, gradually escalated with kissing, touching etc. When she showed no resistance, it culminated with him carrying her to his bedroom and having sex. She said he never blocked her exit, and she could have walked out anytime but didn’t because she didn’t want him to feel bad. She wondered if it was rape. The board exploded with calls for her to go the police to report rape because she never gave active consent, acting like this boorish guy deserved to get years in prison for seducing her. In modern morality, because she didn’t give a verbal, enthusiastic yes, it was rape. Such a morality turns the entire erotic dance into a lawyerly contract, and it’s just as exciting.

If the man blocked her way, threatened her, or otherwise forced himself, the case is more clear-cut, though this brings the problem of how you prove such an assertion. The Believe All Women movement focused on taking a woman’s word for it, but in reality this turns every legal mechanism into a kangaroo court, especially when even enthusiastic consent can be rescinded at any time. None of it would stand in court using classic Western legal norms, which is why women once avoided going alone to strange men’s homes.

In a nation where the only morality is consent, people are finding out what a nebulous term consent even is, and the reason there were many guardrails to assure consent was actually consent in messy human relations. There’s an idealism that sexual relations can exist in a sort of platonic form, free from any sort of psychological conflict. Yet the quest for that idealistic form has created a mass of conflicts. The woman above likely didn’t want sex but was worried he would lose interest if she didn’t put out. And she likely was right. As expectations change, so do the calculations of what one needs to do to maintain it. Where does psychological coercion start? Who decides?

If you look at modern dating discourse, there are men who say if she doesn’t put out on the first date, she’s not into you. After all, there’s no taboo against sex anymore, so if she likes you, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Others give more leeway and argue she has to put out by the third date or you’re just a meal ticket for a bored girl looking for something to do. We’ve have non-monogamous couples, friends with benefits, situationships, and every other association known to man. With all taboos destroyed, there’s a mix of extreme openness and extreme paranoia that has sucked all mystery away. Sex is always on the table, and therefore with time it’s seen as obligatory.

Yes.

Probably the strangest evolution is the inversion of marriage. While once sex was seen as an inextricable part of one’s conjugal duties, it’s now treated as, at best, a secondary concern. In earlier times, marriage equaled sexual consent. Now it’s seen as completely acceptable to totally withhold sex from one’s spouse while also making it morally unacceptable for the jilted spouse to get his or her wants taken care of elsewhere without the other’s permission. Sex outside of marriage is seen as liberating and no big deal. Sex inside marriage is seen as a little vulgar and going against the ideal platonic form of two people loving each other in a wholly metaphysical way.

For those looking for a temporary, no attachment fling, it’s a godsend… for a while. If you are attractive with good charisma, you can have sex with plenty of available people. Sex is fun, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it. Some pundits on the right like RedHawk point to this as proof that traditional chastity in the modern world is detrimental to your cause, and you’re not going to find a good wife by sticking to the old sexual norms. In a world where sex is easy, only the most asexual types are going to wait until marriage, and then you’re going to have a really bad time. This is especially true when people are now marrying in their thirties. You can only make people wait so long.

Of course, submitting to thoroughly modern dating practices means you will have a thoroughly modern marriage. A partner who you slept with on your third date isn’t going to be more traditional, isn’t going to be willing to have more than 2 kids, isn’t going to start taking your religious faith seriously, and isn’t going to sacrifice herself for your higher aspirations. A modern marriage is a farcical contact where dissolution is on demand and everything is divvied equally, if you’re lucky, with no recourse. The data is in, and it’s also a fertility sink. If you’re okay with that, go for it. Otherwise, the only way to have a different sort of marriage is to foster a different sense of what a marriage is. This requires living those principles, even if no one enforces them.

The argument about people being incapable of waiting too long isn’t without merit though, and religious institutions aren’t helping. Many Catholics parishes require engaged couples to go through over a year of marital training. While this is an attempt to circumvent the abysmal divorce rate, in reality it just makes the chastity they demand far more difficult. Telling a couple who has likely been exclusive for over a year to wait another year-and-a-half is near impossible for two lovebirds, while likely doing nothing to avoid divorce. Sorry, but people aren’t getting divorced because they didn’t read Theology of the Body. Both Catholics and Protestants also emphasize getting established first, a more and more nebulous term with each passing year. Such work to “get established” now often goes into their late twenties.

There are a couple studies showing a possible lack of bonding ability with many partners, and there might be some truth to it. There’s also the argument that no-attachment sex damages a person’s sense of self, especially for women. It’s argued such an intimate encounter can’t be psychologically separated so easily as a simple fling. This may also be true, but issue is more fundamental. The drive to separate sex as its own thing outside the other cultural norms of society have erased any sense of long-term romance. Relations being circumscribed to quick bedroom flings have removed the mystery and exciting tension of sex.

As anyone in a romantic relationship knows, there’s a dance going on between the sexes. In previous times the game was understood. Women show interest but not too much interest. They would vie for his attention but be subtle about it. Men would find ways to show their value and work to disarm women’s defenses by clever language and charm. As tensions grow, the woman gives more contact in a structured environment. Eventually, if they saw themselves as having good social standing, had value compatibility, and held a solid dose of raging hormones, they would get married.

While sex was usually within marriage, about every family tree has that entry where a kid entered the picture a few months after the wedding and everyone just pretended not to know how that happened. Even with these cases, the courtship process was secure with means to gauge romantic attraction and compatibility without leading to sex. There was verbal sparring, teasing, sexual tension, and an opportunity to “break” the rules a little in a romantic frenzy. There was an order where men and women had a structure to gauge the other person without romantic compatibility being solely through sex.

When marriage and sex arrived, there likely wasn’t the stilted repression we saw in purity culture. They had an outlet to act sexually, even if restrained within social games. Purity culture tried to succeed through emotion and piety without the social scaffolding that allowed chastity to work in the past. Both secular culture and ill-advised purity culture have none of this, making sex its own thing either by eliminating all taboos and turning it into an act akin to using the bathroom, or elevating and abstracting it to the extent that its actual reality becomes disappointing while you’ve stifled your natural impulses to the extent sex becomes weird and awkward.

Probably the greatest forgotten social technology is the formal dance. Even the bump and grind “dancing” of bars have gone by the wayside. It’s hard to find anywhere even in large cities that has a robust dance scene, and schools certainly are not teaching them. There is the carefree and jubilant style of swing, your waltz for more secure relationships, and tango for your very intimate couple. It was a formalized interaction than ensured exploration, fun, and tension in a safe environment.

Instead, social networks have atrophied, and with it the chance encounter of meeting a friend of a friends of a friend at a dinner party and hitting it off. Walking up to the cute co-worker is risking your job. While humiliation is always on the table, it has accelerated with a small cadre of psychopaths who will humiliate you not just to a closed group, but the whole world. The physical sphere has contracted while the online sphere has a simulacrum of opportunity while rarely delivering.

A paradox of modernity is pornography is nothing more than a click away, you can have no-strings-attached sex without anyone blinking, and you can dress as provocatively as you like, but still be tragically under-sexed. While the outward forms are still there, they have been turned into nothing more than a bodily function, lacking the emotional and spiritual connections other generations took for granted. People in healthy relationships know sex is not just about sex, but flows into everything else.

Sex is an entire way of being, and when put it its proper place, gives a meaning and emotional resonance far greater than the best temporary fling. A firm grasp of the palms can be more emotionally powerful than the best orgasm. Making out in the woods behind the teacher’s back can be more exciting than the best foreplay. A clever seduction of one’s wife when she “isn’t in the mood” is more rewarding than sleeping with a supermodel.

Modern ideas of sex don’t work because it has the same mindset as one who fast-forwards to the climax of the movie. There might be a temporary thrill, but it will be forgetting and not have lasting impact. Sex without the tensions and social games is a short spectacle akin with watching a YouTube short. Entertaining, but ultimately a timewaster and eventually a bore.

Secular sex is sterile, a flaccid wasteland bereft of excitement, hazard, and long-term bonding while also suffocating in rigid legalism and bizarre and stifling rules. Religious ideals of sex rely on abstract principles and emotivism, failing in their own way in creating sustainable norms. Both has failed to create a cultural scaffolding that allows the sexes to feel the excitement of older forms of romance. Neither is healthy.

While those awkward school dances where teachers told the boy to leave “enough room for Jesus” while dancing with his crush are mocked, it was the scaffolding young kids needed to learn how to live in the strange new world their maturing bodies threw them into. While some of these formal rites still exist, they tend to go extinct after prom. The ability to pair off in a physical environment is looked at with terror, with easy apps giving a filter and a sense of abundance. formalized rituals to pair off men and women have fallen to the wayside, and co-ed spaces like work have been completely sterilized.

Young adults don’t dance. Young adults don’t talk to girls in bars. Young adults don’t have Church groups to attend. Young adults don’t have family members setting them up. All the usual ways to get a guy and girl in a sexually charged situation that can foster an organic encounter and pairing off has been mechanized into a sterile app. While one can argue that this makes less discomfort, the discomfort is part of the process. You can’t avoid discomfort and risk in pairing off any more than you can run a marathon without breathing hard.

If secular culture can’t foster pairing, and religious culture failed to, where does that lead young singles? It makes one wonder if real love is possible anymore. I look at my grandfather, married over sixty years to my grandmother. He held on solely to care for her when her mind failed and then died two weeks after she did, mission accomplished. I look at my grandmother on the other side of my family, who sat by her husband’s bedside for six months as he succumbed to cancer. She lived alone for 25 years with a prayer card with his image she prayed from until the day she joined him. They had cultural norms that fostered it, the role they played was in the air they breathed, never questioned.

Anything created today will necessarily be artificial. Anyone who wants a healthy relationship will have to LARP. And sadly, this means the love others felt in a cohesive society with established rules and roles will be unattainable for the vast majority living today. Everyone has been impacted by an anti-culture that forces men and women not to hone their instincts, but to reject them entirely. Men have to fake an untamed, confident aggression that was beat out of them in their youth. Women have to fake the subtle charms their teachers and peer groups scoffed at. The romantic games others took for granted since their youth will need to be learned in adulthood. Fake Taboos have to be followed like they have real social consequence if broken.

They’re larping, but looking good doing it.

For some, the programming can be broken. For others, their entire lives will feel a little bit like faking it. It’s hard to maintain a marriage when there’s little stigma in ending it. It’s frustrating when an attractive girl looking for casual relationship with benefits has to be refused. Going on a date in formal attire with and learning social graces is uncomfortable. Limiting your prospects to those who somehow didn’t get indoctrinated into the mass anti-culture or is willing to LARP with you will greatly reduce your prospects. Your LARP will likely break many secular pieties.

A return to romance will create new own rules, customs, and taboos to bring excitement back into relationships. The total openness of secular society will need to be destroyed, but the purity culture scolds will likely be aghast as well. There will be no direct RETVRN to old customs, but the free love ideology of the 1960’s is also dead. What will be created will not be a mix of the two, but an entirely new phenomenon built from sweat and tears to confront the world as it is,. It won’t be the one that scolds the best, nor the one who points to abstract rules and ideals. The winner will be the one that successfully transmits his culture through the generations, the one most capable of both reproducing and building the stability necessary for value transmission. The one who lets go of reason and learns the dance, the ones who made their LARP reality.

Of course, the discussion so far hasn’t even gone into what fundamentally gives sex its excitement: children. Owen Cyclops gave a fantastic essay that everyone should read, but this excerpt stood out.

Likewise, folk expressions almost always reveal something about mass psychology, because they cannot be forced. They are intuitively adopted and spread. One relevant one here that is functionally universal and long-lasting is “mind-blowing sex.” We’ve all heard that term before.

That’s because it intuitively resonates with the above concept. What does it mean to have your “mind blown”? Some horizon is expanded, something new is introduced, you are changed. People subconsciously understand this, so they use and adopt this term - almost as a necessity.

All this is downstream of the absent baby. The transformation of maiden into mother is a kind of sublimation or refinement - a wholesome conclusion to sex. When that potentiality is intentionally blocked (it’s beyond our scope here, but simply “not getting pregnant” is philosophically distinct from “intentionally not getting pregnant”), there are only so many things that can attempt to mimic that transformative process - most involve a type of debasement.

While contraception has increased freedom, it’s done so at the expense of sterilization. Sex with the intentional effort to prevent pregnancy removes much of the drama and mystery of relationships. It also removes the stakes. Unhindered, full intercourse leads to the creation of a child that shares both member’s genes. As the child grows, he will be permanently influenced by the temperaments of his parents. Those who make things work will impact a child’s development, as will parents who abandon him. It forces both to have skin in a game that has far-reaching consequences. New life means they are stuck together permanently. Romantic love has always been secondary to propagation of children, because love requires the potential of the former to attain the latter.

If modernity destroyed romance, maybe just making the best of it would be a reasonable option. For those who want to continue their line and leave something better, you have an obligation to give them something better than what society has to offer. You want them to understand the fundamental transformation of mind, heart, and soul that a romantic relationship can have. Even if you are too beaten and jaded to feel it yourself, you can at least point to a healthier alternative. Your wife or husband will LARP along with you but get enough LARPers together and it becomes real for the next generation.

Maybe we did get screwed over. Maybe classic romance is impossible in a world that devolved to base instinct. Maybe so, but you can till the soil for the next generation. I’m long out of this game, getting married just as the dating market collapsed, but am part of organizations that are trying to reinvigorate pairing. Our kids will attend barn dances and formal gatherings. We are building social networks of like-minded families that will form our children’s dating pool. I’m hoping similar efforts by other will create an organic network that can serve as a counter to modern norms. We embarrass our nephew by offering to set him up. I hope every adult does the same.

Not everything is lost, but expectations will have to be managed, and a healthy dose of ineffable confidence will need to be internalized. As fertility falls off a cliff, those who power through will truly inherit the earth.

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