Posted on 09/22/2019 12:04:03 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The birth control pill didn't do this alone. The abortion license also played a role. In generational terms, the two were near contemporaries, and they were certainly driven culturally and politically by the same impulse: to demoralize sex and normalize non-marital sex.
Prior to the birth control pill, the teleology of sex was unquestioned. Sex produced babies. It was important. It was consequential, with high probability. Licit sex was the foundation of families. Illicit sex was dangerous; it wrecked lives and destroyed families. Sex was powerful and not a toy. It was treated with care. Yes, people could and did cheat, but they did so at their own considerable risk.
The birth control pill then changed the game. It enabled the view that sex was primarily recreational. Casual sex was ok. You could have sex with no consequences (and the abortion license said that if you made a mistake, you could just kill it). Culture does not change overnight, but two generations later, every consequence to which Eberstadt points has indeed come to pass.
She might also have mentioned that every wealthy technological society that has embraced the pill, which is all of them, is now below replacement rate in fertility. The moderns do not regard this as a problem; they are too busy having sex to have children, and they are willing outsource this job to backward third world peoples who still make babies. Much of the left, in fact, looks down on "breeders" and is busily reengineering society as a playground for swinging singles and childless couples, with ever-increasing economic pressure on families with children.
The view of sex as primarily recreational -- i.e., forgetting the telos -- has now reached the point at which the sexual revolutionaries reject the very idea of gender and thinks it is ok for bearded penis people to invade women's locker rooms, dressing rooms and showers, because gender is really just a state of mind.
Yeah, Paul VI was right.
Really excellent post and I wanted to quote it in its entirety.
There should be a college major on "the sexual morality of technological societies." I'm only being a bit sarcastic but people need to stop and think about what all this tech has wrought. In grade school, at at time when the oral contraceptive pill was in general use and Roe v. Wade was on the horizon, we were told that contraception freed a _married_ woman from the drudgery of endless pregnancies, plus there was the spectre of overpopulation to consider.
You want a time machine, you say? I'd encourage you to go down to your local public library and go through old newspaper microfilm. Look at the issues, day after day, especially the layout of the paper and the advertisements. In the 1950's/early 1960's, women had their own "society" pages. Engagements and weddings were a very big deal and a source of local celebration. Families were a big deal. Sure, there were ads in the entertainment section for "stag" theaters and "burlesque" houses, but smut wasn't mainstream as it became in the later '60s and '70s. It took time to percolate down, culturally.
The other day I overheard an attractive, healthy young woman, married, in her late '20s/early '30s, say "I don't need a child to feel fulfilled."
We have lost so much.
Sorry, but I am sure you can't substantiate that with anything like facts, It's all "I believe," "I don't believe."
There are surely constants in human nature as long as the human genome exists. But instinct operates in an animal as a command: in a human, as a persistent suggestion.
As for sexual behavior? Instinct supplies a general itch: society, ideology and behavioral contagion conspire to lay out 1, 2, 3, 75, 150 ways to scratch it.
Inshallah.
Cell phones have done far more social damage than the pill ever did. In my day, it made dating more accessible, wrong, but more accessible. The real thing that puzzles the crap out of me, what did black female ever do without the cell phone? I rarely see one who is not yapping on one. White people tend to text.
Apparently the culture has deteriorated not merely due to our complacency, but conservative/Christian people’s active defense and sanction of one of the foremost — if not the foremost pillars of modern progressivism: which is birth control and the sidelining of God and His jurisdiction from the operations of nature and society.
Has led to a whole slew of unsexy consequences for society at large.
My first wife and I enjoyed the pill. She had horrible periods that left her unable to go to work. It moderated that and made her life better. Much better. We were not ready for kids at that time in our life, and after she met a predatory lesbian at her new job, she left. Thank the heavens that we never had kids. In the right circumstances the Pill is okay.
There is a lot to unpack in the rest of your post, so I will just take this statement. It is not that anyone is condemning the additional medical uses of the pill, but that now the pill is considered the monopoly cure-all for post-pubescent women and decades of research and medical innovation have been stalled as a result.
And it’s made me quite choosy and discerning about OB/GYN’s I go to. You’d be surprised by how dogmatic and anti-choice and brutal the ‘pro-choice’ ethos of modern Obstetrics Gynecology is.m...and we even fall behind the rest of the developed world in things like maternity care and mortality. Very sad.
They also knew to have mama sleep with baby, nurse at night on demand, and wean late. I must have had Industrial Strength Lactation Hormones. because I did that and I didn't ovulate for 2 years (!)
Historically, traditional Catholic and Buddhist societies regulated birth by monasticism (celibacy) --- not necessarily lifelong, but at certain life stages: before readiness for marriage, for instance, or after the death of a spouse (voluntary decision not to remarry and build a second family.)
The U.S fertility transition began in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century at the latest, and commenced its sustained decline long before that of mortality.
Without contraceptives, the white fertility rate dropped by more than half in a little more than a century, from 7.04 babies per woman in 1800, to 3.17 in 1920.
(Margaret Sanger opened the first U.S. birth control clinic in 1916 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of New York's most densely populated, impoverished area. So 103 years later, what is Brownsville? One of New York's most densely populated, impoverished areas. Just a coincidence I'm sure.)
The trouble with contraceptive devices --- as opposed to periodic abstinence --- is that they make nonmarital sex cheap, shallow, and easy by separating sex from procreation. In contrast, people who abstain never lose the ever-present awareness that sex and procreation--- and therefore marriage --- are linked. It is that link that ties together the (2) genders and the 1,000 generations. Lose that link, and it all falls apart.
Proof? Look around you.
“I don’t believe that sexual behaviour has changed that much since the pill.”
I think I’m going to go ahead and believe my lying eyes.
I was sexually active before the pill.
I observed a significant change.
“’greatest generation’ and baby boomer parents pushed the concept of delayed gratification to their kids.”
That’s not true. Maybe where you lived, but not in the South. The “greatest generation” always encouraged marriage to their children, and definitely for them to have children too. That was a normal life.
It was the media (TV shows, movies, magazines) which influenced that next generation...promoting material wealth as THE happiness in life. And unfortunately, so many young people believed that lie.
“’greatest generation’ and baby boomer parents pushed the concept of delayed gratification to their kids.”
I would say in some cases yes, but yes I think the media and cultural influence was greater. The world always calls us to ‘have a good time’ and ‘you surely won’t die’. I say this in contrast to the call to accept responsibility today and tomorrow and the next day.
I think most parents in days past would have liked to see the kids get married and have children as a responsible next step.
I am not Catholic, but the thoughts in Human Vitae have been proven correct. Sex, taken out of context of marriage and children, changes the dynamic.
“’greatest generation’ and baby boomer parents pushed the concept of delayed gratification to their kids.”
I would say in some cases yes, but yes I think the media and cultural influence was greater. The world always calls us to ‘have a good time’ and ‘you surely won’t die’. I say this in contrast to the call to accept responsibility today and tomorrow and the next day.
I think most parents in days past would have liked to see the kids get married and have children as a responsible next step.
I am not Catholic, but the thoughts in Human Vitae have been proven correct. Sex, taken out of context of marriage and children, changes the dynamic.
Hardly...
Beside the obvious direct effects off the pill on the person impacted, there is ample evidence of the hormones affecting the entire human environment, lacing drinking water of many municipalities which affects men and children as well.
I’m convinced the relatively recent upswing of male homosexuality is one indirect result.
That’s a non-argument that I’d expect to hear at the DUmp.
It even made possible the rise of the Third Gay Reich that we suffer under today.
If you met your wife at a bar, I seriously doubt she was saying “no” to guys looking for action. That’s what bars are all about.
It might be regional, as you point out, but most definitely my experience has been what I wrote.
Some DO go to find action. I did, but by sheer will power (and more probably my mother’s words of wisdom and prayers), I was able to wait. Yeah, I was dumped more than a few times by women that wanted it.
Some folks go to bars to get drunk; some to hang out and socialize. My wife was the latter. Her girl friends would go there. She was in love with a guy (I saw him once. Tall, looked similar to Christopher Reeve. His cousin was a best girl friend of my future wife. After going stready with him for a while she confided to his cousin that he was really smooth at trying to pressure her into sex. The cousin loved her a like sister, and decided to stake him out one night. Told my wife her suspicions were correct, and told her to dump him. She did, and take it from me, he lost out big time. (His own mother told my wife as much at the wedding of the cousin)
I wouldn’t be surprised. They use hormones so widely and far too many underestimate the impact it has on our anatomy as well as psychological state.
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