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To get a 5% decrease from 56 to 51, 8% of those who originally thought it succeeded had to change their minds (if everyone on the other side stayed the same - which they probably did not). So that 8% of opinions changed is a minimum. No wonder people in power do not want real debate, it works. No wonder real debate is so necessary

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A few thoughts

1) “We sacrificed the happiness of children for the freedom of adults. And because every adult starts out as a child and carries their experiences with them, we get to live with the consequences.” So true.

2) The fact, as Rob points out, is they started with the wrong question, and should have asked if it made us happier, not free. This illustrates the importance of asking the right question at the beginning.

3) The pursuit of Meaning is more important than the pursuit of Happiness. Jefferson got it wrong. It should have been, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

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Great points.

Failure to adhere to the mental model of ‘second order thinking’ leads to short-term thinking and the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure brings short-joy but often lacks the payoff we were hoping it’d deliver.

Take freedom vs commitment.

To the young man in his ‘prime’ - the first order thinking of commitment is a drain on their freedom and pursuit of joy. The second order thinking is that commitment acts as an anchor, or deep rooted system, that frees you to be a man that you will be proud of in 50 years. A man that cares for others, his wife, his children, his community, his work. Yes, the anchor can feel stifling at times, but it can produce a wonderfully beautiful outcome if the man tries his hardest and commits the full attention of energy to it.

A committed man is a fulfilled one when you play it out over a very long string. A committed man has a life full of meaning.

Funny enough, my grandfather’s dad didn’t approve of him marrying at 24 as he himself had waited until he was 40 so as to ‘play the field’. My grandparents celebrated 64 years last month - I asked my grandfather what is the best decision he’s ever made ... ‘oh simple ... the day I married your grandmother’

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My dad (soon to celebrate his 54th wedding anniversary to my mom) tells a story about a woman flirting with him when he’d been married about 5 years. He was tempted, but then had a flash of realization of everything he could lose - as he describes it, the loss of everything that had been and would be - and knew that any short-term pleasure couldn’t be worth that loss. My mom once told me that my dad wasn’t her “soul mate” in the romantic sense but that that type of romantic connection wasn’t the only thing that mattered in marriage.

We admire people who make long marriages work, but I think we should talk more about what it takes - the willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure, the ability to recognize that romance alone doesn’t make for lifelong partnership - as well as the deep joys and real benefits that type of commitment produces. It’s deeply unfashionable now, I think.

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What we are talking about is that without an opposing something, a thing has no meaning. Black without white, love without hate, freedom without responsibility. Philosophical I know but it's true. Unfortunately our culture increasingly demands all the rights and the freedom but rebels against the responsibilities and self discipline etc that give it meaning. Listen to some Jordan Peterson about this. When you offer up sex or take sex without requiring anything of them, the result will be one party is happy happy and one party is much less. Duh. As a consultant many years ago, I learned that services people get for free are services people do not appreciate or value. It is ironic, when humans get what they want in a frictionless way without anything being demanded of them to get it, they become more entitled, demanding, impatient and spoiled. And helpless, frankly. Certainly less happy. It's pretty simple really. And it can be applied to many fields.

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Just one caveat: there was child abuse (emotional, physical, sexual) and domestic abuse in intact families too. Adults bound unhappily together by strict social norms could create a lot of misery and trauma for children. Traditional belief in corporal punishment left scars, visible and invisible, as overpermissiveness can now. Adults have power over children, and adult selfishness, appetite, and unhappiness hurt children in all kinds of social structures. Parenthood may be the biggest moral challenge human beings face, and maybe we take it, and take it on, too lightly

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Agreed. That’s mentioned I believe in still saying that it happens in 4%.

Also agreed that people take the idea of parenting ‘well’ for granted and there isn’t enough attention around the area.

I believe Rob’s point is more stating the facts that the outcomes for children / society are demonstrably better in those situations. The starting point of a functioning society is the intact family and then you can work from there to make it even better.

Abuses of authority will still grievously happen - but the concept should be celebrated and not belittled.

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I appreciate your bringing this up. I think the "but abuse happens in intact families, too!" argument tends to be overused in this conversation. Generally speaking, it's the exception, not the rule, and we should not be using the exceptions as the guiding principal for how we develop policy or social norms.

Considering that children are significantly more likely to be abused in a household with unrelated adults, I would favor policy, laws and social norms that aim to keep families together.

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Agreed Kathleen. I've always been able to imagine some crazy scenario where someone could murder their spouse, but I have never been able to imagine any scenario where I could hurt my own children.

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Sep 17, 2023
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Really sorry that happened to you Penny. That’s horrible.

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Most of us aren't very good at freedom. The difficulty arises in who does the curtailing of others' freedom "for their own good." It is likely true that we are not fit to be our own masters. But others are even less fit than we are in authority over us. In our wisest moments we can see what limitations we should impose on ourselves, whether we call them fences, or disciplines, or structures. Marriage would be one, and parenthood another. Becoming a group member rather than a mere observer. Being a student (or teacher) instead of a receiver of entertainment.

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I think some of the "aren't very good at freedom" stems from the slow but steady cultural changes Rob often highlights in his writing. If we lived in a small, tight-knit community like our grandparents probably did and had a spouse we couldn't really divorce, close friends across the street, family nearby, lots of community involvement, 5 kids in the house, and a job that exhausted us so that we couldn't wait to hit the hay every night, I think you would much better at freedom. Try to imagine the response from a 30 year old Marine returning from seeing service in the Pacific in World War II and having his governor tell him he can't go to the beach because he might get a virus... right, I can't imagine it either.

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None of my own grandparents or great-grandparents had that life. I keep hearing that someone did, so I figure it was true somewhere. And I can easily imagine my WWII relatives going along with what governors said, even if they didn't like it. Well, officially "going along," without making a stink about it. They would quietly shade the rules they thought pointless, or make frequent exceptions. But in the main, they would just put up with it and get on with their lives.

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That's true, but the government tended to be more "hands-off" 100 years ago, so there were many fewer rules to follow. As far as our grandparent's life, you're right... a bias of my own family history north of Boston is showing.

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All four grandparents were north of Boston! Nova Scotia, Sweden, Leominster MA and Londonderry NH.

Yes, government was more hands off, certainly. The Great Depression and WWII were big accelerants of size of government.

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Would’ve loved to have seen the debate in person.

I’m reading Freddie deBoer’s book right now, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, which is basically about how the elite (both white and non-white alike) turned what ought to have been a movement about improving the material concerns of lower-class POC (especially black people) into one about elite POC interpersonal grievances against white people. In an AMA in the r/redscarepod subreddit, deBoer said he defines wokeness as an ideology that elevates the “personal is the political” to the highest level.

The natural evolution of that mindset is to turn happiness itself into an ideological goal. What could be more personal? And even if the idea of happiness is incredibly subjective and capricious, if the personal is political, then one’s happiness is a political right, even above all else.

Going back to the Sexual Revolution debate, happiness-as-ideology is the only way I can think of that can reconcile the fact that social and technological progress have nevertheless contributed to women’s unhappiness. With sexual mores, it’s usually presented as a conservative = prude / liberal = free love dichotomy. A socially progressive ideology that preaches traditionally conservative dating norms would seem contradictory, unless the ideology centers around women’s happiness. Then it makes sense.

I wrote about it more here if people would like to read: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/cat-person-2017-brain-and-womens

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Eye-opening post. Did anyone discuss ways to encourage two biological-parent marriages?

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Louise Perry does in her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

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The debate was great! (Also, I sat in front of you. Hi! 👋)

For me, Grimes made one of the most compelling arguments that human morality and behavior has not kept up with the technology and liberation of the sexual revolution. Under these circumstances where we have not self-regulated to keep up with change, we really couldn't have expected the sexual revolution to make us happier.

That being said, whether it be societal or personal, humans need rules and structure in order to lead happy lives.

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And just to leave the thought here: Of course, we tend to see people who would suffer the least from violating social norms/rules arguing against that structure.

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The stats on abuse in “step parent families” is staggering. That set of data should be very widely publicized.

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I argue in one chapter in my forthcoming book that the sexual revolution absolutely benefited men more because it explode the number of available women for middle aged and high earning males. And it made them wiling and available in their offices. It created easy opportunities for consensual, yet unethical, sexual entertainment. Noncommittal sex as you note with orgasm data only benefits men as well. Men suffer few downsides from accidental pregnancies because women tend to conceal them and get abortions privately, so not ask for child support to end the relationship or men just avoid child support as deadbeats by moving out of state. Men won in so many ways it’s hard to close the list.

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interesting to see the attention this has received in the media:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/scenes-from-the-end-of-the-sexual-revolution.html

https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/19/female-titans-debate-the-sexual-revolution-a-successful-movement-thats-failed-women/

I am betting that it will get even more attention, and be cited in the future. Bellwether event.

I have 4 children. Still married. great kids. I am fortunate. Marriage and kids is the hardest thing that we do.

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Agree bro. Been married 26 years to my first wife. We have 3 children and you speak the truth. It is challenging to maintain family unity, but it’s the best option!

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It reminds me of the constant propaganda in Orwell’s “1985,” telling the population how much everything is better and how they wouldn’t want to go back to the “bad” old days. We see the same in our culture. Failure across the board and harm to both women and men, but an intransigence to re-examine assumptions. Instead, people are told how horrific the 1950’s were despite the data mentioned in this article proving both sexes happier and women in particular much more satisfied with the previous, traditional arrangement.

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It’s not a representative sample, but 9 out of 10 of the couples with children who got divorced in my child’s class at school was because the father was cheating on the mother and wanted out. Not sure you can blame women’s lib for that.

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There're a lot of studies on cheating and it's usually 50/50. But they cheat for different reasons. And women have the tendency to breakup but not men if I remember correctly. Sex is not perceived the same way for men and women. So you might just not know how many husbands got cheated in your class because they didn't divorce.

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If you look at any of the high-profile celebrity rape cases, including the one just broken on Russell Brand, it’s very easy to see how sexual freedom has brought unhappiness to women. It’s hard to watch fragile legal limits of consent be pulled so taught to the point of breaking.

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Hello Rob, I attended this event, and you may recall I briefly said hello.

Thank you to Rob and the other commenters for your great comments.

I was one of the people who switched from "yes" to "no"., for basically the reasons already commented.

Indeed, I decided the sexual revolution has been a successful revolution, even though it has left us overall probably worse off than before. Similarly, the French Revolution was a successful revolution, but it unleashed tremendous injustice and human suffering, and it took France decades to recover.

Revolutions may be inevitable, but whenever society spins out of control, we are not wise enough to anticipate the trajectory. The same thing was true of the idealistic communist revolutions.

The real question is, what do we do now? We cannot put the Jini back into the bottle. Most of us really control only our own household, and that only if we are lucky.

The title of the debate derived from Louise Perry's book title, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I agree, the debate title should have been more like, "Are we better off or worse off as a result of the sexual revolution?", or, "Have we mismanaged the social effects of the Pill?"

Also discussed was the wide dissemination of pornography. Sarah Haider (as I recall) pointed out that this was more related to relaxation in laws governing porn, and to the internet. Porn itself has been around for thousands of years. Porn would have happened without contraception, and without a changing role of women. Porn may have been a parallel revolution.

Notably, the discussion was largely women-centric. Next, Bari should direct attention to our entire human species and society, including men, women, and children. It is narcissistic for any one gender-age group to focus on their own insular needs. We are in this together; women, men, and children.

The interest in this event was remarkable. That was perhaps the most remarkable thing about it. It was sold out with at least 1000 people in attendance. The crowd was extremely diverse, mostly really regular-looking people listening carefully. Young and old people, men and women, gay and straight, dreadlocks and sport jackets. Bari is reading the forefront of social-cultural change.

The panel emphasized that the rich and educated are the ones best able to avoid the adverse effects of the sexual revolution. It is self-contradictory that rich educated social idealists are the most likely to support removing the “guardrails” (quoting Louise Perry) of society, hurting the less privileged.

Rob has articulated the paradox-dilemma very well.

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Recent Social Media fake-empowerment style feminism might be about consumerism-style happiness, but the original goals of Women having equal rights had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with being a person under the law with all of the responsibilities and opportunities of Adult personhood. All of which are still under attack from both extremes of the 'political spectrum.' Gender ideology is a mirage to hide the big profits it brings to big pharma and amoral surgeons, and hides the purposeful rebranding of sexism and homophobia as somehow progressive.

Gender ideology turns womanhood into a kink, children into sex toys and all defined sexualities into bigotry. Gender ideology harms us all, it is a perverse mockery of every Civil Rights movement in history. If you think it has anything to do with feminism or gay rights you have fallen for the mirage.

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