Response to the Dark Horse podcast

https://youtu.be/JZ_MEX0vtRE

I just read a whole book on this subject called Cheap Sex. In which it is argued by a sex researcher that the economics of sex have shifted so that the cost of it, and of all kinds of sexual freedoms, has dropped drastically, largely driven by technological advances (not cultural ones). And one of the end results is actually greater inequity. Women lose out the most overall, and only a very specific sort of male that is able to properly capitalize on the new market benefits the most. Good looking, desirable, casual-sex-desiring men win the most because they get what they want and have to pay the least for it and have to give the least to others of what those people want for it.
On a side note, if you’re basically arguing that something isn’t good for a person and isn’t good for society, isn’t that likely to be exactly what traditional values structures mean when they say that it’s wrong? And, restrictive as it may seem, doesn’t saving sex for marriage seem like a pretty effective strategy for preserving the value you risk with casual sex? I mean, if you had to codify an ideal, realizing that likely many people will fall outside it, but wanting to provide a guideline that circumscribes what it would be beneficial for the majority to at least aim at and aspire to?
It sort of seems like you recognize the actual practical value of beourgois approaches, but you don’t want to seem uncool or restrictive and actually have to bring the bad news to the kids that they’ve got school tomorrow and they need to get ready for bed. I suppose there is an argument for a strategy that tries to lead people into a value and ideal without actually laying it out as something with a true demand on them and their behavior. You try to explain the value of the rule so you don’t have to actually codify the rule and apply it externally. And certainly, people should choose something because they see the value behind it, not merely because of external compulsion. But that’s also largely a function of maturity and someone gaining the ability to actually see and follow what’s good for them.
People are bad at that, especially the immature. Kids often need the rules long before they’re able to understand the reasons behind the rules. You can’t always wait for them to mature enough to be convinced before they’re already at risk of suffering the consequences of the behavior. And immaturity isn’t always limited by age. And our short term instincts can often overwhelm our more reasoned positions. Make hot, willing, naked women available in front of a man (real or digital women), and they will be hard for him to resist. He might throw over his career, his reputation, even his family in a moment of impulsive desire. So what do you do? Will you deny and them and your society the value of an ideal or standard? Is that really fair? Or does it just save you face and save you from being the bringing of bad news and being the disciplinarian, under the guise of moral sophistication? I’m not saying that moral sophistication and understanding the underlying reasons behind moral proscriptions isn’t incredibly important, and that getting shallowly prescriptive without that sophistication behind (or in front of) it isn’t absolutely essential. But is refusing the actually define a rule, understanding all that, actually being a good parent? Are you truly helping the person? Are you truly helping yourself? The need not to have shallowly understood or shallowly applied rules and laws doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. And, admittedly, many people don’t understand the reasons behind a lot of the laws we have. They just navigate them to the degree they’re willing. And if they’ve had a good education and good examples they will eventually come to understand why they’re there and what value they’re preserving and what dangers they’re forestalling.
Anyway, I think my point was, that it doesn’t really seem that sexually retrogressive to have “save sex for marriage” as a social ideal. And dissolving it as an ideal doesn’t seem to have actually seem to yield the positive results that destruction of a negative limit might have been expected to yield. Lots of people already didn’t save sex for marriage. Today, when we’ve dropped it altogether as an ideal, rather than making things better, it seems to have made things harder for a lot of people and worse for a lot of people and less satisfying for a lot of people. Sex has become cheap. Relationships have become unstable. Women especially suffer in the new economy, which doesn’t favor the sort of long term investment (even in just their physical pleasure, much less emotional lives) that they often desire. If saving sex for marriage was really so bad, we should have expected better results from abolishing it. If that was sex positivity, it shouldn’t have sexually impoverished so many women and unequally advantaged and disadvantaged so many men. It should have resulted in better provision for everyone, not worse. The mere fact that removing that prescription actually resulted in worse outcomes is a strong argument in its favor, or at least a good argument that it was not “sexually regressive” but was actually, ironically, in many ways sex positive.