A recurring theme here, and one that has gone wholly underappreciated by our elites on the Left and the Right, is how insidiously the culture and the sexual market have changed since the advent of the Four Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse. As a helpful reminder, here are the four sirens I’m talking about:
- Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and the de facto contraceptive abortion).
- Easy peasy no-fault divorce.
- Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio is any indication).
- Rigged feminist-inspired laws that have caused a disincentivizing of marriage for men and an incentivizing of divorce for women.
As I have written, these changes are slowly, but powerfully, tectonically shifting the courtship playing field. The big winners are alpha males and the big losers are beta males. Alpha females continue to do well because their beauty is so rare that they can successfully leverage their mating capital even when market conditions turn unfavorable. Beta females lose their long term advantage under the new dispensation at the gain of an ephemeral, deceptively alluring short term advantage. The modern PUA, an amalgam of the wisdom of old-fashioned rakes and the science of new-fangled evolutionary psychology, is one outgrowth of this massive and heretofore misapprehended trend.
We’ve had 40 years of this informally polygamous system killing us softly, and the results can be seen directly in delayed age of first marriage, rising divorce rates, decreasing fertility, and harem volunteerism, and indirectly through the coarsening and bastardization of American sensibility and governmental policy (e.g., Title IX, multicult suicide pact, AA, open borders, the ascendence of the therapy culture, and just about every assinine court decision since).
Maxim #66: The worst thing to happen to America was women’s suffrage.
Naturally, changes on this scale don’t happen overnight. There was a store of good will and optimistic future time orientation bequeathed us by our beta male forebears — the men of the 19th and 20th centuries who built America into the hyperpower that made France shit its knickers — that will take generations to dissolve into the watery gruel of transnationalist solipsistic hedonism. We may even witness brief moments of cultural comeback, but the overall trend is unmistakeable. We are going the way of Rome.
A few months ago I had an email exchange with Randall Parker who writes two blogs I enjoy – Parapundit and Futurepundit. I wondered aloud what Greg Cochran — co-author of a PC shibboleth-smashing book about how human evolution has sped up in the last 10,000 years (and judging by his online persona a royal prick (my kind of guy) held in high esteem by his fellow genomic scientists) — anticipated the future shape of human evolution would take given the sexual marketplace changes I’ve written about on my blog. Specifically, I wanted to know if the Four Sirens would speed up human evolution even faster than the dawn of agriculture. This was Parker’s and Cochran’s reply (via R. Parker):
Contraception is a selective pressure for the desire to make babies and for less planning. Women who want to make babies won’t use the pill. Women who can’t plan for dinner won’t plan for getting a doctor’s appointment for a contraceptive prescription. I’ve written posts about this on FuturePundit. An Australian twins study found that Catholicism and fewer years of education are both positively correlated with fertility (no surprise on either score).
I asked Greg and Henry about this. Greg says in theory one can calculate the speed at which higher fertility will be selected for. But Henry says there’s not good data on the heritability of fertility.
As for other selective pressures: Greg has speculated that people will become more loyal to family. So the world will become more like the Middle East. Not good.
Greg also sees a biological eugenic arms race on the horizon.
http://www.isteve.com/Thatcher-Speech-Text.htmUnencumbered by post-Christian ethics, the Chinese government recently passed a pre-1945-style eugenics law calling for the sterilization of “morons.” The ruthlessness of this law portends that if China implements genetic enhancements while the multiculturalist West either bans them or pursues a politically correct reengineering of human nature, the inevitable result within a few generations would be Chinese economic, and thus military, global hegemony. As the weapons scientist and evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran pointed out, “We cannot opt out of this biological arms race any more than we could opt out of the nuclear arms race.” Therefore, those serious about either preventing or decreeing genetic engineering should start planning a preemptive nuclear strike on China, and soon.
