Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit. Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom.

I think there is also another mechanism at work in why many modern societies seem at the same time oversexualized and prude: By raising and restricting sexual desire you end up with some very effective carrots and sticks to control behaviour: You can sell the promise of sexual fulfillment directly (porn), you can link it to completely unrelated products through advertising (scantily-clad women that advertise cars, mattresses or mortgage contracts). You can also use it as a stick by either presenting unrealistic beauty standards ("You look unattractive! What is wrong with you?! Buy product X to fix that!") or by declaring the very desire that was raised before as immoral and therefore shaming people into compliance.

> I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit.

Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years. But after just two generations of “progressive literature” western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

Meanwhile, literature piles up about the “epidemic of loneliness” and deterioration in quality of life since the 1960s. Suicides increase, etc. Many people seem unhappy. They eagerly blame anything we changed in the areas of economic or welfare policy. We need to go back to 1960s top tax rates! But the “progressive literature” is supposed to be beyond question. All that had to be a good idea. It couldn’t be that any of those changes was misguided overreach in the same way as trickle down economics or financial deregulation.

> Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years.

Civilisation also had wars and famines for thousands of years to manage population and "cull off the weak". Do you want to go back to that?

> western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

And yet the same people who argue like that are also usually worried about overpopulation of the planet.

> those changes

What do you mean by that? Allowing people to be in charge of their own sexuality?

It has also become almost prohibitively expensive to raise children (in the US).

Was it not always prohibitively expensive to raise children? Seems to me that the main thing that has changed is the invention of (modern) contraception, making not having children but still having sex an option in a way that it wasn't in the past.

I don't get it. You're saying now that without no-fault divorces, free love, nudity in movies etc, we would have more war and famine?

I have never understood how people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it? Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

And decades of progressive values in action that argue why it is not in fact bullshit.

>Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom

What does that mean?

If you make sex too difficult to attain you get frustrated people who give up and stop participanting and become vulnerable to things like the propaganda of certain ideological cults that provide promises of controlling women, for example.

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