Bastards and Birth Control
In the 1960s, the advent of birth control and affordable household appliances changed the foundations of the nuclear family, a unit whose definition had remained fixed for centuries, and whose sex-based roles had remained fixed for thousands, if not millions, of years.
Today, the pill and affordable condoms are in every U.S. pharmacy, but for a girl in the 1880s, sex meant rolling the dice on pregnancy, and that meant the stakes of sex were a hundred times greater. Likewise, it meant families had to emphasize early marriages, and strongly encourage abstinence beforehand. There was no other way to minimize the number of babies born out of wedlock. Which, despite what our modern culture says, remains disastrous for the mother, the child, and society at large.
The impact of these necessities cannot be overstated. In 1880, the age of sexual consent in Delaware was 7... yes, you read that correctly... and the age of consent in every other US state was either 10 or 12. To a modern reader those numbers will sound criminally low. To a person in 1880 (with a life expectancy of 44 years) the number was simply a harsh reality of life.
It was set that low, so that 12 year olds could be married off before they inevitably had sex out of wedlock, thus minimizing the number of “bastards,” a term whose modern meaning has been permanently altered to “jerk,” but for centuries meant a baby born out of wedlock. Society put negative connotations on the term because, to put it bluntly, they didn’t want bastards around. One feels tremendous pity for individuals with the bad luck to lack a cohesive family, but for communities they present a real issue. Bastards need as much care as any other child, yet do not have any natural providers or caretakers, putting great strain on grandmothers (if they’re lucky) and soup kitchens if they’re not. In small communities with limited resources, this could be the difference between life and death.
Necessity drove family dynamics through adulthood as well. An adolescent needs a home and a bed, warmth in the winter and resources from the outside world. The only choice available to a family in 1880 was to have the mother take care of the home, while the man “brought home the bacon,” either literally or metaphorically.
Today, Ivy League professors have argued that “patriarchal sexism” drove men to relegate women to the home, and this dynamic was merely an abuse of power to collect free labor. This is appalling idiocy. A man was just as relegated to the coal mines or the railroad tracks as a woman was to the home. If the man didn’t work (often long, backbreaking, dangerous hours) then the family starved. If the woman didn’t keep up the home, there would be rats in the kitchen and nowhere to sleep. A construction job in 1880 (and modern firemen for what it’s worth) required an individual who can lift tremendous weight…. When the average female height hovered around 5’1”, biology itself dictated who worked where.
This is not to be confused with discriminatory sex-based law that, for example, gave a man the right to beat his wife, but not the other way around. These laws were cruel, biased, and unmistakably wrong, but it is a modern mistake to equate such patriarchal laws with familial roles based on sex, which eclipse all cultures and have been the dynamic of the human family for at least 8000 years, when modern agriculture and permanent settlements began. In fact, it’s likely that it has been the dynamic of families for millions of years, since before we were even Homo Sapiens. Very little is known about these early hominin societies, as they left no written record, but according to Professor C. Owen Lovejoy,
our “ancestral polygamous mating system was replaced by pair bonding when lower-ranked hominin males diverted energy from fighting one another toward finding food to bring to females as an incentive to mate. Females preferred reliable providers to aggressive competitors, and [thus] bonded with the better foragers. Eventually, females lost the skin swelling or other signs of sexual receptivity that would have attracted different males while their partners were off gathering food.”
Young, strong, monogamous family partnerships have been the center of not just human, but all hominin life for millions of years, carrying enormous social and physical changes to both our bodies and our behaviors. From sexual dimorphism (the degree to which human males and females differ in size) to the labeling of bastards.
And so it remained from (roughly) 4.4 million years ago, until the 1960s.
Today, though it sounds like a Glenn Beck bumper sticker, the family unit is faltering. Not from a conspiracy, or a leftist plot concocted by George Soros, but from cultural changes whose roots lie in birth control, condoms, tampons and the washing machine. From school shooters to trans rights, from female empowerment to the modern obsession with gender, we owe these changes to a technological inflection point that occurred in the 1960s, and society has yet to properly confront this, or develop a strategy to move forward.
In 1880, 0.1% of women would have been effective coal miners or ditch diggers, but a modern woman who opts out having children is an equally effective doctor or lawyer (see: Camille Vasquez, age 38, unmarried). So, when the opportunity presented itself in the 1960s, millions of women began doing just that. By the end of the Baby Boom, professional woman became commonplace. This, more than Facebook or the iPhone, is what truly created modern Western culture, including the Millennial and Gen. Z cohort; most noted for extending their adolescence, remaining unmarried into their 30s, waiting to have children (and having fewer of them), then bouncing around locations and occupations ad nauseam.
Because professional woman are often quite good at their jobs, and enjoy working (particularly if it means financial independence) they now choose work and play over marriage and motherhood for upwards of a decade after college (and sometimes far longer). This has created a host of downstream effects, some good, many less so.
Let’s begin on the bright side; America has been financially enriched to the tune of trillions by women entering the workforce. While some countries still force women into cloth bags, America unleashed a torrent of financial activity by allowing women to be professionals, entrepreneurs and artists. This creates more dual-income households which, in theory, provide for greater prosperity both inside and outside of the home.
The reality is more of a mixed bag. While dual-income households are significantly wealthier if they marry young and stick together, marriage rates, marriage lengths, and child counts have been plummeting. We marry later (if at all), the marriages are less likely to last, and they are far less likely to produce 2.1 children (the amount needed just to keep a society from losing population). What use is having a rich, dual-income household if it falters and doesn’t produce children? For the first time in human history, more woman will be childless at thirty than mothers at 20. Some might cheer this fact….. but it has profound implications.
For instance, have you ever asked yourself what makes a school shooter? As near as makes no difference, all of them are young males, all of them are incels (involuntary celibates) and none of them have fathers in the home. They are, in both the old and new sense of the term, bastards.
These demographic data-points confound no one, but for some reason the talking heads at CNN blame guns, or act perplexed as to why school shootings are increasing. The answer is obvious, and it’s not guns or gun ownership; it is because, after birth control and the sexual revolution, more children than ever are being raised in environments that are tailor made to create school shooters. These adolescent males are fatherless, have little to no sex, and endure friendless, disjointed lives online without a proper outlet for their teenage aggression, angst, desire or fear. Either directly or indirectly, a stable family mitigates nearly all of these negative emotions into something manageable, and is why (with almost no exceptions) school shooters do not have fathers and stable homes.
Then there is the sexual problem; we’re having less of it, a lot less. Online pornography and a decrease in quality in-person time have a lot to do with it, but it’s not the whole story. The real answer lies in a newly created power imbalance between the sexes. In 1880, any woman who wanted to have sex without making a bastard had to get married young, and any woman who wanted to be fed and clothed when she left her family home needed a husband. She therefore had to pick from a pool of local options to find a suitable mate, or go celibate and homeless. Small wonder these things worked themselves out in quick order, with most people finding mates young( most of the time). All of that has changed. A modern woman can have sex without consequences, and by the numbers, is now likely to earn more than her male counterparts if she chooses not to have children. What this means is that, during the peak mating years of 18-28, dating dynamics have shifted into something that looks more like a lion pride than the 1880s. A smaller and smaller group of the most desirable males are now capable of becoming Wilt Chamberlains (who famously claimed to have had sex with over 20,000 woman) whereas below-average males are screwed (and not in a good way).
This is an enormous problem, and school shootings are merely the most extreme tip of the iceberg. Males who feel unwanted and lash out angrily are a problem, males who give up masculinity in a futile attempt at “pick-me-mating” are a problem, males who abuse woman online and develop intense misogyny are a problem, males who retreat into video games are a problem, 20% of males reporting no sex in the last year are (or are going to be) a serious problem. We have to fix this, or we face demographic and societal ruin.
The problem is no one knows how. In statistics that Tinder made public, the company found that heterosexual males will “swipe right” on over 46% of women, whereas heterosexual females will only swipe right on 14% of men. In a world where females have no incentive to go for the other 86% (until they want to settle down around 30) What happens to all those males in their 20s?
Then there is the modern gender obsession, and all of its discontents. At first glance, it seems extremely odd that Western society, while having less and less sex, would become so obsessed with sex and gender at the same time. However, this is far less of a mystery than one might think, if you again look at what has happened since the 1960s.
For men, a job in the fields or the coal mines has become a job in the office, dramatically changing their daily schedules, but not fundamentally altering their basic goals and desires: to work hard and become a successful provider. Through that lens, modern males are still very much tasked with bringing home the bacon. Even if that is now done with 1s and 0s rather than arrows and spears.
For women this is not the case. For thousands (and perhaps millions) of years, their primary task was to bear children and maintain the allegorical “cave,” birthing, then fostering, a safe environment for the next generation. But, as with Camille Vasquez and countless others, this is no longer their primary goal, and is in fact in direct conflict with the modern goals of becoming successful in their own right, being promiscuous in their twenties, or asserting themselves independently. No wonder then, that so many women have begun to seriously question or lash out at the societal norms of sex they refer to as “gender expression.” An XX chromosome is still an XX chromosome, but we would be kidding ourselves to argue that the blueprint of femininity hasn’t lost it’s raison d’être for millions.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 6 years, the consequences of this waywardness have been extreme(ly odd). Transgenderism is now in every political speech (both left and right), green hair is very common on every college campus, and LinkedIn has a space to enter your personal pronouns. What exactly is a “Two Spirit, they/them” and what does this person do differently you might ask? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing, other than talk about how they/them are Two Spirit, and society must treat them as such.
Many conservative commentators, aghast at seeing children ask for hormone treatments and body-mutilating surgery, have called this an absurd expression of confusion and narcissism, and they are mostly right. Correct in the sense that it is also an ego-trip to force ones classmates into increasingly absurd verbiage that changes on a regular basis. Incorrect, in that it’s a veneer masking profound internal confusion about modern roles, but confusion that is justified given the circumstances. Through both technological and cultural changes, a young lady in 2022 is now thoroughly stripped of the idea that childbearing and homemaking are commendable goals, and because goal oriented thinking and self identification are such important parts of growing up and becoming stable adults, today’s generation has seen a 100 fold increase in children identifying as “gender diverse” or non-binary, to go along with the largest increase in mental health issues, self harm, and depression the world has ever seen.
This is not a coincidence, we have simply confused cause and effect. The collapse of traditional gender roles has left a deep chasm where once stood self identity and purpose, which has in turn led to waywardness, malaise and anxiety, which has in turn led to a severe mental health crisis across the West.
The school shooter might be on 8Chan, and the pink haired activist might be throwing paint on Picassos to save the planet, but they are both suffering from the same disease: a crisis of identity, purpose and direction that has been brewing for 70 years.
CAN ANYTHING BE DONE?
The answer is a resounding maybe. Maybe we can balance the needs of society with the new reality that faces young people, and especially young women. But this will require a renegotiation about what it means to have the goals of a woman and a man. Chromosomes are chromosomes, height and weight differences are fixed, but the quintessential goal of 1950s living; mommy cooking dinner waiting for dad to get home is dead, as a critical mass of people no longer desire it. What replaces it is an open question, but it cannot be the destruction of the family, or we will have a generation of school shooters. In cannot be the destruction of reality, or we will lose meritocracy to sex-based equity. And it cannot be to mutilate the bodies of children so as to “affirm their new gender,” or the mental health of our youth will continue to deteriorate.