Summary: Here is a story about a girl, one familiar to Millennials (and to Gen Z, following the same path). It is from one of the most important books of 2017, describing eye-opening research about what might be the major event of our time — the revolution in gender relations.s
Most stories these days are about good girls revolting.
Bulletins from Weimerica about the social experiment the Left has enrolled us in.
Communism did not work well for the Soviet Union and China.
But they are sure this one will work for America!
“You should sleep with at LEAST 25 guys before settling down,
and I’ll tell you exactly why“
by Amanda Ross at Babe — “Ideally more, but y’know, whatever.”
This is a milder version of truly revolutionary words by Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) in her best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.”
This is the advice, indoctrinated into American girls for several decades now. It produced the confused narratives that comprise much of the meToo movement (such as “Grace’s” story). Women working to get their 25 guys before marriage to a nice beta boy, finding that guys do not respect them — and feeling abused. After 10+ years of that we get Sarah’s story, told below. A story of feminism at work.
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy.
By Mark Regnerus (Oxford Press, 2017).
Posted with his generous permission.
Opening to the Introduction.
Sarah is 32 years old and recently moved to Texas from New York, looking for a new start — in more ways than one. Brooklyn had grown too expensive for her hipster pocketbook. A relationship she had hoped would blossom and mature there had instead withered. So to Austin she came, hoping she could improve upon her modest $22,000 annual earnings the previous year.
Her most recent sexual partner — Daniel — was not actually a relationship per se. He was not the reason she moved. Rather, he was a 23-year-old American she had met in China four years before during a three-week language immersion program. The acquaintance and the sex were not that unusual for her, historically: “I meet people in strange places. …It just happens.”
When they first met, and slept together, Sarah was in a relationship with David, the man for which she had moved to, and then away from, New York. She ended up “cheating on him,” that is, David, several times. She felt guilty, because “I’d be heartbroken if someone was cheating on me, you know.” So she would {sic} stop.
If you’re having trouble keeping times, dates, and boyfriends straight, it’s understandable. Sarah herself laughs at the drama of it all.
Relational reality for very many young adults is not easily mapped today. There are fits and starts, flames and flame-outs. Sarah conveyed an account replete with honest attempts at working it out with David, a musician who seemed more committed to making it in the industry than to making it work with her:
I’m like, ‘I want to get married. I want to have kids.’ And you know, he basically told me that I shouldn’t waste my time on him because he didn’t know. And I said, ‘All right then, I’m not gonna waste my time.’
David and Sarah were finally through. She plotted her move in part to make her decision stick.
But then Daniel reappeared. He was not actually living in New York; he was in Rhode Island. But that did not matter so much, especially when on the rebound: “From then until three weeks ago we had this (arrangement), basically like whenever he came to town, we got together and dated and, like, slept with each other.”
Getting serious was never much of an option. He was 23, and she was 32: “We both knew …he was graduating from college and, you know, like we both, at least I knew it was never gonna work out. I think he kind of felt the same way.” Why? “He’s 23 and I didn’t want to be in New York …we had fun and everything but I was like, I don’t wanna marry the guy.” Her mental age range for a mate is between 32 and 40.
Daniel and David were not Sarah’s only partners. She recounted “probably about 20” partners when asked about it. Most of them were during a several-year stint in Baltimore, before her time in New York. Four were one-night stands, the rest longer.
When asked how rapidly her relationships tend to become sexual, Sarah replied, “the first or second date.” That account did not stand out from those of many other interviewees.
The numbers are on her side, too. In the 2014 Relationships in America survey, sex before the relationship begins was the modal — meaning the most common — point at which Americans report having first had sex in their current relationships.
[Is her timing of sex intentional?] No. “It just happens,” she reasoned.
[Trained to detect unlikely passivity, I responded skeptically with a “Nothing just happens. Tell me how this works.”] Well, it happens if there’s really strong physical chemistry. If there’s physical chemistry then usually it’s gonna, the date’s gonna end with some kind of, like, physical (activity), at least for me in my experience.
[Even date number one?] Oh yeah, (laughs). Date number one, like, kissing, and then I feel like the kissing always leads to something else.
[You feel like it, or you make it, or …?] It just does, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s me, I think it’s more the guy, and then I’m just OK with it. And then a lot of times, though, I will say, like, there are times when I feel comfortable with having sex on the first date, and other times I don’t feel comfortable.
[How do you discern those?] Depending on if I like the guy more or not.
[So if you like the guy more which one happens?] I don’t want to have sex with him. [OK. Can you explicate that a little bit?] (Laughs) … Because I wanna see him again, and I don’t want it to just be about something physical.
She nevertheless often finds herself regretting “first-date sex,” she admits, but finds it difficult to predict beforehand: During the date itself “I feel like I get (sighs) … caught up in the moment.”
So waiting for the second or third date, she asserts, is a better strategy than first-date sex, because “he’s going to stay interested.” This, she claims, is the standard approach to dating among her peers, if not necessarily the most optimal: “I don’t think it’s unusual, but I think that for a lasting relationship, it’s not the best approach.”
As noted above, Sarah was 32 years old when we spoke with her. The 30s are notorious for their association with women’s “ticking biological clock.” Sarah was well aware of her age and the fertility challenges it might soon present, but had grown ambivalent on the matter. Did she want children, as she noted in passing when discussing the end of her relationship with Daniel?
I don’t know. I’ve always wanted, it’s interesting because I’ve always wanted children. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a great mom,’ and, and umm, the last couple years, I, I don’t know. I definitely want to get married, like that, I definitely wanna get married and do that deal, but I don’t know if I wanna have kids or not. …
[But you used to want them?] I used to want them.
Three years later, now 35, Sarah continues to live in Austin and continues to find commitment elusive. She does not dislike her life, but it is not the one she envisioned a decade earlier.
Her account is not unusual. In fact, the relationship histories that young Americans tell us about are growing increasingly predictable: plenty of sex, starting early (before expressions of love but not necessarily before feelings of and hopes about it), underdeveloped interest in sacrificing on behalf of the other (especially but not exclusively discernable in men), accounts of “overlapping” partners, much drama, and in the end nothing but mixed memories and expired time.
Valuable “experience,” many call it. Some have fulfilling careers to focus on, steering their attention away from other, less successful areas of their lives. Others, like Sarah, find themselves frustrated there as well.
Some are becoming jaded, skeptical. Others hold out hope or redirect themselves toward a different vision of the good life. While some observers are adamant that we are making progress in sex, sexuality, and relationships, others aptly wonder about the state of our unions.
In the end, many find themselves ambivalent about it all. There are personal and relational freedoms for which many fought hard. And there are certainly technologies that seem to boost equality and simplify our lives — including how people meet and evaluate each other — but somehow they have not spelled notably greater happiness and relationship contentment. …
————- End of excerpt. ————-
Conclusions
Sarah and millions like her are the products of America’s giant social science experiment — much like that of the Soviet Union and China with communism. As in communist States, the news media provide enthusiastic accounts about the Progress So Far and the Wonders That Lie Ahead. Professor Regnerus provides a more accurate status report.
This is the logical outcome, and was predicted (as a future post will describe). We dismantled the rules of conduct between the sexes, but are surprised at the resulting Hobbesian jungle. For young people, relations have returned to the “state of nature — a “war of all against all”
This chaos might ruin the lives of many in the next few generations. It is the almost inevitable result of Leftists playing with controls they don’t understand, implementing their ideology without testing. Instead they rely, as fanatics usually do, on their belief that they “know” what’s best for us. They are monkeys in the control room.
If Americans are unhappy with the Left, we can turn to the Right. They are shepherds ready to lead, treating us as sheep — stupid, gentle — to be sheared, then killed and eaten. This is the Great Circle of Life, just like in the Disney films. The weak, the passive, and the apathetic get exploited.
This is the essence of Weimerica, both the Right and Left against us. The next decade might test us as much as any period in our history.
About the author
Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. He’s the author of 40 articles and book chapters, as well as three books.
- Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers
(2009).
- Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying
(2011).
- Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy
(2015).
See his website, his Wikipedia page, and his page at the University website.
For more information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about women and gender, about feminism, about romance, about marriage, and especially these…
- Men are abandoning the rat race, & changing American society.
- Why men are avoiding work and marriage.
- Will young men break America’s family structure?
- Will today’s young men marry? America’s future depends which of these answers is right.
- Our society will be shaped by technology as porn and sexbots destroy 21st century marriage.
- Important: For Father’s Day: revolutionary words that will forever change the American family.
- Mark Regnerus’s essay: Cheap Sex is the Inconvenient Truth in the end of marriage.
See Professor’s Regnerus’ other books.
Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers
Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying
Hi Fabius,
I’m curious as to your blaming of the “Left” for the current state of sexual relations in America. In my experience socialism is particularly prudish when it comes to sexual mores, the traditional left has certainly not been a driver in this. The sexual revolution in the west was driven by many factors, the growth of leisure time and the middle classes, the growing involvement of women in education and the workplace, the fragmentation of society in the 50’s and 60’s, the growth of cities and urban sprawl and the decline of agriculture. The youth movements rejection of their parents social mores during the 60’s. It’s a complexed picture. Perhaps your confusing social progressives justifications of the current sexual dynamic for an actual plan.
You might as well blame the hippies/libertarianism/free market theorists/the travel industry for today woes, as some nebulous left.
If you ever get the chance you should try Atomised and Platform (Michel Houellebecq), two novels which explore the consequences of the 1960’s sexual revolution in France, there reception by French intellectuals was queasy to say the least. His latest novel is about the election of an moderate Islamist government in France, and the gradual reimposition of conservative sexual values. Interestingly, the protagonist, a College Professor, finds the new regime to be quite to his liking, as he finds his vague misgivings over the sexual revolution begin to crystallize as women are removed from the workforce and forced to dress modestly. Those changes free him from the tyranny of sexual titillation his daily life had become. This novel also received an outraged reception.
I would recommend adding them to your no doubt already very long to read list.
Gerard,
“In my experience socialism is particularly prudish when it comes to sexual mores”
First, the Left has doctrines and interests other than socialism. Second, socialism hasn’t been the primary interest of the Left in the American since the 1950s.
“The sexual revolution in the west was driven by many factors”
This is a much narrower focus than something so large as the “sexual revolution.”
“You might as well blame the hippies/libertarianism/free market theorists/the travel industry for today woes, as some nebulous left.”
That’s quite a bogus attempt to distract attention away from specific behaviors advocated by Leftists. Movements, like people, have to be held accountable for their actions.
I don’t think you addressed his main point, “I’m curious as to your blaming of the “Left” for the current state of sexual relations in America.”
The Real Peterman,
“yourr blaming of the “Left” for the current state of sexual relations in America.”
To repeat what I told Gerald.
(1) I am not blaming the Left for the full “current state of sexual relations”. Just some specific aspects that have had destructive results. Such as that described here. I give two quotes. Anyone can easily find scores, hundreds, or thousands more like it during the past few decades.
(2) As I said — “These are specific behaviors advocated by Leftists. Movements, like people, have to be held accountable for their actions.”
Assuming the argument merits being seriously considered, surely there are more credible arguers available to make it.
“Regnerus contributed to an amicus brief in opposition to same-sex marriage[25] and appeared as an expert witness in a 2014 federal court hearing regarding Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage. Citing widespread criticism of NFSS methodology, Judge Bernard A. Friedman rejected Regnerus’ testimony, alleging the arguments derived from methodologically flawed data were “not worthy of serious consideration” and served rather to please the conservative organizations (Witherspoon Institute and Bradley Foundation) that underwrote the survey research project.[26]”
Or perhaps there are none. Cheers.
Steve,
“surely there are more credible arguers available to make it.”
What a wonderful statement of the tribalism that dominates — and clouds — discussions in modern America! This guy isn’t of my tribe, so whatever he says must be invalid. Such tribalist thinking is among the crudest defenses against things you find disturbing.
This just in: facts and logic are independent of the person saying them.
Based on my personal experience in NYC among the banker/lawyer/counseltant set, a shockingly large percentage of women cheat or have cheated on their partner. I’m surprised that this is almost never discussed because I think it’s a key reason why the dating market has changed to such an extent (I.e., men aren’t willing to play the game because they can’t trust their partner faithfully uphold the deal).
From a moral perspective, I almost never see any kind of idea expressed in the mainstream about women needing to clean up their integrity and honor. Its almost all focused on vilifying men for the smallest of infractions. I feel that there has been a dramatic increase in casual infidelity among women and it’s having a very significant corrosive effect on gender relationships.
NYC Male,
I’ve seen studies suggesting increased rates of infidelity among women. These are often discussed on men’s websites. It’s often attributed to women’s participation in the outside work world. Their time at home is a small fraction of their lives, and their time with their husband an even smaller fraction. And at work they meet many higher-status guys, and have ample opportunities for “20 minutes of alpha.”
Combine that with the lower status of husbands and father — as the patriarchal system crashes and burns — higher rates of infidelity seem inevitable. This probably explains some of the high rate of divorce — which makes marriage such a bad gamble for men.
Here’s a good review of the research (describing unknowingly the effect of the rising number of beta men): “Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences” by Alyssa Giacobbe at NY Magazine.
The Left might be the monkeys in the control room, but the Right were the technicians asleep at the switch. Like drunken coeds, they more or less consented at the time to things that were never likely to end well, whatever regrets about it they express now. There’s plenty of blame to go around here. I can’t dispute your conclusions. Yeah, it really has become a war of all against all, and like most wars there are winners and losers. The losers in this war are left without a lot of investment in society, and sooner or later that’s going to matter.
Most wars produce winners and losers. And then again some wars end up with everyone a loser. What we have in practice is a parasite class of alpha males and sluts, and that parasitic infection is reaching a point where it threatens to kill the host society.
The Man,
“Like drunken coeds, they more or less consented at the time to things that were never likely to end well,”
That’s pretty harsh, and sets a high bar for the standard of conduct. If others do wrong, I’m equally at fault for not resisting? I wouldn’t want that to be applied to my actions. Esp since the Left’s advocacy in this case probably had a high degree of public support. 1/3? 1/2? 2/3? Enough so that when amplified by the media, it would have been a horrifically painful battle for the Right. Everybody has limited resources and finite tolerance for pain, and so picks their fights.
Try that standard for rape victims and you’ll be burned at the stake (metaphorically speaking).
I might not care to have it applied to my actions either, but whatever we did or didn’t do about the Great Experiment now unfolding before us, the whole society will share in the consequences, whether that’s fair or not. We can end up regretting our actions, or lack thereof, even in cases where we didn’t will or intend the outcome, and I’ve got a couple of those somewhere in my background, too. And they go way beyond waking up in a strange bed. I’m quite certain that what I said would get me burned at the stake, but that doesn’t mean it’s altogether wrong.
The Man,
” but that doesn’t mean it’s altogether wrong.”
Declaring “right” and “wrong” is fun, but imo is a waste of time. Leave it for “Nature’s God.”
My point is that setting standards so high is operationally useless. Why not just declare that we should all love one another and be good all the time? Problem solved! /s
I do find it rather peculiar women assume men have no agency. If young women go for irresponsible bad boys, then it is men’s incentive to be one. It would be hard for most of them, the ones that are not millionaires, to find good guys after their series of flings. The supply has dried up, and so has her bargaining power.
No worries, though: A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Tony,
That nails it. Many women are following the “party hard then settle” strategy. Much depends on young men’s willingness to accept the deal offered by women 28-33, marriage on modern terms to experienced women. I’ve written several posts about this.
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Absolutely, since she can have cats instead. There might not be a songbird alive in North America by 2100, after a few generations with a large fraction of women becoming cat ladies at 33.
Mail order brides are becoming a brisk trade. Do Manhattan women have a right to resent brides shipped in from Thailand and Estonia? Difficult to see that they have any standing whatsoever in the case.
James,
That’s an interesting issue! Perhaps the mail order bride business is the opposite side of the coin to women supporting open borders — allowing in stronger (i.e., non-domesticated) men from more Darwinian-environments.
Which of the two is more socially disruptive?
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Women assume that men have no agency because women really have no agency. Women do, say, and think whatever the influential men in their lives (or if that’s missing, the jews media) tell them to do, say, and think.
Dave,
That’s an interesting, if quite odd, perspective.