“Pope Paul VI made four predictions about the effects of artificial birth control: it would lower standards of morality, it would make men disrespect women, it would make infidelity more common, and governments would start shoving them down everyone’s throats. That’s four for four. Once again, what the cool people promised did not happen while what the bigots prophesied came to pass.”
--Some dude in the comment section of West Hunters
“Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. [...] Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman”
That rather depends on which moral standards you’re using to start with. For example, modern humans—men as well as women—are often seen in public wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. Pope Paul VI may or may not have seen this as normal, but his predecessors surely would’ve condemned the practice as supremely immoral. Does this mean that moral standards had fallen during the past 500 or so years ?
I’d like the original wording for the last prediction; the government subsidizes and promotes it but only China forces everyone to use it. Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.
Also, right above what you quoted:
Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, and all of the other cool people promised that free love and artificial contraception would make society so much better. Instead, we have good-for-nothings breeding like…well…good-for-nothings and the hard-working smart people barely have children at all.
That’s pretty vague. Like, if they predicted “Smart hard workers will be able to do their stuff without wasting time with kids”, that’s a win for them.
Oversimplified. One-child policy. I have an adopted Chinese daughter, I went to China for the adoption in 2002, and I talked about the policy with Chinese working for the adoption agency.
“Artificial birth control” is one method by which Chinese might avoid unwanted children, but if anyone is forced to use it, that’s not official by the government. However, there were isolated, unofficial actions taken by local officials, sometimes, cases of forced abortion.
Normal enforcement of the policy is through fines on excess children, the definition of excess varies by region, ethnic group, and, sometimes, the sex of already-born children. The most stringent requirements are on the Han majority
The situation is much more complex than most in the West might imagine..
Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.
<Bile-spewing rad-fem mode ON! Be warned, I’m not sure I quite get radical feminist thought, so this is a test run.>
I have few doubts here. Indeed this perverse logic looks simple to me, as I am habitually terribly disrespectful to my ideological opponents—so I automatically assumed that the “Dude” above, who presumably counts himself among the savvy “Bigots”, went for as much cynicism as possible. So the phrase “disrespect women” should not be taken as a decent modern person would, at face value—“treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant”.
Instead, you should assume that our oh-so-savvy Dude considers men to be entirely sex-driven, and indifferent/hostile towards the Other that is a woman’s personality, individuality, etc, and so a woman is an entirely commodified barrier (a walking, talking tax) to a rare and precious resource—Consequence-Controlled Sex.
“Risky” sex is more available but the patriarchal society taxes/fines it with a whole lot of potential troubles, so such selfish and casually misogynistic men must go for the safer option, which is bundled with the sacred function of childbirth. So by such a roundabout way the women as a group can get the “respect” of the patriarchal society—it trickles down from the market value of their bodies, and that’s it—men aren’t taught to seek anything else, instead they’re just given the carrot of “proper” sex and the stick of unintended pregnancies of STD.
Gotta love them old good traditional values! They’re full of such harmony and beauty, and are totally not quick, dirty, cynical hacks!
P.S.: (looks up and finally notices MixedNuts’ username) - might I be preaching to the choir with this?
I think the reasoning under “disrespect woman” is as follows:
1) Increased availability of birth control leads to an increased frequency of non-marital sex. 2) Increased non-marital sex must be caused by social pressure on women to have non-marital sex. 3) Social pressure on women to have non-marital sex at a higher frequency than the women “naturally” desire is not respectful to women.
From most feminist perspectives, (1) and (3) seem like reasonable predictions / moral assertions. Step 2 is filled with some noteworthy implicit assertions about how sexual relations are and should be negotiated—for one thing, there’s not much female agency in that story.
I’m not sure how much, if at all, that my interpretation differs from yours, except that it doesn’t directly require different understandings of words (i.e. “disrespect”) than a feminist might use.
I’d add that the “patriarchal” thinking can get perverse enough that 2) might be replaced with “the disappearance of the risk of pregnancy removes the barrier to women’s naturally wanton and irresponsible sexuality”, so that 3) becomes “if men see the woman’s true, uncontrolled sexual nature, they’ll disrespect her much as if they saw her uncovered, naked body; both states are savage and animal.”
But your interpretation might work too—it’s just that mine seems crazy and perverse enough to be the product of cultural adaptation/rationalization while yours is more logical. And damn, I swear I could see my version implied/assumed in the wording of some angry MRA/PUA rants I’ve read.
(Dear downvoters, what exactly are you opposing here?)
Strawman or not, TimS’ version is still very problematic to a modern view of gender, as he says.
And more importantly, why do you believe that most people—especially in a traditional society—even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex? So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!
is still very problematic to a modern view of gender,
What does this have to do with it being or not being true?
And more importantly, why do you believe that most people—especially in a traditional society—even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex?
You seam to be conflating the progressive/traditional distinction intellectual/popular distinction. There were a lot of smart people in the past (who would today be considered traditional) who thought about these things.
So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!
This is equally true in non-traditional societies.
What does this have to do with it being or not being true?
It’s a response to the charge of me intentionally picking the more strawman-like answer.
This is equally true in non-traditional societies.
Sure, but in traditional societies reflection on sacred matters is officially discouraged, whereas in modern ones there’s just the silent pressure to come to the approved conclusion—but many still decide not to! There are more patriarchally oriented people now in the 1st world than there were liberal people in the past.
If neither position is obviously insane and they just stem from different moral instincts, then there must be slightly more freedom of thought today along these axes.
That some didn’t stop Christian theologians from doing an awful lot of reflection on sacred matters.
The sacred is a territory that a caste claims for themselves. The edict is about preventing outsiders from impinging on their turf, not one of preventing all from doing the reflection.
Freely available birth control → Fewer direct consequences to having sex → Men have sex with more women → Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects
I was complaining about you, not the Universe. If your model of reality includes “women are automatons” as a feature, your model is not very likely to be correct.
Fewer direct consequences to having sex → Men have sex with more women
Why not state the conclusion here as: People have more sex. Just as men have more sexual partners, why wouldn’t women have more sexual partners.
When phrased like that, the next conclusion (Women increasingly thought of as sex objects) requires a bit more justification. One could assert that women naturally have fewer partners than men, but surely some or most of that is explained by the relative ease of avoiding the consequences of pregnancy.
Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects
Modern western societies have women integrated with men in most professions, whereas societies that highly limit sexual behavior with women seem to be the ones who turn women into something other than humans primarily.
Reqiuring women to be coevered head to toe if they appear in public, requiring them to only appear in public when they are with a man from their family who can protect them, and limiting their rights to own property, work, drive, and attend schools are all features of “highly moral” societies and essentially absent from “immoral” societies.
If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I’m not sure whether it’s true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.
The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call “men disrespecting women”.
Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.
Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean “keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts” then I won’t be able to convince you, because by respect I mean “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse.”
If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.
If you want to say Pope Paul VI’s prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse” seems wrong.
Do you really believe that’s Pope Paul VI definition?
I suppose if you were asking me “do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions” it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I’d bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of
I didn’t use the word “personal”. Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.
Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of “respecting women” get’s defined top-down.
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you
That’s not what I’m doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I’m reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.
It’s bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying.
It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.
Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the
reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.
I don’t see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers
Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the “cool people” within living memory. The RC’s still don’t respect
women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.
Do y’all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?
Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it’s moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it’s profanation and therefore gross/evil.
Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it’s a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it’s good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can’t see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.
(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)
I’d say “respect” for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.
It is not “respect” of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Sex aversion in cultures I’m most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don’t know if it’s because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it’s innate.
But that’s not quite my question. What I’m asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don’t feel it’s morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don’t think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they’re not fundamental bases.
And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It’s a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?
I’m not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.
Or interacial kisses?
No, that one’s easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place—impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.
Whereas I’d expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they’re nobler in the sack. (And two women can’t have sex, silly.)
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it’s a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.
I don’t know that there is a culture (other than some subcultures in the modern First World) who don’t consider sex sacred, though certainly there’s quite a gap between “Son, if you ever lust after another guy you’re going to Hell!” and “Son, if you don’t suck enough cock, you’ll lose your vital energy!”.
No, sacredness is way more specific. Sacred things are:
Special. They belong to their own sphere of sacred things apart from mundane ones.
Powerful. If you fuck with them, they will fuck you up.
Important. You care about them a lot.
Emotionally charged. This kinda follows from the above, but the stronger and more unusual emotions you add, the sacreder. Awe is sacred as balls.
Big. You can’t quite comprehend them; maybe there’s too much importance or power or emotion for you to handle, maybe they act unpredictably (because they’re people or something), maybe they’re inherently and magically mysterious.
A lot like your parents when you’re a little kid, really.
the prevalent culture is very much not to regard sex as sacred in that sense
That’s how that culture “wants” people to think (believe-in-belief) - because sex-in-itself has largely the “taboo” + “big” + “powerful” factors for it so people shrink from thinking too much about it; while the “importance” and the “emotional charge” factors are attached to the intersection of sex and romantic love/marriage/childbirth. Thinking about sex with those attachments is easier in such a culture than thinking about sex-in-itself.
Presumably to make sex without those latter attachments less desirable/less of a goal on a memetic level, but keep the overall cover of sacredness.
Sounds plausible/falsifiable enough within MixedNuts’ model, doesn’t it?
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
Now I don’t find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.
The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being “bad”, “gross” and “disgusting” or even outright “evil” by my peers. However, that’s only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don’t have real data.
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
I don’t think so. I think that everything vile, disgusting, and repugnant got normal, not just gay sex.
I say this from observation of people who have conditioned themselves for a politically correct lack of disgust reflex. They also have a non political lack of disgust reflex: Observe, for example the “no pressure” video, and the cannibalism video
I predict that you are also no longer disgusted by poop eating, cannibalism, or the malicious infliction of painful and destructive injury.
I predict that if you watch the “no pressure” video, or the cannibalism video, you will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Someone who quite genuinely does not find feminists disgusting, is likely to be sincerely astonished when lots of people who piously pretend that they do not find feminists disgusting react with outrage at the “no pressure” video.
Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example “date rape”, “marital rape”, and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.
Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.
The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.
(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)
According to the New Testament:
let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.
The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time,
And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today’s sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.
From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried “hypocrisy” after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.
Should morality reflect reality or should our reality be frozen in time, immune from technical advances, so that it stays relevant to an old morality? Yah… if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.
Women in modern societies have violence of various sorts much less often perpetrated against them, and have many fewer life choices precluded to them than in the past. It would be an odd definition of respect indeed which rated women less respected now than they were in the days of less effective birth control.
if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.
And if you’re Roman Catholic, having children is the goal you’re optimizing for.
--Some dude in the comment section of West Hunters
Source quote (thanks to ErikM):
I think this is the source you want.
See the section Consequences of Artificial Methods, subheading 17.
I was just going to edit it in after you mentioned it on IRC. Thank you!
That rather depends on which moral standards you’re using to start with. For example, modern humans—men as well as women—are often seen in public wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. Pope Paul VI may or may not have seen this as normal, but his predecessors surely would’ve condemned the practice as supremely immoral. Does this mean that moral standards had fallen during the past 500 or so years ?
I’d like the original wording for the last prediction; the government subsidizes and promotes it but only China forces everyone to use it. Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.
Also, right above what you quoted:
That’s pretty vague. Like, if they predicted “Smart hard workers will be able to do their stuff without wasting time with kids”, that’s a win for them.
Oversimplified. One-child policy. I have an adopted Chinese daughter, I went to China for the adoption in 2002, and I talked about the policy with Chinese working for the adoption agency.
“Artificial birth control” is one method by which Chinese might avoid unwanted children, but if anyone is forced to use it, that’s not official by the government. However, there were isolated, unofficial actions taken by local officials, sometimes, cases of forced abortion.
See also Two-child policy.
Normal enforcement of the policy is through fines on excess children, the definition of excess varies by region, ethnic group, and, sometimes, the sex of already-born children. The most stringent requirements are on the Han majority
The situation is much more complex than most in the West might imagine..
<Bile-spewing rad-fem mode ON! Be warned, I’m not sure I quite get radical feminist thought, so this is a test run.>
I have few doubts here. Indeed this perverse logic looks simple to me, as I am habitually terribly disrespectful to my ideological opponents—so I automatically assumed that the “Dude” above, who presumably counts himself among the savvy “Bigots”, went for as much cynicism as possible. So the phrase “disrespect women” should not be taken as a decent modern person would, at face value—“treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant”.
Instead, you should assume that our oh-so-savvy Dude considers men to be entirely sex-driven, and indifferent/hostile towards the Other that is a woman’s personality, individuality, etc, and so a woman is an entirely commodified barrier (a walking, talking tax) to a rare and precious resource—Consequence-Controlled Sex.
“Risky” sex is more available but the patriarchal society taxes/fines it with a whole lot of potential troubles, so such selfish and casually misogynistic men must go for the safer option, which is bundled with the sacred function of childbirth. So by such a roundabout way the women as a group can get the “respect” of the patriarchal society—it trickles down from the market value of their bodies, and that’s it—men aren’t taught to seek anything else, instead they’re just given the carrot of “proper” sex and the stick of unintended pregnancies of STD.
Gotta love them old good traditional values! They’re full of such harmony and beauty, and are totally not quick, dirty, cynical hacks!
P.S.: (looks up and finally notices MixedNuts’ username) - might I be preaching to the choir with this?
I think the reasoning under “disrespect woman” is as follows:
1) Increased availability of birth control leads to an increased frequency of non-marital sex.
2) Increased non-marital sex must be caused by social pressure on women to have non-marital sex.
3) Social pressure on women to have non-marital sex at a higher frequency than the women “naturally” desire is not respectful to women.
From most feminist perspectives, (1) and (3) seem like reasonable predictions / moral assertions. Step 2 is filled with some noteworthy implicit assertions about how sexual relations are and should be negotiated—for one thing, there’s not much female agency in that story.
I’m not sure how much, if at all, that my interpretation differs from yours, except that it doesn’t directly require different understandings of words (i.e. “disrespect”) than a feminist might use.
I’d add that the “patriarchal” thinking can get perverse enough that 2) might be replaced with “the disappearance of the risk of pregnancy removes the barrier to women’s naturally wanton and irresponsible sexuality”, so that 3) becomes “if men see the woman’s true, uncontrolled sexual nature, they’ll disrespect her much as if they saw her uncovered, naked body; both states are savage and animal.”
But your interpretation might work too—it’s just that mine seems crazy and perverse enough to be the product of cultural adaptation/rationalization while yours is more logical. And damn, I swear I could see my version implied/assumed in the wording of some angry MRA/PUA rants I’ve read.
(Dear downvoters, what exactly are you opposing here?)
In other words, “I prefer mine because it makes a better strawman”.
BTW, see here for a good description of the actual catholic position.
Strawman or not, TimS’ version is still very problematic to a modern view of gender, as he says.
And more importantly, why do you believe that most people—especially in a traditional society—even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex? So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!
What does this have to do with it being or not being true?
You seam to be conflating the progressive/traditional distinction intellectual/popular distinction. There were a lot of smart people in the past (who would today be considered traditional) who thought about these things.
This is equally true in non-traditional societies.
It’s a response to the charge of me intentionally picking the more strawman-like answer.
Sure, but in traditional societies reflection on sacred matters is officially discouraged, whereas in modern ones there’s just the silent pressure to come to the approved conclusion—but many still decide not to! There are more patriarchally oriented people now in the 1st world than there were liberal people in the past.
If neither position is obviously insane and they just stem from different moral instincts, then there must be slightly more freedom of thought today along these axes.
That some didn’t stop Christian theologians from doing an awful lot of reflection on sacred matters.
The sacred is a territory that a caste claims for themselves. The edict is about preventing outsiders from impinging on their turf, not one of preventing all from doing the reflection.
Modern scientists tend to take a similar attitude to outsiders who impinge on their turf.
Exactly what I was thinking of as I wrote the comment. Scientists and Doctors are certainly priestly castes.
But here the Pope is predicting how the “people” would react, presumably applying his cynicism and savvy.
My point is that over time the Church has acquired a decent working model of how humans behave in large groups.
Would anyone please challenge this? Are there other ways to construe the “disrespect women” line?
I took disrespect woman to mean “treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant”.
That’s a reasonable definition of “disrespect.”
Why should one believe that freely available birth control is likely to cause disrespect towards women?
Freely available birth control → Fewer direct consequences to having sex → Men have sex with more women → Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects
Doesn’t this explanation rather rob women of agency ?
If you feel annoyed at the universe for robbing women of agency in this instance, go ahead. The universe doesn’t care.
I was complaining about you, not the Universe. If your model of reality includes “women are automatons” as a feature, your model is not very likely to be correct.
“Agency” in this sense (social and moral agency, I’d call it) obviously =/= “Libertarian free will”.
What does this have to do with the discussion?
Why not state the conclusion here as: People have more sex. Just as men have more sexual partners, why wouldn’t women have more sexual partners.
When phrased like that, the next conclusion (Women increasingly thought of as sex objects) requires a bit more justification. One could assert that women naturally have fewer partners than men, but surely some or most of that is explained by the relative ease of avoiding the consequences of pregnancy.
I was presenting a possible causal mechanism, not an argument. The argument is that the Pope’s prediction did in fact come true.
In case it isn’t clear, there is not agreement that the second prediction did come true.
(or the fourth. And the first is simply argument by definition).
Here is Catholic John C Wright describing what they mean.
Modern western societies have women integrated with men in most professions, whereas societies that highly limit sexual behavior with women seem to be the ones who turn women into something other than humans primarily.
Reqiuring women to be coevered head to toe if they appear in public, requiring them to only appear in public when they are with a man from their family who can protect them, and limiting their rights to own property, work, drive, and attend schools are all features of “highly moral” societies and essentially absent from “immoral” societies.
As a result children are raised by people how are neither smart nor hard-working.
But those children would have been raised by those parents regardless of what the smart hard workers did.
On the other hand, it affects what the average member of the next generation is like.
How?
If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I’m not sure whether it’s true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.
The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call “men disrespecting women”.
Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.
Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean “keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts” then I won’t be able to convince you, because by respect I mean “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse.”
Your welcome.
If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.
If you want to say Pope Paul VI’s prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse” seems wrong.
Do you really believe that’s Pope Paul VI definition?
I suppose if you were asking me “do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions” it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I’d bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.
I didn’t use the word “personal”. Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.
Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of “respecting women” get’s defined top-down.
That’s not what I’m doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I’m reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.
It’s bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying. It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.
Honestly, I think there’s a fairly tenable argument that all of those things have happened (not 4, but...).
I think the better objection is that there’s no causal connection between those things and birth control.
Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.
I don’t see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers
Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the “cool people” within living memory. The RC’s still don’t respect women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.
Do y’all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?
Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it’s moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it’s profanation and therefore gross/evil.
Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it’s a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it’s good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can’t see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.
(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)
I’d say “respect” for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.
It is not “respect” of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).
That’s the preaching-to-the-converted version. When preaching to the unconverted, more pragmatic arguments tend to be brought forward
Unwanted pregnancy would have been as disastrous as disease in the econiomcally constrained socieites of our ancestors. .
Or interacial kisses? Depends where y’all come from, I figure. Old chap.
Short answer: conditioning.
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Sex aversion in cultures I’m most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don’t know if it’s because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it’s innate.
But that’s not quite my question. What I’m asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don’t feel it’s morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don’t think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they’re not fundamental bases.
And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It’s a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?
I’m not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.
No, that one’s easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place—impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.
Whereas I’d expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they’re nobler in the sack. (And two women can’t have sex, silly.)
Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it’s a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.
Miswiring.
Is it? So sex isn;t sacred. it is just believed to be. By some people.
I don’t know that there is a culture (other than some subcultures in the modern First World) who don’t consider sex sacred, though certainly there’s quite a gap between “Son, if you ever lust after another guy you’re going to Hell!” and “Son, if you don’t suck enough cock, you’ll lose your vital energy!”.
Not sure what you mean by “sacred”. Almost everybody obsesses about it, positively or negatively. Is that sacredness?
No, sacredness is way more specific. Sacred things are:
Special. They belong to their own sphere of sacred things apart from mundane ones.
Powerful. If you fuck with them, they will fuck you up.
Important. You care about them a lot.
Emotionally charged. This kinda follows from the above, but the stronger and more unusual emotions you add, the sacreder. Awe is sacred as balls.
Big. You can’t quite comprehend them; maybe there’s too much importance or power or emotion for you to handle, maybe they act unpredictably (because they’re people or something), maybe they’re inherently and magically mysterious.
A lot like your parents when you’re a little kid, really.
Uh-huh. Where I come from, the prevalent culture is very much not to regard sex as sacred in that sense.
Attempt at explanation:
That’s how that culture “wants” people to think (believe-in-belief) - because sex-in-itself has largely the “taboo” + “big” + “powerful” factors for it so people shrink from thinking too much about it; while the “importance” and the “emotional charge” factors are attached to the intersection of sex and romantic love/marriage/childbirth. Thinking about sex with those attachments is easier in such a culture than thinking about sex-in-itself.
Presumably to make sex without those latter attachments less desirable/less of a goal on a memetic level, but keep the overall cover of sacredness.
Sounds plausible/falsifiable enough within MixedNuts’ model, doesn’t it?
You can rescue any theory with a furry of auxilliary hypotheses.
Fixed that for you.
I stand by this answer.
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
Now I don’t find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.
The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being “bad”, “gross” and “disgusting” or even outright “evil” by my peers. However, that’s only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don’t have real data.
I don’t think so. I think that everything vile, disgusting, and repugnant got normal, not just gay sex.
I say this from observation of people who have conditioned themselves for a politically correct lack of disgust reflex. They also have a non political lack of disgust reflex: Observe, for example the “no pressure” video, and the cannibalism video
I predict that you are also no longer disgusted by poop eating, cannibalism, or the malicious infliction of painful and destructive injury.
I predict that if you watch the “no pressure” video, or the cannibalism video, you will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Someone who quite genuinely does not find feminists disgusting, is likely to be sincerely astonished when lots of people who piously pretend that they do not find feminists disgusting react with outrage at the “no pressure” video.
Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example “date rape”, “marital rape”, and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.
Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.
The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.
(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)
According to the New Testament:
And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today’s sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.
From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried “hypocrisy” after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.
Are you quite sure that’s not being pro-consent?
Should morality reflect reality or should our reality be frozen in time, immune from technical advances, so that it stays relevant to an old morality? Yah… if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.
Women in modern societies have violence of various sorts much less often perpetrated against them, and have many fewer life choices precluded to them than in the past. It would be an odd definition of respect indeed which rated women less respected now than they were in the days of less effective birth control.
And if you’re Roman Catholic, having children is the goal you’re optimizing for.