https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DpgahEiZltw
you often get artistic types like Andre Geid, let’s say, and left-wing intellectuals pushing for full sexual freedom. And some of that’s high openness and some of that’s low conscientiousness, that’s for sure. But then there’s a kickback that’s really interesting to me, because it’s the same radicals, possessed by exactly the same set of ideas, who make a very radical counterclaim. And the counterclaim is something like, while every form of sexual behavior must be celebrated, and it’s nothing but a testament to the ever-blossoming range of human freedom, but every form of sexual interaction between particularly a young man and a young woman is so dangerous right to its core that there’s nothing more important than full consent. And that consent has to be documented verbally and maybe even beyond verbally, formally, for even interactions that were once as casual, let’s say, as dancing. And so at Princeton University, for example, there was a push to make men ensure that even when they’re dancing with a girl who agreed to dance, that it was incumbent upon them, multiple times during the dance, to ask verbally to ensure that that once established consent was still continuing. Now, if you weren’t being cynical about that, you might say, well, that’s a stumbling attempt to something approximating awake politeness, because if you have any sense, when you’re dancing with someone, one of the things you actually wanna know is, do they really wanna be doing it? But it’s very peculiar to me and illuminating that this insistence on negotiated contract for every step of a potentially sexual interaction is being insisted upon, not by Christian apologists for traditional morality, but by the same radicals who are out there dancing three quarters naked in the street in their dog costumes and insisting that every bit of sexual expression is to be lauded. My suspicion with what’s going on there with this rise of sort of a bureaucratic attitude to sex, shall we say, this idea of asking for consent at every stage and so on. I mean, the funniest example, which I mentioned briefly in the book, is an idea cooked up by some university students that you would have a sign of contract before you had casual sex, and you take a photo of either the pair of you with your contract and so on. And the joke obviously is, why not get dressed up in a big white dress? Why not invite all your friends? It’s this sort of reinvention of marriage. I think that that’s basically what is going on. We’re married for the day, that’s the contract. I think what’s going on with this reintroduction of these new rules post-MeToo is that complete sexual freedom is not actually a sustainable system. And what we’ve had for many centuries, millennia, up until the 1960s really, is a very complicated tapestry of laws and norms which regulate sexuality and which particularly regulate heterosexuality. Because what you’re dealing with when it comes to heterosexuality is great imbalances of physical strength, the fundamental imbalance of reproductive roles, and also personality differences and all of this, which make it very, it’s just inherently very, very difficult to deal with mating smoothly. There is a lot of heartache, there is a lot of risk. And what we have in most societies is this complex dance of marriage customs and thinking more recently in the West, chaperones, and asking the father’s hand, and all of these things which are supposed to basically control sexuality. I mean, the progressive account of this is that they repress people’s sexuality to which I say, yes, they do. But they do that because they have to, because that is, completely untrammeled sexual freedom is not possible because of, you can’t run a society like that. And because you will inevitably have people coming into conflict with one another if that’s permitted. So you need people to be, men and women, to be repressed. I think that’s what marriage does. But in a good way, you know, as a necessary step towards having productive relationships. And I think there’s an attempt to kind of reinvent that new bureaucracy, but it’s not nearly as good. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, okay. So here’s the rule is that responsibility abdicated is vacuumed up by tyrants. And so if young men and young women aren’t regulating their own sexual behavior, then tyrannical bureaucrats will definitely step in to have fun on that front. So, but you brought up two points that we could pursue. And one is an analysis of what actually constitutes consent. And then we could start with that. And then the other one was, let me see if I’ve exactly got this. Oh yes. Inhibition and oppression, let’s say, of sexual desire. See, this is something that has to be handled conceptually very carefully. So there’s different models of socialization that permeate the, let’s say, the psychological community. And one of them is an ethos of something like inhibition and repression. And so the Freudians sort of fall into that camp that the superego inhibits the id and squashes it down, I’d say. And that part of what makes you a social being is your ability to suppress and inhibit desires like aggression and sex. And I don’t think that’s true. I only think that’s true when it’s gone wrong. So here’s an alternative viewpoint. This is the viewpoint of people like Jean Piaget, who’s a great developmental psychologist. He thought of the developmental process as one of integration. Now, you already put forth a three-stage model of female development, and you could think about that as a continuing model of complex integration. And so the reason that sex becomes regulated isn’t because it’s now being inhibited, it’s being regulated because it’s being integrated into higher-order games. And so it’s being integrated, for example, and maybe can even be celebrated within this confined area of, or regulated area of integration. It’s becoming integrated with the more mature realization that sex outside of an iterated relationship is actually a net negative, even for the parties involved, even if they’re primarily motivated by their own hedonism, and then hypothetically, their own will. And so it isn’t inhibition that’s regulating sex, and it isn’t top-down social control. It’s the necessity of integrating sex, which can be just a unimensional desire into a much more sophisticated symphony of social interactions. Now, when that fails, inhibition is necessary. So if you have someone who’s acting in an antisocial manner, parading their sexuality, insisting upon the short-term gratification at their own expense and that of others, then compulsion might have to be brought to bear. But that indicates a failure of the proper developmental pathway, rather than a manifestation of a necessarily oppressive patriarchy. And that’s a much more positive vision of the regulation of sexual behavior. It’s more like ordered freedom rather than inhibition. And that also opens up another positive idea, which is that we’ve thought, toyed with the idea that the birth control pill meant that impulsive hedonism could now rule, and that that would be the highest form of sexual expression. And the idiot artists who jumped on that bandwagon were certainly of that mind. But what we’re seeing instead is that young men and women are turning in ever greater numbers to a very casual pornography, especially with regards to the boys, to the abandonment of any relationships whatsoever. And then interestingly enough, it seems to much less sexual activity in general, I think it’s 30% now of Japanese, I think it’s 30% of Japanese young people under 30 are still virgins, 30%, and similar figures in South Korea. And you can see the same proclivity emerging in the West. So what’s happening paradoxically is that by removing all the principles from sexual interaction, not the inhibitions, but the principles, we’re actually dooming the sexual enterprise rather than facilitating it, even for the hedonists. So anyways, it’s very useful to know that there’s an integration model rather than an inhibition model, right? Because it also stops those who might oppose the sexual revolution from just being finger wagging conservative moralists, because you can say, no, no, you’re gonna have a way better sex life in every possible way if you actually like fall in love with someone and have a long-term relationship. And I think the psychological, the statistical data on that are pretty clear too. Most single people don’t have a lot of sex. The phrase that I use in the book to describe this exact phenomenon where you on the one hand have hypersexual public life, you can walk down any street and see women in lingerie on posters or watch TV and there’s very explicit sex scenes, et cetera, so on the one hand, we’ve had this amazing ramping up of sexuality in public life, but on the other hand, exactly as you say, we have what’s sometimes called the sex recession, the fact that people are having sex later, less frequently. I think what’s happening generally is people are having probably more casual sex, but they’re having sex less frequently. So when they are having sex, it’s more likely to be casual, but they’re not forming these long-standing relationships. And the term that I use in the book is cultural death grip syndrome, taken from the quasi-medical term death grip syndrome, which is used by compulsive porn users to describe the physical experience of impotence when you use too much porn. You get to the point where you actually can’t be aroused either physically or psychologically in real life because you use so much porn. And I think cultural death grip syndrome is the counterpart to that, where on the one hand, we have this astounding availability of sexual stimuli at the click of a button at any moment, anything that you can imagine is available on the internet immediately. And that seems to be demotivating people to actually seek out meaningful sexual relationships, which in the long term are vastly better for us in every possible way. But we have a culture enabled by technology, which is very, very short-term in every way. So people are channeled towards that kind of immediate relief that disincentivizes proper, yeah. I think the rule is something like unearned surfeit turns into revulsion. Right? It’s too much of a good thing means that it’s no longer a good thing. And that goes along with an idea too that there’s something like optimal deprivation, right? I mean, look, let’s say you’ve just had a big banquet and someone sits you down and says, well, now you have to eat five pounds of dessert. It’s like, first of all, that’s not gonna be a very attractive proposition. And second of all, it might actually make you ill is that everything has to be in proper proportion. And one of the things we really haven’t contended with at all in our society is how much desperation is necessary on the sexual front to drive young men and young women together. And the answer is not zero. And the problem with pornography, one of many problems, is that drives desperation on the male front down to zero. Now, I know perfectly well from my clinical experience that the standard state of most young men, especially under 20, let’s say, is pretty much terror in the face of a woman who they’re very attracted to. And the reason for that is that, well, there’s all sorts of reasons, but the primary reason is the probability that any given male, even one who’s very attractive, let’s say in multiple ways, is going to be rejected by any given female, especially a high value female who has a lot of people attracted to her is extremely high. So there are classic psychological experiments showing this. If you send attractive undergraduates out to talk to other undergraduates to offer sexual access, say, well, would you be willing to have coffee with me? Would you be willing to give me your phone number? Would you be willing to come back to my apartment? If the girls offer that, then whoever they’re offering that to on the male front will take them up on their offer. But if the boys offer that, even when they’re attractive, the probability that their advances will be rejected is extremely high. And so young men face the uncomfortable situation where even if they’re competent and will turn eventually into useful men, which isn’t the status of most very young men, the probability that they’ll be rejected is extremely high. And then it’s also the case that there’s little that’s more psychologically impactful than such rejection, especially if it’s undertaken by someone to whom there’s a genuine attraction. So that means that boys are paralyzed into terror. I think that’s not too exaggerated a term. By the mere fact of attractive women. And so, you know, they slough that off and they make derogating jokes and so forth to try to get over that, but doesn’t change the basic reality. That also means that a certain percentage of males, and it’s not low really, it could easily be like 30% are just paralyzed into utter stasis by the possibility of rejection, especially because they haven’t been fortified against it with their dependency inducing upbringing. Unless they’re driven forward by a certain amount of desperation, some of which needs to be sexual, there’s actually, they’re never gonna go, they’re never gonna break through that barrier. And so then they can satisfy themselves momentarily with pornography and then that turns into that host of problems you already described. Now they’re training themselves, maybe right from puberty, to be impotent cock-holed voyeurs, essentially. So that’s not good training. Then they’re training themselves to view women as targets of short-term gratification. So that’s like training in psychopathy. And then they’re also interfering with their ability to establish a relationship and also to perform sexually in a real environment. So all that seems like a five-dimensional catastrophe and that’s gonna get a lot worse in the next year, by the way, because we haven’t seen anything on the pornography front compared to what’s gonna be coming down with the advent of AI. Because now what’s gonna happen real soon is that this is already underway. So imagine a sign-up service where you can talk to a very attractive young woman. So, and she’s an AI, right? So she can be as attractive as you want her to be and tuned exactly to your preferences. Okay, so now there’s already a service offering this, by the way. So now you have a friend and that friend can keep track of your conversations and especially if you’re lonesome and isolated, that might be the best friend you’ve ever had and certainly the most attractive person you’ve ever talked to. Now, it’s not real, but men are pretty damn visual. So it’s got a long ways towards real. And then for your subscription fee, you can talk to the woman nude and then the whole avenue of sexual display is open to you. And so God only knows what that’s going to do. Yes, and sex drive-ups are the next step.