is our modern society actually libertine?

There’s a widespread assumption that western society has become increasingly libertine about sexuality over time and that we now live in an age of sexual degeneracy and sexual libertinism. But is that really true?

In some ways we’re more puritanical about sex than ever before. Engaging in mild flirtation can now lead to the loss of your job and your career.

The libertinism of today may be more apparent than real. Society is more tolerant of homosexual libertinism than ever before, but arguably it’s less tolerant of heterosexual libertinism. A man who has consensual sex with a woman can have his life destroyed if the woman changes her mind after the act. If it wasn’t as magical and meaningful as the woman expected it’s rape. The #metoo hysteria is a prime example of the New Puritanism.

Surveys suggest that young people are having less sex than previous generations. Which would not be surprising. Engaging in entirely consensual heterosexual sex is now a high-risk activity. Engaging in the normal human activities that have always been part and parcel of courtship is now like wandering through a minefield.

Read Steve Sailer’s recent post on the professor accused of sexual misbehaviour. The behaviours in which he engaged were so innocuous that twenty years the women involved would simply have laughed the whole thing off.

I’m not even convinced that monogamy has gone out of fashion. It still seems to be the norm, even among young people. In fact, especially among young people. Not necessarily marriage but monogamy in some form. It’s easy to see internet hookup culture as proof that young people are highly promiscuous but I suspect that promiscuity is less common today compared to fifty years ago. The high tide of modern sexual libertinism was the 1970s. The tide of libertinism has been receding ever since.

Our real problem is that so many people are getting married and are remaining monogamous, but they’re not having children. That’s a problem with multiple causes but I don’t think it has anything at all to do with a rising tide of libertinism.

I don’t think there is a rising tide of libertinism. Quite the reverse.

The trans thing is interesting. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, much of the trans mania actually seems to be driven by avoidance of sex. If people are having their genitals surgically destroyed or pumping themselves full of the hormones of the opposite sex and thereby destroying any possibility of an actual functional sex life that doesn’t sound like libertinism. That sounds like a twisted form of puritanism. It sounds like a phobia of sex. Especially in the case of young girls deciding that they’re really young boys what really seems to be happening is a flight from adulthood and from normal sexuality, or from any sexuality at all.

I want to emphasise that I’m not arguing that everything is hunky-dory and that our modern society is healthy and there’s nothing to worry about. Our modern society is very very unhealthy.

But the real problem is that completely normal heterosexual desires and completely normal heterosexual behaviours are now seen as problematic. Completely normal heterosexual behaviours have been pathologised. Such normal behaviours are now seen as wrong and oppressive.

A big part of the problem is of course feminism. Back in the 90s when the anti-sex feminists lost the Feminist Sex Wars we thought we wouldn’t have to worry about those crazies any more. But we were wrong. The anti-sex feminists have made a major comeback. They’re as crazy as ever and they’re as aggressive as ever.

I’m not advocating for sexual libertinism. I’m merely arguing that the dysfunction in our society is not actually sexual libertinism, but increasing anxiety about sex and fear of sex. We’re obsessed with the subject, but then puritanism is also driven to a large extent by an obsession with sex.

I don’t think the current situation is as straightforward as it seems to be.

I’m more worried about the de-normalisation of healthy heterosexuality than about a largely imaginary libertinism. The de-normalisation of healthy heterosexuality is a fundamental attack on the foundation of any sane healthy society.