French translation here
Editor’s Note:
The following essay is based on a section of the essay “Home Economics,” from F. Roger Devlin’s new Counter-Currents title Sexual Utopia in Power.
What is “sexual liberation”? It is usually spoken of by way of contrast with the constraints of marriage and family life. It would seem to be a condition under which people have more choice than under the traditional system of monogamy. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” seemed to offer men more choices than just sleeping with the same woman every night for fifty years.
Feminism promised women it would liberate them from “domestic drudgery” and turn marriage and motherhood into just one among many lifestyle choices.
On the other hand, there was always an element of free choice even regarding marriage: one may choose whether, and to a certain extent whom, one will marry. Indeed, marriage is perhaps the most important example of a momentous life choice. But on the traditional view you cannot make your choice and still have it. Once one takes the vow and enters into the covenant, ipso facto one no longer has a choice. In other words, marriage is a one-way nonrefundable ticket. Your wife is your choice even if she eventually displeases you in certain ways, as all mortal wives necessarily must. Keeping your choice of mate open forever is called “celibacy.”
Ultimately, the ideal of sexual liberation rests upon a philosophical confusion which I call the absolutizing of choice. The illusion is that society could somehow be ordered to allow us to choose without thereby diminishing our future options. Birth control, abortion, the destigmatizing of fornication and homosexuality, arbitrary and unilateral divorce—all these have been pitched to us as ways of expanding our choices.
Now, I am in favor of giving people all the choice they can stand. But I would like to be careful about what this means: analysis will reveal that the term “choice” has distinct and partly contradictory senses which may not be equally applicable in all contexts. In other words, choice is not a single thing which can be expanded indefinitely at no cost; the appearance of greater choice in one area can be shown to entail reducing one’s possibilities in another.
One perfectly legitimate sense of choosing is doing as one desires. When we are asked to choose a flavor of ice cream, e.g., all that is meant is deciding which flavor would be the most pleasing to us at the moment. That is because the alternative of chocolate or strawberry involves no deep, long-term consequences. But not all choices can be like this.
Consider, for example, a young man’s choice of vocation. One of the charms of youth is that it is a time when possibility overshadows actuality. One might become a brain surgeon, or a mountain climber, or a poet, or a statesman, or a monk. It is natural and good for boys to dream about all the various things they might become, but such daydreams can breed a dangerous illusion: that, where anything is still possible, everything will be possible. This is only true in the case of trivial and inconsequential matters. It is possible to sample all of Baskin-Robbins’ thirty-one flavors on thirty-one successive days. But it is not possible to become a brain-surgeon and a mountain climber and a poet and a statesman and a monk. A man who tries to do so will only fail in all his endeavors.
The reason for this, of course, is that important enterprises demand large amounts of time and dedication, but the men who undertake them are mortal. For every possibility we realize, there will be a hundred we must leave forever unrealized; for every path we choose to take, there will be a hundred we must forever renounce. The need for choice in this sense is what gives human life much of its seriousness. Those who drift from one thing to another, unable to make up their minds or finish anything they have begun, reveal thereby that they do not grasp an essential truth about the human condition. They are like children who do not wish to grow up.
Now, sexual choices, especially for women, are analogous to a man’s in regard to his calling. Inherently, they cannot be made as easy and reversible as choosing flavors of ice cream. But this is what sexual liberation attempts to do. The underlying motive seems to be precisely a fear of difficult choices and a desire to eliminate the need for them. For example, a woman does not have to think about a man’s qualifications to be a father to her children if a pill or a routine medical procedure can remove that possibility. There is no reason to consider carefully the alternative between career and marriage if motherhood can be safely postponed until the age of forty (as large numbers of women now apparently believe). What we have here is not a clear gain in the amount of choice, but a shift from one sense of the word to another—from serious, reflective commitment to merely doing as one desires at any given time. Like the dilettante who dabbles in five professions without finally pursuing any, the liberated woman and the playboy want to keep all their options open forever: they want eternal youth.
The attempt to realize a utopia of limitless choice in the real world has certain predictable consequences: notably, it makes the experience of love one of repeated failure. Those who reject both committed marriage and committed celibacy drift into and out of a series of what are called “relationships,” either abandoning or being abandoned. The lesson inevitably taught by such experiences is that love does not last, that people are not reliable, that in the end one has only oneself to fall back on, that prudence dictates always looking out for number one. And this in turn destroys the generosity, loyalty, and trust which are indispensable for family life and the perpetuation of our kind.
Most of those who have obeyed the new commandment to follow all of their hearts’ desire do not appear to me to be reveling in a garden of earthly delights. Instead I am reminded of the sad characters from the pages of Chekhov: sleepwalking through life, forever hoping that tomorrow things will somehow be changed for the better as they blindly allow opportunities for lasting happiness to slip through their fingers. But this is merely the natural outcome of conceiving of a human life as a series of revocable and inconsequential choices. We are, indeed, protected from certain risks, but have correspondingly little to gain; we have fewer worries but no great aspirations. The price we pay for eliminating the dangers of intimacy is the elimination of its seriousness.
In place of family formation, we find a “dating scene” without any clear goal, in which men and women are both consumed with the effort to get the other party to close options while keeping their own open. There is a hectic and never-ending jockeying for position: fighting off the competition while keeping an eye out for a better deal elsewhere. The latest “singles” fad, I am told, is something called speed dating, where men and women interact for three minutes, then go on to someone else at the sound of a bell.
Sex belongs to early adulthood: one transient phase of human life. It is futile to attempt to abstract it from its natural and limited place in the life-cycle and make it an end in itself. Sustainable civilization requires that more important long term desires like procreation be given preference over short term wishes which conflict with them, such as the impulse to fornicate.
The purpose of marriage is not to place shackles upon people or reduce their options, but to enable them to achieve something which most are simply too weak to achieve without the aid of a social institution. Certain valuable things require time to ripen, and you cannot discover them unless you are faithful to your task and patient. Marriage is what tells people to stick to it long enough to find out what happens. Struggling with such difficulties—and even periods of outright discouragement—is part of what allows the desires of men and women to mature and come into focus. Older couples who have successfully raised children together, and are rewarded by seeing them marry and produce children of their own, are unlikely to view their honeymoon as the most important event of their marriage.
People cannot know what they want when they are young. A young man may imagine happiness to consist in living on Calypso’s Island, giving himself over to sexual pleasure without ever incurring family obligations; but all serious men eventually find such a life unsatisfying. The term “playboy” was originally derogatory, implying that the male who makes pursuing women his highest end is not to be taken seriously. The type of man who thinks he’s hot stuff because he’s able to have one night stands will never raise sons capable of carrying on the fight for our embattled civilization.
Confusion about one’s desires is probably greater in young women, however. For this reason, it is misleading to speak of women “wanting marriage.” A young woman leafing through the pages of Modern Bride does not yet know what marriage is; all she wants is to have her wedding day and live happily ever after. She may well not have the slightest notion of the duties she will be taking on.
Parenthood is what really forces young men and women to grow up. Young men whose idea of the good life was getting drunk, getting laid, and passing out suddenly start focusing on career planning and building capital. They find it bracing to have a genuinely important task to perform, and are perhaps surprised to find themselves equal to it.
But without the understanding that marriage is an inherently irreversible covenant, both men and women succumb to the illusion that divorce will solve the “problem” of dissatisfaction in marriage. They behave like the farmer who clears, plows, and plants a field only to throw up his hands on the first really hot and sweaty day of work, exclaiming: “Farming is no fun! I’m going to do something else!” And like that farmer, they have no one to blame but themselves when they fail to harvest any crops.
Understanding the marriage bond as an irreversible covenant similarly influences the way economic activity and property are understood. Rather than being a series of short-term responses to circumstance, labor and investment become an aspect of family life transcending the natural life span of any individual. From a mere means to consumption, wealth becomes a family inheritance. In Burke’s fine words: “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.” By contrast, the characteristically modern view of property finds its clearest expression in the title of a bestselling 1998 financial planning guide: Die Broke. This amounts to a scorched earth policy for our own civilization. Perhaps someday the author will favor us with a sequel entitled Die Alone or Die Childless.
But not everyone is equally receptive to this kind of message. Women in parts of West Africa are averaging over eight children apiece. The revolt against marriage and childrearing is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. It is primarily in white countries that the birthrate has fallen below replacement level. It would behoove racially conscious whites, therefore, not to ignore the sexual side of the revolt against our civilization, nor shortsightedly to limit our attention to the single issue of miscegenation. The homosexual bathhouse view of sex as merely a means to personal pleasure attacks our race from within and at its source. As much as with inimical races and racial ideologies, our survival will depend upon our ability to organize effective resistance.
When we look around at all the forces arrayed against our race, it can be daunting. How can we fight them all? Are circumstances right? Would we be ready even if they were? And what to do in the meantime? The situation becomes a lot less daunting when we realize that the first battle, and the first victory, must take place within ourselves.
An address given at The Occidental Quarterly Editor’s Dinner on October 30, 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.
TOQ Online, April 8, 2010
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11 comments
Fathers are to blame for not vetting their daughter’s choice. They are the ones who should be looking at the groom’s potential and explaining to the daughter that it is not about love only, but about the children. It has been my experience that a daughter always wants the approval of her father. If he is too fucking lazy to care, then what we got is what we got. He should at least know about infatuation (perhaps he should read Kierkegaard) and the meaning of vows. No, he is too busy pretending to be a Christian and making money and if the potential groom makes him look good.
I agree with the gist of what you are saying here. I can tell you from watching my Christian brother struggle to save his daughters, it’s not easy. I’ve intervened in the past to tell my niece, the one that is first born of her generation and who I played with as a baby, that I love her and that I wanted only the best for her in life.
My brother got divorced against his will. His wife beat him in front of his two daughters repeatedly, eventually cracking his head open one night, leaving him bloody on the floor. He eventually regained consciousness and showed up at my apartment. To this day, he still has a large scar on his forehead.
Even with that, he would not divorce his wife and wanted to reconcile. She refused, sued for divorce and got custody of their kids.
His ex-wife ended up remarrying twice. One of the men she married abused both of my nieces sexually for years. The criminal is doing 35 years in prison for his crimes and both of my nieces are destroyed. They blame their father — my brother — for stuff having nothing to do with their problems in life. Their mother, the one who brought a strange man into her home to abuse them, is a heroine so far as they are concerned. My nieces had plenty of uncles to tell them that they loved them, supported them and would help with tuition for college. It’s destroyed my mother.
I wish it were not so. My brother has died a thousand deaths in front of my eyes. He now has a grand baby he will never see because his daughter refuses to even talk to him by email. My brother paid well over his child support for many years, so that his daughters could have ballet and piano lessons and nice clothes. When you mock Christians, you mock my brother who sacrificed to save his kids from lives of drug abuse, sexual promiscuity and self-destruction. He believes he failed and he dies every day because neither of his children will talk to him.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for both genders, but please don’t ever assume that my Christian big brother has not carried his cross a long distance. A lot of Christian men have as have Christian women. And atheists. And agnostics.
The sexual revolution is poison no matter what your standing with God is.
Was it because of his “Christianity” that he allowed himself to be beaten? A very strange type of Christianity indeed. I cannot imagine any woman respecting such a man after repeatedly beating him. I’m not saying that he could have saved his marriage by defending himself but he at least might have saved some self respect. It’s only one factor, but to my point, symptomatic of a completely wrong understanding of women and ones relationship with them. If he has understood, he probably would have marked her as a psychopath early on and never married her.
Some men will always refuse to hit a woman no matter their creed or lack thereof. Regardless of who is getting beaten in a marriage, a victim will sometimes adopt an attitude of hope, that things will get better. In my brother’s case, the violence did not begin until after there were children on the scene.
I met a woman years ago who got married to a man she dated for over year. On their honeymoon, the man punched her in the face and announced that he “owned her.” I was bothered by this. I asked a psychologist about this case and she noted that marriage is sometimes seen as permission to do horrible things.
I think pre-marital sex is very common and it clouds judgment to the point of blindness. Warning signs are always there, but sexual pleasure and bonding overrides everything.
Many moderns will think of continence as being prudish, or a Christian hang up. In fact, Christianity and all faith traditions understand human nature very well and so prohibit fornication to protect people and the broader community from the ravages of lust-fueled decisions. St. Thomas notes that lust darkens the mind and separates the spirit from reason. Buddhism has a pretty stark understanding of lust as well, such that its moral teachings resonate very well with Western spirituality.
My brother married because he wanted children. He was active military and was being posted to a new place and he made a bad choice regarding his spouse. A lot of military men have done this. They get new orders and they have a girlfriend. The girlfriend cannot go with them very easily, so they marry on a hope that it will all work out. Hope as the saying goes, is not a strategy.
Per usual, there are always those who will blame the victim.
This article describes your brother to a tee.
http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2015/2/4/beta-dads
If your brother let his wife beat him repeatedly in front of his own daughters, and yet after that tried to reconcile with the offending wife as if it were his fault, then do not be surprised that his daughters are so repulsed by this display of astounding weakness that they would not want this man anywhere near their children.
The reason they blame him for their problems is because it was his job as their father to enact boundaries on the family and raise them in a stable environment. The fact that he could not even control his own wife tells me there is no hope in hell he would have had any influence controlling his daughters.
As a result his negligence left them exposed and vulnerable to a predatory culture of ruin; which explains the drugs, promiscuity, and self-destruction you alluded to.
It sounds to me like he tried to play Jesus, and this should be an object lesson to you both how utterly pacifying and degrading this religion is to manhood.
This story is one of the more extreme cases I have heard of, and it’s valuable because it demonstrates precisely not what to do.
I suggest you consult Manhood Academy for the solution.
Devlin very eloquently elucidates the problem, but what is the solution? That is all the more complicated.
I am in my early 30s, never married, and never had kids, and unfortunately, don’t plan on it. Virtually everyone I know around my age has been divorced at least once (some twice) or have been in long-term relationships resulting in a couple of children, usually ending the relationship when the children are quite young (2-3), sometimes before they are even born! It is horrifying to look on at the generations that will follow us in which fathers are altogether absent, along with all the other issues that accompany a total disregard for the institution of marriage. I cringe when I see such popular terms as “future ex-wife,” “baby daddy,” or “my children’s father” – what kind of world are we living in that this is concerned normal and not something to be deeply ashamed off? If anything, this is the new normal, it is expected, it is okay. We can talk until we’re blue in the face about the problems we see, but I see no easy solution for any of this whatsoever. Devlin is correct, however, in putting the blame on ourselves – this is something that we, and only we alone as a race, can fix.
The solution resides in this statement: “The situation becomes a lot less daunting when we realize that the first battle, and the first victory, must take place within ourselves.”
As always, first, we must master ourselves. If you want to call what is going on as a “battle of the sexes,” “peace” will not come entirely. You must carve out for yourself a “separate peace.” Individuals reclaiming traditional values will create small groups, will create communities, will eventually have an outward impact. It’s all in your hands.
The remarkable Mr. Devlin once again goes where even otherwise intrepid WNs refuse to go. But it must be said: the seemingly universal notion in the White Nationalist community that we are being subjected to a genocide campaign is only half the story. Not that the Usual Suspects aren’t doing their dead-level best to rid the planet of us, but the Eternal Enemy has always been with us. Only in the modern era have they achieved universal success throughout the Western world.
The white race is committing suicide. A race that refuses even to reproduce itself has no right to complain about its dire straits. The enemies of our culture and civilization treat us with well-deserved contempt.
As the author points out:
“..But not everyone is equally receptive to this kind of message. Women in parts of West Africa are averaging over eight children apiece. The revolt against marriage and childrearing is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. It is primarily in white countries that the birthrate has fallen below replacement level….”
Essentially, our core problem is a whole postwar generation of men and women who are suspended in a state of perpetual adolescence. Our adversaries, evil as they are, are serious people. They are adults.
As it is said: “I have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The white race is committing suicide. A race that refuses even to reproduce itself has no right to complain about its dire straits.
This is a point that is too often asserted rather than demonstrated. According to a Census report entitled Fertility of Women in the United States 2012 only 16.4% of white, non-hispanic women aged 40-44 were childless. A woman aged 42 in 2012 was born in 1970 and thus had every opportunity to experience the sexual revolution to her heart’s content. Surely it is too much to say that the entire race is refusing to reproduce based on the life decisions of one sixth of its population.
According to the same report, only 19.1% of white women aged between 35-39 were childless in 2012. Based on CDC data, in 2013 some 60,000 white women between 40-44 gave birth to a child, therefore if the 35-39 cohort follows suit, by the time it becomes the next 40-44 cohort its rate of childlessness will have dropped to slightly beneath 18%. And if the trend is towards childbirth (at least among women near the end of their fertile years), as suggested by the fact that 45-49 cohort’s childlessness rate in 2012 was 17.6 – ie higher than the 40-44 cohort – then the rate of childlessness of this cohort could reduce even further.
With respect to white women’s total fertility rate, just how much of a difference would it make if every single of the childless women aged 40-44 had a child? According to the report linked above, white women 40-44 had a completed fertility of 1.885 children per woman. Statistics regarding the precise distribution of women per child class are difficult to come by (I’m certain I had this data once, but have lost it), but the report at least provides us with the proportions of women having 0, 1, 2, and 3+ children. Modelling the data, I achieved a completed fertility rate of 1.885 using the following distribution [number of children per woman – proportion of total women 40-44]:
0-17%
1-19.5%
2-36.5%
3-19%
4-4%
5-2.5%
6-.5%
7-.5%
8-.5%
Going from 17% of women having 0 children and 19.5% having 1 child to no women having 0 children and 36.5% of women having 1 child increases the completed fertility of the cohort from 1.885 to… only 2.06. That’s still a slight tad below traditional replacement rates, but with modern medical technology it would probably be sufficient but for the effect of racial intermixture, which is currently running at some 12%, which means the white completed fertility rate of these women would be 2.06 * .88 = 1.81, which is well below replacement.
Women who remain childless likely do so for reasons of powerful liberal inclination. Strong liberal inclinations are associated with an openness to racial mixing, therefore these women would likely have a considerably higher rate of intermixture than 12% – probably in the region of 25-30%. Expending efforts to entice these women to have children would therefore provide less in the way of racial returns than expending the same effort to entice women who have two children to have a third, three children to have a fourth, four a fifth and so on.
Women who already have two children are by definition open to the idea of having and raising children and are unlikely to have stopped at two children for strongly ideological reasons in comparison the strength of ideological resolve in women who never have any children, therefore the expectation should be that it would be easier to encourage these women to have a third child than it would be to encourage a childless woman to have a first child.
Still, even if fully 50% of each child-size class from 1 and up had an extra child it would only raise the the completed fertility rate to 2.275. That’s certainly above replacement, but again, factoring in an intermixture rate of 12% reduces the fertility rate to 2.002 – barely at replacement level.
But even this will not do because the intermixture rate is not static, it is increasing. It has been doubling roughly every 20 years and based on indications from the most heavily multiracial zones in America this trend will continue at the very least until an intermixture rate of 25% is reached, though we should be prepared for it to continue increasing unabated to 40% or even 50% before any possible genetic predispositions against the practise begin to make themselves felt.
If the intermixture rate were 25% then the total fertility rate of white women would have to be 2.75 in order to reach replacement level. This would require that every single woman in every single child-class (except the 0-child class) have on more child . I have made an allowance for the 0-child class because that is where I expect ideology to be most resilient, but even so in this example I am still reducing it from 17% to 5%. This example maintains the distribution of women into child classes listed above, just shifted one child up for each class. There is no reason the real world must adhere to this distribution, but I do believe there is reason to think it wouldn’t diverge from it too drastically. This example does not rely on that precise distribution to make my my point, however. That point is that in the presence of high intermixture levels the effort to reach replacement fertility is considerable indeed; childlessness is of distinctly secondary importance.
What should this imply for white activism? Firstly, I think, it should urge racial thinkers to set aside or put on the backburner grand plans for “taking it all back” or battling it out over less consequential aspects of the culture wars. If the present trends continue it’s going to require everything that whites have merely to secure racial survival. I assert that it is imprudent and irresponsible to imagine that present trends will not continue, that they will magically halt and reverse themselves, at which point grand plans may begin to be implemented. Such thinking belongs in the realm of fantasy.
It seems to me vastly more prudent to focus on raising awareness that the present trends are destructive of white existence, why they are destructive, and that wholly viable alternatives to the path of destruction exist, as well creating a sense of urgency with respect to taking those viable alternatives: exploring them, reflecting on them, debating them, and, finally, setting about implementing them. White existence is not secure and if white existence isn’t secured, nothing else will matter – not IQ studies, not crime reports, not genetics plots, not immigration, not revisionism, not gay marriage, not fascism, none of it (except to future antiquarians).
This is a very informative article.
But it will only speak to men. The fickle mind of the woman, especially the young one who is reaping all of feminism’s benefits will never heed this advice.
But it doesn’t take fine language and impeccable reasoning to make a woman do something.
What we need is a framework to accomplish what’s stated in this article, and that framework is male authority.
There is only one book I know which addresses it properly and fully:
http://manhood101.com/ebook.html
PS: I do not endorse Manhood Academy, for all intents and purposes it is a cult. The bad type of cult, but this book alone is worth its weight in gold. Read it White Man.
I read Devlin’s essays when they came out years ago.
I remember Thomas Fleming’s snarky dismissal of his writings in the comments section over at Chronicles. I didn’t renew my subscription after that as a protest. Conservatives of Fleming’s stripe really are worse than the liberals, but as Devlin notes in his book, it’s an age thing. Older men simply have no clue what their grandsons are up against in the dating market.
Devlin veers into misogyny at times and the rhetoric about women being able to cook, clean, take care of babies has truth. Still, it comes off a bit harsh.
I’ve made it about 75% through the new volume. It’s really nice to have his essays on the woman question all together. Thanks for doing this Greg.
I did note one passage in which he expresses surprise that any man would seriously consider marriage given the prevailing misandrist climate. Personally, I’m stumped as to what to tell any young, marriage minded man or woman. While Devlin focuses rightly on the deleterious effects of feminism on the modern woman and marriage, he is able to summon some moving memories of his female relations and acquaintances. This is where I’m stuck. The older women in my family are/were nothing like what exists on the marriage market today. There’s the usual cognitive dissonance between things remembered and things seen in this moment.
He talks about his granny, who raised 9 kids and worked tirelessly out of love, finding in this life true meaning and purpose. In another essay, he talks about the elderly woman who fed her aged husband, a WW II vet, every day in a nursing home. Scratch a misogynist, find a sensitive romantic.
Women would like to go back to being women. Men as the author observes want marriage, family and children, more so than contemporary women.
It’s such a crapshoot though and men can only lose exponentially whereas women have relatively safer crash couches to fall back on. I think marriage can only work if there’s a private support system in place, based on higher ideals and mutual support.
One of C-C’s recent articles by Juleigh Howard-Hobson suggests a radical, healthy lifestyle. I think she and those who are pursuing her path will find success. I’ve really enjoyed her pieces.
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