"Gay marriage implies sexual exclusivity. There are monogamous gay men, and they are the ones who benefit from legalized gay marriage."
Prominent gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan is openly not monogamous, and himself has AIDS. He's openly anti-condom as well.
His view seems to be the norm. Most married gays are not monogamous.
To us straights, monogamy and marriage are synonymous. If it's not monogamous, it's not a marriage. Though people cheat, it's considered a breach of contract, not part of the arrangement.
There was a feeling that gay marriage would normalize gay relationships, but instead I think it prompts making straight relationships more gay.
"I don’t think that we should either shame or praise promiscuity in women. But we should have a norm to criticize promiscuity in males, either heterosexual or homosexual."
Augustus tried to shame bachelors too. It's difficult to control male promiscuity because male promiscuity is attractive to women. If you tried to shame a man for bedding a bunch of women, it would just help him bed more.
If you want to control sexuality, you control the females. That's the natural choke point on sexual activity. And female promiscuity is not attractive to males.
There is a strange reluctance to offer negative criticism to women. If you're not willing to slut shame, you're not willing to get serious about promiscuity.
What we should be doing is investing in research to find the virus that likely causes neural damage at a young age and leads to homosexual males. Which we could then probably vaccinate against.
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." - Douglas Adams
That view seems to be seriously single-minded, and makes its sound like the 1950s were some sort of aberration. As a species we've condemned open homosexuality (while tolerating it in specific circumstances), tolerated promiscuous heterosexual men, and condemned promiscuous heterosexual women for hundreds of years.
Heterosexual female promiscuity, especially in the form of legitimized serial monogamy, is far more damaging to overall social relations than male promiscuity. The number of men who desire to be promiscuous is large (as evidenced by observation of straights, gays, and lesbians) but necessarily limited by both personal resources and the number of women willing to engage in such relationships. Conditioning sexual relations on the formation of a stable monogamous relationship by severe social sanctions on promiscuous heterosexual women simultaneously rewards men who devote their resources to that relationship while reducing the pool of women willing to engage with promiscuous heterosexual men. Trying to do it the other way around to appear egalitarian between hetrosexual and homosexual men is all stick and no carrot. Few if any heterosexual men will transition to homosexuality to take advantage of promiscuity but virtually every heterosexual man will take advantage of heterosexual female promiscuity if offered. The impact of homosexual promiscuity is necessarily limited.
I think the reason shaming women for promiscuity developed as a social norm was to stem the tide of male promiscuity indirectly. Since male sex drive is dramatically higher than female sex drive (at least in terms of desire for many novel partners), a widespread norm against women sleeping with multiple partners may be needed to cut the male tendency off at the knees.
Shaming women for promiscuity is aimed more at minimizing doubts about paternity in children, thus procuring higher levels of paternal investment in them.
What's more, and as in Perry's book (also see Robert Frank), women have an interest in stopping the degenerative competition and Red Queen's race to the bottom in terms of engaging in behaviors useful for sexually attracting high value men.
Sexual 'Liberation' (more precisely, the road to transvaluation) knocked down what was not quite a Chesterton's Fence in terms of its use being unknown or thought obsolete, but a kind of fence which doesn't yet have a name, for which people thought they knew the use as one not helping them, but then later discovered themselves to be mistaken, much to their own misfortune.
The strength of this particular interest, however, varies greatly according to a woman's life circumstances and sexual market value. Partly by historical happenstance, liberation happened to coincide with the proportion of attractive and available young women rising to a peak from which it has continuously and substantially declined. More of today's women are different and want a different social equilibrium, but it's easier to tear down a fence than to build one, and the damage is done.
I see little reason to believe differential attitudes toward promiscuity are primarily social. It seems clearly biological to me: a given person’s genes, in premodern times, were negatively affected by one’s daughter’s/wife’s/sister’s promiscuity, and positively affected by their son’s/brother’s promiscuity (though not husband’s).
It’s not - at least primarily - about society controlling sexuality or whatever. It’s your own selfish genes maximizing their chances. So most men are fine with unrelated women they want to sleep with being promiscuous but jealously guard their wives’/daughter’s’ sexuality, and are undisturbed by their sons’ promiscuity but much disturbed by the men courting their daughters.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it nonetheless. I think it's a simple case of morality mapping onto biology, or, to put it another way, software harmonizing with firmware. As you acknowledge in your comment, men have a far more robust sex drive and we place a far higher premium on mate novelty. This is, of course, completely consistent with being the sex that can produce a virtually unlimited number of gametes. Women don't experience the same biological incentive toward promiscuity, their reproductive capacity and childrearing responsibilities (biological) don't support it.
If I were to add an additional factor, I'd be tempted to consider social power dynamics, particularly the female tendency to engage in social/reputational conflict vs. the male tendency toward physical conflict (a subject explored often and articulately in this very space). Slut shaming, as it were, already biologically incentivized, offers even greater utility when used as a form of social violence. The "women in the crowd," in all their jealously, were as hostile to Hester Prynne as anyone. Through this lens, it's easy to see how promiscuity became so potent a taboo among the sex that uses taboos as men use fists.
For what it's worth I happen to disagree quite strongly with the characterizions of female sex drive in this and other comments, though that is a bigger conversation which, given the topic, stands a good chance of attracting unwanted attention and sending the conversational reactor into meltdown.
Note that I am not taking the leftist black slate / socially constructed / infinitely malleable by culture stance by any means. I'm saying that even the fixed biological sources of the tendencies are not as they are usually perceived and accepted to be. This is something one can see on one's own with close observations and some rigorous reflection, but the fact that many ancient and more recent authors (just look at Shakespeare) wrote as if they thought about this matter quite differently than is common today should be sufficient to tip one off that one should more closely examine one's assumptions and question the received conventional wisdom on the subject.
I appreciate the respectful disagreement and can assure that I, myself, would not contribute to any potential meltdown. That said, considering discretion and valor and whatnot, I'll simply say that I welcome the opportunity to further explore this subject with you down the road. Cheers!
Thanks, and I'm not worried about you. All I can say is that in decades now of observing and participating in online conversations on the topic, no matter how civil and intellectually rigorous everyone is trying to be, unless the conversation is private and confined to an exceptionally high quality group of people, there is no other subject - not even race! - more likely to go completely off the rails than this one. Of course that makes perfect sense given the direct relationship to sexual reproduction upon the details of which the survival and direction of evolution of our species depend and which cannot but instinctively arouse the strongest passions that will practically always trump any restraints attempted by the intellect and rational faculty.
To borrow from Voltaire and Hume, if you want to know for which topics reason is most slave to passion, go on the internet and see what subjects always quickly make people go nuts and lose at least 45 IQ points.
At any rate, I certainly wouldn't feel within my rights to trigger such a possibility if a blog owner had not already and expressly opened the door.
"69% having had at least 10, and 54% having had 20 or more."
Twenty seems quite low given what we hear. One recent gay twitter user reported more than 40 sexual partners just in one week, whereafter he found he had monkeypox. I seem to recall Larry Kramer reported more than 200 with some regret, since that was during the AIDS era, but of course there were also some documented with 10x that number of partners back then.
With the bath houses, "circuit parties", grindr, festivals, pride month, and so on of Current Day, I'm guessing it's very, very easy to build up your body count ("unique visitors"?) as a gay man.
I'd prefer a norm targeted at government officials responsible for controlling communicable diseases. I can't agree with shaming, however. It's not enough. Even prison may fall short of the mark. Perhaps we could rub some poxed pus in their eyes should case numbers get into the 5 digits. Now that's motivating.
Most social norms have some kind of evolutionary basis. Don't eat pork became a thing because eating pork would make people sick. Shaming promiscuity became a thing because promiscuity could make you sick. Now, I don't see any reason to shame promiscuity any more than I reason to avoid eating pork. If I do eat it, I'm going to cook it properly.
Likewise, if you're going to be promiscuous, OK, fine. What does deserve shame, disapprobation, and probably prosecution is knowingly exposing people to a communicable disease without their consent.
That's what I find strange about the monkeypox thing. It's not like HIV where it silently lies in wait for years to kill you. I think most people, no matter how promiscuous, would like to avoid getting such a disease. If I was flirting with a girl and suddenly saw she had a bunch of weird lesions, I'd run the other way. And no matter how different gay guys might be, I have to think the vast majority would do the same.
YES to "shame, disapprobation, and probably prosecution [in] knowingly exposing people to a communicable disease without their consent."
It should be illegal to infect others with an STD w/o a written (or verbal recording?) consent. Contact tracing backwards with prosecution and increasing fines, punishing those irresponsible (unlucky?) having sex while being infected.
Also need lots more low cost testing.
All STDs, not just monkeypox & AIDs.
Plus genetic tracking of the disease, as well as the mutations of it. I'm wondering if small mutations are enough to identify who did the infecting. If one was infected by having sex among a group who include two or more who are infected, would the pox genes identify the one who infected the victim?
Total fertility rate (TFR) in the US is 1.6 and dropping. A bare minimum of 2.1 is required for a civilization to survive. And the US is far from the worst. (In South Korea TFR is less than 1.0.) Norms surrounding sexual relations are not the only reason for this unprecedented collapse but they undoubtedly contribute, how much we don’t know. Since we refuse to recognize this issue I see no chance that we will reverse it. Whatever replaces western civilization will no doubt marvel at our blindness.
Are you suggesting Japan and South Korea are famously promiscuous societies? Or China? I think focusing on sexual norms may be putting the cart before the horse here.
I'm skeptical of such views myself. "Civilization" hasn't been around for very long at all in the grand scheme of things. We really don't have a clue about what's necessary for it to survive.
Beyond that, I'm skeptical that sexual norms have much to do with the decline in fertility, especially compared to the lots of big, obvious reasons out there. Just to be contrarian, give me a good example as to why encouraging promiscuity isn't an evolutionary response to the reduced desire for fertility? That is, a marginal increase in promiscuity actually acts to increase fertility, somewhat offsetting the other factors driving it down.
This article points out he wants his two surrogate mothered sons to NOT be told the truth about Furnish's promiscuity.
It's about "changing expectations about marriage: monogamy and loving commitment no longer involve fidelity. [The] married couple are in a loving, committed relationship. However, a gay marriage by no means implies sexual exclusivity."
I would favor legally allowing "open marriages", legally different from "marriage", with the latter explicitly stating they are monogamous. So that infidelity becomes a (marriage) contractual violation.
Heinlein, Rand, many (most?) Libertarians, maybe Rationalists, decry monogamy. I used to support "responsible promiscuity". It was a mistake for me, and usually also for those I had relations with. I now oppose it.
Between two norms: "promiscuity OK", or "No sex outside of marriage", the latter is socially optimal.
Especially for poor people - and norms which are optimal for the poor and/or low IQ folk are optimal for all society. High IQ folk can adjust more easily to whatever norms there are, with less bad results.
YES to more, far more, slut shaming. Kids with loving mothers who are also sluts are victims, and have worse life results (on avg.).
"I don’t think that we should either shame or praise promiscuity in women. But we should have a norm to criticize promiscuity in males, either heterosexual or homosexual. We should be willing to discourage behavior that helps to spread STDs."
I don't see how the last sentence jives with the first. Doesn't promiscuity in women enable more promiscuity in men, and thus enable the spread of STDs? Why not discourage promiscuity in general?
Mother Nature doesn't care about equal protection or anti-discrimination. Different kinds of circumstances and behaviors pose different risks to the public, and to avoid undue over-restriction of behavior it helps when norms are 'narrowly tailored' (to borrow the legal term of art) to deter only the particular kinds of behaviors that pose the biggest risks. You want to maximize the rate of marginal transformation from restrictions into public benefits, to get as much bang for the buck as possible.
Of course it's all kind of complicated because there are all kinds of different risky behaviors out there which if considered in isolation would need differently tailored norms, but you can't ask normal people (responsible, after all, for enforcing informal social rules) to keep the deep fractal case law of rules, exceptions, exceptions to the exceptions, etc. straight in their heads. So some degree of oversimplification is inevitable and in terms of communicating and inculcating a few strong and reflexive aversions, and that will inescapably result in some unavoidable unfairness and injustice which enlightened and compassionate leaders can only try to minimize and mitigate by means of discretion, secret tolerance, willful blindness, and pubic hypocrisies, but only to the point of not rocking the boat on the social equilibrium and the maintenance of control over the targeted risks.
The thing is, for the particular risk discussed in the OP, "male promiscuity" does not as all capture the particular behaviors that are the source of danger, nor does it qualify as being narrowly tailored. It is more like "collective punishment" when fingering the culprits with more precision and specificity is ideologically forbidden and personally costly. Furthermore, traditional societies already went through the long evolutionary process of discovering cultural norms of the type I described above and that were well adapted to dealing with the whole set of risks and behaviors to include control of communicable disease. Not just culture of course, since, when dealing with communicable disease, we can now go back so far that we should expect at least some relatively common and biologically hardwired psychological aversions to have established themselves on a genetic basis. While these would still be malleable by culture, the baseline is not neutral and if one is working against it one is fighting an uphill battle. By their very nature such instinctive aversions would also be 'oversimplified' if one tried to translate these pre-verbal impulse patterns into language and distill them into 'normative rules'.
And it's worth pointing out that the common aversive and normative adaptations of both biology and cultures - for most of the history of most civilizations for which densities and interactions rose to the point where socially communicable diseases could prove catastrophic - were precisely in line with the one thing it is suggested we not do, and indeed, are not doing in practice, it very much seems to our severe and alarming detriment.
"Mother Nature doesn't care about equal protection or anti-discrimination. Different kinds of circumstances and behaviors pose different risks to the public, and to avoid undue over-restriction of behavior it helps when norms are 'narrowly tailored' (to borrow the legal term of art) to deter only the particular kinds of behaviors that pose the biggest risks. "
Yeah, Mother Nature may not care, but feminists do, and we've got a few of those around these days, as you probably noticed. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, sometimes making concessions to perceptions of fairness, neutrality, and a sense of shared sacrifice might be worthwhile.
Certainly right. However, one also had to keep in mind that such concessions are hardly costless and sometimes exact a toll so heavy so as to make such compromises counterproductive instead of expedient. For any attempt to solve a practical problem, to make concessions to political and sentimental considerations that will by their very nature work at cross purposes to one's goals is to play with fire.
This sort of depends on who the "we" is. PH messaging should certainly not shy away from recommending non-promiscuous sex for men at this stage (hopefully the only stage) of Monkeypox. Generally monogamous long term relationships is a good norm the point is how much if any "penalty" should attach to violating the norm.
I think LOTS of penalty would be good, for society, but is so politically unpopular that any politician suggesting a "bad behavior penalty" would lose the election.
I'd propose higher carrots, tax credits, for good behavior. More gov't pork, social meddling, unintended consequences (tho also intended).
Specific programs to increase the gov't help to married folks who have kids, like child tax credits, will likely be among the least wasteful ways of spending gov't money.
"Gay marriage implies sexual exclusivity. There are monogamous gay men, and they are the ones who benefit from legalized gay marriage."
Prominent gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan is openly not monogamous, and himself has AIDS. He's openly anti-condom as well.
His view seems to be the norm. Most married gays are not monogamous.
To us straights, monogamy and marriage are synonymous. If it's not monogamous, it's not a marriage. Though people cheat, it's considered a breach of contract, not part of the arrangement.
There was a feeling that gay marriage would normalize gay relationships, but instead I think it prompts making straight relationships more gay.
"I don’t think that we should either shame or praise promiscuity in women. But we should have a norm to criticize promiscuity in males, either heterosexual or homosexual."
Augustus tried to shame bachelors too. It's difficult to control male promiscuity because male promiscuity is attractive to women. If you tried to shame a man for bedding a bunch of women, it would just help him bed more.
If you want to control sexuality, you control the females. That's the natural choke point on sexual activity. And female promiscuity is not attractive to males.
There is a strange reluctance to offer negative criticism to women. If you're not willing to slut shame, you're not willing to get serious about promiscuity.
What we should be doing is investing in research to find the virus that likely causes neural damage at a young age and leads to homosexual males. Which we could then probably vaccinate against.
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/greg-cochrans-gay-germ-hypothesis-an-exercise-in-the-power-of-germs/
From a bang for the buck perspective, likely the lowest of hanging fruits in the entire medical field.
A key that opens any lock is a great key. A lock opened by any key is a terrible lock.
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." - Douglas Adams
That view seems to be seriously single-minded, and makes its sound like the 1950s were some sort of aberration. As a species we've condemned open homosexuality (while tolerating it in specific circumstances), tolerated promiscuous heterosexual men, and condemned promiscuous heterosexual women for hundreds of years.
Heterosexual female promiscuity, especially in the form of legitimized serial monogamy, is far more damaging to overall social relations than male promiscuity. The number of men who desire to be promiscuous is large (as evidenced by observation of straights, gays, and lesbians) but necessarily limited by both personal resources and the number of women willing to engage in such relationships. Conditioning sexual relations on the formation of a stable monogamous relationship by severe social sanctions on promiscuous heterosexual women simultaneously rewards men who devote their resources to that relationship while reducing the pool of women willing to engage with promiscuous heterosexual men. Trying to do it the other way around to appear egalitarian between hetrosexual and homosexual men is all stick and no carrot. Few if any heterosexual men will transition to homosexuality to take advantage of promiscuity but virtually every heterosexual man will take advantage of heterosexual female promiscuity if offered. The impact of homosexual promiscuity is necessarily limited.
I think the reason shaming women for promiscuity developed as a social norm was to stem the tide of male promiscuity indirectly. Since male sex drive is dramatically higher than female sex drive (at least in terms of desire for many novel partners), a widespread norm against women sleeping with multiple partners may be needed to cut the male tendency off at the knees.
Shaming women for promiscuity is aimed more at minimizing doubts about paternity in children, thus procuring higher levels of paternal investment in them.
What's more, and as in Perry's book (also see Robert Frank), women have an interest in stopping the degenerative competition and Red Queen's race to the bottom in terms of engaging in behaviors useful for sexually attracting high value men.
Sexual 'Liberation' (more precisely, the road to transvaluation) knocked down what was not quite a Chesterton's Fence in terms of its use being unknown or thought obsolete, but a kind of fence which doesn't yet have a name, for which people thought they knew the use as one not helping them, but then later discovered themselves to be mistaken, much to their own misfortune.
The strength of this particular interest, however, varies greatly according to a woman's life circumstances and sexual market value. Partly by historical happenstance, liberation happened to coincide with the proportion of attractive and available young women rising to a peak from which it has continuously and substantially declined. More of today's women are different and want a different social equilibrium, but it's easier to tear down a fence than to build one, and the damage is done.
Shaming a man for being promiscuous is a great way to get him laid.
Trying to control promiscuity through men is like trying to defend the Steppe from the Huns.
Women are the Thermopylae of sexuality. If your going to make your stand you make it there.
I see little reason to believe differential attitudes toward promiscuity are primarily social. It seems clearly biological to me: a given person’s genes, in premodern times, were negatively affected by one’s daughter’s/wife’s/sister’s promiscuity, and positively affected by their son’s/brother’s promiscuity (though not husband’s).
It’s not - at least primarily - about society controlling sexuality or whatever. It’s your own selfish genes maximizing their chances. So most men are fine with unrelated women they want to sleep with being promiscuous but jealously guard their wives’/daughter’s’ sexuality, and are undisturbed by their sons’ promiscuity but much disturbed by the men courting their daughters.
It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it nonetheless. I think it's a simple case of morality mapping onto biology, or, to put it another way, software harmonizing with firmware. As you acknowledge in your comment, men have a far more robust sex drive and we place a far higher premium on mate novelty. This is, of course, completely consistent with being the sex that can produce a virtually unlimited number of gametes. Women don't experience the same biological incentive toward promiscuity, their reproductive capacity and childrearing responsibilities (biological) don't support it.
If I were to add an additional factor, I'd be tempted to consider social power dynamics, particularly the female tendency to engage in social/reputational conflict vs. the male tendency toward physical conflict (a subject explored often and articulately in this very space). Slut shaming, as it were, already biologically incentivized, offers even greater utility when used as a form of social violence. The "women in the crowd," in all their jealously, were as hostile to Hester Prynne as anyone. Through this lens, it's easy to see how promiscuity became so potent a taboo among the sex that uses taboos as men use fists.
For what it's worth I happen to disagree quite strongly with the characterizions of female sex drive in this and other comments, though that is a bigger conversation which, given the topic, stands a good chance of attracting unwanted attention and sending the conversational reactor into meltdown.
Note that I am not taking the leftist black slate / socially constructed / infinitely malleable by culture stance by any means. I'm saying that even the fixed biological sources of the tendencies are not as they are usually perceived and accepted to be. This is something one can see on one's own with close observations and some rigorous reflection, but the fact that many ancient and more recent authors (just look at Shakespeare) wrote as if they thought about this matter quite differently than is common today should be sufficient to tip one off that one should more closely examine one's assumptions and question the received conventional wisdom on the subject.
I appreciate the respectful disagreement and can assure that I, myself, would not contribute to any potential meltdown. That said, considering discretion and valor and whatnot, I'll simply say that I welcome the opportunity to further explore this subject with you down the road. Cheers!
Thanks, and I'm not worried about you. All I can say is that in decades now of observing and participating in online conversations on the topic, no matter how civil and intellectually rigorous everyone is trying to be, unless the conversation is private and confined to an exceptionally high quality group of people, there is no other subject - not even race! - more likely to go completely off the rails than this one. Of course that makes perfect sense given the direct relationship to sexual reproduction upon the details of which the survival and direction of evolution of our species depend and which cannot but instinctively arouse the strongest passions that will practically always trump any restraints attempted by the intellect and rational faculty.
To borrow from Voltaire and Hume, if you want to know for which topics reason is most slave to passion, go on the internet and see what subjects always quickly make people go nuts and lose at least 45 IQ points.
At any rate, I certainly wouldn't feel within my rights to trigger such a possibility if a blog owner had not already and expressly opened the door.
Hear! Hear!
"69% having had at least 10, and 54% having had 20 or more."
Twenty seems quite low given what we hear. One recent gay twitter user reported more than 40 sexual partners just in one week, whereafter he found he had monkeypox. I seem to recall Larry Kramer reported more than 200 with some regret, since that was during the AIDS era, but of course there were also some documented with 10x that number of partners back then.
With the bath houses, "circuit parties", grindr, festivals, pride month, and so on of Current Day, I'm guessing it's very, very easy to build up your body count ("unique visitors"?) as a gay man.
I'd prefer a norm targeted at government officials responsible for controlling communicable diseases. I can't agree with shaming, however. It's not enough. Even prison may fall short of the mark. Perhaps we could rub some poxed pus in their eyes should case numbers get into the 5 digits. Now that's motivating.
Most social norms have some kind of evolutionary basis. Don't eat pork became a thing because eating pork would make people sick. Shaming promiscuity became a thing because promiscuity could make you sick. Now, I don't see any reason to shame promiscuity any more than I reason to avoid eating pork. If I do eat it, I'm going to cook it properly.
Likewise, if you're going to be promiscuous, OK, fine. What does deserve shame, disapprobation, and probably prosecution is knowingly exposing people to a communicable disease without their consent.
That's what I find strange about the monkeypox thing. It's not like HIV where it silently lies in wait for years to kill you. I think most people, no matter how promiscuous, would like to avoid getting such a disease. If I was flirting with a girl and suddenly saw she had a bunch of weird lesions, I'd run the other way. And no matter how different gay guys might be, I have to think the vast majority would do the same.
YES to "shame, disapprobation, and probably prosecution [in] knowingly exposing people to a communicable disease without their consent."
It should be illegal to infect others with an STD w/o a written (or verbal recording?) consent. Contact tracing backwards with prosecution and increasing fines, punishing those irresponsible (unlucky?) having sex while being infected.
Also need lots more low cost testing.
All STDs, not just monkeypox & AIDs.
Plus genetic tracking of the disease, as well as the mutations of it. I'm wondering if small mutations are enough to identify who did the infecting. If one was infected by having sex among a group who include two or more who are infected, would the pox genes identify the one who infected the victim?
Total fertility rate (TFR) in the US is 1.6 and dropping. A bare minimum of 2.1 is required for a civilization to survive. And the US is far from the worst. (In South Korea TFR is less than 1.0.) Norms surrounding sexual relations are not the only reason for this unprecedented collapse but they undoubtedly contribute, how much we don’t know. Since we refuse to recognize this issue I see no chance that we will reverse it. Whatever replaces western civilization will no doubt marvel at our blindness.
Are you suggesting Japan and South Korea are famously promiscuous societies? Or China? I think focusing on sexual norms may be putting the cart before the horse here.
I'm skeptical of such views myself. "Civilization" hasn't been around for very long at all in the grand scheme of things. We really don't have a clue about what's necessary for it to survive.
Beyond that, I'm skeptical that sexual norms have much to do with the decline in fertility, especially compared to the lots of big, obvious reasons out there. Just to be contrarian, give me a good example as to why encouraging promiscuity isn't an evolutionary response to the reduced desire for fertility? That is, a marginal increase in promiscuity actually acts to increase fertility, somewhat offsetting the other factors driving it down.
You can tag this one “reasons for religion”
"Gay marriage implies sexual exclusivity. " Why? Is this in law, or merely (Christian) custom?
Elton John is not monogamous, is he? Well, he wasn't before, but became so, tho his husband David Furnish wasn't:
https://mercatornet.com/how-elton-john-has-changed-marriage/20592/
This article points out he wants his two surrogate mothered sons to NOT be told the truth about Furnish's promiscuity.
It's about "changing expectations about marriage: monogamy and loving commitment no longer involve fidelity. [The] married couple are in a loving, committed relationship. However, a gay marriage by no means implies sexual exclusivity."
I would favor legally allowing "open marriages", legally different from "marriage", with the latter explicitly stating they are monogamous. So that infidelity becomes a (marriage) contractual violation.
Heinlein, Rand, many (most?) Libertarians, maybe Rationalists, decry monogamy. I used to support "responsible promiscuity". It was a mistake for me, and usually also for those I had relations with. I now oppose it.
Between two norms: "promiscuity OK", or "No sex outside of marriage", the latter is socially optimal.
Especially for poor people - and norms which are optimal for the poor and/or low IQ folk are optimal for all society. High IQ folk can adjust more easily to whatever norms there are, with less bad results.
YES to more, far more, slut shaming. Kids with loving mothers who are also sluts are victims, and have worse life results (on avg.).
"I don’t think that we should either shame or praise promiscuity in women. But we should have a norm to criticize promiscuity in males, either heterosexual or homosexual. We should be willing to discourage behavior that helps to spread STDs."
I don't see how the last sentence jives with the first. Doesn't promiscuity in women enable more promiscuity in men, and thus enable the spread of STDs? Why not discourage promiscuity in general?
Mother Nature doesn't care about equal protection or anti-discrimination. Different kinds of circumstances and behaviors pose different risks to the public, and to avoid undue over-restriction of behavior it helps when norms are 'narrowly tailored' (to borrow the legal term of art) to deter only the particular kinds of behaviors that pose the biggest risks. You want to maximize the rate of marginal transformation from restrictions into public benefits, to get as much bang for the buck as possible.
Of course it's all kind of complicated because there are all kinds of different risky behaviors out there which if considered in isolation would need differently tailored norms, but you can't ask normal people (responsible, after all, for enforcing informal social rules) to keep the deep fractal case law of rules, exceptions, exceptions to the exceptions, etc. straight in their heads. So some degree of oversimplification is inevitable and in terms of communicating and inculcating a few strong and reflexive aversions, and that will inescapably result in some unavoidable unfairness and injustice which enlightened and compassionate leaders can only try to minimize and mitigate by means of discretion, secret tolerance, willful blindness, and pubic hypocrisies, but only to the point of not rocking the boat on the social equilibrium and the maintenance of control over the targeted risks.
The thing is, for the particular risk discussed in the OP, "male promiscuity" does not as all capture the particular behaviors that are the source of danger, nor does it qualify as being narrowly tailored. It is more like "collective punishment" when fingering the culprits with more precision and specificity is ideologically forbidden and personally costly. Furthermore, traditional societies already went through the long evolutionary process of discovering cultural norms of the type I described above and that were well adapted to dealing with the whole set of risks and behaviors to include control of communicable disease. Not just culture of course, since, when dealing with communicable disease, we can now go back so far that we should expect at least some relatively common and biologically hardwired psychological aversions to have established themselves on a genetic basis. While these would still be malleable by culture, the baseline is not neutral and if one is working against it one is fighting an uphill battle. By their very nature such instinctive aversions would also be 'oversimplified' if one tried to translate these pre-verbal impulse patterns into language and distill them into 'normative rules'.
And it's worth pointing out that the common aversive and normative adaptations of both biology and cultures - for most of the history of most civilizations for which densities and interactions rose to the point where socially communicable diseases could prove catastrophic - were precisely in line with the one thing it is suggested we not do, and indeed, are not doing in practice, it very much seems to our severe and alarming detriment.
"Mother Nature doesn't care about equal protection or anti-discrimination. Different kinds of circumstances and behaviors pose different risks to the public, and to avoid undue over-restriction of behavior it helps when norms are 'narrowly tailored' (to borrow the legal term of art) to deter only the particular kinds of behaviors that pose the biggest risks. "
Yeah, Mother Nature may not care, but feminists do, and we've got a few of those around these days, as you probably noticed. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, sometimes making concessions to perceptions of fairness, neutrality, and a sense of shared sacrifice might be worthwhile.
Certainly right. However, one also had to keep in mind that such concessions are hardly costless and sometimes exact a toll so heavy so as to make such compromises counterproductive instead of expedient. For any attempt to solve a practical problem, to make concessions to political and sentimental considerations that will by their very nature work at cross purposes to one's goals is to play with fire.
This sort of depends on who the "we" is. PH messaging should certainly not shy away from recommending non-promiscuous sex for men at this stage (hopefully the only stage) of Monkeypox. Generally monogamous long term relationships is a good norm the point is how much if any "penalty" should attach to violating the norm.
I think LOTS of penalty would be good, for society, but is so politically unpopular that any politician suggesting a "bad behavior penalty" would lose the election.
I'd propose higher carrots, tax credits, for good behavior. More gov't pork, social meddling, unintended consequences (tho also intended).
Specific programs to increase the gov't help to married folks who have kids, like child tax credits, will likely be among the least wasteful ways of spending gov't money.