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Comment by _xnmw | Hacker News Reader

Scarcity increases value. We often artificially enforce the scarcity of things in order to preserve its value. That's the reason why patents, IP and copyrights exists, for example. "Marriage" and "fidelity" are a means of artificially enforcing scarcity on sex, in order to increase the value and likelihood of partners bonding for life, which in turn improves the child-rearing situation for society, as single parents fare worse in general. "Marriage", according to anthropologists, is a universal human construct found in all human societies, ancient and modern, and many aim for it as the "ideal" or "perfect" human condition especially in old age. Hence "prudeness" is a well-founded desire to continue enforcing the scarcity of sex to increase its value and enjoyment, not to decrease it.

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I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit. Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom.

I think there is also another mechanism at work in why many modern societies seem at the same time oversexualized and prude: By raising and restricting sexual desire you end up with some very effective carrots and sticks to control behaviour: You can sell the promise of sexual fulfillment directly (porn), you can link it to completely unrelated products through advertising (scantily-clad women that advertise cars, mattresses or mortgage contracts). You can also use it as a stick by either presenting unrealistic beauty standards ("You look unattractive! What is wrong with you?! Buy product X to fix that!") or by declaring the very desire that was raised before as immoral and therefore shaming people into compliance.

> I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit.

Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years. But after just two generations of “progressive literature” western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

Meanwhile, literature piles up about the “epidemic of loneliness” and deterioration in quality of life since the 1960s. Suicides increase, etc. Many people seem unhappy. They eagerly blame anything we changed in the areas of economic or welfare policy. We need to go back to 1960s top tax rates! But the “progressive literature” is supposed to be beyond question. All that had to be a good idea. It couldn’t be that any of those changes was misguided overreach in the same way as trickle down economics or financial deregulation.

> Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years.

Civilisation also had wars and famines for thousands of years to manage population and "cull off the weak". Do you want to go back to that?

> western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

And yet the same people who argue like that are also usually worried about overpopulation of the planet.

> those changes

What do you mean by that? Allowing people to be in charge of their own sexuality?

It has also become almost prohibitively expensive to raise children (in the US).

Was it not always prohibitively expensive to raise children? Seems to me that the main thing that has changed is the invention of (modern) contraception, making not having children but still having sex an option in a way that it wasn't in the past.

I don't get it. You're saying now that without no-fault divorces, free love, nudity in movies etc, we would have more war and famine?

I have never understood how people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it? Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

And decades of progressive values in action that argue why it is not in fact bullshit.

>Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom

What does that mean?

If you make sex too difficult to attain you get frustrated people who give up and stop participanting and become vulnerable to things like the propaganda of certain ideological cults that provide promises of controlling women, for example.

Monogamy should actually decrease sexual scarcity. There are a lot of sexual topologies out there, but let's compare two historically common ones: monogamy and polygamy.

Boys and girls are born in equal proportion, and monogamy pairs them up. If nobody died before old age and everyone were adequately paired up, monogamy would mean that every couple that wants sex could have it, a certain shade of zero scarcity.

Historically, polygamy meant that attractive or powerful men could have multiple wives. So again, given our sexes' equal birth rates and assuming nobody died before old age, a polygamous society must leave some men without a committed partner for sex.

Monogamy increases sexual scarcity for the highest value males, while decreasing it for almost everyone else. I would argue that's actually an ideal situation for everyone, a progressive tax.

> "Marriage", according to anthropologists ....

There is a very interesting discussion about that in "Sex at dawn". Shortly put, anthropologists are very biased, and they will use their data selectively.

Today, there are people that live wholesome lives with multiple consensual sexual partners, search for polyamory.

IMHO, there simply is a lot of residual prejudice coming down from old religious dogma.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if human sexuality adapted flexibly to the social environment. Both can be true. Marriage might be a natural and ubiquitous response to the pressures of living in settled relatively highly communities, while flexible relationships might be common in societies of small loosely associated nomadic groups.

Show me evidence of this. Blaming all the anthropologists for being prudes and suppressing the data that everybody wants to hear and that would make them famous is just not even remotely believable.

I suspect that it was the advent of agriculture that led to monogamy as we know it. Now that almost nobody works in agriculture any more we are reverting to the relationship styles we evolved with.

>Today, there are people that live wholesome lives with multiple consensual sexual partners, search for polyamory.

"Wholesome" as self-reported in their merry period.

And getting that to work as random pockets of individuals here and there is different as having it be a stable basis for society.

For good and evil prejudice is a stabilizing factor in a complex society.

Prejudice is inertia. It muffles your decisions. It can be stabilizing and it can drive you off a cliff even though you're flooring the breaks. A truly stable system is flexible and always has inertia under control.

It is indeed the best argument for conservative social values.

But we also have xhamster, xvideos, pornhub and so much more. It doesn't make sense to have fake, sterilized characters in one show, and then have fake sexualized characters in another if you care about the effects on society.

At that point it makes more sense to show how sex can be integrated healthily into a normal human life - neither fucking step-sis because she is stuck in a washing machine nor being superbuff and not even looking a women seems the ideal for society.

Scarcity mindset, fear, adds undue pressure onto natural mechanisms - adding the whole pressure of the Disney Princess story to find your "one true love;" which eventually you do but that won't be until you've figured out yourself, the more you've figured out yourself, the better you'll match with someone and grow old together.

Disease management.

Think about AIDS of other STDs without modern medicine.

Forcing one partner for life is way to deal with it.

Other customs involving the “unclean” are equivalent to days social distancing.

> "Marriage", according to anthropologists, is a universal human construct found in all human societies, ancient and modern

I'd be wary of an antropologist claiming knowledge of all human societies, ancient and modern.

From written record. We know for sure, since Old Egypt/bronze era, marriage was almost universal.

Heck, we even have tablets of workers that built the pyramid that were writing about how they think they made a mistake marrying their wife, as she is miserable and complains all the time, and suspicion of her cheating.

It is a story that could have been written today, but it was written 4800 years ago

There's a decent argument that marriage came about as a consequence of agriculture, where paternity suddenly mattered when it came to inheriting property. Of course, this predates writing, making it hard to definitively prove one way or another.

It's possible, but pair bonding is also common in other species such as Puffins where inheriting property is unlikely to be a factor.

I'm not implying you don't find marriage in ancient times that resembles modern marriage. I'm pointing out the bold generalizations.

> We know for sure, since Old Egypt/bronze era, marriage was almost universal.

For sure almost. Earth's experienced a larger number and variety of cultures than some people give it credit for. Let's not make generalizations about human nature based on someone else's generalizations about human past. Noone owes a justification for acting the way they do. When you introduce justifications, you enter the realms of dogma.

Not universally-true. Contrived scarcity is bullshit and reduces enjoyment for me.

I don't subscribe to monogamy or closed relationships. Regularlly, I'm with 3 bi/pan females who would all eagerly have my children whenever I wanted. They sleep around primarily with women, as do I. It's way more enjoyable than the "waiting until marriage"-types and virgins who I actively avoid because they're dull.

Yikes. Is this 2004-era Tucker Max speaking?

Civilization cannot exist without promoted monogamy.

Q. Do you believe polygamy in the Middle East hurts women or men more?

A. Men. Young, poor, men. You have tens of thousands of young, poor men with zero prospects of having a mate. That translates into a thousand suicide bombers. To a man that desperate, that 60-odd virgin fantasy starts to hold far more meaning.

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