Modern cities - creations of humanity's selfishness

Joel Kotkin writes about the sex recession and, in doing so, provides this striking statistic:

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, this had expanding to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry.

Kotkin points to technology and a millennial generation who find personal interaction troubling or stressful ("...a survey of American millennials found 65 percent don’t feel comfortable engaging with someone face-to-face, and 80 percent prefer conversing digitally...").

Some of the outcomes from this de-sexed society are probably a good thing - fewer teenage pregnancies, for example - but it does give us another example of the prurience of modern youth culture, a puritanism embraced with enthusiasm by a generation of helicopter mums and judgemental fussbuckets.

The main reason, however, probably isn't culture change but rather the consequences of economic circumstances. For sure, employers like kidults - university educated millennial sorts who probably aren't going to do anything inconvenient like settling down to have a family - but the circumstance of people's lives also matters - people can't afford the risks of sex (also known as children). Here's Kotkin again:

High property prices and rents associated with dense cities correlate closely with low marriage and fertility rates. The places where child-bearing has plunged towards historic lows, are generally those with the highest house costs — including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

This utilitarian urban culture represents, as I've said before, a dead end for humanity. Cities and the life of dense urban civilisation is anti-child. Such places are designed to entertain young adults (a definition now extending to adults into their 40s) rather than the old-fashioned purpose of our presence on the planet - having a family. The environmental argument about population provides cover for such indulgence - having a family is portrayed as more selfish than living an essentially unattached life in one of civilisation's urban wonderlands.

Perhaps, in thinking about our society, we'll one day wake up and realise that two generations of anti-family public policies did not represent a liberation but, instead, were a period of spectacular selfishness on behalf of humanity.

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Some more good stuff for your reading lists

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Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

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"Bad sexual ettiquette" - George Galloway is becoming an embarrassment to Bradford

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OK, George Galloway is a contravertialist, ever willing to say the unsayable, to defend the undefendable and to march fearlessly into the corridors of power shooting from the hip. But this might just tell us rather more about George, and it ain't good:

I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them.

It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, "do you mind if I do it again?". It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning. . .

I don't adhere to the tedious "all men are rapists" argument heard too often from feminist agitators but it does seem to me that having "another insertion" without the woman's agreement is rape. George Galloway is entitled to take the view that the women in the Assange case weren't assaulted (although we'd know the answer to this if the dear old chap would pop over to Sweden for his trial) but to describe penetrative sex without the woman's consent as anything other than rape is quite appalling.

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Pondering on power and the politics of sex

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Sex and the politics of sex have been at the forefront of the news in recent days. From the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on an accusation of rape in New York through Nadine Dorries’ crass assertions about ‘sex abuse’ to Ken Clarke’s bumbling, clumsy attempt to explain that not all rape case are the same. As ever we must be struck by the nature of the response to these events – from attempts to argue that Strauss-Kahn is somehow the victim of a ‘set up’ to a tirade of ad hominem attacks on the characters of the two sinning Tory MPs.

In all this debate – setting aside the liberal lefts tendency to skate over the sins of its favoured sons in these matters – we get a glimpse of the real discussion we need to have, a discussion that doesn’t characterise someone who argues against sexual liberation as some form of evil misogynist. Nor for that matter a debate that describes the advocate of sexual freedom as some form of corrupt libertine. The real discussion – the politics of sex – is far more important than the froth and bother about Nadine Dorries. Indeed, by allowing Nadine to promote her view while the contrary view is drowned out by bile and vituperation does the cause of freedom no good at all.

The politics of sex is further characterised by the difference between our personal attitude and that we promote in political debate – I have no doubt that there are many bleeding heart liberal men who urge abstinence on their daughters while taking a more laissez-faire attitude – “don’t do anything daft” – to the sexual education of their sons. And good Christian men and women have often struggled with balancing a public commitment to Biblical teachings on sex with their own personal thoughts and feelings - and with the sexual choices of their children. The debate about sex is a tangle of conflicts between personal and private, liberal and controlling – all wrapped about with a preference in debating these issues to leap to judgment, to condemn and (that word so loved of the left) to demonise.

However, in all this there is (for me at least) one central theme – an area of profound significance that plays out in everything from tales of seduction through to the ghastliness of rape. This is that the exploitation of power to get sex is wrong – whether it be the great French intellectual or mighty businessman using his position to coax another into sex or a seventeen-year-old boy insisting on sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. And here I know that Nadine Dorries and those who seem to hate her so much agree – the disagreement is in how we respond, in terms of public policy, to the problem of men (and it is mostly men) using their strength and power to get sex.

For some the response is that openness, honesty and information will act to protect those most vulnerable – with, of course, appropriate support for victims and education for perpetrators (or possible perpetrators). Others see this approach – in all its non-judging, touchy-feeliness – as failing the interests of the weak. These argue for hellfire, for punishment and for condemnation – sex as sin (or as sin in some circumstances), if you will.

Through all this there is a path – a balance between teaching young people what is right, telling them that using power, strength or position to get sex is wrong and allowing them the ability to explore and understand sexuality with all its stresses, angst and wonder. I do not feel those charged with this difficult task are helped by the way in which we are conducting our debate, the politics of sex has become puerile, accusatory and lacks the essential characteristic of good debate – actually listening and considering the other side’s argument.

I am a ‘don’t know’, a doubter in all this debate – I can see the strength in the arguments for sex education having a moral context and worry about non-judgemental approaches as they seem value-free. But which moral context do we choose? Our culture has largely rejected the strictness of many religious codes – we no longer condemn homosexuality, we are tolerating of extra-marital sex and mostly accept that what goes on between consenting adults in private is their business (unless, of course, it involves smoking). However, we still want values to be attached to how we learn about sex – the importance of relationships, the purpose of commitment and the social hazards of promiscuity. In end I suspect that the task of teachers in this tricky area is to provide children with the tools that enable moral choice, that help protect from abuse and that promote respect for others.

Finally, in all this debate, I wonder whether – if the allegations are true – we should worry more about our reaction to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s case than about Ken Clark’s bumbling confusion or Nadine Dorries’ proposals for teaching girls sexual abstention. Indeed, it is the excusing of sexual aggression in powerful men that gives the lie to sexual ‘liberation’. And if we are to debate the issues of rape it is this aggression and the message it sends to young men that should be concerning us rather than screaming at each other for cheap political advantage.

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