Really need to factor in the availability and normalisation of porn in Gen Z, sure they’re the least Heterosexual, but they’re also the least sexually active too (excluding Alpha obviously). Another thing I’ve been considering is based off the rat utopia experiment that eventually resulted in hyper masculine males and females, as well as hyper feminine males and females, but overall a complete collapse in reproduction, leading to the extinction of colony. Much the same thing is happening now in human populations, and I think it’s going to take a lot more than just cultural encouragement to mitigate the disastrous consequences.
This is just based on a sample size of two guys I've known, but there are men in the straight-but-not-disgusted-by-gay-sex category who really in all instances would prefer to be with a woman, but occasionally have sex with men just because it's so unbelievably easy and cost free. Like all you need for this is just the fact that men are way more horny, and it becomes a fall-back option, especially once you have apps that allow you to just order it up instantly on command. In those cases it's more like they're really horny, right then, and after not getting any takers trying to message women for an hour or two, they can easily turn to messaging a guy and someone will be over sucking him off in 15 minutes for free. Quite literally. If this has exploded among Zoomers that's probably mostly why. That and also maybe some are being paid for it (like WBE indicated he was thinking of doing). This kind of guy is not going to put off forming a family or choose a boyfriend over a girlfriend though...it's just something they do now and then based on an immediate urge.
> However, eventually we learned that it’s a luxury our society cannot afford. Maybe if heterosexual men could offset low gay fertility with their high fertility, we could have still afforded it. But we no longer can.
"Straight men are unable to impregnate women in sufficient numbers, so we must force all men to have bad sex with people they are not attracted to (or worse, don't love) and create offspring to raise with in such a union" is certainly a fascinating position to take. An absolute horrible one, but nevertheless fascinating.
It has always been this way in any society with a long term sustainable above replacement TFR. In our Western society, we tried something different and it failed. I know that's a bitter red pill but it's true.
If 50% men are non-heterosexual, it's way easier to incentivize them to generate 2+ TFR, than to continue incentivizing homosexuality and somehow have the other half to compensate with 4+ TFR. The proof is that this is exactly what was done in the past for most of the history.
Why not turn to sperm donation to offset allegedly increased gay behavior? (Which you dont seem to provide much evidence for, at least in the sense of significantly increases in # of men forgoing hetero relations to be with men)
Yes - sperm/egg donation/surrogacy is an acceptable solution for gay/lesbian couple fertility. Unlike adoption, it produces new humans.
There are minor problems though. A child with gay/lesbian parents won't have proper male & female parental figures in their life. It's a cliche that one gay guy in a gay relationship is usually "the woman", and one lesbian in a relationship is more butch. Even if this is a thing, it's not enough.
Also, there is the chicken-or-egg problem of social homophobia: kids will get bullied for having gay parents until having gay parents becomes "the normal thing to do".
Still, I think that increasing Western fertility is more important than the fact that some kids will be (temporarily) bullied or will need to look for mother/father figures elsewhere. Some children of straight parents also have these problems and manage somehow.
Same-sex attracted men consistently have fewer children, even if you force into them marriages with women against their desires, which is of course completely expected.
If you actually care about fertility, besides the egregious ethics of it all, forcing gay men to reproduce with women is not a sustainable way of producing more children.
I just don't accept a fertility crisis. And I certainly value human freedom and fulfillment much more than some central-planning notion of population maintenance. So, people should do what they want and no government should be encouraging them to be homosexual or not. Something very dark about your overall frame.
Accepting the Western fertility crisis is anti-gay in the long run. After it's fall, the Western civilization will be superseded by more fertile, deeply homophobic civilizations (think of punishing homosexuals by torture or death all over again). Then, it will take decades if not centuries to reinvent a pro-gay society.
Think of ancient Greece & Rome and what came next - the Middle Age Europe.
That's an amusing narrative, but I don't give it much credence. Culture is not static and I don't really accept the idea that civilizations are in competition or "supersede" one another. There's a lot of exchange, mutual evolution, and continuity. In particular, I don't think there are "homophobic" civilizations - there may be homophobic regimes or phases. But plastering whole civilizations is too general and silly. Your own example shows this, unless you are arguing that medieval Europe is/was a different civilization than Rome. One was the descendent of the other.
More to point - and I mis-stated this in my first comment - I don't accept a "fertility crisis" in the first place. Declining fertility isn't a crisis, per se. And i certainly don't accept repression of sexuality in the cause of addressing a fictional crisis.
Don't you think there would be knock-on effects of incentivizing people to marry someone they "should" marry, rather than one they want to? I take your point about gay men not finding straight sex as disgusting as we (straight men) find gay sex disgusting, but I have to imagine they would be much happier being married to a man. Couldn't we just approach the fertility crisis by incentivizing the people who do want kids to have big families, or by investing more in IVF research such that it becomes cheaper and same-sex couples could more easily have biological children? Telling people to do anything with their sexuality other than what they want to (with a consenting adult of course) really rubs me the wrong way.
EDIT: Missed the line, "However, eventually we learned that it’s a luxury our society cannot afford. Maybe if heterosexual men could offset low gay fertility with their high fertility, we could have still afforded it." This obviously opposes my point, but are we sure this is true? It seems to be true at the moment, but if incentives are really as powerful as we think they are, it seems like we could overcome this.
In any sustainable society with above replacement TFR, most people did end up marrying someone that they didn't want to. Low status men married. Ugly women married. In some societies there were arranged marriages. In others, people simply settled. Another option was to invent bullshit copes like "A "normal girl" is better than a fake dumb blonde bimbo" or "A "normal guy" is better than a high status narcissistic psychopath" (of course, it's debatable whether someone who sincerely believes in a bullshit cope marries the person he/she wants or not).
Even in today's liberal individualistic Western society, a lifelong loving marriage is a very rare thing: half of marriages end of divorce, and for many (if not most) marriages that survive, people still end up resenting each other but nevertheless decide to stay together for children, money or status.
Yes, IVF and helping people who want to have big families but i.e. cannot afford them would and should help with fertility. But that's simply just not enough. Currently, TFR in Western countries with lowest fertility is HALF the replacement rate. And it will get far worse. I honestly think that with current incentive structures, Zoomers will have a near-zero TFR. That's why this is an "all hands on deck" situation and we need to double up on all available incentives.
"LQBT is progress": within a decade of homosexual sexual freedom a terrible pandemic was born then spread claiming the lives of tens of millions, with gays in the US knowing they were spreading it but too selfish to stop. Gay sexual attitudes are poison and show why the most successful societies demonstrate restraint
How does 1 in 10 adults in Malaysia "not know" if they are gay or straight?
And what does "mostly straight" even mean?
What the hell does "incidentally" homosexual or heterosexual even mean?
When better questions asking unambiguously about sexuality are used then number non-straights goes down to around 4-5% (at least in the US) and most of the change over time is driven by women identifying as "bi" (these types happen to marry men)
Yes, I think the purpose of these studies is to demonstrate that sexual orientation is a spectrum (and that many people are on it), and using vague questions supports that goal even better than using the Kinsey scale.
I agree that it's convenient to use a binary approach (gay/not gay), but in terms of converting from the spectrum to binary I opt for a permissive approach, not for a restrictive one.
In WBE's post I linked he writes: "If you ever jerked off to something gay, you're gay forever." and I kind of agree with that.
I wrote "It's (still) not OK to be gay", but it's not "It's (still) not OK to be gay, but don't worry because this applies only to the 100% fully undoubtedly gay", it's "It's (still) not OK to be gay, even if you only jerked off to gay stuff once".
I don't see a spectrum at all. You either like something or don't. Is there a "spectrum" for every single possible sexual interest that all of us are on? Is there also a scat fetish spectrum? Why is gay so different? The spectrum is really only straight, gay, or bi and this applies to all sexual interests.
You either have a full blown fetish and can only get off to that thing, you have something like a kink and can get off to that thing but can also enjoy normal sex, or you have no interest in that thing.
The percentage of people primarily attracted to the same sex is much lower than 50%. The idea of "incentivizing" them to enter disastrous sham marriages for the purpose of marginally improving the birthrate is bizarrely out of touch.
The low birth rate has much more to do with straight couples having fewer children than with primarily straight people experimenting with homosexuality.
I mean, for me it was more a long period of feminist socialization resulting in celibacy followed by a fear of getting wiped out in a divorce than any burning desire to have sex with men. It doesn't really bother me if men do.
Of course the USA has both family courts biased against men and a lack of social supports, so you can easily wind up working to support an ex-wife who divorced you for the lulz.
Personally if it really came to it I'd be okay with vetted gay pairings, lesbian and homosexual male friends that bred together.
But you also have to consider that when conditions are right gay men are a massive source of cultural capital, producers - their lack of fertile activity doesn't come from being a loser or dysgenic, it comes from disinterest.
Imagine of 2-10% of the population (the natural fluctuation of strongly kinsey 3+ men) were not denied masculinity, but were also nurtured besides a fatherhood role, to dedicate their prime years and beyond to mastery of their craft, advancing the Nietzschean dialectic, or for the more hard right reading this, refining/raising culture, or for a left winger, championing worldly causes in the name of a more compassionate world.
If society didn't reject and brutalise them so harshly for so long and if masculinity wasn't denied to them (thus triggering a self rejection of their masculine instinct, and yes, obviously some are naturally effeminate), perhaps they wouldn't be attracted to subversive cultural marxism, perhaps their mainstream subculture wouldn't be so wildly decadent.
Love it...but I'm a sucker for a good set of orthogonal axes.
So homophobia is an evolved biological and cultural construct, but it's in equilibrium with homosexuality. So sophisticated individuals should view homosexuality as something that should exist, but needs to be carefully balanced as a social phenomenon. Erasing the homophobic norms is problematic, but so is erasing gay people.
As I tried to convey in the post, the total disgust of gay sex is a sum of default sexual disgust (natural, supported by social construct) and sexual homophobia (social construct). The default disgust part was the only part I was able to find an evolutionary explanation for. Hence, I figured that the sexual homophobia part must be a social construct.
I'd say that homosexuality and homophobia SHOULD be in an equilibrium in any stable, sustainable society. But with high homosexuality and low homophobia, our Western society is as far away from equilibrium as possible. And this is why our marriage rates and fertility are a disaster.
Some interesting points, but I'm just not convinced that we need high fertility. We're on the cusp of an AI revolution which will both drastically raise GDP and simultaneously result in a drastic reduction of available jobs.
So we just won't need as many people as we have now. In fact, we already have far more people alive now than we did a few hundred years ago. Under these circumstances, decline is not really an issue. The decline should level out eventually once the most low fertility types are selected out of the population.
“Occasionally straight” is like saying a thief occasionally buys stuff. Which he probably does as a matter of course, but that doesn't make him less of a thief. To the extent there's a scale, it's one of severity.
There’s petty thievery, kleptomaniac, grand theft auto, organized crime and then central bankers.
Likewise there's rollerbladers, dumpster pumpers, Gay Pride Parade organizers, pedo rings and then P. Diddy and his ilk.
Between fertility collapse and homophobia most people would chose the former,even people who lean on the right/conservative side. So we have to find another option to fix the population decline
You really need three boxes - one for homophobes, one for mostly straight people who aren’t homophobes, and one for gay people. A majority of men in the US are OK with gay marriage. And obviously they’re not all gay or bisexual.
Also, if you’re concerned with fertility, you should focus on women, sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive.
The "man who has sex with men but does not identify as gay" bit reminded me of Jack Donovan. He preferred to call himself "androphilic" and had a strong aversion to anything effeminate.
Most likely, a self loathing homosexual deeply immersed in rationalizations. There are many such examples and I wonder if perhaps getting married to women gave some of them a way to cope.
Still, I'm unsure about your prescriptions. At face value, they would be the rational thing to do, and yet I can't not see the devastating effect it would have on many individual families. Is that how own society survived until a few decades ago? Yeah, it's also how it produced the fucked up generation we have now, though.
Gentle incentives would be preferable, if they could be conceived.
Really need to factor in the availability and normalisation of porn in Gen Z, sure they’re the least Heterosexual, but they’re also the least sexually active too (excluding Alpha obviously). Another thing I’ve been considering is based off the rat utopia experiment that eventually resulted in hyper masculine males and females, as well as hyper feminine males and females, but overall a complete collapse in reproduction, leading to the extinction of colony. Much the same thing is happening now in human populations, and I think it’s going to take a lot more than just cultural encouragement to mitigate the disastrous consequences.
This is just based on a sample size of two guys I've known, but there are men in the straight-but-not-disgusted-by-gay-sex category who really in all instances would prefer to be with a woman, but occasionally have sex with men just because it's so unbelievably easy and cost free. Like all you need for this is just the fact that men are way more horny, and it becomes a fall-back option, especially once you have apps that allow you to just order it up instantly on command. In those cases it's more like they're really horny, right then, and after not getting any takers trying to message women for an hour or two, they can easily turn to messaging a guy and someone will be over sucking him off in 15 minutes for free. Quite literally. If this has exploded among Zoomers that's probably mostly why. That and also maybe some are being paid for it (like WBE indicated he was thinking of doing). This kind of guy is not going to put off forming a family or choose a boyfriend over a girlfriend though...it's just something they do now and then based on an immediate urge.
> However, eventually we learned that it’s a luxury our society cannot afford. Maybe if heterosexual men could offset low gay fertility with their high fertility, we could have still afforded it. But we no longer can.
"Straight men are unable to impregnate women in sufficient numbers, so we must force all men to have bad sex with people they are not attracted to (or worse, don't love) and create offspring to raise with in such a union" is certainly a fascinating position to take. An absolute horrible one, but nevertheless fascinating.
It has always been this way in any society with a long term sustainable above replacement TFR. In our Western society, we tried something different and it failed. I know that's a bitter red pill but it's true.
If 50% men are non-heterosexual, it's way easier to incentivize them to generate 2+ TFR, than to continue incentivizing homosexuality and somehow have the other half to compensate with 4+ TFR. The proof is that this is exactly what was done in the past for most of the history.
Why not turn to sperm donation to offset allegedly increased gay behavior? (Which you dont seem to provide much evidence for, at least in the sense of significantly increases in # of men forgoing hetero relations to be with men)
Yes - sperm/egg donation/surrogacy is an acceptable solution for gay/lesbian couple fertility. Unlike adoption, it produces new humans.
There are minor problems though. A child with gay/lesbian parents won't have proper male & female parental figures in their life. It's a cliche that one gay guy in a gay relationship is usually "the woman", and one lesbian in a relationship is more butch. Even if this is a thing, it's not enough.
Also, there is the chicken-or-egg problem of social homophobia: kids will get bullied for having gay parents until having gay parents becomes "the normal thing to do".
Still, I think that increasing Western fertility is more important than the fact that some kids will be (temporarily) bullied or will need to look for mother/father figures elsewhere. Some children of straight parents also have these problems and manage somehow.
Yet it worked perfectly well for millennia.
No, it definitely doesn't, which is the craziest part about this.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stevestewartwilliams/p/the-genetics-of-same-sex-sexual-orientation
Same-sex attracted men consistently have fewer children, even if you force into them marriages with women against their desires, which is of course completely expected.
If you actually care about fertility, besides the egregious ethics of it all, forcing gay men to reproduce with women is not a sustainable way of producing more children.
But it worked. Look at the pop numbers. Whatever we were doing befkrey, worked. Fewer homos around, too
I just don't accept a fertility crisis. And I certainly value human freedom and fulfillment much more than some central-planning notion of population maintenance. So, people should do what they want and no government should be encouraging them to be homosexual or not. Something very dark about your overall frame.
Accepting the Western fertility crisis is anti-gay in the long run. After it's fall, the Western civilization will be superseded by more fertile, deeply homophobic civilizations (think of punishing homosexuals by torture or death all over again). Then, it will take decades if not centuries to reinvent a pro-gay society.
Think of ancient Greece & Rome and what came next - the Middle Age Europe.
That's an amusing narrative, but I don't give it much credence. Culture is not static and I don't really accept the idea that civilizations are in competition or "supersede" one another. There's a lot of exchange, mutual evolution, and continuity. In particular, I don't think there are "homophobic" civilizations - there may be homophobic regimes or phases. But plastering whole civilizations is too general and silly. Your own example shows this, unless you are arguing that medieval Europe is/was a different civilization than Rome. One was the descendent of the other.
More to point - and I mis-stated this in my first comment - I don't accept a "fertility crisis" in the first place. Declining fertility isn't a crisis, per se. And i certainly don't accept repression of sexuality in the cause of addressing a fictional crisis.
Don't you think there would be knock-on effects of incentivizing people to marry someone they "should" marry, rather than one they want to? I take your point about gay men not finding straight sex as disgusting as we (straight men) find gay sex disgusting, but I have to imagine they would be much happier being married to a man. Couldn't we just approach the fertility crisis by incentivizing the people who do want kids to have big families, or by investing more in IVF research such that it becomes cheaper and same-sex couples could more easily have biological children? Telling people to do anything with their sexuality other than what they want to (with a consenting adult of course) really rubs me the wrong way.
EDIT: Missed the line, "However, eventually we learned that it’s a luxury our society cannot afford. Maybe if heterosexual men could offset low gay fertility with their high fertility, we could have still afforded it." This obviously opposes my point, but are we sure this is true? It seems to be true at the moment, but if incentives are really as powerful as we think they are, it seems like we could overcome this.
In any sustainable society with above replacement TFR, most people did end up marrying someone that they didn't want to. Low status men married. Ugly women married. In some societies there were arranged marriages. In others, people simply settled. Another option was to invent bullshit copes like "A "normal girl" is better than a fake dumb blonde bimbo" or "A "normal guy" is better than a high status narcissistic psychopath" (of course, it's debatable whether someone who sincerely believes in a bullshit cope marries the person he/she wants or not).
Even in today's liberal individualistic Western society, a lifelong loving marriage is a very rare thing: half of marriages end of divorce, and for many (if not most) marriages that survive, people still end up resenting each other but nevertheless decide to stay together for children, money or status.
Yes, IVF and helping people who want to have big families but i.e. cannot afford them would and should help with fertility. But that's simply just not enough. Currently, TFR in Western countries with lowest fertility is HALF the replacement rate. And it will get far worse. I honestly think that with current incentive structures, Zoomers will have a near-zero TFR. That's why this is an "all hands on deck" situation and we need to double up on all available incentives.
"LQBT is progress": within a decade of homosexual sexual freedom a terrible pandemic was born then spread claiming the lives of tens of millions, with gays in the US knowing they were spreading it but too selfish to stop. Gay sexual attitudes are poison and show why the most successful societies demonstrate restraint
That ISPOS survey smells like BS.
How does 1 in 10 adults in Malaysia "not know" if they are gay or straight?
And what does "mostly straight" even mean?
What the hell does "incidentally" homosexual or heterosexual even mean?
When better questions asking unambiguously about sexuality are used then number non-straights goes down to around 4-5% (at least in the US) and most of the change over time is driven by women identifying as "bi" (these types happen to marry men)
Yes, I think the purpose of these studies is to demonstrate that sexual orientation is a spectrum (and that many people are on it), and using vague questions supports that goal even better than using the Kinsey scale.
I agree that it's convenient to use a binary approach (gay/not gay), but in terms of converting from the spectrum to binary I opt for a permissive approach, not for a restrictive one.
In WBE's post I linked he writes: "If you ever jerked off to something gay, you're gay forever." and I kind of agree with that.
I wrote "It's (still) not OK to be gay", but it's not "It's (still) not OK to be gay, but don't worry because this applies only to the 100% fully undoubtedly gay", it's "It's (still) not OK to be gay, even if you only jerked off to gay stuff once".
I don't see a spectrum at all. You either like something or don't. Is there a "spectrum" for every single possible sexual interest that all of us are on? Is there also a scat fetish spectrum? Why is gay so different? The spectrum is really only straight, gay, or bi and this applies to all sexual interests.
You either have a full blown fetish and can only get off to that thing, you have something like a kink and can get off to that thing but can also enjoy normal sex, or you have no interest in that thing.
These are functionally discreet categories.
The percentage of people primarily attracted to the same sex is much lower than 50%. The idea of "incentivizing" them to enter disastrous sham marriages for the purpose of marginally improving the birthrate is bizarrely out of touch.
The low birth rate has much more to do with straight couples having fewer children than with primarily straight people experimenting with homosexuality.
I mean, for me it was more a long period of feminist socialization resulting in celibacy followed by a fear of getting wiped out in a divorce than any burning desire to have sex with men. It doesn't really bother me if men do.
Of course the USA has both family courts biased against men and a lack of social supports, so you can easily wind up working to support an ex-wife who divorced you for the lulz.
Personally if it really came to it I'd be okay with vetted gay pairings, lesbian and homosexual male friends that bred together.
But you also have to consider that when conditions are right gay men are a massive source of cultural capital, producers - their lack of fertile activity doesn't come from being a loser or dysgenic, it comes from disinterest.
Imagine of 2-10% of the population (the natural fluctuation of strongly kinsey 3+ men) were not denied masculinity, but were also nurtured besides a fatherhood role, to dedicate their prime years and beyond to mastery of their craft, advancing the Nietzschean dialectic, or for the more hard right reading this, refining/raising culture, or for a left winger, championing worldly causes in the name of a more compassionate world.
If society didn't reject and brutalise them so harshly for so long and if masculinity wasn't denied to them (thus triggering a self rejection of their masculine instinct, and yes, obviously some are naturally effeminate), perhaps they wouldn't be attracted to subversive cultural marxism, perhaps their mainstream subculture wouldn't be so wildly decadent.
Love it...but I'm a sucker for a good set of orthogonal axes.
So homophobia is an evolved biological and cultural construct, but it's in equilibrium with homosexuality. So sophisticated individuals should view homosexuality as something that should exist, but needs to be carefully balanced as a social phenomenon. Erasing the homophobic norms is problematic, but so is erasing gay people.
As I tried to convey in the post, the total disgust of gay sex is a sum of default sexual disgust (natural, supported by social construct) and sexual homophobia (social construct). The default disgust part was the only part I was able to find an evolutionary explanation for. Hence, I figured that the sexual homophobia part must be a social construct.
I'd say that homosexuality and homophobia SHOULD be in an equilibrium in any stable, sustainable society. But with high homosexuality and low homophobia, our Western society is as far away from equilibrium as possible. And this is why our marriage rates and fertility are a disaster.
Some interesting points, but I'm just not convinced that we need high fertility. We're on the cusp of an AI revolution which will both drastically raise GDP and simultaneously result in a drastic reduction of available jobs.
So we just won't need as many people as we have now. In fact, we already have far more people alive now than we did a few hundred years ago. Under these circumstances, decline is not really an issue. The decline should level out eventually once the most low fertility types are selected out of the population.
“Occasionally straight” is like saying a thief occasionally buys stuff. Which he probably does as a matter of course, but that doesn't make him less of a thief. To the extent there's a scale, it's one of severity.
There’s petty thievery, kleptomaniac, grand theft auto, organized crime and then central bankers.
Likewise there's rollerbladers, dumpster pumpers, Gay Pride Parade organizers, pedo rings and then P. Diddy and his ilk.
Between fertility collapse and homophobia most people would chose the former,even people who lean on the right/conservative side. So we have to find another option to fix the population decline
You really need three boxes - one for homophobes, one for mostly straight people who aren’t homophobes, and one for gay people. A majority of men in the US are OK with gay marriage. And obviously they’re not all gay or bisexual.
Also, if you’re concerned with fertility, you should focus on women, sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive.
The "man who has sex with men but does not identify as gay" bit reminded me of Jack Donovan. He preferred to call himself "androphilic" and had a strong aversion to anything effeminate.
Most likely, a self loathing homosexual deeply immersed in rationalizations. There are many such examples and I wonder if perhaps getting married to women gave some of them a way to cope.
Still, I'm unsure about your prescriptions. At face value, they would be the rational thing to do, and yet I can't not see the devastating effect it would have on many individual families. Is that how own society survived until a few decades ago? Yeah, it's also how it produced the fucked up generation we have now, though.
Gentle incentives would be preferable, if they could be conceived.