A throwback to the 50s would only lead us to where we are now.

Readership: All
Author’s Note: I said I would write this post a long while back, 2017 December 14 to be exact.
Length: 1,800 words
Reading Time: 6 minutes

“More lonely, fewer friends, less sex… But we have smartphones and the internet!”

The Atlantic (feat. Jean M. Twenge): Have Smart Phones Destroyed A Generation? (August 3, 2017)

Introduction

There is a widespread conception that middle America in the 1950s was a conservative’s tree house. OTOH, there is also the notion that the 1950s was a period of stodgy puritanism. This analogy is usually mentioned whenever a female gets called out for dressing seductively.* The cliched retort is, “The 50s called… they want their narrative back!”

This post will blow both of these notions apart.

While it is true that the 1950s were a “High” in American socio-economic-political history, therein lay the rot that led to the unraveling in subsequent decades.

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Boxer (Secret King of All Gamma Males) wrote,

“The most obvious problem [with the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/etc. socio-sexual hierarchy heuristic] is that they’re clearly socially constructed. Basing a hierarchy on who gets most sex would have our married, potbellied, Ward Cleaver type grandfathers as the “alphas” of the 1950s, and the motorcycle-riding cad as the “beta” who wanders from town to town, having sex with prostitutes. Most women in that era wouldn’t touch him, and he was run out of town (and sometimes got his ass kicked) when he ran day game down at the laundromat. The current regime is only in place because of artificial surpluses due to mechanization and immigration, and only the most shortsighted would think it meaningful.”

Is the Alpha/Beta hierarchy, and by extension, the intrinsic sociosexual marketplace in which women favor Alphas, merely a construct that only applies to the current SMP? Or does it run back farther?

To address this question, first we’ll look at the prevalence of fornication in the 1950s, and then compare that to the trends in recent years.

* As Earl once noted, women love to dress to entice but hate being called on it. It pops the bubble of two narratives, (1) “Women good, men bad”, and (2) “Blame the men for everything bad that happens to women”. Women have seemed to lose all common sense and decency with feminism. Men are going to look at cleavage and tight fitting clothes and most women already know this…they aren’t fooling anybody. The hypocrisy is so thick, you could cut it with a butter knife. Perhaps if somebody put into their brains that dressing modestly shows off their dignity and ’empowers’ them it might change minds.”

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Trends in the Prevalence of Fornication in the 1940s and 50s

Alan Petigny wrote an article in 2004 [1] that identified the following cultural shifts.

  • Between 1940 and 1960, the frequency of single motherhood among white women increased from 3.6 to 9.2 newborns per 1,000 unmarried white women of childbearing age.
  • Among all women, single motherhood rose from 7.1 to 21.6 newborns per 1,000 unwed women.
  • Between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled.
  • The silent generation may have been silent about what they were doing, but they weren’t all that complacent.
  • The crucial distinction between the ‘40s and ‘50s and the 1960s are in differences between conventions and conduct — what people said versus what they did.
  • During the ‘60s, Americans simply were more willing to acknowledge the extracurricular sexual activities of the young than they had been during the previous decades.
  • Rather than a sexual revolution, an upheaval in social conventions is what occurred in the 1960s. What was publicly respectable changed enormously as social conventions came into line with personal conduct or as public manners converged with private morals.

Petigny’s article concluded that…

“The evidence from our study using census data suggests that the ‘40s and ‘50s experienced a sizeable increase in the frequency of premarital intercourse…”

A review of Petigny’s article is available for non-scientific minds. In addition to the above points, it says,

“Lawrence Friedman, a visiting professor in the history of science department at Harvard University, calls Petigny’s findings “very revolutionary.” Petigny tells us that “during the ‘40s and ‘50s big social and cultural changes occurred, and we acknowledged them and they became part of ‘60s headlines when the changes had already occurred…”

This agrees with what L. B. Finer [2] wrote in a report on trends in premarital sex in the United States between 1954 and 2003.

“…there is a common popular perception that most or all of those who came of age before the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s waited until they married to have sex, and that it is necessary to revert to the behaviors of that earlier time in order to eliminate the problems of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, research has questioned whether such a chaste period ever existed.”

So if I am getting this straight, the sexual revolution didn’t really begin in the 1960s. What made the 1960s unique was that people started to be candid about what had already been going on for decades. In other words, extramarital sex had been so prevalent, for so long, that it had become commonplace by the 1960s. So much so, that people felt no qualms nor shame about discussing such things openly. Therefore, Christian social mores had already began to give way to a cultural-wide hedonism before that time.

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Recent Trends in the Prevalence of Fornication

A research article written by Twenge, et al. [3] states,

“American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010’s compared to the late 1990’s in data from the nationally representative General Social Survey (N = 26,620, 1989–2014). This was partially due to the higher percentage of unpartnered individuals, who have sex less frequently on average. Sexual frequency declined among the partnered (married or living together) but stayed steady among the unpartnered, reducing the marital/partnered advantage for sexual frequency. Declines in sexual frequency were similar across gender, race, region, educational level, and work status and were largest among those in their 50’s (Generation Jones), those with school-age children, and those who did not watch pornography.”

From this concise paragraph, we can presume the following.

  • More people are single.
  • Single people have less sex than married couples.
  • The decline in sexual frequency has affected the entire culture.
  • Partnered couples (married or cohabitating) are having less sex than the same cohort did in the 90s. Extrapolated, we can presume that Gen X and Millennial couples have less sex than Boomers did at comparable ages.
  • As a whole, Generation Jones was probably the most hedonistic generation in modern history. The sexual promiscuity they enjoyed in their youth has led to sexual burnout later in their lives.
  • People who have children have more sex.
  • People who do not watch pornography have more sex.

Twenge, et al. [3] confirmed my assumptions about generational cohorts in this paragraph.

“In analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort, the decline was primarily due to birth cohort (year of birth, also known as generation). With age and time period controlled, those born in the 1930s (Silent Generation) had sex the most often, whereas those born in the 1990s (Millennials and iGen) had sex the least often. The decline was not linked to longer working hours or increased pornography use.”

The Silent Generation was the generational cohort experiencing their sexual prime in the 1950’s. The next time I see Liberals and Feminists scorn traditional norms and customs for “being a throwback to the 1950’s”, my default response will be, “The 1950’s offered more sexual opportunity to the broader society than our post-modern, Feminist-controlled society, you lying, denying, hypocritical bigots!”

Twenge, et al. also notes (unsurprisingly) that…

“Age had a strong effect on sexual frequency: Americans in their 20’s (late Millennials, early iGen’s) had sex an average of about 80 times per year, compared to about 20 times per year for those in their 60’s (Boomers).

This study did not cover the effects of the divorce rate on premarital sexual frequency, but I’m willing to bet there is a correlation there.

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Polygyny and Polyandry are on the Rise!

The U.S. National Health Statistics Report 36 [4], and the data from the Center of Disease and Control [5], both indicate that sexual activity outside of marriage is on a slow decline, and apparently more so for the younger age bracket (18-24). This agrees with Twenge, et al.’s study. However, a closer examination of these two sources indicates there is a rise in the number of people who are sexually active with multiple people!

Think about that for a moment. This means that…

  • The majority of people are having less sex on average.
  • Singles are having less sex.
  • Married couples are having even less sex.
  • But the subset of people engaging in polygyny/polyandry is increasing!

The current state of the sexual market is a sexual paradise for top SMV individuals, and a death camp for all others. If Hitler and Stalin had introduced Feminism into their genocide and eugenics programs, then they would have been much more successful in producing a super-race, since birth control then, was not what it is now.

Conclusions

Judging by the above information, it appears as though the Sexual Revolution started much earlier in the 20th century than what we were led to believe. I would guess it had its origins in the post WW1 period. At that time, men were rare due to battlefield casualties and the Spanish flu epidemic, and women’s suffrage was introduced. These seeds of destruction grew and eventually blossomed after WW2. By the 1960s, it was already in full swing, at which point, people accepted sexual saturation as a societal norm which had entirely superseded the pre WW1 norm.

So actually, more people had more sex in the 1950’s than they do today, and it was most likely more enjoyable too, because it happened within a cultural context that supported healthy sexual relations, not the laissez faire mess we have today. People had sex with a person they knew and were in love with (and most likely were married to), and went through life experiences together (both good and bad). The current Don Juan-hookup scene will never have that important emotional aspect cast within a stable community setting.

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The cited research articles suggest that, today, Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors:

  1. An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner.
  2. A decline in sexual frequency among those with partners.

Here’s another way to think of this. If we could somehow ascertain the total number of coital orgasms experienced each year by all Americans living in the 1950’s up until the present day, and divide that number by the total running population to get a function of orgasms per capita versus each year, and then use this number as a general indicator of happiness, then I am certain this estimation of happiness would closely resemble the surveyed results on happiness taken from the 1950’s to the present day – that is, slowly and steadily declining.

Those traditional norms have a very clear purpose. They set up a society-wide, coital orgasm generation machine, which maximizes sexual efficiency by decreasing the total cost investment and increasing the total number of sexual liaisons available. And it does so for most every person in society, not just for top class Alphas and genetic jackpot Gina’s. In addition, people operating within a traditional sexual market could retain a sense of honor, dignity and purpose surrounding their sex lives. Not so much for people living today, e.g. incels, MGTOW’s, and Feminist s1uts.

References

  1. Alan Petigny, “Illegitimacy, Postwar Psychology, and the Reperiodization of the Sexual Revolution”, Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Issue 1, Pages 63–79 (2004 October 1). https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2004.0100
  2. L. B. Finer, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954­–2003”, Public Health Reports 122:73-78 (2017).
  3. J. M. Twenge, R. A. Sherman, and B. E. Wells, “Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989–2014”, Archives of Sexual Behavior 46(8):2389–2401 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0953-1
  4. U.S. National Health Statistics Report 36: Sexual Behavior, Sexual Attraction, and Sexual Identity in the United States: Data From the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth Trends in Attitudes About Marriage, Childbearing, and Sexual Behavior: United States, 2002, 2006–2010, and 2011–2013 (March 3, 2011).
  5. Center of Disease and Control: Key Statistics from the National Survey of Family Growth – N Listing (Data from 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2015)

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