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A review by lpm100
Sexual Suicide by George Gilder
2.0
Book Review
Sexual Suicide
George Gilder
2/5 stars
Book didn't age well; Good in some respects, empirically false in others
*******
Of the book:
19 chapters/263 pages
≈14pps/chapter
Bibliography = 176 sources
332 total citations. (≈17 per chapter; 1.25/page.)
If I had to sum up his point in writing this book in one sentence, it would probably be something like: Societies function best when there is a clear division of labor between men and women, and current efforts to vitiate that (Feminist Movement, etc) are putting us on the path to destruction.
***My First Big Thought with this book is that it is getting at a fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives: The latter group says that some social arrangement that has existed for tens of thousands of years *can be* because it *has been.*
Progressives try to treat society as a tabula rasa onto which they can superimpose this or that Latest Fashionable Theory.
The specific "hot topics" of the hour are incidental; A lot of the things that Gilder talks about in this 50-year-old-book have fallen out of fashion long ago. (And that would make sense now that we actually have a little bit more data to work with with the progression of Molecular Genetics.)
***The Second Big Thought is that: I just don't know if I agree with this author's epistemic foundations. He is talking about a type of Society - - Western - that is trying to figure out what it is.
But, a society's learning things is more like an evolutionary process: There are some number of ideas that exist as of a moment (it doesn't matter what or why) and those ideas may cause the society to thrive - - or fail. Societies that have managed to survive a long time are ones that have learned things, by definition.
Now that we understand that civilizations that have survived have taken the right steps (because they are still here for us to observe them), this book probably would have taken a better direction to choose a half dozen successful societies and show what they did right that we are now doing wrong. Or, what they did wrong and why they are no longer here.
***The Third Big Thought is that: Some societies are reactionarily conservative, and they offer a lower quality of life for extremely long periods of time because of their unwillingness to make any adaptations. But, they are stable! (China had a famine on average every 15 months from the time of the First Emperor, 2300 years ago.)
Other societies are experimental/progressive, and they slowly tear themselves apart through the process of incremental change, and then what? (The Roman Empire is with us no longer, and all across Europe they are in a demographic death spiral.)
So, Western Society Once Upon a Time knew that the family unit is the appropriate one in which to raise children, and division of labor between the sexes is an efficient way to order society. (Division of labor within a society is a great thing, and not only between sexes. It has been thought that the reason Neanderthals were overtaken by humans is that they had no division of labor between rolls of men, women, and children.)
And now they're in the process of forgetting it.
So now what?
Is there a stopping point if you are part of a society that is forgetting what it once knew?
Is there any possibility that you yourself can be the Agent of Change in the society that is experimenting itself into oblivion any more than you could be one in a society that is is mentally embalmed in the past?
(Just what *could* an enlightened secularist do in Yemen or a reactionary Christian do in Norway?)
Given that there are many many people that are no longer with us that once were (Hittites, Jebusites, Canaanites, etc), don't the statistical odds make us believe that some civilization destroying itself is actually a predictable/natural thing? (And in that case, if 160 million people believe a foolish thing - - it is still a foolish thing; people may have convinced themselves that there are 32 different genders, but we'll just see how sustainable is that belief.)
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was written half a century ago, and a lot of the ideas seem.....(forgiveably) quaint:
a. (p.33) "The woman's clitoris is an organ exclusively devoted to pleasure; it has no procreative function."
b. Author also seems to think that butt sex is something that people do just because somebody said it was "cool." It's like he's saying that if there was never a sexual revolution, there would never have been people engaging in that act. (Really?)
c. In fact, he also seems to have a problem with any type of oral activity. (If a family man with 5 kids just couldn't keep his face out of his wife's carpet, what would be the problem since they have already had many children?)
2. I do agree with Gilder that:
a. Once you separate the idea of (sex) and (commitment+children), for many people it will be a very long road to nowhere.... one sexual partner at a time. (How many people have we seen go through a promiscuous life and finally die alone?)
b. It's also true that for the vast majority of couples, sexual interest cannot be enough to bond people together over several decades (although children can).
c. Societies in which there is a division of labor between men and women are much more efficient than those without. (p.54). And this has been observed / verified later many times by evolutionary biologists/anthropologists.
d. A surplus of males equals a deficit of peace. (This is actually the title of a book by Valerie Hudson.) And a large number of men floating around unable to find a single woman that they can protect and invest in is a great way to have an unstable society. (China has collapsed more than once because of excess males. Polygamy is very popular in Africa, along with predicted political instability.)
e. Bringing other people into a marriage ("open marriage") has led a lot of couples down the road to perdition. (I've seen more than one time that couple A hooks up with partner B and partner B pulls one of the partners out of the relationship.)
3. What is Gilder's happy medium between living in the frying pan and the fire?
-In ultra conservative societies such as Taliban Afghanistan or Haredi Judaism, men and women are kept way too far apart and so that results in inordinately high amounts of pedophilia and opportunistic homosexuality. (And if you don't believe me, look up about the "dancing boys of Afghanistan" or count how many *weekly* scandals of sexual abuse are unearthed in Haredi communities.)
-In excessively libertine societies, birth rates have fallen far below replacement just in the space of a generation or two. (Failure to replace population is a crisis that comes on too slowly to see but too quickly to solve.)
-Not all people in one space behave the same, and they may not all experience the same decline/collapse. Indians, Muslim Arabs and Jews live in the United States, but they are not OF the West; they know what their traditions are and they have no intention on changing them. (Marriage, children, and division of roles for males and females are going to be what they always have been. Is anybody aware of any discussion about gender dysphoria within China or the Islamic world?)
4. Difficulties in population replacement can happen as a result of sexual libertinism, but it also happens in very conservative societies because it just becomes too expensive to raise children for reasons unrelated to changes in moral standards. (Japan. China. Korea. Russia. Etc. Birth rates so low that no Society has ever recovered from them.)
5. Yes, white people do co-opt various movements to make it about them, and this is not new. (Affirmative action started off about black people and ended up about "proportional representation" of mostly-white-women. You never see anybody EXCEPT white people moving off into virtue-signaling abortion extremism, even though black people are the majority of people who do not deliver their children to term.)
6. What is new is old.
a. Universal basic income has been under discussion at least since the 1960s.
b. Feminazis are not new.
c. Government has been trying to establish the "appropriate" distribution of income between different sectors of the population for a very long time. And failing. "Negative tax rates" in one generation, "refundable tax credits" in the next.
d. The current transgender Hysteria is something that has been a long time coming. At least, if you believe this author's sequence of events. Once you have sanded down the difference between males and females, the next logical step is to just try to throw away any concrete notion of gender at all.
Synopsis of each of the 3 parts.
Part 1:
-Men and women are fundamentally different in that women can have an identity just by being who they are, whereas men have to carve out an identity based on some type of accomplishment (building a career/building enough to attract a mate).
-Separation of the sexual impulse from marriage and procreation=Not good.
-Open marriage is not new. (Author would be surprised that people were rehashing the same lines of reasoning a half a century later. See:Jenny block. "Open.")
Part 2:
-The socialization of males is a delicate process that must be repeated in every generation, and small perturbations can have huge effects.
--It is known and knowable that delete opinions have nothing to do with facts on the ground. (p.131) "Public opinion is largely shaped by the kind of small minority that holds the sophisticated view. The articulate, knowledgeable elite has influenced far beyond its numbers."
-In this case, it happens that elite opinion is against traditional mechanisms of socialization of/division of Labor between the sexes.
Part 3:
There is no problem with keeping boys and girls separate at school, because the needs of each can be specifically addressed. Also, people who are separated during their formative years are more likely to have "generous" sex lives. (And that does make sense, because Haredi homes I feel to the rafters with children, created by people who had no concept of the opposite sex before the wedding night.)
Other century thoughts that are not very well developed about benefits for appropriate sex roles.
*******
Verdict: I'm going to have to give this book a miss, for the following reasons:
1. It is dated. Written well before Molecular Genetics. (And that would have corrected *so* many of his provincial conceptions about homosexuality.)
2. There are books that describe the actual outcomes of having huge numbers of unsocialized men about. Notably, the aforementioned Valerie Hudson book.
3. In some aspects, this author is WAY off.
a. He goes on for a little while in Part II about how to the reason that men's salaries are higher than women is because it is some implicit social contract to pay men more in order to civilize them because a surplus of males equals a deficit of peace.
It's like actual data doesn't exist for him - - which shows that men and women doing the same job with the same number of years of experience are paid equally, but the distribution of males and females in all types of job is not the same.
b. (p.105). No, men do not become killers because they feel that they have no role as men and they don't become violent because they look at porn.
c. AFDC hung on for about another 20 years after the publication of this book, but it has been gone for the last several decades. (Ain't nobody living large on welfare.) Paid maternity leave is not a reality even a half a century later. Nor is universal daycare.
d. (p.201). The United States is not being transformed into a dominantly surface economy; it always WAS a dominantly service economy
New vocabulary words:
Mandan torture
Eudaimonia
Dildotage
Sexual Suicide
George Gilder
2/5 stars
Book didn't age well; Good in some respects, empirically false in others
*******
Of the book:
19 chapters/263 pages
≈14pps/chapter
Bibliography = 176 sources
332 total citations. (≈17 per chapter; 1.25/page.)
If I had to sum up his point in writing this book in one sentence, it would probably be something like: Societies function best when there is a clear division of labor between men and women, and current efforts to vitiate that (Feminist Movement, etc) are putting us on the path to destruction.
***My First Big Thought with this book is that it is getting at a fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives: The latter group says that some social arrangement that has existed for tens of thousands of years *can be* because it *has been.*
Progressives try to treat society as a tabula rasa onto which they can superimpose this or that Latest Fashionable Theory.
The specific "hot topics" of the hour are incidental; A lot of the things that Gilder talks about in this 50-year-old-book have fallen out of fashion long ago. (And that would make sense now that we actually have a little bit more data to work with with the progression of Molecular Genetics.)
***The Second Big Thought is that: I just don't know if I agree with this author's epistemic foundations. He is talking about a type of Society - - Western - that is trying to figure out what it is.
But, a society's learning things is more like an evolutionary process: There are some number of ideas that exist as of a moment (it doesn't matter what or why) and those ideas may cause the society to thrive - - or fail. Societies that have managed to survive a long time are ones that have learned things, by definition.
Now that we understand that civilizations that have survived have taken the right steps (because they are still here for us to observe them), this book probably would have taken a better direction to choose a half dozen successful societies and show what they did right that we are now doing wrong. Or, what they did wrong and why they are no longer here.
***The Third Big Thought is that: Some societies are reactionarily conservative, and they offer a lower quality of life for extremely long periods of time because of their unwillingness to make any adaptations. But, they are stable! (China had a famine on average every 15 months from the time of the First Emperor, 2300 years ago.)
Other societies are experimental/progressive, and they slowly tear themselves apart through the process of incremental change, and then what? (The Roman Empire is with us no longer, and all across Europe they are in a demographic death spiral.)
So, Western Society Once Upon a Time knew that the family unit is the appropriate one in which to raise children, and division of labor between the sexes is an efficient way to order society. (Division of labor within a society is a great thing, and not only between sexes. It has been thought that the reason Neanderthals were overtaken by humans is that they had no division of labor between rolls of men, women, and children.)
And now they're in the process of forgetting it.
So now what?
Is there a stopping point if you are part of a society that is forgetting what it once knew?
Is there any possibility that you yourself can be the Agent of Change in the society that is experimenting itself into oblivion any more than you could be one in a society that is is mentally embalmed in the past?
(Just what *could* an enlightened secularist do in Yemen or a reactionary Christian do in Norway?)
Given that there are many many people that are no longer with us that once were (Hittites, Jebusites, Canaanites, etc), don't the statistical odds make us believe that some civilization destroying itself is actually a predictable/natural thing? (And in that case, if 160 million people believe a foolish thing - - it is still a foolish thing; people may have convinced themselves that there are 32 different genders, but we'll just see how sustainable is that belief.)
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was written half a century ago, and a lot of the ideas seem.....(forgiveably) quaint:
a. (p.33) "The woman's clitoris is an organ exclusively devoted to pleasure; it has no procreative function."
b. Author also seems to think that butt sex is something that people do just because somebody said it was "cool." It's like he's saying that if there was never a sexual revolution, there would never have been people engaging in that act. (Really?)
c. In fact, he also seems to have a problem with any type of oral activity. (If a family man with 5 kids just couldn't keep his face out of his wife's carpet, what would be the problem since they have already had many children?)
2. I do agree with Gilder that:
a. Once you separate the idea of (sex) and (commitment+children), for many people it will be a very long road to nowhere.... one sexual partner at a time. (How many people have we seen go through a promiscuous life and finally die alone?)
b. It's also true that for the vast majority of couples, sexual interest cannot be enough to bond people together over several decades (although children can).
c. Societies in which there is a division of labor between men and women are much more efficient than those without. (p.54). And this has been observed / verified later many times by evolutionary biologists/anthropologists.
d. A surplus of males equals a deficit of peace. (This is actually the title of a book by Valerie Hudson.) And a large number of men floating around unable to find a single woman that they can protect and invest in is a great way to have an unstable society. (China has collapsed more than once because of excess males. Polygamy is very popular in Africa, along with predicted political instability.)
e. Bringing other people into a marriage ("open marriage") has led a lot of couples down the road to perdition. (I've seen more than one time that couple A hooks up with partner B and partner B pulls one of the partners out of the relationship.)
3. What is Gilder's happy medium between living in the frying pan and the fire?
-In ultra conservative societies such as Taliban Afghanistan or Haredi Judaism, men and women are kept way too far apart and so that results in inordinately high amounts of pedophilia and opportunistic homosexuality. (And if you don't believe me, look up about the "dancing boys of Afghanistan" or count how many *weekly* scandals of sexual abuse are unearthed in Haredi communities.)
-In excessively libertine societies, birth rates have fallen far below replacement just in the space of a generation or two. (Failure to replace population is a crisis that comes on too slowly to see but too quickly to solve.)
-Not all people in one space behave the same, and they may not all experience the same decline/collapse. Indians, Muslim Arabs and Jews live in the United States, but they are not OF the West; they know what their traditions are and they have no intention on changing them. (Marriage, children, and division of roles for males and females are going to be what they always have been. Is anybody aware of any discussion about gender dysphoria within China or the Islamic world?)
4. Difficulties in population replacement can happen as a result of sexual libertinism, but it also happens in very conservative societies because it just becomes too expensive to raise children for reasons unrelated to changes in moral standards. (Japan. China. Korea. Russia. Etc. Birth rates so low that no Society has ever recovered from them.)
5. Yes, white people do co-opt various movements to make it about them, and this is not new. (Affirmative action started off about black people and ended up about "proportional representation" of mostly-white-women. You never see anybody EXCEPT white people moving off into virtue-signaling abortion extremism, even though black people are the majority of people who do not deliver their children to term.)
6. What is new is old.
a. Universal basic income has been under discussion at least since the 1960s.
b. Feminazis are not new.
c. Government has been trying to establish the "appropriate" distribution of income between different sectors of the population for a very long time. And failing. "Negative tax rates" in one generation, "refundable tax credits" in the next.
d. The current transgender Hysteria is something that has been a long time coming. At least, if you believe this author's sequence of events. Once you have sanded down the difference between males and females, the next logical step is to just try to throw away any concrete notion of gender at all.
Synopsis of each of the 3 parts.
Part 1:
-Men and women are fundamentally different in that women can have an identity just by being who they are, whereas men have to carve out an identity based on some type of accomplishment (building a career/building enough to attract a mate).
-Separation of the sexual impulse from marriage and procreation=Not good.
-Open marriage is not new. (Author would be surprised that people were rehashing the same lines of reasoning a half a century later. See:Jenny block. "Open.")
Part 2:
-The socialization of males is a delicate process that must be repeated in every generation, and small perturbations can have huge effects.
--It is known and knowable that delete opinions have nothing to do with facts on the ground. (p.131) "Public opinion is largely shaped by the kind of small minority that holds the sophisticated view. The articulate, knowledgeable elite has influenced far beyond its numbers."
-In this case, it happens that elite opinion is against traditional mechanisms of socialization of/division of Labor between the sexes.
Part 3:
There is no problem with keeping boys and girls separate at school, because the needs of each can be specifically addressed. Also, people who are separated during their formative years are more likely to have "generous" sex lives. (And that does make sense, because Haredi homes I feel to the rafters with children, created by people who had no concept of the opposite sex before the wedding night.)
Other century thoughts that are not very well developed about benefits for appropriate sex roles.
*******
Verdict: I'm going to have to give this book a miss, for the following reasons:
1. It is dated. Written well before Molecular Genetics. (And that would have corrected *so* many of his provincial conceptions about homosexuality.)
2. There are books that describe the actual outcomes of having huge numbers of unsocialized men about. Notably, the aforementioned Valerie Hudson book.
3. In some aspects, this author is WAY off.
a. He goes on for a little while in Part II about how to the reason that men's salaries are higher than women is because it is some implicit social contract to pay men more in order to civilize them because a surplus of males equals a deficit of peace.
It's like actual data doesn't exist for him - - which shows that men and women doing the same job with the same number of years of experience are paid equally, but the distribution of males and females in all types of job is not the same.
b. (p.105). No, men do not become killers because they feel that they have no role as men and they don't become violent because they look at porn.
c. AFDC hung on for about another 20 years after the publication of this book, but it has been gone for the last several decades. (Ain't nobody living large on welfare.) Paid maternity leave is not a reality even a half a century later. Nor is universal daycare.
d. (p.201). The United States is not being transformed into a dominantly surface economy; it always WAS a dominantly service economy
New vocabulary words:
Mandan torture
Eudaimonia
Dildotage