You're right that Nicholas's comment was more nuanced than I gave him credit for. However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown and likely harmful.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.
> However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown and likely harmful.
You haven't clearly defined what you mean by harmful. Does it ruin otherwise healthy relationships on a massive scale? Does it teach impressionable young men that all women want to fuck them, leading to violence? Those seem like typical charges brought against porn. Were they true I'd agree there would be cause for serious concern. I haven't seen the data to back up these claims. If it exists, let's see it. Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest.
>"Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest."
There is certainly a modern syndrome around the nexus of sex, relationships, and family (less stable relationships, fewer children raised in stable homes, fewer children, more sex, more sexual culture, technology that lowers the cost of sex, easy access to porn). It's hard to know which pieces of the syndrome are causes and which are effects.
But if you don't see anything broken with modern relationships, you aren't paying attention to the statistics. Since the 1960s things have certainly changed at a rapid rate and some of that change is clearly for the worse.
More equality for women? That has improved.
Access to abortion? That has improved?
Domestic abuse and assault in sexual relationship? Are there any good statistics on these trends?
Courts upholding child support agreements with force of law. Don't pay your child support and see what happens.
The reason something may appear broken with modern relationships is the fact we are looking at them thru historical perspective, when it was much less likely a person could survive and raise children while not married. The fact is so many things have changed (at least in the U.S. where I am) in the last 50 year the chain of causality is likely impossible to unwrap.
Unfortunately, as far as I know children of single-parent families do worse in education, earnings, the legal system, and in other ways, so the breakdown of the family has immense social costs.
You will notice that the upper class still marries before they have children.
We don't know whether these children will do better or worse in an unhappy married family. And certainly we don't have reasons to think that marriage (the piece of paper) is the casuation for the gap, not merely a correlation.
The most parsimonious way to interpret the data is that divorce is bad for children. But we can add epicycles to some other secular hedonist theory and make it fit.
The most parsimonious way is also a most uninformative one.
For example, you can figure out that being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick.
Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father).
What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.
Children raised in single-parent homes, children born out of marriage, and rates of divorce all started skyrocketing in the 60s. The upper class has been less effected, as Charles Murray's book "Coming Apart" shows. Divorce, single-parenthood, and other symptoms of sexual liberation went up slightly for the upper class in the 60s and then leveled off. But in the lower classes the standard family has become the exception to the norm.
Again, I'm not saying porn or a less repressed culture are causative, but they are part of the syndrome we observe that sex is less serious and more pervasive, relationships are more temporary, and children grow up in more chaotic homes at a distinct disadvantage to children that grow up in stable homes. The family is disappearing for a large portion of the population. Marriage is later. Children are fewer - especially for the upper class. You have more wealth in the country and more children being raised in poverty by a single parent.
I think you're conflating two very different things. One is a growing bifurcation between rich and poor. The other is what you might call "sexual liberation", though it's much wider than that.
For instance, a higher divorce rate is not necessarily bad. Decades ago, women had fewer rights in marriage and there was a cultural expectation for marriages to stay together, no matter how unhealthy, unhappy, or sometimes even abusive the marriage happened to be. As recently as the 1970's, the law had no concept of spousal rape--in other words, it was perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. Today, not only can women escape from marriages that are bad for them, but married couples can mutually agree that the marriage is no longer serving their or their childrens' needs.
I also find little to complain about in a lower birthrate. The bifurcation by class is troubling, but the net trend is towards zero or negative population growth. This doesn't necessarily indicate the disappearance of family, but rather a slight adjustment from more of an r-selection strategy to more of a K-selection strategy.
Conflating these issues as a "syndrome" is a little too simplistic and tendentious towards an ill-founded social conservatism.
I don't see how anybody could look at the social changes of the last 50 years and see all good or all bad. I don't. Certainly at some point the human population needs to stop growing or we will have to begin colonizing other planets. So a lower birthrate is in some ways good, even if it causes other problems.
On the other hand, when couples decide that their marriage "is no longer serving ... their childrens' needs", they are most likely wrong. Children grow up with fewer problems if their parents stay together, on average. Easier divorce in cases of abuse is good. But how common is that out of the 50% of first marriages that break up? Divorce in cases of boredom have a high cost on children with little social benefit.
In many ways we are better off than our parents and grandparents. But I don't think cheap sex and disposable relationships represent an advance.
It need not be outright abuse for it to be an unhealthy relationship. If your marriage is characterized by constant bickering, or by a partner who stays long hours at work followed by long hours at the bar every day just to avoid a spouse they have grown to detest, there may not be any actual abuse but it's hard to see that as a healthy environment to raise a child in. Unfortunately, these are exactly the kinds of things that are difficult to capture in statistics, particularly the very broad statistics you're discussing.
It's also hard to see why decreased birthrates, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth are bad moves. High birthrates and family formation early in life are more of an r-strategy. Moving to a K-strategy is better for the children you do have, which is the entire point. As a side effect, maybe young people have to find outlets other than marrying at age 16 and having babies to satisfy their sexual urges, but what's the harm in that?
You could plausibly say that most of the harm, in terms of single mothers, comes from the war on drugs, which affects minorities and the lower classes the most. It's two-faced for conservatives to point at certain communities for having so many children out of wedlock while locking up alarming proportions of their men for victimless crimes and turning them into hardened criminals.
Fundamentally, I think people more qualified to make decisions about their own families and relationships than the Pope, the government, or you and I.
Either those "unhealthy relationships" are incredibly uncommon as a proportion of marriages, or it is better for children to live in a marriage with an "unhealthy relationship" than a straight-up broken home.
Decreased birthrates pose problems for current economic systems which are premised on taxing the young to pay for the old. Later children are more likely to have birth defects. But like I said, ultimately it is necessary, so it is a mixed bag.
I totally agree with you on the War on Drugs. A legal system that sends 28% of black males to at least one year of prison undoubtably has something to do with why 80% of black children in the US grow up without fathers, and that undoubtably has something to do with why 28% of black males in the US spend at least a year in prison.
I think it's hard to discuss these statistics in any detail without even looking at them, but this isn't a controlled experiment. If the worst marriages selectively end in divorce, you're comparing single parenthood to the marriages that are healthy enough to continue, not to the marriages the children would have actually been raised in.
Feel free to email me if you want to continue this discussion. It's interesting and I'm enjoying it, but it's grown into a bit of a tangent.
The magnitude of it is new. The normalization of it is new. A marriage means a lot less than it used to. It's a status symbol, or a source of entertainment that can be disregarded when it no longer entertains.
"The normalization of it is new. A marriage means a lot less than it used to. It's a status symbol, or a source of entertainment that can be disregarded when it no longer entertains."
And thank goodness for that. You have an overinflated opinion of what marriage "used to mean". People having an out from abuse and misery is worth it all. Your efforts to shame the divorced are moralizing, not "for the children". Marriages are not happy because they're forced through law and social stigma. The option to leave is freedom.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.