Demographic decline has entered the chat.
People across the political spectrum are gradually realizing that the world is not having enough babies. As the extent and impact of the world’s birth rate crisis become clearer, another issue has finally become respectable to talk about: the unforeseen impacts of the sexual revolution. This is no coincidence.
Post-sexual-revolutionary culture is antithetical not only to the interests of most women, but to the process of human reproduction itself. If we want to reverse the decline of birth rates, we must first understand the radical societal shifts that enabled that decline.
The Data: Understanding the Extent of the Problem
“But aren’t there too many people in the world?”
Ask demographer Stephen Shaw this question, and he’ll respond: “That’s yesterday’s question.”
In his presentation at the London Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in February, Shaw painted a detailed picture of the global birth crisis. 75 percent of the earth’s nations are below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, including many of the earth’s most populous or economically powerful: China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia. Around the world, nations are facing growing gaps between the number of aging members of society heading for retirement and the number of babies (and new workers) able to support them.
Shaw went on to explain the concept of “the societal half-life”: the number of years it will take for births in any given population to halve, given current fertility rates. According to the data presented by Shaw, it will take 800 years for the number of births in a society to halve if that society’s current fertility rate is 2.0. If the rate is 1.9, it will take 300 years; if 1.8, 150 years; if 1.7, 85 years. Given that most industrialised countries around the world have fertility rates around 1.5-1.6, we face a population crunch gathering pace at an exponential rate.
This process is very difficult to wind back. In fact, no known society that has gone into demographic decline has succeeded in reversing it.
Importantly, the source of the global birth gap is not shrinking family size. The average mother has about the same number of children as did the average mother in the 1970s. What has changed is the far greater proportion of childless adults in society. As Shaw’s documentary Birth Gap reveals, much of this childlessness is unintentional and due to choices which, unbeknownst to people at the time, decrease future chances of having children. As we have seen drastic drops in birth rates and rising proportions of childless people, we have also witnessed an increase in average age of the onset of parenting, and a more staggered transition into parenthood.
Later at the ARC conference, Polish political theorist Paula Olearnik-Szydlowska shared that her country had “hit a ceiling” in its endeavours to reverse demographic decline, despite strong pro-natal policies. Her comment reflects a growing consensus: policies that seek to relieve the monetary burdens of having children achieve some short-term improvement in birth rates, but not enough, ultimately, for sustainable, long-term population replacement. What is needed to achieve the latter, Olearnik-Sydlowska argued, is cultural change. In matters of romantic decision-making, mate selection, and family formation, young people need better coaching than they are getting from mainstream culture.
Life-long marriage between a child’s two biological parents remains the simplest and most stable setting in which that child can be created and raised. No amount of social support for single parents, however just, nor alternative arrangements made possible through expensive fertility technology, is likely to change this reality. If we want to see more births, more and earlier marriage between men and women must be part of the answer. But young people are not initiating these processes in the seamless ways they always have. They are not gearing their lives toward the formation of long-term partnerships that prepare them for children.
How Cheap Sex Split the Mating Market
Post-sexual revolutionary society is inherently hostile to family formation, for at least two reasons. First, the sexual revolution has led to a dilution of sexual energy that gets channelled into the pursuit of marriage or marriage-like relationships. Second, the privatisation of sexual morality facilitates widespread mismatch in relationship expectations, leading to widespread disagreement and confusion about how romantic relationships are supposed to work.
The first reason draws on key insights of sexual economic theory. When women collectively set a high relational “price” for sex (marriage, or a level of commitment very similar to it), men are incentivised to subsume the pursuit of sex under the search for long-term love. The population-wide result of such sexual norms is that a lot of mate selection and marrying ends up happening and, unsurprisingly, at younger ages. Alternatively, the more women who, (emboldened by contraception) engage in sexual relationships while asking for little to no romantic commitment, the more men can afford to overlook women with more reticent standards. Such women, in turn, are then incentivised to give up on the standards they would ideally like to set in order to “compete” in the sexual market, and as a result, the relational price of sex continues to steadily decline. Economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, sociologist Mark Regnerus, and legal scholar Helen Alvare (to name just a few) view this dynamic as primarily responsible for rising ages of first marriage, the decline of marriage rates, and the decoupling of sex from romantic significance in broader culture.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, sexual economic theory does not assume that all men are obligate animals who “only want one thing.” Neither does it assume that women never experience strong sexual desire. The theory simply recognises the fact that average evolved sociosexuality in men is higher than it is in women, given the greater female burden in human reproduction. Women thus inevitably have a gatekeeping role to play in any population in which heterosexual sex is exchanged. A runaway “cheapening of sex” is initiated when women loosen their grip on this role, as they did when birth control first made the illusory promise of completely consequence-free sex.
Sexual economic theory demonstrates the inadequacy of the hallowed liberal mantra that sex is just a private matter between two consenting adults. Superficially, it might seem like the sexual revolution, through its “non-judgmental” ethos, allows people of all preferences to have whatever they want: Jessica, who wants life-long love can pursue it freely, while Jesse, who is interested only in casual sex can pursue that freely too, and everybody wins. In contrast to such simplistic individualistic assumptions, sexual economic theory reminds us that the choices we make shape the moral ecology we inhabit, and that our moral ecology, in turn, determines the kind of choices available to us and to others. It is, in fact, much harder for Jessica to find life-long commitment in today’s world, regardless of the sincerity of her desire, because the pool of available men prioritising the same goal has dwindled.
Accordingly, what emerged in the decades following the sexual revolution was the split mating market: one part of which long-term commitment was being sought (in which women were over-represented), and another in which sex was being sought (in which men were over-represented). In older generations, by contrast, everyone was participating in one mating market. Whether participants were more motivated by the pursuit of marriage or sex, everybody had to pursue one in order to have the other. What the sexual revolution created was a widespread lack of coincidence of wants, resulting in less “exchange,” less marrying, and fewer relationships set up for reproduction.
The Privatization of Sexual Morality
It was over ten years ago that the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture released their viral video “The Economics of Sex,” which led to a renaissance in public understanding of these phenomena. Since then, the split mating market seems to have given way to a more complex picture in which we see both women and men “opting out” of marriage and long-term commitment in advance. This result, perhaps, is exactly to be expected as the resentments and frustrations created by the power imbalances in split mating markets have inevitably boiled over into outright contempt between the sexes (of which the incel phenomenon is but one example). Adding fuel to this fire is the ongoing hyper-liberalisation of sexual norms. Due to the ever-increasing erosion of agreed-upon assumptions in the realm of sexual ethics, questions never possible in previous ages have become sources of potential conflict in relationships now, creating new barriers to workable partnerships.
Is it reasonable, for instance, to not want your partner to be regularly consuming violent porn? Many women want to say “yes.” But an individualistic, disenchanted attitude toward sex entails that men are entitled to give the following reply: “Suit yourself. I’m sticking with porn, and if you don’t like it, go find an anti-porn guy.” Women are denied the support of the moral authority of society’s agreed-upon sexual ethic, which would have, in the past, resolved such a dispute in their favour. Not all men are into porn; a conscientious minority oppose it. But the coordination problem remains: anti-porn women have a hard time finding these potential mates when they are a minority within a large population of men.
“But some women are pro-porn too!” comes the predictable objection. This is true, though if the insights of Louise Perry and Mary Eberstadt are anything to go on, the pornification of Gen-Z women is likely a self-defensive mechanism borne of suppressed despair. If you can’t beat porn, many women reason, you may as well join it. Whatever the reason for the growing number of pro-porn young women, it only makes our problem worse. Men may follow pro-porn women on OnlyFans for a while, but (as the depressing debates on Brian Atlas’s whatever podcast suggest) they generally do not want to marry or have children with these women. Once men get into “marriage mode,” leave release-valve sex behind, and endeavour to imbue sex with more meaning, most of them seek women who have similarly elevated views of sex. As men express such sentiments, they’re shouted down by the militant cohort of pro-porn women accusing them of assailing female sexuality.
This is not to excuse the age-old hypocrisy of men who objectify a class of women they regard as “whores,” only to turn around and declare these women “unmarriageable.” Nonetheless, the campaign from pro-porn women to de-stigmatize permissive sexual behaviour is not a fruitful way of addressing this sexual double standard. Rather than dismiss the desire to marry a virgin as retrograde, the persistence of this male desire could, instead, be viewed by women as an opportunity to remind men that a part of them, too, clings to the intuition that sex is supposed to be significant or sacred. A consistent recognition of the significance of sex would require that both sexes be choosy about sexual partners, purposefully channelling their sexual desire into committed relationships.
Unfortunately, such a coherent system of sexual ethics has long since been abandoned, and what we are left with is a proliferation of conflicting, incompatible wants. If you’ve been in a monogamous relationship, and your partner wants it to become non-monogamous, is it reasonable to feel deeply upset and betrayed by the request alone? Suppose you want to get married young, and you inform your boyfriend of this. Suppose you wait patiently, planning your life around this eventuality, but then find yourself, eight years down the road, still waiting when your boyfriend finally reveals he never really believed in marriage? Are you entitled to be upset at him for wasting your time?
Without a shared system of sexual morality—a culturally shared understanding of how sexual relationships are meant to work—individuals must resolve divergent sexual expectations couple-by-couple. But, as the increasing vitriol between the sexes seems to indicate, this individualistic strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Learning from the Past
In the 1940s and 1950s, people met, fell in love, married, and formed families like clockwork. It was one of the easiest things a young person could do. You did not even have to be “competitive” by the standards of modern dating apps in order to find a life partner. The dream of life-long love that remains out of reach for some of the most accomplished young people today was easily enjoyed by masses of regular, ordinary people in the 1940s and 1950s.
Obviously, the baby boom era had its own problems. The malaise experienced by women rigidly confined to domestic roles, channelled by second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan, was real. The roles of wife and mother were erroneously relegated to the “private sphere” and thereby demeaned, and the intellectual equality of men and women was still not fully accepted. And yet, in the realm of romance, there was an enviable simplicity to the way life unfolded for the average man or woman. Such simplicity, I am sure, is longed for by many an “empowered” Gen-Zer who secretly fantasizes about monogamy, or by many a frustrated millennial approaching forty who cannot understand why their personal and professional qualities have failed to win them a spouse.
Why was dating, falling in love, and marrying so much easier in the 1940s and 1950s? The answer is simple: everyone was doing it. Not only was everybody doing it, but everybody was doing it in the same way, in a uniform mating market, governed by a generally well-maintained social script.
The script went something like this: as soon as you can, make yourself marriageable. Decide what you’ll do for a living, get a job, and prepare your nest. Be intentional about finding a partner. Ask a nice girl to dance. Date a person with the intention of figuring out whether you are compatible as marriage partners, and don’t take forever to decide. Don’t have sex until you’re married (a great incentive for following the preceding piece of advice). When you get married, commit to making the relationship work. Be a gentleman, treat the fairer sex with dignity, and provide for your family. Be a lady, use your talents for the good of the community, and respond with appreciation to male efforts at competence and responsibility. Engage in mutual self-sacrifice for each other, and for the good of your children, on whom the continuation of the humanity depends.
Not everybody followed this social script perfectly. Nevertheless, when a critical mass of people followed this social script closely enough, and agreed, at least publicly, on the inherent wisdom of these norms, this created a culture in which men and women entered the dating and mating market with shared expectations about how things were supposed to unfold. There were limits placed on how different, and how incompatible, relationship expectations could possibly be. The net result of this uniform sexual culture was a busy conveyor belt for young people from coming of age, to dating, to courtship, to marriage, to parenthood.
Indeed, as scholar Mads Larsen’s work Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder indicates, most human societies throughout history have operated under shared, public, marriage and reproduction norms. If Larsen’s work (and the revolutionary experiment of the last eighty years) suggests any anthropological law, it may be this: human populations just do not reproduce in effective, sustainable ways when sexual morality is privatised.
Reason for Hope: The Rise of Neo-Traditional Subcultures
If demographic decline is to have any hope of reversing, this is unlikely to be achieved through immigration or technological fixes. Not even pro-natal policies alone will do the job. We need cultural renewal: the reestablishment of dating and mating cultures and subcultures in which sexual ethical codes are explicit and shared social scripts are maintained.
I have seen many real-life examples of such subcultures. Most are voluntarily opted-into by young people with strong religious beliefs, who have an above-average success rate when it comes to family formation. Such young people spend much of their time in churches, university campus faith groups, youth groups, or other religiously based communities. On top of providing young people support in their pursuit of sanctity, intellectual growth, and service to others, these communities also, unofficially, act as match-making agencies.
The reason why is not hard to see. These organisations attract and pool together large numbers of joyful, energetic young people who have adopted, in advance, a well-defined sexual ethic. These youth tend to restrict their romantic interests to others who share their principles, and their belonging in a community of likeminded peers strengthens their resolve. This collective resolve then exercises a degree of soft power over sexual behaviour in the form of mutual encouragement to stick to the code. As a result, the sexual energy in these communities—the flirting, the dating, the romance—is oriented toward marriage, which, when it comes, is joyfully celebrated. In such dating and mating subcultures, in other words, we see the exact reverse process of the runaway cheapening of sex that occurs in the wider secular world.
In many ways, the young people operating in these neo-traditional dating subcultures resemble the youth of the 1940s and 1950s. And yet, in other ways, they are thoroughly contemporary young men and women. Their understanding of what it means to be masculine or feminine is (with some exceptions) more expansive than those of their predecessors. Their attitude toward those who are single, those who are divorced, or those who live with sexual regret is more generous. Amidst economic uncertainty, individualistic career-focused existence has lost some appeal for them (for the young men, as well as for the young women). Parenthood is seen as a rewarding component of responsible citizenship, not a “private” activity confined to a separate sphere fit only for an “inferior” sex. In all these ways, the neo-traditional cultures of religious young people present an inspiring synthesis of old and new wisdom.
How might birth rates shift if the attitudes and sexual strategies within such cultures were more widely shared? Could they be brought into the mainstream? No doubt, this is an uncomfortable question for the secular liberal world to ask, for it inevitably raises other questions. Are there objective norms in sexual morality that ought to be heeded, regardless of individual preference? Do sexual relationships have a telos? Are there universally applicable truths about what is and isn’t conducive to true sexual love, which our shared social scripts ought to reflect?
The problem of demographic decline presents an urgent need to find ways of regulating our mating markets again. This need not, and ought not, mean reviving all the ideals of the 1940s and 1950s. But as demographic decline worsens, it’s time to start thinking more seriously about what sexual norms are conducive to healthy family formation.
Dedicated libertines will continue to resist the emerging sexual counter-revolution with the familiar complaint: “What about individual sexual freedom?” Such a question, by now, is as unhelpful and overdone as the one with which we began: “Aren’t there too many people in the world?”
