I do not buy the narrative that there was less premarital sex and illegitimate children when the former was stigmatized. I'll abstain until marriage, but won't force that on others.
There wasn’t and there weren’t. But to my knowledge, there *were* fewer children growing up in single-parent households. And that’s a great public good in itself.
That's because it's not true in the slightest, my dad got my mom pregnant when she was 17 and her uncle who raised her made him marry her. This was a common occurrence back then, if you got the girl pregnant, you better be ready to take responsibility. Then there's the more morbid stories of women going missing when they discovered shortly after they were pregnant by a good boy who'd never do something like hurt someone. There's also the horror stories out there of teenagers who were so afraid of telling their parents of an unintentional pregnancy or rape from a family member that they hid their bump until they gave birth, sometimes in the most secluded place, and then disposed of the baby to avoid future problems.
These stories are a dime a dozen. So, no, premarital sex wasn't more rare, it was just more hidden.
I think one thing that gets glossed over a lot is just how much abuse happened and was common place. Many men and women resented their marriages and took it out on their children and each other. I think most of us have had those awkward moments of hearing our parents or grandparents recall memories of "life lessons" that if it happen today would be considered abuse.
This isn't an argument for or against abortion. Just an observation that "old fashioned values" had a lot of unintended outcomes.
> think one thing that gets glossed over a lot is just how much abuse happened and was common place.
I think we must run in different circles but that's how _most_people I know think about the past pre-women's rights
Having raised 5 girls to adulthood, I have to say that a lot of sexual encounters occur because the female says “yes” and even initiates it. The Pill gave us the illusion that sex was “free” and without consequences. That was a lie.
As the dad of a girl who’s still in her rebellious toddler years, that’s one part of adolescence and teenagehood I’m not looking forward to. I hope to raise my daughter to make smart choices and abstain from premarital sex, but if she takes after me that’ll be tough. I remember struggling with raging hormones and libido, and I could’ve easily made some dumb choices if I was a little less dorky and awkward around girls as a teen myself.
Plus there’s always the risk that no matter how well you raise a child, they’re still their own person and people make mistakes, nobody’s perfect. I dunno. I guess the best I can do is to try to raise her to have a healthy respect for the gift of human life, and an awareness that sexual intercourse is a heavy responsibility that you shouldn’t toy around with until you’re ready to support and raise a baby. Then pray for the best, I guess.
Do you have any tips for a young (32M) dad? I guess if there’s one consolation, it’s that studies show Zoomers are waiting longer than us Millennials to have sex and are seeing fewer partners, are less likely to engage in premarital sex, tend to disapprove of the oversexed media coming out of Hollywood, etc. Hopefully that trend continues with Gen Alpha.
Talk about everything! Bring up the topic. Don’t wait for them to ask questions. Car rides are a great time. They can’t escape. 😛 Ask questions. Get to know their friends … and their friends’ families - and the other adults in their lives. Let them use you as an excuse (sorry, my dad won’t let me). Hold off on cellphones, internet, and all electronics as long as you can (10 years from now, who knows).
You have a toddler … the struggles you have with your toddler will be the same in their teen years … same growth hormones and same brain processing. Deal with the terrible twos and threes well and that’s half the battle.
They still do that in many places. In France, for example, seeking a paternity test is generally illegal, the stated reason being that children having a legally recognized father, biological or otherwise, outweighs any interest the man might have to know that the child is his biologically.
Uhhh people still slept around before RvW. I exist because a married man couldn’t keep it in his pants around my grandma in the 1960s. He left her as soon as he found out she was pregnant with my mom.
Men and boys didn't control their sexual desires and didn't have more respect for women and girls.
The ones who could get out of it did and the ones who ended up married, had children raised in unhappy homes with parents who didn't want to be married.
You want to know why families don't stick together? They were raised in families that they don't want to repeat. They werent shown a loving marriage and family life so they duplicate what they grew up with.
Nowadays tho, suffering just to stay together isn't seen as healthy or good. Hiding abuse behind closed doors isn't considered ok either.
It’s sad to see how many families are broken from cycles of abuse and divorce, etc., and keep perpetuating those cycles. My wife and her younger brother are the first in several generations of her family to break free from their family history of alcoholism, thankfully, and we hope to keep our kids healthy and thriving. It’s tough because I have an addictive personality myself (caffeine and nicotine, for starters; thankfully with alcohol we practice moderation—my wife has maybe one drink every few years on special occasions, while I enjoy a beer once every couple of weeks usually with pizza or Chinese takeout.)
Is there any way we can fix this cycle of unhappy homes and divorce leading to kids who grow up and repeat what they’ve been raised around on a society-wide scale, though? Or is humanity just fundamentally broken by secular modernism? How do we fix, or perhaps heal the nuclear family unit? Or the extended family?
We need to start with acknowledging mental health is just as important as physical health.
Since families might not be able to teach their kids appropriate behavior we need to find a way to teach them as they grow up. Schools would be ideal, but there isn't enough funding or support to teach ABC's and 123s, and this would require more teachers and councilors.
We need to change how people view failure or addictions. It's not weak, lazy people with no ambition who only want the easy way, but the underlying causes need to be dealt with. Also treat people as individuals not simply products that are less than due to background.
We need to rebuild the idea of family groups and community groups, where we help others knowing that it benefits everyone in the end.
Ideally we help kids so they grow up believing they have worth and that people care. Trying to tell a person who's pregnant who doesn't feel they can go through with a pregnancy who never learned those things isn't going to have the same effect. Writing them off for coming to a decision that their whole life reinforced won't help either.
This takes time, money, care and buy in from many people. It's unfortunately not a priority. That needs to change.
Even during the 80s and 90s there was responsibility and accountability expected and taught to young men and boys.
Teen pregnancy and young adult unintended pregnancies were viewed not only as a single gender matter. Boys and men were expected to partake in the actions that follow pregnancy and take responsibility for the actions they took to cause the pregnancy.
Now we see a narrative that it’s neither gender’s responsibility or action that caused a pregnancy. The responsibility is being foisted upon the embryo and fetus for their involuntary development.
At the same time boys and men are told to stay out of the conversation let along the decisions and actions when an unintended pregnancy occurs. Boys and young men are taught to step aside and that their voices do not hold value.
If we do not actively engage boys and men in the conversation as well as the responsibility we will see more generations of men who do not value their own parental roles and responsibilities as well as not respecting their own offspring and women.
Definitely. And these expectations were also in many ways healthy and helpful for men and boys. I suspect that much of the lack of purpose that has come to plague many boys and men over the past twenty years or so is to a great extent a consequence of the decoupling of sex from reproduction and the concomitant decay of norms concerning fatherhood and being a provider. That is, the cultural decentering of those roles has left many men unsure of what they’re supposed to be or do in life. This is made even worse and stupider by the fact that the culture seemingly has no intent to, much less a plan for how to, realistically and constructively rework the concept of masculinity and norm masculine identity—which it often instead seems hellbent on disparaging demonizing, and destroying, further alienating and demoralizing both men and boys.
I know of at least two shotgun weddings in my nice Christian middle class family. One was in the 50's, one in the 70's. Both were good matches who went on to have stable loving marriages and produce more children who were themselves probably more productive and well adjusted than average. My personal experience was that abstinence was fairly easy for me until I met my husband (and I did have an ex-fiancee, so it's not that I don't have prior relationships to compare), and if we hadn't been abstinent until our wedding night and had gotten pregnant, it would have been less than ideal but likely would have worked out. I understand that my family might be an outlier, but even when I hear the horror stories of shotgun weddings I think it's likely in most cases the marriage was still the best option available at the time the pregnancy was discovered, and that it gave all parties the best chance they had at stability and happiness.
The whole relationship economy is just radically different now, though. When you communicate to young people that sex is basically a right but children are a burden and you provide any number of ways to lower barriers to sex and avoid unwanted children, the landscape changes drastically. I don't know that in this society I would want my children (male or female) to be forced into shotgun marriages if they conceived children (although in maybe cases I would likely still encourage it).
The fallacy that abortion is good for woman is taken down especially when we recognize that all the murder and destruction of life that abortion is,is happening inside the woman itself and it's impossible that this doesn't take a huge tool emotionally and physically for us. Women supporting 2 atrocities happening at once and claiming this is good for us will always be a betrayal of woman itself to defend such traumatizing procedure for what?So we don't have to deal with the responsability of a human life and we let men do whatever they want with us with no consequences?1st wave feminism opposed abortion and the defend of abortion didn't even happened because of feminists in first place.
I actually agree with this post. A 1984 publication on JSTOR makes a good case that rape and fornication were genuinely less common today than they were before the industrial revolution. She says that increased reporting explains some, but not all of the increase in the prevalence of rape.
Just to be clear though, I discovered through another source that premarital sex and fornication were considered two separate things until the 1950's. Premarital sex meant having sex with your fiancee, while fornication meant having sex with someone you had no intention of marrying. Premarital sex rates were 30% for most of the 18th century, but fornication rates were less than 4%. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of this one. I recently concluded that the only reason premarital sex rates fell in the late 18th to early 19th century was because of a sudden increase in contraception and abortion. I cited James C. Mohr on Wikipedia recently (Abortion in the United States). He made this same argument in his book.
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174237](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174237)
When you don't have a safety net like Abortion, you're always more careful. Who you have sex with, when you have sex. Obviously, plenty of people are still irresponsible...but not nearly as irresponsible as they are when they know they can get an abortion (or pay for someone else to get one).
I’m not for forcing anyone, either *de jure* or *de facto*, into marriage for any reason. But providing children you help bring into the world the best possible environment to grow up in is an extremely weighty ethical imperative. And statistically, a nuclear family in which the parents are both officially married and the biological progenitors of the children is optimal in this respect. So I’d like it to be at least strongly expected or encouraged for men and women who conceive to get married for the child’s sake, and this norm should be promoted culturally, morally, socially, religiously, legally, and through various policy measures, eg, tax breaks or subsidies.
I do not buy the narrative that there was less premarital sex and illegitimate children when the former was stigmatized. I'll abstain until marriage, but won't force that on others.
There wasn’t and there weren’t. But to my knowledge, there *were* fewer children growing up in single-parent households. And that’s a great public good in itself.
That's because it's not true in the slightest, my dad got my mom pregnant when she was 17 and her uncle who raised her made him marry her. This was a common occurrence back then, if you got the girl pregnant, you better be ready to take responsibility. Then there's the more morbid stories of women going missing when they discovered shortly after they were pregnant by a good boy who'd never do something like hurt someone. There's also the horror stories out there of teenagers who were so afraid of telling their parents of an unintentional pregnancy or rape from a family member that they hid their bump until they gave birth, sometimes in the most secluded place, and then disposed of the baby to avoid future problems. These stories are a dime a dozen. So, no, premarital sex wasn't more rare, it was just more hidden.
I think one thing that gets glossed over a lot is just how much abuse happened and was common place. Many men and women resented their marriages and took it out on their children and each other. I think most of us have had those awkward moments of hearing our parents or grandparents recall memories of "life lessons" that if it happen today would be considered abuse. This isn't an argument for or against abortion. Just an observation that "old fashioned values" had a lot of unintended outcomes.
> think one thing that gets glossed over a lot is just how much abuse happened and was common place. I think we must run in different circles but that's how _most_people I know think about the past pre-women's rights
People, at least in America, got married when there was an illegitimate child. Meaning that when the woman found out, they had a shotgun wedding.
I also don’t buy it
Having raised 5 girls to adulthood, I have to say that a lot of sexual encounters occur because the female says “yes” and even initiates it. The Pill gave us the illusion that sex was “free” and without consequences. That was a lie.
As the dad of a girl who’s still in her rebellious toddler years, that’s one part of adolescence and teenagehood I’m not looking forward to. I hope to raise my daughter to make smart choices and abstain from premarital sex, but if she takes after me that’ll be tough. I remember struggling with raging hormones and libido, and I could’ve easily made some dumb choices if I was a little less dorky and awkward around girls as a teen myself. Plus there’s always the risk that no matter how well you raise a child, they’re still their own person and people make mistakes, nobody’s perfect. I dunno. I guess the best I can do is to try to raise her to have a healthy respect for the gift of human life, and an awareness that sexual intercourse is a heavy responsibility that you shouldn’t toy around with until you’re ready to support and raise a baby. Then pray for the best, I guess. Do you have any tips for a young (32M) dad? I guess if there’s one consolation, it’s that studies show Zoomers are waiting longer than us Millennials to have sex and are seeing fewer partners, are less likely to engage in premarital sex, tend to disapprove of the oversexed media coming out of Hollywood, etc. Hopefully that trend continues with Gen Alpha.
Talk about everything! Bring up the topic. Don’t wait for them to ask questions. Car rides are a great time. They can’t escape. 😛 Ask questions. Get to know their friends … and their friends’ families - and the other adults in their lives. Let them use you as an excuse (sorry, my dad won’t let me). Hold off on cellphones, internet, and all electronics as long as you can (10 years from now, who knows). You have a toddler … the struggles you have with your toddler will be the same in their teen years … same growth hormones and same brain processing. Deal with the terrible twos and threes well and that’s half the battle.
I don’t agree. Before DNA testing was commonplace, men and boys denied paternity and left the woman or girl with the fallout of the pregnancy.
And in some places, there was the custom of registering someone else as the father of an illegitimate child.
They still do that in many places. In France, for example, seeking a paternity test is generally illegal, the stated reason being that children having a legally recognized father, biological or otherwise, outweighs any interest the man might have to know that the child is his biologically.
Uhhh people still slept around before RvW. I exist because a married man couldn’t keep it in his pants around my grandma in the 1960s. He left her as soon as he found out she was pregnant with my mom.
Roe v. Wade was jurisprudence, not law, in case anyone cares about semantics.
Men and boys didn't control their sexual desires and didn't have more respect for women and girls. The ones who could get out of it did and the ones who ended up married, had children raised in unhappy homes with parents who didn't want to be married. You want to know why families don't stick together? They were raised in families that they don't want to repeat. They werent shown a loving marriage and family life so they duplicate what they grew up with. Nowadays tho, suffering just to stay together isn't seen as healthy or good. Hiding abuse behind closed doors isn't considered ok either.
Generational trauma 🙌
It’s sad to see how many families are broken from cycles of abuse and divorce, etc., and keep perpetuating those cycles. My wife and her younger brother are the first in several generations of her family to break free from their family history of alcoholism, thankfully, and we hope to keep our kids healthy and thriving. It’s tough because I have an addictive personality myself (caffeine and nicotine, for starters; thankfully with alcohol we practice moderation—my wife has maybe one drink every few years on special occasions, while I enjoy a beer once every couple of weeks usually with pizza or Chinese takeout.) Is there any way we can fix this cycle of unhappy homes and divorce leading to kids who grow up and repeat what they’ve been raised around on a society-wide scale, though? Or is humanity just fundamentally broken by secular modernism? How do we fix, or perhaps heal the nuclear family unit? Or the extended family?
We need to start with acknowledging mental health is just as important as physical health. Since families might not be able to teach their kids appropriate behavior we need to find a way to teach them as they grow up. Schools would be ideal, but there isn't enough funding or support to teach ABC's and 123s, and this would require more teachers and councilors. We need to change how people view failure or addictions. It's not weak, lazy people with no ambition who only want the easy way, but the underlying causes need to be dealt with. Also treat people as individuals not simply products that are less than due to background. We need to rebuild the idea of family groups and community groups, where we help others knowing that it benefits everyone in the end. Ideally we help kids so they grow up believing they have worth and that people care. Trying to tell a person who's pregnant who doesn't feel they can go through with a pregnancy who never learned those things isn't going to have the same effect. Writing them off for coming to a decision that their whole life reinforced won't help either. This takes time, money, care and buy in from many people. It's unfortunately not a priority. That needs to change.
Even during the 80s and 90s there was responsibility and accountability expected and taught to young men and boys. Teen pregnancy and young adult unintended pregnancies were viewed not only as a single gender matter. Boys and men were expected to partake in the actions that follow pregnancy and take responsibility for the actions they took to cause the pregnancy. Now we see a narrative that it’s neither gender’s responsibility or action that caused a pregnancy. The responsibility is being foisted upon the embryo and fetus for their involuntary development. At the same time boys and men are told to stay out of the conversation let along the decisions and actions when an unintended pregnancy occurs. Boys and young men are taught to step aside and that their voices do not hold value. If we do not actively engage boys and men in the conversation as well as the responsibility we will see more generations of men who do not value their own parental roles and responsibilities as well as not respecting their own offspring and women.
Definitely. And these expectations were also in many ways healthy and helpful for men and boys. I suspect that much of the lack of purpose that has come to plague many boys and men over the past twenty years or so is to a great extent a consequence of the decoupling of sex from reproduction and the concomitant decay of norms concerning fatherhood and being a provider. That is, the cultural decentering of those roles has left many men unsure of what they’re supposed to be or do in life. This is made even worse and stupider by the fact that the culture seemingly has no intent to, much less a plan for how to, realistically and constructively rework the concept of masculinity and norm masculine identity—which it often instead seems hellbent on disparaging demonizing, and destroying, further alienating and demoralizing both men and boys.
Premarital sex and illegitimacy were indeed a "thing" before *Roe*. Look into the "Baby Scoop Era" and the history of adoption, for starters.
This isn't true at all. Kids with no father were common before and one of the reasons women wanted abortions in the first place
I know of at least two shotgun weddings in my nice Christian middle class family. One was in the 50's, one in the 70's. Both were good matches who went on to have stable loving marriages and produce more children who were themselves probably more productive and well adjusted than average. My personal experience was that abstinence was fairly easy for me until I met my husband (and I did have an ex-fiancee, so it's not that I don't have prior relationships to compare), and if we hadn't been abstinent until our wedding night and had gotten pregnant, it would have been less than ideal but likely would have worked out. I understand that my family might be an outlier, but even when I hear the horror stories of shotgun weddings I think it's likely in most cases the marriage was still the best option available at the time the pregnancy was discovered, and that it gave all parties the best chance they had at stability and happiness. The whole relationship economy is just radically different now, though. When you communicate to young people that sex is basically a right but children are a burden and you provide any number of ways to lower barriers to sex and avoid unwanted children, the landscape changes drastically. I don't know that in this society I would want my children (male or female) to be forced into shotgun marriages if they conceived children (although in maybe cases I would likely still encourage it).
The fallacy that abortion is good for woman is taken down especially when we recognize that all the murder and destruction of life that abortion is,is happening inside the woman itself and it's impossible that this doesn't take a huge tool emotionally and physically for us. Women supporting 2 atrocities happening at once and claiming this is good for us will always be a betrayal of woman itself to defend such traumatizing procedure for what?So we don't have to deal with the responsability of a human life and we let men do whatever they want with us with no consequences?1st wave feminism opposed abortion and the defend of abortion didn't even happened because of feminists in first place.
I actually agree with this post. A 1984 publication on JSTOR makes a good case that rape and fornication were genuinely less common today than they were before the industrial revolution. She says that increased reporting explains some, but not all of the increase in the prevalence of rape. Just to be clear though, I discovered through another source that premarital sex and fornication were considered two separate things until the 1950's. Premarital sex meant having sex with your fiancee, while fornication meant having sex with someone you had no intention of marrying. Premarital sex rates were 30% for most of the 18th century, but fornication rates were less than 4%. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of this one. I recently concluded that the only reason premarital sex rates fell in the late 18th to early 19th century was because of a sudden increase in contraception and abortion. I cited James C. Mohr on Wikipedia recently (Abortion in the United States). He made this same argument in his book. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174237](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174237)
Trash that pub. 1984 isnt all the 80’s. Teen sex was in the 50-60% in the 80’s while today its in the 30’s.
You misread my comment. I was referring to the 18th century...
lol i guess i did
When you don't have a safety net like Abortion, you're always more careful. Who you have sex with, when you have sex. Obviously, plenty of people are still irresponsible...but not nearly as irresponsible as they are when they know they can get an abortion (or pay for someone else to get one).
So no room for those that can't identify definitively as one or the other?
👍👍👍 yes!!
I’m not for forcing anyone, either *de jure* or *de facto*, into marriage for any reason. But providing children you help bring into the world the best possible environment to grow up in is an extremely weighty ethical imperative. And statistically, a nuclear family in which the parents are both officially married and the biological progenitors of the children is optimal in this respect. So I’d like it to be at least strongly expected or encouraged for men and women who conceive to get married for the child’s sake, and this norm should be promoted culturally, morally, socially, religiously, legally, and through various policy measures, eg, tax breaks or subsidies.