2,096 words

Some weeks ago, a study from Columbia University was publicized which found that 27% of ‘Alt–Right’ men were still virgins by the age of 26.

Of course, we know why this is the statistic that was spread in the media. If a study found that ‘Alt–Right’ men were 100% less likely to practice bizarre and disgusting sexual activities like, say, felching than liberals, we wouldn’t find the media reporting on that at all. Even if something the media reports about us isn’t literally false, the bias in what numbers they choose to look for–or mention–in the first place is still there. The point of this report was propaganda. Even though we’re talking about less than a third of identified ‘Alt–Right’ men, the point is still to portray the whole of the ‘Alt–Right’ as sexually frustrated losers, and our movement as the byproduct of sexual frustration.

When “the manosphere” started to take tips from pick–up artists to try to have more casual sex—and it worked—that was because they were manipulative misogynists. If the Alt–Right is now having less casual sex, well—that’s because the Alt–Right is full of misogynists too! Nevermind findings like the discovery that more women than men are obese in America, and the gap is only widening, of course—this is all just about men being losers .

For the purpose of propaganda, the article would, of course, neglect to mention that all millennials are having less sex than their grandparents did. In fact, in recent years “the average American adult had sex nine times fewer per year than the average American adult did in 1989.”

It’s convenient to ignore this while singling out ‘Alt–Right’ men because it so obviously suggests that the problem, to the extent that there is one, is one deeply entrenched in society as a whole. How could a rapidly dropping frequency of sexual activity across the entire population coincide with how much more “sex–positive” the world has become since the 1930’s? How could it coincide with the ubiquity of pornography and contraception, legalized abortion, and rises in STD infection rates being traceable through hookup apps like Tinder? The percentage of polled subjects who viewed premarital sex as “not wrong at all” grew from about 29 percent in the 70s to 58 percent by 2012. So how the Hell could we be having less of it now?

Much of the answer revolves around marriage. First, because “approximately two-thirds of the decline in sexual frequency was [directly] due to the decline in the number who were married.” Second, a decline in sexual frequency among married individuals is happening in large part because marriage is happening so much later (the average age at first marriage in 1990 was 23; now, it’s 27).

Another part of the answer is hormonal contraception, which ironically lowers sexual desire in women directly —while also making them less attracted to masculine men and more attracted to feminine ones. Meanwhile, a whopping 1 in 5 women are now on antidepressants —which interfere with the lubrication process, block orgasm, and lower desire all at once. How long before we see articles in the mainstream press blaming womens’ currently lowered sexual activity on their mental instability?

Leah Fessler’s senior thesis based on studies of hookup culture on Middlebury college campus is available for download online, detailing how miserable these environments actually make everyone involved: it isn’t just the women who would prefer actual relationships, it’s the men too. But everyone keeps having more casual sex in part because they overestimate how much everyone else is having—keeping everyone in a perpetual state of trying to keep up with imaginary Joneses. This is why other studies have found that just giving everyone an accurate picture of how much sex everyone else is actually having actually does directly cause hookup cultures on college campuses to slow down.

So hookup cultures contribute to a great deal of emotional misery, in part because what people really crave are meaningful bonds of connection, but they also make everyone less capable of forming those meaningful bonds, then or later. And surprisingly, this doesn’t just go for women. We already know that the more previous sexual partners a woman has, the less likely she is to be happy in marriage. But the same thing is true in men, too: marital sexual satisfaction declines more than 5% for every partner a man has been with other than his spouse. Since this effect isn’t restricted to just men or women, it suggests an explanation in terms of human universals.

Attempts at giving such explanations tend to revolve around the idea of opportunity costs: it’s not that it changes anything about a person’s current relationships to have had a more extensive past, but simply that a more extensive past makes them more aware of what they might be missing out on when they think about where their current relationship is. First of all, even if this is the case, it still isn’t a good thing. If what married people are pining for and judging their marriages against—to growing dissatisfaction with their marriage—are one night stands, then the most likely scenario is that they’re thinking of another relationship that would have been highly dissatisfying in all the same ways had it actually evolved into a serious long–term relationship like marriage. And increasing the amount of fuel that people have for this kind of unrealistic idealization obviously isn’t a good thing.

The only people actually defending this sort of explanation are those that view the goal of relationships as pursuit of a solipsistic fantasy of self–indulgence by finding a person that strikes off every conceivable checkbox of perfection, thinking of the ideal partner as ‘someone who makes me happy in every way’ without giving anywhere near as much thought to what it is that they actually have to offer in turn in the first place. And the real problem with this is that we have an entire world full of less than perfect people who have to come to grips with loving each other enough to be willing and able to raise families together, or else civilization is literally going to end up dead. That’s the actual goal.

But I think this explanation is idiotic in the first place, because it really isn’t an argument we’d use for anything else. All I have to do to know how much I like chocolate is eat chocolate and then notice that my response to it is positive. All I have to do to know how much I dislike broccoli is eat broccoli and then notice that my response to it is negative. I don’t have to eat chocolate for comparison to know that I dislike broccoli, and I don’t have to eat broccoli for comparison to know that I like chocolate.

Of course, it has also become well established as a general principle of psychological research that giving people more choices actually contributes directly to making people less happy itself, anyway—to the point that giving people more choices in jams literally makes them less satisfied with the experience of eating the sandwich later. If giving people a wider range of choices in jams makes them enjoy eating sandwiches less, why wouldn’t giving people a wider range of choices in sexual partners make them enjoy marriage less in just the same way?

Here’s my theory about what’s actually going on.

The occult is full of all kinds of bizarre “sex magic” rituals used to pursue altered states of consciousness. While it isn’t an ideal we can realistically expect everyone to uphold, virginity until marriage (by which I mean at least mutual, tested and proven emotional commitment) really is the strongest form of “sex magic” there is.

When a mother duck gives birth to ducklings, those ducklings come hardwired with a ‘program’ that seeks out the first moving object and then designates that as the object they will follow until they grow up to become adult ducks. This heuristic worked in their evolutionary past because the first thing they saw that moved was effectively always their mother. But we can exploit that heuristic now by placing something other than their actual mother duck in front of them—a moving object, a human being—causing them to bond to that thing and follow that thing until they reach adulthood instead.

In human beings, the neural mechanisms that lead to pair–bonding and partnership are intensely linked to sex. In other words, orgasm works for the human brain much like seeing birth works for a newborn duck, activating a system that says something like “the next thing I see move is what I’m going to bond to.” It makes very clear evolutionary sense why something like this should occur: sex is the thing that produces babies, and babies are the evolutionary reason why we need to pair–bond in the first place. I think we all understand this intuitively, actually: I’ve known many ‘player’ types who explicitly had the rule that they would make sure to avoid the girl they had just had casual sex with post–coitus, precisely to help retain their emotional aloofness, lest they form a stronger emotional attachment to sounds and smells they experience in the post–coital state. When I first arrived at college, I started to think I liked a girl, apparently more than she liked me. She was, however, interested in having sex with me. The advice I received from a ‘player’ friend was that if I was going to lose my virginity with someone in my first semester of college, I should absolutely do it with absolutely anyone but her, unless I wanted to end up with a seriously difficult and disappointing case of “oneitis.” In my experience, even those most actively interested in casual sex have always expressed some level of awareness of this phenomena.

So what would happen if we took that mechanism, and we constantly exposed it to its built–in, triggering event (orgasm) but then refused to allow the program it’s designed to activate (deep bonding) follow? It seems very obvious that if there were a way to do so, then this would be the way to de–program it. A chef who spends his entire day surrounded by food isn’t going to salivate as often as the sight or smell of food. He may have refined and specific tastes in what kind of food he enjoys eating. But where most of us, who only expose ourselves to food once we’re actually hungry, will experience our entire digestive system begin activating when food is nearby, the chef has taught his body through years of behavior that seeing or smelling food doesn’t mean that digestion is happening soon.

In the same way, the more orgasms we have with people we don’t end up bonding deeply to—and the less deep any resulting bonds are—the more we train our innate programming that sex is not an occasion to activate those deep bonding mechanisms. At the far end of the extreme, however, remaining a virgin until marriage would retain the full force of that mechanism ready to be unleashed. This theory is completely consistent with what most people implicitly acknowledge in their real world behavior, and if true it would perfectly explain why there would be a linear correlation between fewer previous sexual partners and greater marriage satisfaction and success.

Alt–Right men desire families. They want the kind of lasting and meaningful compatibility in their relationships that it takes to build one. They want children. And they want women who are in tune with their feminine nature enough to want them too. One classic image I assume is from the 1950’s I’ve seen shared around circles in the Alt–Right in a whole variety of different contexts looks like this:

Instead of going for cheap shots by laughing at ‘Alt–Right’ men for all the obese, anti–depressant–ridden purple–haired feminist thots they aren’t fucking on Tinder, you might be better off to check back in another fifteen or twenty years and ask how successful their marriages and their children have been. Because it’s already quite clear that the liberal environment of widely available but rarely satisfying porn and casual sex the media has helped to create isn’t working well for much of anyone in the first place.