Americans Are Cheating More, Are Less Keen on Monogamy – Survey Results – This is One Result of Christians Not Advancing and Defending Sexual Purity – The Slow, Steady Decline of U.S. Christians Defending Celibacy, Virginity, etc

Americans Are Cheating More, Are Less Keen on Monogamy – Survey Results – This is One Result of Christians Not Advancing and Defending Sexual Purity – The Slow, Steady Decline of U.S. Christians Defending Celibacy, Virginity, etc

I don’t know about this – the report says that more America adults are not as into monogamy and so on. This must be a smaller percentage of people.

In the years I’ve run this blog, I’ve seen studies, reports, etc in the last few years that more adults are staying single, and that singles are having less sex, so that ones who are married or coupled up must amount to a small number.

I’ve also seen more and more people, even self proclaimed feminists and liberals, start to write more essays and books in the last few years about how the “sexual revolution” did a lot of harm to people (especially women), how younger women now reject “sex positivity” feminism, and how young men would rather stay at home on Friday nights playing video games than date women or have sex with women.

As to any single, hetero sexual adults who are having sex outside of marriage, if this new report is accurate and true:

I’ve been warning on this blog the last ten or so years that American Christians have dropped the ball on teaching about biblical sexuality.

What I saw as the progression of events concerning this subject are as follows (the first step below seems to have started around 2005 or there abouts):

• (Step 1) Pastors, churches, and Christian authors, bloggers, online influencers and personalities at first stopped preaching on the importance of staying a virgin until marriage and stopped openly, regularly condemning pre-martial sex (they just went silent on the topic),
  while, during or around this time, idiot sex-obsessed pastors (such as Ed Young,  Mark Driscoll, and others) started giving more frequent, inappropriate, salacious, “How to Have Great, Steamy Sex With Your Spouse” type sermons, to,
• (Step 2)… they assumed (wrongly) that because all single adults are fornicating horn dogs, might as well start giving sermons about how God will forgive you of your sexual sins, since, the assumption goes, all adults are fornicating now (no mention of condemning fornication and encouraging and honoring those adults who are chaste to keep on hanging in there and remain chaste), to,
• (Step 3)… when the liberal and progressive Christians, some of whom are self professing feminists, began complaining about 1980s and 1990s era “Purity Culture,”
  the pastors and Christian bloggers and influencers decided to chuck sexual purity out the window altogether as even a possible option,
  all to soothe and placate the offended feelings of (mostly) women who had fornicated,
  and they further disgraced biblical sexual morality standards by disturbingly beginning to fall all over themselves to blog and tweet vomit-worthy, groveling apologies to all the hurt fee-fee’s of any Christian woman who had felt stung or offended by 1980s or 1990s purity culture messages, to,
• (Step 4 – we are now here in this depressing journey)… this gross attitude of, “Let’s re-define sexual purity and virginity in such a way to make purity abstract, to make purity all about loving Jesus and “purity of the heart,” so that for all the adults who have LITERALLY engaged in actual physical sexual activity, they won’t feel so icky, shamed, and guilty about their sexual sins”

So, the church opted to cave in to in-church and out-church (secular society) views and trends on sex.

(Edit and disclaimer: in so far as old school Christian Purity Culture contained things like sexist double standards, no, I do not support all of “Purity Culture,” but I also don’t agree with Christian feminists or other anti-Purity Culture Christians who insist that “virginity is nothing but a patriarchal construct,” that virginity (for men and women) just does not matter, that fornication is a-okay, and that sexual purity is merely an abstract, of being “pure in heart” with regards to Jesus. -Actual, physical virginity, literal sexual purity, is of import as well, not just “purity in Jesus.”)

I am not surprised, therefore, that the culture at large (at least the small percentage that is still dating and marrying) is practicing all sorts of weird, deviant, distasteful, and sinful sexual and relationship behaviors these days.

There is no longer any American Christian voices out there regularly speaking up on behalf of remaining a virgin until marriage, speaking against fornication, and repeating the Bible’s message that self control in all areas, including sexual ones, is possible.

Hey, moderate to conservative Christians, including preachers: the following result is what happens once you give up and cave in and/or neglect to uphold sexual purity messages! You get a nation that drifts more and more off course and into living gross sexual lifestyles and seeing nothing wrong with it.

Instead you idiot preachers either ignored the topic altogether, or else gave “how to have sizzling sex with your spouse” sermons, or, you apologized for churches that actually did the right thing (but carried it out wrongly) of the 1980s and 1990s of preaching that sex before marriage was sin.

In the meantime, virtually nobody in Christendom was speaking up in favor of virginity- until- marriage and its benefits, and pointing out that the Bible condemns pre-marital sex.

(Link): Americans Are Cheating More, Are Less Keen on Monogamy – Survey Results

by James Reinl
February 23, 2023

Americans are increasingly cheating on partners, are more open to multiple lovers, and less keen on monogamy, a new survey on changing attitudes to sex and love has revealed.

YouGov polling this month shows that while most Americans still want a wholly monogamous marriage, the numbers are slipping as people increasingly accept some degree of dallying.

Meanwhile, polygamy — the custom of having more than one spouse at the same time — remains mostly taboo, but nearly a fifth of US adults say it will be legal within 50 years.

For many, the trend is not surprising, echoed in the celebrity cheating scandal involving stars Meghan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly and the open marriage between Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.

But for others, including conservative DailyMail.com columnist David Marcus, the trajectory is a worrying progression from the collapse of traditional norms about family life.

‘Polygamy will be legal in parts of the US within a decade,’ Marcus posted on social media.

‘There is no logical basis to oppose it once you accept gay marriage.’

The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution” by Ralph Leonard

The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution” by Ralph Leonard

According to the review below – a review of Perry’s book ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,’ she, Perry, to bolster her view, appeals to the concept of ‘evolutionary psychology,’ a discipline or worldview I do not agree with.

(In my understanding of it, evolutionary psychology ends up attributing socially conditioned behaviors to hardwired, in-born traits, and is, and has been used, to practice sexism against women, or to try to explain or justify sexist outcomes against women by men.)

I don’t support the history of, and on-going existence of, sexual double standards, where, for example, women get punished for sexual behaviors that men have routinely engaged in.

However, I also don’t support third wave feminist views or sexual excess, where some portions of society advocate for sexual hedonism.

Sexual hedonism, the “there should be no boundaries on sex” type of attitudes promoted by progressives, comes with its own set of problems which hurt people (especially women and children).

(Link):  The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution” by Ralph Leonard

Excerpts:

June 3, 2022

[The author begins by explaining what by now should be a familiar refrain: the sexual liberation which was supposed to put women’s sexual behavior and choices on an even playing ground to that of men, has in the decades sense, apparently, resulted not in women’s sexual liberation, but in making a lot of women unhappy and straining relationships between men and women and in introducing a whole new set of problems.
The author says this is some of what the new book “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” by Louise Perry has set out to tackle.]

… she [Perry] questions the notion that the sexual revolution has been a gain or a liberation for women. Quite the opposite. “Women have been conned,” she declares.

The sexual revolution, Perry emphatically argues, didn’t liberate them. Instead, it liberated the libidos of high-status playboys and lechers such as Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein at the expense of women.

… This isn’t your usual traditional religious moralism.

Perry’s thinking is quite secular. It appeals to science (specifically, evolutionary psychology).

But, like religious moralism, which is based on the idea of man as a fallen being, Perry’s use of evolutionary psychology reveals the supposed limitations of our evolved nature.  …

Perry advertises her book as an attempt to reckon with the immense change the sexual revolution has created throughout society and culture. She proclaims that she does not endorse either “the accounts typically offered by liberals, addicted to a narrative of progress, or conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline.”

Instead, she makes the following arguments.

The Sexual Revolution Has Backfired on Women by S. Moore

The Sexual Revolution Has Backfired on Women by S. Moore

Before I paste in excerpts from the editorial, and though I’m a conservative, I’d like to say that I don’t agree with the usual conservative response to the “sexual revolution.”

First of all, too often, too many conservatives blame “women’s lib,” and the 1960s “sexual revolution” with any and all societal ills – conservatives will blame sexual promiscuity and so on for all that, but sexual promiscuity existed prior to the 1960s, and in other cultures.

Secondly, while I am not opposed to parenthood, the nuclear family, or marriage – or to the notion of waiting until marriage to have sex – too often, most conservatives instruct people that the way out of cultural rot is for everyone to marry, marry by the time they are 23, and have ten children. I disagree – for several reasons.

Marriage and parenthood do not keep people from sin, sexual or otherwise (see examples of what I mean in this post and in this post).

If you’re a Christian conservative, you should be aware that the Bible does not say that a “cure” for the individual or for society is marriage and parenthood – for more on that topic, please see (Link): this post, (Link): this post, and (Link): this post on this blog.

The Bible actually advises that singleness is preferable to marriage (see 1 Corinthians 7), and recall that Jesus of Nazareth never married, never had children, and he actually made some anti-nuclear-family-esque type comments (see posts linked to in the aforementioned paragraph for examples of that).

There are adults – like myself – who are single by circumstance (I had hoped to marry but it never came to pass). Some adults are single by choice, which is fine – nobody should be shamed or guilt tripped for being single by circumstance or for choosing not to marry.

The problem is not one’s martial status.

A person can remain single and celibate over a life time and manage NOT to rob liquor stores, not participate in looting and rioting, not pelt police officers with rocks, and not rape and murder people.

The problems stem from lack of self control and choice – do you choose to be a law abiding citizen or not? Being a law abiding citizen is not contingent on being married or on having children.

Hopefully, the editorial below does not fall back on the usual tropes of, “Oh dear me, if only everyone would marry young, have kids, and form their own nuclear families, society would be crime and sin free” fairy tale.

If women of any age are having difficulties getting a mate, or in staying married, the answer is NOT always or necessarily to return to stifling, sexist, 1950s American “pro marriage and pro nuclear family” positions.

Things are not always mutually exclusive or do not have to be – life for women does not have to consist of only two choices (this is a false dichotomy):

1. be a “sex positive” feminist lady who has sex with any body and every body or 2. be a traditional, stay-at- home wife and mother

You can cook up a third or fourth way of living life.  Life does not have to be lived by only one or the other parameter above. I don’t know why most on the right and some on the left continue to depict life as though only two avenues for women are possible.

I don’t entirely fit into either the left’s or the right’s notions of how women should live, and the older I get, I resent individuals, groups, or organizations (whether right, left, religious, or secular) condescendingly trying to define me or tell me how they think I should live, and at that, based on my biological sex.

There were a few aspects of this I didn’t agree with, but most of it seems okay enough:

(Link): The sexual revolution has backfired on women

Young women today are more sexually liberal than ever, but this could be extremely damaging – as the modern Mary Whitehouse has warned us

by Suzanne Moore
May 31, 2022

Who wants to be thought of as uncool, uptight and no fun? Certainly not young women who have been brought up to be “sex-positive”. This means being open, tolerant and progressive about sex, removing all judgment and shame and believing anything goes as long as those involved consent to it. It’s a beautiful idea: sexual freedom and enjoyment for all and personally I cannot wait for this revolution to happen.

It’s something of a shock, then, to be reminded that we are supposedly living in post-revolutionary times. As feminist author Louise Perry makes plain in her clear-sighted new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, what this actually means is a flood of pornography and hook-up culture, where a few swipes lead to casual encounters, “rough sex” is seen as routine, prostitution is viewed as just another career choice and we have the lowest rate of conviction for rape in a decade.

… It certainly is “progressive” for some men, who get to sleep with women who have been taught that all desires are acceptable and transgression is erotic, but the number of young women who tell stories of being choked and spat on or pushed into sexual acts they were not sure of, during what used to be called “one night stands”, is disturbing.

…But there is a case to be made that today’s aggressively sexual culture does not make many women happy; indeed quite the opposite. Some are paying such a high price for our so-called freedom that we might question what it all means.