Another sign of American decline

In another sign of American decline, the number of Boy Scouts dropped by 600,000 over the past decade. But at least the dwindling numbers are not as bad as Europe: they now allow girls. Some of my fondest (wholesome) childhood memories are of scouting, but if I had shared a tent with a girl, my memories would be a bit different. And what's with female Scout leaders now? Is there no escape from women for a boy?  A life of Perpetual Mom. I'm sure the knitting merit badge is much more popular now than was firearms when I was a boy.   

Gay couples teach us that open relationships are awesome!

As elite culture turns homosexuals into our heroes and role models (Do we have a gay superhero yet?), research is documenting that open marriage is common among gay men (shocker, I know). In a study of 566 gay couples, only 45 percent had even made the promise to be monogamous.The findings are so essential to the welfare of American society, the NIH forked out 3.5 million additional dollars to continue the study for five more years.  

And these coupled gay men generate catchy memes for the rest of us. Dean Allemang, who just started a new relationship, dispensed this gem: "I don't own my lover, and I don't own his body," he said. "I think it's weird to ask someone you love to give up that part of their life. I would never do it."

TCM: Happy Sweet Sixteenth

Ted Turner has managed to do one positive thing in his long career--he started Turner Classic Movies 16 years ago. TCM is far and away my favorite channel. It connects me to an America I recognize. You can have all your idiotic reality programming. 

It's getting better all the time

Whites, N = 24,684

Blacks, N = 4,235

Other races, N = 1,225

Cultural conservatives and old people have the bad habit of assuming that everything is going hell. Data have a way of proving everyone wrong sooner or later.

I know from prior analysis that whites are more intolerant of marital infidelity than they used to be, but I wanted to check for other racial groups. You can see in all three groups shown above that since 1973 there has been a gradual increase in the number of people who say that cheating on your spouse is always wrong. In an era of tolerance, it's refreshing to see so many people close-minded about the issue.

People used to be more indulgent about affairs, at least for men, but now they are much more approving of sex before marriage. I'm not thrilled with either era, but if you're going to be free sexually, I would prefer that you do it before children are involved. We traditionally make a big deal about divorce, but it's breakup of any sort with children involved that's the problem.

People seem to put marriage on a high pedestal now. Higher status people are thinking about how it's the institution where our precious children are raised and how they will be ruined or saved depending on the parenting, while lower status folks will start families without marriage, but still see it as an ideal they hope to eventually have.

And once you finally get married, you've got to get it right (although our expressive individualism makes that difficult). Does Hollywood have something to do with the idealization of marriage? Sailer has writen about the pro-family messages found in some films.

Can we attribute the moral improvement to feminism, to a greater concern for the treatment of women, like we might with attitudes towards wife beating and rape? Damn, I hate giving fems credit for anything. Is it due to a greater desire for couples to have an authentic relationship; to have real honesty?

If you're inclination is not a moralistic one like mine, keep in mind that society's condemnation of cheating benefits us beta males by making it harder for the alphas to have multiple women. If you're an alpha, why are you reading this dumb blog when you could be out on the prowl?

Celibacy among girls seems to be up a bit: Agnostic has an interesting post at Gene Expression which presents evidence that previous generations of young people were sluttier than this one.

It has seemed the case that many social indicators have at least plateaued, if not improved slightly since the early 90s, but increasingly coarse pop culture does give older people the impression of a continuing slide.

For example, phenomena like Jackass or Eminem leave one with a sense that the march toward the next, even more shocking fad continues apace. One mistake is to assume that young people are what they seem to older people. Fashion always involves a certain amount of the absurd, and once you move out of those years when it's so important to impress peers, one becomes more disinterested, and many fashions then just seem stupid. "Wearing your pants down below your butt? Idiotic. Only a delinquent would do something that irrational. Wearing a thong that everyone sees? Slutty. Only a girl who sleeps with anyone would do that."

What older folks fail to realize is that fashion--even when it seems extreme--is ultimately about show, and is a poor indicator of behavior. I've got a friend who was a headbanger as a teen. He looked like a two-time felon, and all the grownups at the mall were terrified of him. But I've never known a bigger pussycat--it was all pose, and it usually is.

That's what so great about data--it gets past appearances. Which is a nice segue to my purpose--analyzing General Social Survey data to document trends in sluttiness. I list below the percent of males and females ages 18-25 who report having had 5+ sex partners so far, and the percent who have remained celibate:


Percent--1988-1991 average (N = 624)

5+ partners
Males 11.7
Females 1.8

Celibate
Males 14.0
Females 10.8


Percent--1993-1998 average (N = 1009)

5+ partners
Males 8.2
Females 3.2

Celibate
Males 15.2
Females 11.2


Percent--2000-2006 average (N = 1,133)

5+ partners
Males 10.8
Females 2.2

Celibate
Males 14.3
Females 14.1

I'm not surprised to see what basically looks like a plateau, but one encouraging sign is that the number of girls who are remaining celibate appears to be up. I'm damn happy to see it.

By the way, I'm a bit of a cultural declinist, but Agnostic and other young bloggers I've read seem to be targeting Boomers and X-ers. My reference--and for a lot of thoughtful declinists, I think--is not any of the last four decades. It's WWII through the late 50s. I see a steady decline (with important exceptions) since then, with a flattening more recently. (This is a complicated question, of course, since there are so many trends one could choose to look at).

The only reason why I have a little bit of nostalgia--not much--for my childhood and adolescence is because I was raised in a place that was decades behind every place else. In other words, it was a bit like the 50s. It's easy for me to wax nostalgic as people much older than I (Pat Buchanan for example) do because in a weird way I grew up in that.

Cutural decline among women

I often think that the country is in cultural decline, but it could be that Old Man Syndrome is setting in. I mean, haven't old people always bitched about how everything is going to hell?

Well I found some evidence that Grandpa might not be totally senile. The General Social Survey has asked people from 1991 to 2006 if they had ever cheated on their spouse. (I limited the analysis to those who have ever been married).

The graph shown above displays the trend for women. I focus on them since the trend is sharper: from 1991-2006, the percent of men who have cheated has only gone up a couple points. For women, the percent rose from 10.6% in 1991 (N = 616) to 17.5% in 2006 (N = 1,038). That's a 65% increase in a historically short period of time.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of convergence: in 1991, there was a gap 10.6 points between men and women; by 2006, the gap was down to 5.6 points. So, women are rapidly becoming as bad as men.

You know, come to think of it, this is consistent with other things I'm observing. You read reports like the following: the gender gap in prison inmates has narrowed; girls plan attacks on other girls and tape the assault in order to put it on YouTube; women are becoming plumbers in large numbers.

I get so pissed when I see all of the Girls Gone Wild ads on channels that young kids watch.

When I teach 8 am classes, my nearsightedness makes it difficult to differentiate the girls from the boys. The girls show up in sweats or gym shorts, and make zero effort to look good. A girl in a class just the other day said that if a woman hits a man, the man has the right to treat as her if she were a man and beat her silly if he can. They should duke it out, chivalry be damned. I see all the Gladiator women on TV and wonder, "What the hell is going on?"

And I blame feminists, in part, for this mutant society I observe all around me. There is a theory which sums it up very nicely. If society encourages women to move into the social roles traditionally held by men, well big frickin' surprise, they become like men, and not in just the good ways. They become more aggressive, more deviant, and more criminal. I ain't that crazy about the way men are, but when you see it on a woman, it's like ten times worse. I'm troubled when I see two guys fighting, but when I see some muscle-bound chick hovering over the victim, all tattoos and trash talk, I feel like becoming a revolutionary.