Based Camp - September 02, 2024Communism's Age of Consent Problem (Why Were So Many Communists PDA Files)
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss communism and the age of consent, and how it deals with class differences. Simone is a writer, activist, and feminist, and she has been a long-time member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Communist International (CIT). She's also a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.
Transcript
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Wherever you have socialists or communists, you have a push to erode and decrease the age of consent.
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The Communist Party of Great Britain, this party supported abolishing the age of consent altogether.
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The Italian communists, in 1985, the Italian communists attempted to lower the age of consent to 12.
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The Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party, which is a communist-slash-socialist group, in 1979, they supported a petition to lower the age of consent to 12.
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And I have read that in parts of the USSR, it was 12.5 years.
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Oh, 12 and a half, those prudes. Lord almighty, can you believe? That's, I mean, that's young.
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You are intrinsically creating a class distinction by denying sexual access.
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I'm excited for this. You have me so intrigued. I have no idea how this, what? And how do you learn of these things?
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today.
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Hey, this episode was inspired by a question that you had asked me before.
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And we had done an episode on this, which is the concept of a classless society and its intrinsic
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impossibility because there are certain assets that humans desire, which are not in infinite supply
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and intrinsically cannot be made in infinite supply, with the key one we focused on there
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as being the attention of other human beings. Some humans will always have more attention than
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other humans. And that allows them access to certain privileges and abilities. And we see this
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in our world right now. Like, what do the young people want? It's attention. That's what they want
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the money for. That's what, that's why being a YouTuber is like one of the most desired career
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trajectories these days. It is because of the value of other humans' attention, which of course
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cannot be communalized, not without serious human rights violations happening and removing
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most of humanity's free will. Well, in that conversation, I began thinking about other things
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that humans desire. And of course, you know, when people talk about communism, they're usually
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thinking about things like food and housing. But in terms of our like evolutionary pressures,
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food and housing were always an ins to a mean, which was breeding. Right. Food and housing is what
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you do to reproduce successfully. So one of humanity's strongest built-in desires is to breed,
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to have sex with individuals. And with men, this desire, I argue in a previous take,
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the barbarians versus wife sexuality framework, likely bifurcated. So you have one form of sexuality
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for somebody you see as a close long-term partner. And then you have one form of sexual profile for
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the people you see as disposable conquests, likely mirroring the way that you ancestors would have
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treated people and spread their genes when conquering territories, which of course was a major way to,
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you know, get a lot of babies in a short period of time.
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Well, when you look at human genes, it appears that that indeed was the case. Like it shows up in
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But then so does, how does communism deal with the fact that people can decline consent?
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Right. At the end of the day, is not a woman's body the highest all means of production? You know,
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if you want to seize the means of production that is controlled by one cast of people so that other
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cast of people cannot freely access it, well, that puts women in a very precarious position because
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they are born as a group of people with access to a resource, one of the most critical resources in
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society that another group of people is not born with. Therefore, they are born with an intrinsic
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privilege. Like somebody, one, somebody sexually might be more desirable than other individuals.
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Yeah. Which inherently, I guess, is anti-communist because it creates class, to your point.
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Well, I think in a way, this is what this movement that you see among women, where they will say all
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Yeah. It's a very communist kind of take. Yeah.
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Well, they, they believe that, and you see this, this is, this is actually how they deal with this
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particular problem. And it's, it's been very fascinating to watch the Hays, the healthy at
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every size movement and other like fat acceptance movements, try to convince us men that the reason
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we prefer skinny women to obese women is because we've been socialized to prefer skinny women to obese
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women. And actually I've sort of seen this across the board within online socialization.
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Circles is this idea that the things that some humans find attractive, they only find attractive
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because of socialization and not because of an inherent desire for X or Y to be attractive or X or Y
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being a sign of fitness. I think the extreme form of this we're seeing now is the idea of lady dick,
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Yeah. You know, trans women who have not undergone surgery and still have male genitalia say it's not
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male genitalia, it's female genitalia. And if you lesbian won't have sex with me, it is because you
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are transphobic. You learned from society what women are supposed to look like, but actually if you
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remove the socialization, you are equally attracted to everyone is sort of the, the idea behind this,
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which is really interesting way to relate to sexuality and obviously very problematic because
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it is not at all correlated with actual human biology and fundamentally overrides the concept
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of consent. Right. But it goes further than that. So I began to dig deeper to try to get in mind
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communist founding fathers, what did they think about sexuality? What did they think about sexual
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consent? Okay. And what did they think that that consent could happen? And one of the things-
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Did they talk about sex? Oh yeah. Yeah. Foucault talked a lot about sex.
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We'll get into it in just a second. Is sort of wherever you have socialists or communists,
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you have a push to erode and decrease the age of consent.
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So I'll just go over some examples here. The Communist Party of Great Britain,
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this party supported abolishing the age of consent altogether. The Italian communists in 1985,
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the Italian communists attempted to lower the age of consent to 12.
00:06:46.860
The Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party, which is a communist socialist group, in 1979,
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they supported a petition to lower the age of consent to 12. And I have read that in parts of
00:07:03.760
Oh, 12 and a half, those prudes. Lord almighty, can you believe? That's, I mean, that's young. I can
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We are now going to talk about the French intellectual petitions, because this is where Foucault and some
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other really famous early communist thinkers were involved in one of these petitions. So I
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mentioned three, but I haven't mentioned the French one yet.
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So this one has a lot more theory to talk about here. So I'll be reading a perplexity answer on
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In the late 1970s, several petitions were signed by prominent French intellectuals calling for
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reforms to or abolition of the age of consent laws. These petitions were driven by a mix of legal,
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philosophical, and sociopolitical arguments. The 1977 petition, a petition published in La
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Monde, criticized the detention of Monde for nonviolent sexual offenses involving children
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aged 12 through 13. In May 1977, another petition addressed the French parliament calls for the
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equalization of the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual relationships, arguing against the
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discriminatory nature of the existing laws, which I actually agree for. So during this time period,
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the age of consent for gay sex was higher than the age of consent for straight sex.
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Oh, that's interesting. I do not agree with the 12-year age of consent law here.
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Oh, I thought it was like a man-boy-lover thing.
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The 1979 petition, a controversial petition published in Liberation in 1975, defended a man
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arrested for sexual relations with girls aged 6 to 12, arguing that the children were quote-unquote
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This petition was signed by notable figures such as Simon Ife and Jean-Louis Borey and others.
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But let's talk about the specific intellectuals involved. The intellectuals involved include
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Michael Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Doreta, often argued from the perspective that
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questioned conventional understanding of maturity. Foucault, for instance, viewed consent as a
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contractual notion and argued that it was not sufficient to measure whether harm was being
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conducted. So he was against consent more broadly. This perspective is part of a broader critique
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of societal norms and moral structures, which these intellectuals saw as oppressive and overly
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rigid. From a Marxist viewpoint, some arguments against fixed age of consent laws stem from the
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belief that the laws are idealistic and do not account for the material conditions that allow
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individuals to truly understand and consent. This perspective suggests that maturity and the
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ability to consent are not strictly tied to age, but to one's lived experiences and material
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conditions. So that's sort of the context we're looking at here. So let's talk about why you would
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want lowered age of consent if you are a communist, right? Yeah. Well, first, it is the core of
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everything in communism is I want what I want. Like there are things other people have, I want those
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things. The rich have things I don't have. I should have those things. Okay. And so it makes a lot of
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sense to say, well, I want this person for sexual access. Therefore, how dare the government, especially
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if they are not complaining about my, you know, grooming them or whatever. But I also think it brings a lot
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of the modern grooming conversation into new light because it was normalized in their mindset. They're
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basically like, if this person can make decisions like sentient decisions, there's no like gradient
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of intellectual development within this system. The reason the age 12 was chosen, because I was
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looking at this, is they argued that was the earliest a person might go through puberty. And
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therefore, as soon as a person has gone through puberty, they should be able to be like, well, I guess
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nobody's going to want to have sex with a prepubescent person. That seems to be the theory here,
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but they may want to have sex with somebody after puberty. And so there's no understanding of
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continued intellectual development. But I think that we see this again with stuff like the puberty
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blocker argument we're seeing in our society now. Oh, a new age of consent argument.
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12 year olds. Yeah. And they're arguing they're allowed to make this choice. What makes them less
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capable? And society snaps back and says, they're not fully myelinated. They're not sexually mature.
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They're not whatever. And I guess they're very similar arguments. That's, oh, goodness gracious.
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Yeah. A lot of this comes from the concept of does a family, like when does a child that leave
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their family's intellectual protection? Yeah. Right. Or control. I mean, it can be viewed as
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positive or negative, protective or harmful. Yeah. And far progressives, you know, want to take
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the perspective that because they have kids at much lower rates, um, that, you know, how do you get
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access to children? If you're not having them yourself, you need to take them from other people.
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And so it causes them a lot of problems that when people aren't properly, fully thinking,
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like they're not properly myelinated, they're not, sorry, people should, I should explain what I mean
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when I say somebody's not fully myelinated. So myelination is what allows neuron,
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like action potentials to travel down our neurons very quickly. It's, it's the key thing that allows
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human ends to think at all. If you look at non-myelinated species, the only way they can
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increase the speed of the action potential is by making the actual neuron larger. So if you get to
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things like, you know, people will talk about cephalopods, like octopus and squid being really
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smart, but they actually have axons that get up to like half a centimeter wide. A lot of people
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don't know this. That is, that is massive. You could never get, you could never evolve intellect
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if that's the tactic you're using for increasing the speed of the, the action potential. So it's
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not like myelination is like a small boost. It's actually critical for human understanding.
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So you're saying it's like equivalent to upgrading from gravel roads in your mind to
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paved freeways. Yeah. Full myelination doesn't happen until you're late teens.
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So it was mid twenties. Yeah. Yeah. It might be mid twenties. Yeah. Mid twenties is you're
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right. I'm wrong. Mid twenties. I'm going from memory here. But the point being is when
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you are talking to a 12 year old, you actually have the ability to convince them of some really
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crazy stuff quite easily because they're not a fully thinking human being yet. And so if you
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are a, you know, a communist PDA file and you want access to children, you know, why not?
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And even if you don't specifically want access to children, they are easier to access, especially
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in times of poverty, which is, you know, what a lot of these times were, you know, you go
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to the poor kid, you offer them, oh, you get to hang out with this famous French intellectual.
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That's what I see there. What were you looking up?
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I was looking up when myelination is complete. It can go up to until you're 30. And yeah,
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I think it's, it's one of those things where it starts another thing. What are your thoughts
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on age of consent laws, Simone? When do you think consent should be?
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Yeah, that's, that's tough. I think it really depends on the context of your society as well.
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And the, the presence of witnesses, I think affects things too, you know, when a guy's
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like, oh yeah, they consented, you know, I think that there's a certain point at which,
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and this can apply to adults too, consent or confessions only really makes sense in the
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presence of like impartial witnesses who are like, yeah, there's no coercion here. There's
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no, well, I mean, that's the way a lot of society used to be. So Puritan society.
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Women would always have their minders with them.
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I am never alone in the company of men. I even refuse to feed my roosters without a chaperone.
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Sage choice, which will make our gathering a blessed evening.
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I will be gone by evening. Those who court when the sun descends,
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Yeah. They would court with, yeah, with, with, well, they didn't call them.
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So here would be my take on existing age of consent laws. Cause I do think that there is
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definitely room for modification. And I think some States have good age of consent laws and
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Oh, there's differing law in United States states.
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Yeah. Yeah. When I grew up in New England, I had to be pretty aware of them because some States
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have age of consent laws that are like way too easy to trip. So there were some laws in New
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England when I was growing up and I don't know if they've been reformed since then, where like when,
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if you were dating somebody and you had a sexual relationship and you were like both 17 or
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something, right. One day when one of you would go above the age of consent and the other one was
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below it, like suppose your birthdays were like three, four months apart. That'd be three,
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four months where you could be charged with statutory rape and they, because the way it
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worked is people over X age can't sleep with people below. Yeah. You have to stick in your
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zone. Okay. Stick in your zone. That is really stupid. That is a stupid law because. Yeah. I feel
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like a more consistent law would be to accuse both underage parties of. No, no, that is actually true.
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In some States, both of you, if you're both under age, both violated, both the other person.
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So I, I think that that is, am I okay with that? Yeah, I am okay with that. I think the banded
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range is the best way to do it, which is to say if one party is below X age, the other party has to
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be within X many years of them. The half plus seven rule. Or should we just, should we just legalize
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the half plus seven rule? Actually. Just keep it even for fully like super old adults, you know?
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I don't know if I mind doing that. That's actually probably. So if you're, if you're 40 years old,
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you can't date someone who's younger than 27. So explain the half plus seven rule. The half plus
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seven rule is a rule of thumb rule that at least exists in the United States as like a social
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convention that you start hearing about in high school, where it's okay to date someone as long as
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they're older. Like basically if they are half your age plus seven years, that's, that's sort of the
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difference permitted. So if let's see, I'm 36. So the youngest I could date would be, I'm so bad at
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math on the spot. Half of 36 is 13 plus 20. I can date a 20 year old boy and not be super creepy.
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Yeah. Am I getting that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, also I think another thing to talk about
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is it was in communism and classless societies is the dissolution of the family as it relates to sex
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and sexual access. Well, yeah, it reminds me a lot when you first started talking about this
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in terms of the way that a lot of communist states or communist aspiring states, I should say,
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because real communism hasn't been tried is the loss of religion, the removal of religion. And I feel
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like this feels similar to that. When I read Brave New World, the one thing that seemed kind of weird to
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me was, I mean, it's a communist future, like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley actually does describe a
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communist world because it is like post-scarcity. Everyone has enough food. Everyone, you know, does their
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job or whatever, but they also get everything they need and live in luxury. And they have one of their
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many sayings is everyone belongs to everyone else. Something along those lines. You are not allowed to
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be exclusive sexually with anyone. Like it's super not okay. If you're like, well, I don't really feel
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like having sex with you. Actually, this is true. And we see this within modern socialist circles.
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I think this is where polyamory and this idea of it becomes politicized within socialist circles.
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Because I've definitely seen the politicization of polyamory. But how dare you think you own
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another human being? This is, this is one of those situations where like, I feel it kind of works in
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Brave New World. But to your point, Brave New World is a futuristic communist post-scarcity high-tech
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utopia. And what makes this sexual element of this, we'll say like sexual communism make sense and
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work. Is it one, you're only mixing within people of your social class, like alphas and betas and,
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you know, whatever, like these groups that are have, like they have different levels of IQ,
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different levels of interest and aptitude. They're only mixing with each other. So I think one of the
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big issues that people encounter now, when they refuse sex to other people, it's like they're refusing
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sex because they feel like someone is of a lower social class than them. And then there's this big,
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like, oh, you don't think I'm good enough for you. And like, I think there is a distaste,
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especially for women, for sleeping with people who are in some ways, like, or in multiple ways,
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lower, you know, like both in looks and in social class.
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Well, actually, that's a really good point. You are intrinsically creating a class distinction by
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Yeah. And, but, but within Brave New World's world, you're only mixing, like if I'm a beta,
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I'm only mixing with other betas. So like I'm, I'm only having sex with all betas.
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I'm not like in far progressive communes and stuff like that, which is, which is what I've heard
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because I read a lot of Tumblr back in the day, a lot of Tumblr in action, got a feel of the culture
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that was created among the online leftists. And they definitely did have an attitude that it was
00:21:07.340
quite a thing to decline consent, especially if the person you're declining consent to is of a higher
00:21:14.540
caste than you within the, the leftist caste system. So like a white person declining consent
00:21:21.680
to a black person or a disabled person was considered particularly egregious or a-
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Oh, because in leftist circles, those are of higher class.
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Well, yes, they, they, they, they don't see it that way, but they're like, how dare you
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decline consent to someone of my group? I'm the priest caste, right? Like I should be able to get
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what I want when I want, which is interesting that they do already. They built this new caste system
00:21:46.100
that they hold to very rigidly while trying to remove class, but you see within their circles.
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And I've heard this from people who have like detransitioned. One of the things that they say
00:21:55.520
that people try to do beforehand is to really make women sort of hate their bodies because they get
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used sexually by the community so frequently that they begin to look upon their own bodies was
00:22:07.240
discussed. And they felt that that is what motivated transition for them. If they just felt like their
00:22:12.740
body had become so disgusting for such frequent public use and that everyone else had access to
00:22:19.020
their body when they wanted to, and that to decline consent is in like to invoke a contract. Like I have
00:22:24.600
this, you don't have this. And it's quite sad, but like, I can definitely see how that is part
00:22:28.900
of the memetic package, which helps the idea of the surgical genital mutilation spread. Like, well,
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if I do this, then I'll won't be, you know, used this way anymore. And another thing that I wanted
00:22:44.480
to highlight here is the dissolution of the family unit. In many ways, a family identity is a class
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identity, right? It's, I am X group. I have X hereditary connections. And that differentiates me
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from other people. The goal of, you know, a classless society is to break down that connection
00:23:05.300
you have to your ancestors, that connection you have to your parents. And this is why you see,
00:23:10.460
even in like mainstream leftist movements, like BLM, the dissolution of the nuclear family as being an
00:23:15.900
important goal for them, because they see it as an intrinsic hurdle in what they want to achieve.
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And if they can use, you know, a 12 year old sexuality as a bait to achieve that, then they
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will. And this is where I think banded systems are really important for consent.
00:23:42.640
It's important to pronatalism more generally. So, you know, if you look historically, you know,
00:23:47.640
I was just talking with a guy recently and he was, he said that he met his wife when they were 13
00:23:51.800
in chat rooms. Right. You is true that like your sexual system begins to come online in like this
00:23:59.940
Yeah. And there's loads of, I mean, it's considered actually quite sweet to marry your high school
00:24:06.020
Right. And, and I think that, you know, we need to provide an environment where, you know,
00:24:11.660
a 13 year old can flirt online with another 13 year old without like this idea that you shouldn't
00:24:17.900
start dating until you're in college, which is basically the, the norm within the dominant
00:24:23.020
social group in our society makes it very hard to have a lot of kids because you're past most of
00:24:27.660
your peak fertility by then, you know, the age historically, you know, when most people would
00:24:32.800
have been getting married was 20 in the United States. Well, if you're getting married at 20 and
00:24:37.520
you don't start like seriously dating until 18, you, you just don't have a lot of time to figure out
00:24:44.480
what you're doing or how to secure somebody or to see a large pool of partners. But I think
00:24:48.560
realistically, like when did I really start dating, dating around 16, 16. I think that's
00:24:55.180
reasonable in general. I think the rules should be made less restrictive around regular childhood
00:25:02.440
dating stuff. For example, in many States right now, if people are going out and they're in high
00:25:09.060
school and they text each other nudes of each other. Now, both of them is in possession and can
00:25:14.720
be charged with the creation of child corn. And that is like, that's not the same thing. Like you
00:25:22.320
shouldn't have to your entire life deal with the same stigma because you did something stupid when you
00:25:32.680
were, you know, young and horny that somebody does that is like victimizing a minor. And that is like,
00:25:41.440
you know, this is also true in, in, in kid dating where I think the, the, any, any punishments
00:25:46.620
around, like if you do have a form of statutory grape for this age range, it should be far lower
00:25:54.660
punishments. If it's high schoolers and high schoolers, for example, I think that the real
00:25:59.800
evil here comes when somebody who is at a much later state of myelination is manipulating somebody
00:26:08.820
of a much lower state of myelination. And I would also notice here that nature sort of makes this a
00:26:15.340
bit fairer because the male is often going to be the pursuer in this situation. And even in an
00:26:20.280
environment like high school, be dating people slightly younger than him, but females myelinate
00:26:25.300
and develop much faster than males do. So they're always going to be at a slightly higher mental
00:26:30.620
age, but in this dangerous period. And all of this for me is really downstream of not making kids
00:26:37.740
terrified of the opposite gender and dating because you do that, then they're, they're not going to
00:26:46.000
start, you know, seriously dating or engaging with the other gender until college. And it's, it's,
00:26:53.420
that gives them an incredibly short time window to figure out the most important choice they're
00:26:58.240
going to make in their life, which is who they marry. I wouldn't encourage my kids to be necessarily
00:27:03.500
having sex in high school. However, I wouldn't want them to go to jail if they do.
00:27:09.820
Another reason why I like half plus seven as a rule is that you cannot date someone older than you
00:27:16.180
until you're 14. So like that, that seems reasonable to me. And that's what 12 just seems so
00:27:23.660
wildly inappropriate. Yeah. Like even though you may be sexually coming online when you're like 12,
00:27:29.760
13 years old, I get it right. I mean, especially because people are having earlier and earlier
00:27:33.560
puberties now, you are still just getting on your feet. You don't want to start messing around that.
00:27:40.020
Like, you know, chat rooms, great, you know, but yeah, more than that. Well, I mean, it, it,
00:27:47.000
this reminds me of a, one of my good friends who is from an Indian family and we worked together when
00:27:54.180
we were at a hospital. Right. So I'd be a part of my career. I was working in schizophrenia research
00:27:59.240
and I knew him then. And so he was, you know, in college at the time and I, you know, asked him
00:28:05.160
about dating and stuff like that. And he goes, Oh, and my family, we just have this rule from his
00:28:09.560
culture. You don't date until you've got your first job until after college. You don't date in
00:28:14.480
high school. You don't date in college. You just focus on grades. And I can understand how that
00:28:19.120
would be useful in terms of accumulating like social status and wealth. But in the current
00:28:24.280
environment, like given when you exit college these days, especially if you're on a medical
00:28:29.020
trajectory, that makes finding a wife incredibly difficult. And that's one of the things I've always
00:28:34.380
worried for my kids is how do I ensure that they are dating within a safe environment,
00:28:40.500
i.e. intellectual peers. And I think that this is the thing about people when they're myelinating,
00:28:45.000
right? I don't mind, you know, a 16 year old daughter of mine or a 15 year old daughter of
00:28:52.200
mine dating a, you know, 16 or 15 year old boy, right? Like that's not something that worries me
00:28:56.940
because this person doesn't have some giant cognitive advantage that they can use to manipulate the
00:29:02.500
other person. And I think if I'm overly strict in banning them, then groups like these communist
00:29:07.740
groups and stuff like that. Like if you disallow your kids from, from flirting or safe childhood
00:29:13.800
dating, you provide an outlet for people who are promoting dangerous childhood dating where they go
00:29:21.280
further than they should for their particular age range or where they're dating outside of like
00:29:25.180
cognitively safe pools to come in and target those kids because the kids it's like, well, with my
00:29:30.780
parents, it's all or nothing. So, you know, if I'm dating anyone, it's the same as dating anyone,
00:29:35.140
you know, everyone. And so the only way you can prevent that is by putting reasonable restrictions
00:29:40.700
around what they're doing there. This, basically the way that we have planned on doing this is we've
00:29:46.160
built this network that we've talked about for our kids where we have other families with kids around
00:29:51.500
their age range. And we want to create an online community where they can chat with those kids
00:29:57.300
and, and, and get to know these kids with the understanding that unlike other online communities,
00:30:01.180
if they make a friend or they make a girlfriend here, they can go do a sending out where they go
00:30:05.780
stay with that person's family for a couple months, or that person comes and stays with us for a couple
00:30:10.440
months as a way to get to know the person. But all of this is obviously with the presumption of heavy
00:30:17.340
parental supervision, but this, this allows them, you know, if they have access to this, then they're less
00:30:23.920
likely to be forming attachments to random strangers online, which is, you know, I think where the real
00:30:30.020
danger comes into play, especially with online influencers. Cause I can only imagine if I was
00:30:35.440
like an online influencer when I was like 18 or something like that, at like peak, like a sexual
00:30:43.060
desire, that is definitely a position I would have been like, Oh, I have all these girls throwing
00:30:48.220
themselves at me. I'm just going to use this position to, you know, get whatever I want in
00:30:54.100
the moment. Like it's, it's, it's, I understand how so many people at those ages end up getting into
00:30:58.980
trouble. Yeah. But do you have any final thoughts on communism and age of consent laws?
00:31:08.200
Yeah, I think I'm just going to say, I think brave new world got it right because it's the only
00:31:12.980
scenario in which I could really see the free sex that would be required of communism to work.
00:31:17.640
And this is a world in which humans are engineered. So also like everyone's at the equal level of
00:31:22.500
attractiveness. Everyone's kind of a clone, you know, they all look the same. So you're not even
00:31:26.400
dealing with like, Oh, like you're kind of gross. You know, everyone's totally in the same league
00:31:31.260
socially, cognitively and attractively. And they all share exactly the same culture. So there's not
00:31:39.300
even an issue there. So I'm saying that like, there are, there is a scenario in which it could work.
00:31:44.480
Well, I know, but I mean, I'll give you my scenario for a good word, but here's what I
00:31:49.440
would put as age of consent. Okay. Oh, age of consent. I think seven, that's it. Well, yeah.
00:31:55.900
Okay. Half plus seven. We know, but I think you need the banding other, otherwise you, you don't.
00:32:03.740
Okay. You could do a half plus seven. Then it is the older person because it isn't actually encoded
00:32:08.260
into law in a lot of places. The younger person and the older person are both considered violating
00:32:11.860
graping the other. Yeah. The older person who's committing the grape. That is the way I would
00:32:16.540
handle it. Now in a future society, how would I handle this? I would say that we should just
00:32:21.700
remove sexual impulses. I think that they are most useless of all of humans' desires. They are,
00:32:28.900
I mean, it was to ensure that our ancestors who couldn't figure out to put the thing in the thing,
00:32:33.880
and that makes babies and babies are good to make babies through like pure biological impulses.
00:32:40.540
I want to enter a world where when people have kids, it's because they have chosen to have kids.
00:32:45.280
And there is no accidents. There is no anything like that. It is.
00:32:49.680
In addition, this would do wonders to the quality of partnerships that people were forming,
00:32:54.960
because there isn't this externality that's not really tied to the quality of a relationship,
00:33:00.680
i.e. how hot you found someone. In general, this is going to be how I'm going to teach my kids to
00:33:05.600
think about looking for partners. And if any of our audience isn't married yet, it's how I would
00:33:09.900
encourage you to think about looking for partners. What you are looking for is the mother or father
00:33:17.020
of your children. Every criteria you're using to judge whether or not you should date someone,
00:33:22.440
and then whether or not you should escalate that relationship, should not be how turned on by them
00:33:27.140
you are. It should be, is this person going to be a good mother or father to my children? And then
00:33:33.360
secondarily, a good partner to me. And I guess I didn't really, when I was younger,
00:33:37.420
realized that that was the choice I was making. You know, every time I see Simone interacting with
00:33:41.980
our kids, and I see what an amazing mother she is, and I'm so grateful for the choice I made,
00:33:46.560
I realized I didn't understand the weight of the choice when I was making it. I, I, I, even me,
00:33:52.880
I was, you know, it was 50%. You know, how much do I like dating this person? How much do I like
00:33:59.380
being around this person? How much do I like sex with this person? How hot is this person?
00:34:03.700
How much is she going to augment my status within the communities I'm in? And that was just a huge
00:34:08.800
mistake, because that wasn't what I should have been. I mean, I, I locked into a good choice, but
00:34:12.920
I would encourage our listeners to really, really, really discount how the, the whole, how much a
00:34:21.340
person turns you on part of dating. Also, living was in a community that had had its arousal pathways
00:34:27.860
removed, or did not use them when it was choosing partners, would have two really, really huge
00:34:32.260
positive externalities. One is that men would no longer have the incentive to signal to women that
00:34:39.400
they were interested in longer term relationships than they really were to gain sexual access,
00:34:44.380
because men have higher value within the marriage marketplace, and women have higher value within
00:34:49.040
the sexual marketplace. So men will often try to convince a woman that they're interested in
00:34:53.860
something more serious than they are to get her to put out, which is really bad for women. But then men
00:34:59.420
have this, the inverse problem, which is a lot of women come to believe that their value on a marriage
00:35:05.180
marketplace is their value on a sexual marketplace, when it just isn't. A woman can get a much more
00:35:09.940
attractive, wealthy, competent guy to sleep with her than she can get to settle down with her for.
00:35:14.860
I think what should be obvious reasons, but if you removed recreational sex from the community,
00:35:21.900
or at least the desire for recreational sex, the, is anything other than like a training to get good
00:35:28.440
so that it can be, I guess, used to manipulate communities that still have their arousal
00:35:32.840
pathways, it would, it would really help fix a lot of the problems of modern dating.
00:35:38.740
Well, so if you would remove sex, would you also remove food? Because it's, I feel like they're very
00:35:44.600
much the same thing, you know, it's a survival instinct. And, you know, assuming we live in a
00:35:49.360
future where you could probably have like some kind of internal IV drug.
00:35:51.840
Oh, absolutely. I, I, I, yeah, that'd probably be the next one. It would, it would be, uh, arousal
00:35:56.280
pathways I'd remove. And I would remove the desire to eat, but not taste pathways. I think
00:36:02.420
taste pathways are enough to, you know, appreciate interesting dishes and stuff like that. But the,
00:36:09.100
the desire for food for the sake of like calorie type food, like differential calorie load.
00:36:15.580
yeah, I would remove that. I mean, I think from my perspective, all non-reproductive sex is a sin.
00:36:22.660
So it is something that I would definitely want to get rid of. Like I, I, I don't, I just don't see
00:36:30.900
the advantage. Like what's the utility of arousal? Yeah. What's the utility of eating either? And both,
00:36:38.160
when you think about them, can be pretty gross. People smacking their lips.
00:36:41.920
Except for when you eat, the sound that you make when you eat.
00:36:47.320
Well, I mean, I actually think when you speak about getting rid of eating, you're probably right.
00:36:51.360
I imagine in the future, you know, if you think of something like an infant, the way that the
00:36:56.380
mother's body is adapting nutritionally to be giving them directly in their blood supply, like the most
00:37:02.220
optimal nutrition. I think the way that we would probably want society to be structured in the future
00:37:08.360
is humans to essentially have like small backpacks that essentially. Placenta backpacks.
00:37:13.760
Yeah. Placenta backpacks. It's like optimized nutrients for their state level of health,
00:37:18.840
everything like that directly into their bloodstream. And that eating itself would be merely an artistic
00:37:28.740
Like what? Like smoking. Smoking? Yeah. But not like smoking.
00:37:34.400
Social. It's a break. You enjoy it. It's stimulating.
00:37:38.100
But it's not something that you have to do, you know, if you don't want to do it. Because eating
00:37:42.860
takes a lot of time. I mean, three meals a day that some people do. I do one meal a day. I don't
00:37:46.680
know how anyone has time for three meals a day. But it just seems like such an indulgence.
00:37:50.920
Would you agree or? When I am sleep deprived, breastfeeding or pregnant, I need it, but not
00:38:02.640
normally. Yeah. And it's a hassle. I mean, and with sexuality as well, it's one of these things
00:38:09.380
where when people are like anti-porn or anything like that, I'm like anything that can be used to
00:38:16.380
ensure that my sexuality takes up less of my mental capacity or less of my day, I think it's a good
00:38:23.260
thing. You know, I, I do not think movements that end up redirecting attentional.
00:38:31.300
Not attentional. More. How do I say more? Additional.
00:38:35.480
Additional mental processing to sexual thoughts, which I think things like NoFap ultimately end up
00:38:41.080
doing. It's a negative thing because it ends up dedicating more of, you know, the thing that I
00:38:47.080
am, my mental processing. To me, NoFap is a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous, right? NoFap is,
00:38:53.540
is stopping. It's, it's not like an addiction. It's worse because, you know, like I think men's need
00:39:02.460
for, we'll say release is similar to a hunger, you know, like you can't go without food. So you can't
00:39:10.420
go to like, you know, you can't go cold Turkey on food or, I mean, I would argue on any sort of
00:39:17.100
sexual related activity, especially as a man. And so then you just end up getting obsessed with it.
00:39:23.000
And then you think about it too much. It's like when you're starving, I know what it's like when
00:39:26.160
you're starving, like all you can think about is food. It's, it's literally like the only thing
00:39:30.700
that's on your mind. When am I, where can I get, what can I eat? You know, when is, when is my next meal?
00:39:34.640
And I imagine that's what it's like for people on NoFap. Maybe it's not, and hopefully it's not,
00:39:41.320
but it just seems just like AA where like, now you're stuck thinking about it for the rest of
00:39:45.560
your life. And you just have to live that way. It seems so unproductive, like all the things you
00:39:49.140
could do if you weren't focusing on not fapping. And to be clear, I don't want a brave new world,
00:39:57.880
free sex society. I'm just saying, if you have to make free sex work, that's the way to make it work.
00:40:03.540
Will it first remove arousal or to make it work?
00:40:06.260
No, I mean, that's, you don't need free sex if you don't have arousal. In the brave new world
00:40:10.040
scenario, if you have a world in which people have arousal and need sex, then a world in which people
00:40:15.800
are isolated within their own social class, bred to all look similar, think similar, and act similar,
00:40:22.960
then, you know, it's okay. It's fine. It'll work. It won't be too problematic. Although even
00:40:31.120
Huxley in the book suggests it's somewhat problematic, so whatever. But yeah, that's
00:40:37.680
age of consent at 12, too, too low. And I, I only have to add that I hope that we get to do more
00:40:45.940
episodes where you reference French works and philosophers, because again, there's nothing.
00:40:51.100
Yeah, but I also think we need to be diligent about not overly banning our kids from dating and stuff
00:40:57.480
like that. Oh, obviously not. Yeah. But again, I feel like the, the, the tacit social norms of a high
00:41:06.120
school social set, the half plus seven rule are more practical than our actual laws, which is insane.
00:41:13.340
I think a lot of what life is about and where we've kind of become derailed as a society is we've
00:41:20.660
built all these really weird complications instead of just doing kind of what makes sense. You know,
00:41:27.560
how we had like all these, there was the food pyramid and then there's, what do we have now?
00:41:32.440
It's a food pile. I can't remember. Food pile. Food box. We had the pyramid. Now it's a pile.
00:41:38.720
Like all, I can't, I don't know what it is now, but it's complicated. Can you believe that the food
00:41:43.120
pyramid, like when you think back, so people who are younger who don't know the food pyramid,
00:41:47.060
this is something that like in school I was taught, this is what you need to eat to be healthy.
00:41:50.860
And the thing it said you needed the most of was like carbs. Yeah. Like pasta. Like bread.
00:41:57.040
Now we know that you need like none of that. Yeah. Well. And it was like bread. The answer is in the
00:42:03.780
pyramid. The pyramid. That's ancient stuff you're talking about. What is it? What is it?
00:42:08.620
Fuck. We built the pyramid a long time ago to illustrate how much people should eat of the
00:42:12.720
four basic food groups. It's upside down. What? Sir, the pyramid is upside down.
00:42:19.340
Turn the pyramid upside down. It can't be serious. That would put butter and fat at the top of the
00:42:24.240
damn food pyramid. Sir, we've got a match. Didn't want you to know that. Tons of pasta.
00:42:34.960
Oh my God. I'm being so good. I'm eating my pasta. I always felt like I was being healthy when I would
00:42:40.540
eat like pasta or like French fries or like, you know, cause I needed to get all my carbs and I
00:42:47.040
just wasn't getting enough carbs. It's so hard to fit in all the carbs. Yeah. And then I think it
00:42:52.560
was, it was at the bottom bread, then vegetables and dairy. Then there, then there were fats and
00:43:00.480
meats and then just at the very top of sugar. So sugar was bad, but now we live in this world
00:43:06.000
in a society in which sugar and carbs are considered exactly the same thing. Oh yeah. Fruit was in there
00:43:12.440
somewhere. I think it was like middling. Yeah. Fruit. Middling is fruit. Who cares? Who cares
00:43:19.240
about fruit? It's the nineties. Eat your fruit loops, kid. It counts as a, as a bread. It's good.
00:43:24.900
Better. I love you, Simone. You are a spectacular wife and I am fortunate to be married to you.
00:43:30.420
And I hope that our listeners like, and subscribe. If you enjoy our content, it would mean a lot to us.
00:43:37.000
It's actually interesting. Our viewer counts have been like shooting up and like in terms of watch hours
00:43:41.220
and views for a video, our subscriber count barely budges. But I think it's because we don't ask,
00:43:46.080
you know, maybe that's what we're supposed to do if they're like, I can't subscribe.
00:43:49.900
Yeah. And we ask our son Octavian to ask our audience. And he just says that they need to
00:43:54.600
life and describe, which is not very helpful. So I guess everyone's just
00:43:58.060
life and describe people living and describing. And that's why we're not getting any more subscribers.