I'm just going say it: Women who use birth control are empty beer bottles. That's right, Jewel beetles would rather mate with a certain type of empty beer bottle than with females of their own species, because the design of the bottle confuses their mate-finding instincts

An evolutionary mismatch occurs when the conditions that produced an adaptation are disrupted, and the adaptation is no longer beneficial. You can find other famous examples involving sea turtles and such. Bright lights confuse their hatchlings and can't find the ocean

Evolution is a form of computation. Genetic algorithms work by producing a population of variants on a theme, evaluating them by some criteria, and producing the next generation from the winners. Genetic iteration yields shockingly intelligent outputs

Once you understand genetic algorithms and you've seen how they work, it's such a useful and obvious frame that it changes your perspective forever. There's still plenty of room for God, but whatever creation consists of, evolution is a big part of it

The exact same logic that produces animal (and human) instincts produces traditions. Our behavior is optimized over time as beliefs that multiply us proliferate and beliefs that don't, don't

Tradition is a kind of externalized or "socially constructed" instinct, but the construction is not arbitrary. It's the output of an optimization program that's been running for 300,000 years.

Traditions can fail in the same way as instincts, because they're both forms of optimization relative to particular environments. A change in environment can break a tradition, just like it can break an instinct.

People who talk about jeweled beetles usually mention superstimulus, where you prefer a simulation over the thing being simulated. Video games, porn, etc. But the deeper problem is much more dire than that

Superstimulus is a surmountable problem for an intelligent being. We have a solution, and it's called discipline. The real problem is when the environmental disruption is so radical that the instinct is maladaptive even when it's working "as intended"

Environmental disruptions that change our fertility are the most consequential. They're "right over the target," which, for evolution, is multiplication. It's no surprise that that our most emotionally charged traditions revolve around sex and reproduction

So I'm sorry to bring up this discourse again but the trads and the cads are both wrong. No sex before marriage is insanity in the world of birth control and late-life marriage. But banging a bunch of women to "find yourself" is arrested development and spiritually corrosive

I know because I, too, have drunk from these wells. From both of them. And they're both poisoned, because when the environment breaks, instinct and tradition also break.

The only way to fix the jewel beetles is to get rid of the bottles. The only way to fix marriage is to get rid of birth control. But then isn't birth control the beer bottle? And can't women just stop taking it? No. When you elect for sterility, that mark stays with you

There's no social construction that can fix the beetle and the bottle. It mates with things that look like women. Its woman-detector thinks the bottle is a woman. Likewise, men mate with things that look like women. Our woman-detector thinks a female on birth control is a woman

Raising a family may not be so pleasant. There's a tremendous amount of sacrifice in it. Only a deluded right-wing NPC would say otherwise. But raising a family is also the main thing that makes you an adult. Only a deluded left-wing NPC would say otherwise

Traditions are good because they have practical, immediate, and inextricable good consequences. Without birth control, sex means children. Sex before marriage means children before marriage, and produces rotten children. There's a reason "bastard" used to be a slur

But now that chain of causality is broken. When sex means responsibility, then sex makes you a man. When it's just 2-player onanism, it doesn't. The prohibition on sex before marriage in this environment doesn't fix that, it just gives you contempt for those who prohibit

But notice how stupid the cad also looks here; he looks exactly as stupid as the beetle who fucks the bottle. He never grows up. And don't get me wrong: having children is not your salvation that you nobly choose against the modern world. You're not supposed to have a choice

You're not going to outbreed the libs, because liberalism is childishness metastasized in the bodies of adults. Your sons are growing up in a world full of beer bottles, and they're the beetle. For many are culled, and few are chosen. (Yes I said culled)

Now I'm going to let you in on a secret: men are made, not born, and the process where a boy becomes a man is painful. Given the option, most boys won't grow up, they'll just get bigger. Woman's "liberation" from her bio-logic is man's enslavement to his most childish impulses

Paglia knew: emancipation through sex works exactly the opposite way that liberationists imagine. Integration of man's body and mind is a profound problem that is not solvable by recreational sex or an expansion of women's civil rights

The word freedom has two completely different meanings, with zero overlap. The first one, the common one now, is the freedom of a child, which is freedom from consequence, characterized by a radical LACK of autonomy. It's freedom from worry, because you're never at fault

The other type of freedom, which is rarer now, is the opposite of a child's freedom. It's total autonomy, consummate responsibility. People conflate them, because we use the same word. And so often people appeal to the latter, when what they really want is the former

Masculine freedom isn't freedom from constraints, it's MORE constraints. It's the covenant between you and nature or nature's god to abide by his laws. But most can't make this distinction, so when I talk of freedom elsewhere, I mean childish freedom

Males only become men with great difficulty, because masculinity is something over and above our natural state. It's built, and it's built through pain, the pain of responsibility. Two different kinds of freedom. Don't forget.

If you want to understand why masculinity seems to be in short supply, it's because responsibility is in short supply, because one of the main things that causes responsibility, fatherhood, is delayed and deferred, because, given the option, most boys will opt out of it

Sex is not just something that "consenting adults do behind closed doors." That was always a lie. Sex is an act that always, necessarily, has societal (and therefore political) dimensions. By reducing sex to mere pleasure, we reduce people to automatons

And maybe they always were automatons, and maybe most of them alway will be. But I think it's also clear that we are living in a degraded and decadent state whose degradation can be hard to quantify

When we do a bad job of understanding our problems, we come up with bad solutions. Cad and Trad are two bad solutions to the problem that women are empty beer bottles and men are reduced to the spiritual condition of beetles (beetles are lovely but we should stand above them)

Sex is an encounter with that part of us that is the least human, the least safe, the least controlled. Cad and trad alike want to denature it, tame it, whether through lassitude or repression. But it's supposed to be galvanizing, so it can turn you into an adult