Back in 2020, the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher wrote a blog post deploring the growing lack of interest by young American women in marriage, children and heterosexual sex.
A blogger who called himself the Flaming Eyeball then wrote a blog post saying Dreher didn’t tell the half of it. He linked to a series of article depicting a younger generation ravaged by poor physical and mental health, declining testosterone in young men, and loss of interest in dating, marriage, having children and in sex itself.
A short time late he suspended his blog, but another blogger had taken the trouble to copy it.
None of the trends he mentioned are new to me, and he didn’t even get into the topics of Internet addiction, pornography addiction and addiction to prescription drugs. But getting all this information at one time in one post made me stop and think.
I’m hard-put to think of a single factor that would explain all of this. It would have to explain not only rejection of old-time moral standards, but the general apathy and listlessness.
Has the decline of religion and traditional values left the new generations with a lack of purpose? Do some people find a complete freedom of choice too much to deal with? How much is due to addictions?
Or is there a general sense of hopelessness in the face of new existential threats to humanity—the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, famine, pestilence, nuclear war and global warming?
Or is there some insidious biochemical change in the environment, akin to lead poisoning?
I am re-posting the Flaming Eyeball links and summarizing their contents. My goal is to create a second archive of this information, and to invite comments.
Please let me know whether you think this is real, what you think the reason might be and what, if anything, might be a solution.
No Families, No Children, No Future by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative (2020)
There are more unmarried women in the United States than married women. Fertility rates are at a 35-year low. Thirty percent of American women under age 25 identify as LGBT.
The Kids Are Not Alright by the Flaming Eyeball (hat tip to Nikolai Vladivostock), saved by Eddie Willers on Anodyne Mendacity (2021).
Flaming Eyeball said he’s a Zoomer university student, fairly successful and not an incel (involuntary celibate). But he said a disturbingly large fraction of the guys he met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, experienced sex or had girlfriends. He thinks something must be going on. So he did some research, the results of which follow.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 