Sarah Hoyt laments the decline of civilization in her old Portuguese village:
It just seems that every woman my age has been divorced three times, or is shacked up with some guy half her age who is eating out her savings. Every younger woman is having kids out of wedlock starting well before seventeen. And I keep thinking: Oh, h*ll. When did everyone who grew up with me become… low class?”Her answer, I suggest, can be found here: "And I’m not going to lie and say that all things that went on and the established mode was the best one. It very well wasn’t. For one, it was a genuinely patriarchal society in the sense that women had almost no power."
Look, the village was poor as Job, and financially we were probably the wretched of the Earth. Things I remember from my childhood could fit in a documentary on “growing up in the third world.” Stuff like getting clothes stolen from the line, because there were people who genuinely couldn’t afford clothes for their kids; stuff like eating day old peasant bed fried in lard for a meal, to stretch out the grocery money of the household; things like getting the toes of my shoes cut off when I outgrew them, so I had ersatz sandals for spring. Other things, like playing with empty containers, or thinking the days the crops were irrigated (not with water!) ideal for cork boat races (disposable, thank heavens, but…)
We weren’t rich, and my family was relatively well off.
But dear Lord, we were middle class, no matter what our actually available money was....
Again, I ask you – can the roof stay up when the walls fall? Will we turn in the “middle class” standards so many found so oppressive for medieval standards that bring poverty and misery? For places where women and children are only safe while a man is willing to defend them; where the bad men aren’t looked down on by other men?
Is this what we want?
And how is it possible we came so far so fast? How did we tumble to this?
There is her answer right there. Civilization depends entirely upon the restriction of female sexuality and the limitation of female power. It’s not the only factor, but it is a necessary one. The restrictions can be cruel and enforced primarily by men, as in the case of Islamic semi-civilization, or they can be soft and enforced primarily by women, as in the case of traditional Western civilization. Or something in between, such as she describes. But the restrictions must exist, be they self-imposed or externally imposed.
There is no equality. There never will be as long as young men are willing to build, steal, or kill for sex. Unless sex is primarily made available to young men by forcing them to jump through various hoops that help build and maintain civilization, it’s back to barbarism and grass huts for everyone. And that decivilizing process is exactly what she is describing.
The decline of civilization is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution combined with the Divorce Revolution. There were no winners and civilization lost.
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