Virginity, Chastity and Children
One of the biggest differences between a natalist and an anti-natalist culture has to do with what one might call ‘stages of life’. There are several different ways to talk about these stages, but the most significant for our purposes might be the divide between virginity and chastity.
A pro-natalist culture divides a woman’s life into two initial stages: virginity and chastity. The virgin stage starts when the child is born and continues until she is married. During this stage, she is expected not to have sex and to be preparing for sex. Sex in marriage.
Then, during the ‘chastity’ stage, she is expected to have routine sex, but only with her sexual partner. Her, to coin a word, ‘husband’. The person to whom she has committed to have sex for the rest of their life. To them and no other.
Until her husband died, those two phases would define the entirety of her sexual life. And not just her sexual life but her social life. In her ‘virginity’ stage, she would expect and be expected to live with her immediate or extended family. Then, after her marriage, with their husband and his extended family. And, of course, her children.
Contrast that with today’s culture. Today, a young woman is expected to become ‘sexually active’ long before she is considered ‘ready for marriage’. She is expected to pass through a series of sexual stages, from light dating to ‘living together’, before she gets married. If she does.
And socially, she is expected to move from living with her parents to living in a controlled setting, such as college, to living with her boyfriend, to marriage.
And her children? Well, first of all, she probably doesn’t have any. And if she does, they are in a very unstable environment. The number of children living with their original two-parent family seems vanishingly small, with at least 23% living in single-parent families.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the [human] race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.
Theodore Roosevelt
House and Household
The historical woman’s life could be said to revolve around two things: house and household. The ‘house’ was the physical building, which she was largely expected to keep clean and functioning. The ‘household’ were the people involved with the functioning of that house. This would include her husband, her children, but also her servants and other employees and commercial relations.
It used to be said, “A man’s home is his castle” but, in a very real sense, it was the woman, the wife, who built the castle. She raised the metaphorical walls, and washed them. She made sure the castle was always ready for a seige. And, above all, she both produced (bore and breastfed) and raised its inhabitants.
I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing....my contempt boils over into bad behavior when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be 'free' to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word 'free.' By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men....Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect....He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated, and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.
Chesterton, G. K. The Well and the Shallows, "Babies and Distributism" 1874-1936
Differences make Differences
The result of this seismic shift in the role of the woman has been several other seismic shifts, the most devastating, perhaps, is that our women are no longer having children. They are no longer bearing, breastfeeding, or raising children. The fertility rate in ‘modern’ countries is dropping through the floor.
Our societies have decided to treat women differently. I read a post which amused me when it said that shaming men into marriage has not worked. It amused me because we don’t shame men into marriage… any more. And we don’t shame women. We don’t shame hardly anyone and when we do it is for the wrong thing. I was checking out at a hardware store the other day and the guy checking me out had kind of poofy hair with artificial highlights. When I was a kid he would have been… shamed. He wouldn’t have been allowed to come to work, or the boss would have had him sit down while he played a clipper over his head.
You cannot change all of the cultural expectations and get the same results you did from the old ones. If the grandmother is urging college and career on the young woman, then she isn’t urging marriage and homekeeping. For the young man to be successfully shamed into marriage, not only do people have to be shaming him because he isn’t married, but there have to be young women available… for him… to marry; and there has to stop being young women available for him to have casual sex with outside of marriage.
No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home life is healthy, courage, common sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife, and mother
Theodore Roosevelt
The Root of Shame
Our society has rejected shame, for the most part, because we have rejected the root of shame: expectations. If someone walks into your local Walmart (Yes, even Walmart, and in most localities) stark naked, there would be a certain amount of consternation. People’s expectations would not be met by that dress code. Even in Walmart.
And then, assuming the law didn’t get involved, shame would. Little old ladies would cluck their tongues. Small children would stare. Actually, larger children would stare. Indeed, teenagers and even grown adults would stare. Some would look away, and some would gasp in horror. But all of them would, in some fashion, give an indication that the naked person had verged from the standard expected behaviour.
Our society doesn’t do that much… and one of the most important areas that it has diverged from shame is in sexual ethics. The woman walking around with three children is no longer shamed if she happens to be missing a husband. The unmarried girl is no longer shamed, the unmarried boy, the couple ‘living together’ or ‘hooking up’.
The majority of mankind dream, that after God had once ordained this at the beginning, children were thenceforth begotten solely by a secret instinct of nature, God ceasing to interfere in the matter; and even those who are endued with some sense of piety, although they may not deny that He is the Father and Creator of the human race, yet do not acknowledge that his providential care descends to this particular case, but rather think that men are created by a certain universal motion. With the view of correcting this preposterous error, Solomon calls children the heritage of God, and the fruit of the womb his gift; for the Hebrew word rks, sachar, translated reward, signifies whatever benefits God bestows upon men, as is plainly manifest from many passages of Scripture. The meaning then is, that, children are not the fruit of chance, but that God, as it seems good to him, distributes to every man his share of them. Moreover, as the Prophet repeats the same thing twice, heritage and reward are to be understood as equivalent; for both these terms are set in opposition to fortune, or the strength of men. The stronger a man is he seems so much the better fitted for procreation. Solomon declares on the contrary, that those become fathers to whom God vouchsafes that honor.
John Calvin
Conclusion
No society can survive where its women aren’t having children. No society has ever done so without organising their society, and in particular their women’s lives, into the stages of virginity and chastity; unmarried and married; waiting and fruitful. I and others have written science fiction dystopias that have produced children in other ways, but no living society has ever done so… and our society certainly isn’t doing so.
It is remarkable when reading fiction that most of it seems completely devoid of these stages. The characters either seem to be happily sexually abstinent for the whole story, or they fornicate randomly. Almost never do they produce stable marriages with plenteous children. Yet that is what real societies have to do to produce children.
Now, speaking specifically to the Christians… that’s the way we’re designed to be. From the beginning until now we have been called to sexual faithfulness… in marriage. Sexual faithfulness and fruitfulness. ‘Take ye wives…’ ‘I will the young women marry, bear children…’ ‘I will bless you with the blessings of the breast and the womb…’ ‘he will see his children’s children…’.
Our generation has rejected God’s admonition and His blessings. We will never be blessed while living in rejection to Him.
But the greatest good in married life, that which makes all suffering and labour worth while, is that God grants offspring and commands that they be brought up to worship and serve him. In all the world this is the noblest and most precious work, because to God there can be nothing dearer than the salvation of souls. Now since we are all duty bound to suffer death, if need be, that we might bring a single soul to God, you can see how rich the estate of marriage is in good works. God has entrusted to its bosom souls begotten of its own body, on whom it can lavish all manner of Christian works. Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel. In short, there is no greater or nobler authority on earth than that of parents over their children, for this authority is both spiritual and temporal. Woever teaches the gospel to another is truly his apostle and bishop. Mitre and staff and great estates indeed produce idols, but teaching the gospel produces apostles and bishops. See therefore how good and great is God's work and ordinance!
Martin Luther
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
This post isn’t in any of my letter exchanges but seems most closely related to the ‘patriarchy’ discussion.
Patriarchy Discussion
and I are discussing patriarchy. I’m in favour and think it inevitable. J.S… not so much.
The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Laying some foundation.
The Blessings of the Breast and the Womb: // Podcast Version The role of pregnancy, lactation, and raising children in the inevitability of patriarchy.
What is Marriage: Adding the issue of marriage, and discussing meritocracy and inheritance.
Differences Make Differences: Given the differences between men and women, could it be that boys are wired to do their jobs and girls are wired to do theirs?
Not in the letter exchange, but on subject:
The Feminist Problem with Patriarchy: Some logical issues that feminists have when discussing patriarchy.
Not part of the discussion, but related:
Single Income Lots of Kids: The old lifestyle that contrasts with the modern perversions.
Does the Stereotypical Woman have a Vagina? Is it ‘prejudice’ to say women were designed to bear children?
Misogyny and Agency: Is it misogyny to say that women are human beings with agency?
Gender Roles: Should you be judged on how well your fulfil your gender roles?
The Modern Problem with Math: When it comes to kids, modern people can’t count.
INCHEL: Involuntarily Childless Women
Generational Wealth: The Foundation
Rights, Wrongs, and Affirming Gender
Depopulation Solutions: Can we solve our fertility crisis?
Problem with Patterns of Patriarchy
Fundamental Contradictions
Delphic Penumbra
Marriage Discussion
I write a lot on the subject of marriage, and one of the most important threads has been a letter exchange with
. Our question in that thread was ‘What Is Marriage?”.Ryan Shortalso contributed.