If you have any familiarity with my work, you know I publish mainly in the dissident Right press in the United States. Sexual issues do not typically occupy a lot of attention in this milieu. Sometimes I have even encountered confusion as to the relevance of my writings on sex to the political tasks of the nationalist, or identitarian, movement. The proper response, of course, is that any nation or race must reproduce itself sexually. Our people must recover a healthy path to family formation as well as establish institutional incentives for keeping families together.
Our enemies certainly know this. Much of their activism consists in discouraging adaptive sexual behavior among us. This is obvious in the cases of the LGBTQ movement or the current transsexual madness in the United States, but is no less true of the long-established feminist movement promoting market competition in place of cooperation between the sexes. We need to start paying more attention to this, and not limit our work to political activism in the traditional sense. That is why I prefer to publish my writings on the subject with a nationalist outlet such as Logik Förlag. (...)
Some of the most disturbing reports about women and migrants have come from Sweden. A lot of older Swedish women without families of their own to care for apparently eagerly volunteer to host new arrivals from Africa and Asia. Some of these women are the sort you refer to as batikhäxor, I believe. And the young, fighting-age men arriving in Europe — supposedly as refugees — have a well-earned reputation for not being especially choosy where women are concerned. They do not require youth or beauty; a warm body is enough. Such men seem to arouse some weird combination of the sexual and the maternal instincts in the local spinsters who take them in. In effect, the Swedish government has been sponsoring a program to provide menopausal Swedish women with young boyfriends: women who should be baking cookies for their grandchildren rather than thinking about sex. To get a full sense of how bizarre the situation is, try to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that instead of importing fighting-aged men, the government were bringing in foreign girls between the ages of 17 and 22 and housing them with Swedish bachelors. What do you suppose would happen?
One thing that should not surprise us about this situation, however, is Swedish women’s relative lack of concern for their nation. In our environment of evolutionary adaptation, tribes fought over women, and the women went to the winners. It was not unusual for a woman to find herself subject to a foreign tribe with an unfamiliar language and customs. The women who passed on their genes were those who could best adapt themselves to this difficult situation. So we must not expect to find the most fanatical tribal loyalty in women. Men are expected to sacrifice everything for their nation, if required; women are under the primary control of the universal reproductive imperative instead. The only way to get a bit of tribal loyalty from women is to demand it, and Western men have obviously failed in this respect.
The best way to conclude a talk about sexual dysfunction would be to tell you how to cure it, but this is not easy. In America, as I mentioned, critics of the Sexual Revolution usually have nothing better to propose than a religious revival. But this is not likely to work in a country whose Church is governed by lesbian bishops. The most recent news story I read about Christianity in Sweden involved such a bishop calling for the removal of crosses from Christian churches so as not to offend Muslim immigrants.
I do not have a cure for the Sexual Revolution, but I can make an educated guess as to how it will play out. In the long run, maladaptive behavior always comes to an end because it is maladaptive. Those who postpone marriage for too long or devote themselves to sterile sexual practices will fail to pass on their genes. The future belongs to those who procreate and raise children. They will be the founders of the civilization that replaces today’s exhausted and decadent world.
I might even be inclined to look toward the future with confidence if it were not for the fact of demographic replacement. Adaptive sexuality will return one way or another, because that is nature’s way. But there are no guarantees that our own descendants will be the ones practicing it. And I don’t care very much what sexual or family practices prevail in a future Muslim Swedistan. My concern is with my own people and civilization, of which the Swedish people are a part.
Once again, we see that the sexual and political sides of our people’s struggle are intimately connected. I hope the publication of a Swedish edition of my writings by Logik Förlag will contribute to our common cause.
Thank you.
https://counter-currents.com/2023/06/sexual-utopia-in-stockholm/
The proportion of American women bearing five or more children over their lifetimes fell from 20 percent in 1976 to five percent by the early 1990s, but the figure has remained roughly constant since then: we may have discovered the irreducible fraction of women who cannot be led to conform to an anti-natalist social environment. This might even turn out to be an evolutionary selection event that will leave future American women more oriented toward family and motherhood than their ancestors—at least if the country is not destroyed through mass immigration before the process is complete.
So what do these women have in common? The clearest pattern is that all believed in and practiced some form of religion, and only one attached no religious significance to her childbearing. But it is not so obvious how religious influence operates. As the author puts it: “Each of our subjects had a story to tell about just how their religious experiences influenced the decision to have so many children. The path was never straightforward.” (...)
In part, religion offers community, and thus moral as well as practical support for struggling mothers. One woman put it this way:
I would say the vast majority of women that give birth in America don’t have adequate support, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and medically. In religious circles there’s more support. Childbirth is celebrated for us as a community. Women don’t feel valued when they have a baby in the secular world. You become invisible. Now you are no longer this productive member of our working culture. People want to feel valuable, like they’re contributing something important. And when the culture makes them feel that that’s not what they’re doing, it’s very painful.
But the significance of religion for many of Pakaluk’s subjects was even deeper and more personal. As mentioned above, most of these women understand their pregnancies as providential, and many refer to praying for divine guidance on the subject, or becoming “open” to receiving another child (as opposed to deciding for themselves to have one). One mother spoke of a shift in mental orientation from “fitting children into a narrative of the self” to “fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing,” viz, the chain of generations. Such women consciously reject “an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle where children are fitted into our own plans for the future.” Another remarked that the very idea of family planning involved the illusion that we are in control of our lives. In reality, while we have freedom of choice, we are never “directing the play,” so to speak: no mere human being is. The most successful mothers are those who have been able to abandon control, or the illusion of it, and many experience a religious conversion or reversion along the way. They come to think the divine plan superior to their own narrow designs.
This abandonment of control affects even so worldly a matter as family finances. Said one mother: “We’re not family planning according to our finances. We’re not waiting to have that set and then have our children. Our finances don’t add up at all. If we were to try to make them add up, we wouldn’t even have one kid.” Such an attitude does appear to involve a certain leap of faith: if our ancestors had waited until all the financial risks of starting a family were resolved, none of us would be here. Many of Pakaluk’s subjects remarked that expenses turned out to be a lot smaller than they had imagined, as well as mentioning unexpected turns of fortune that had made paying for children easier after they had them.
Another expressed the limits of the human ability to plan as follows:
I think the key thing for us was that we stopped trying to act like we could implement the ideas we had before we started having kids in our marriage after we started having them. We had this idea like it was going to be fifty-fifty. We were going to prioritize my career. And then none of that worked. It’s just surprising how traditional things have turned out to be.
This lady discovered what is called “force of circumstance.” It is the reason traditional arrangements are traditional.
The general point that no human being can control his own life applies to men as well, of course, but men’s lives may be more shaped by intentional choice than women’s, e.g., by the need to choose a career path. In recent years, however, women’s lives have been deliberately reconfigured on this male model: “first secure a professional income, then secure a family. The path of schooling leads inexorably through the years when it would be easiest and most favorable to have children,” as Pakaluk explains. Professional training is not normally geared to the part-time tempo most practical for young mothers, and where such options do exist, “women often pass them up for fear of being relegated to ‘second class’ status.”
One of the author’s subjects was an MD who did not realize until doing her internship that she hated medical practice (“I really developed horrible anxiety”). Her first pregnancy came as a relief, and she planned to take a year off from medicine to care for her son. But motherhood turned out to be such a joy for her that she—probably not coincidentally—conceived a little girl just in time to postpone her return to professional work further. Gradually, motherhood became her profession: “We just sort of kept liking the kids that we were having and liking having kids,” she recalls. She ended up with seven, and never did go back to medical practice. Today she admits that in hindsight, she would not have bothered with her medical training. She is also grateful that she had her first child when still relatively young, pointing out that friends who have come to motherhood later have found the transition more difficult and experienced “a strong sense of betrayal.”
The author comments:
Women who have been encouraged to look at career-building single-mindedly suddenly find themselves up against a gut-wrenching quandary they don’t remember opting into—their desire for a home and children on the one hand, and the fruition of years of training on the other. Most of the time women split the difference, leaving neither incredibly fulfilled nor fulfilling. Mothering small children while working makes motherhood less enjoyable. And working while juggling family responsibilities taints the natural satisfactions of throwing oneself into a career.
In other words, women who try to live like men fail to achieve the characteristic satisfactions of either sex. As Pakaluk notes, subjective measures of women’s happiness have been declining since 1970, both absolutely and relative to men. Mainstream scholars refer to this as the “paradox” of female happiness, assuming women have made plenty of “progress” since that time. They have: towards unhappiness.
The women in Hannah’s Children found that the more children they had, the easier and more rewarding it became to go on having them:
Fixed costs, such as giving up a career or a second income, had already been borne. The variable costs, personal and lifestyle-related, became smaller. And the expected value to the family in terms of excitement, joy, and love seemed to grow larger with additional children. The added joys created a snowball effect.
At what point do the fixed costs give way to the variable costs? “Based on my interviews, it seemed to be somewhere after the second child and not later than the fourth.” The cost of starting a family must be “seen as an investment, or a down payment on a certain kind of growth that one had to value for its own sake.”
The burden of child raising is not additive, because the mother gains practical wisdom over time and because older siblings positively enjoy helping out. One interviewee surmised that taking care of younger siblings lets them feel useful, and protects them from becoming depressed, spoiled, or self-centered. Others predicted that their children’s pro-social virtues “would be a benefit to their future families, places of work, and communities.” Any loss of attention from the parents is more than made up for by the presence of brothers and sisters.
All Western populations are currently at below-replacement fertility, and many wonder whether any policy fix is available. Viktor Orbán’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary represent one well-publicized effort. But the track record of such experiments is not good: government policies have proven more effective at reducing birthrates than at raising them. Cash incentives (“baby bonuses”) seem to affect the timing of births rather than the total number: “women who intend to have children at some point rush to have children immediately to ‘grab’ the bonus.” Thus, in Australia such a program resulted in an extremely brief baby boom followed by a sinking of birth rates to levels lower than the previous. Hungary’s more aggressive policies have raised its fertility rate from 1.2 to 1.6; time will tell whether this is real progress or a “mirage of re-timing,” as Pakaluk suspects.
The difficulty of encouraging fertility politically becomes clear when we compare the incentives available to policymakers with the actual thought processes of women deciding upon (or “becoming open to”) further children:
Women make choices about having children based on “costs and benefits”—but not in the way we usually understand [i.e., not primarily in terms of monetary costs]. Rather, women compare the subjective personal value of having another child with the subjective personal value of what they will miss out on. Both sides include gains and losses. The choice to have a child is a value determination about the relative size of those gains and losses. The values will not usually be quantifiable for an individual woman or comparable across women.
The women in Hannah’s Children saw the “cost” of children in the things they would have to give up: “comforts, plans, hobbies, status, a clean house, sleeping through the night . . . and [everything] else a woman might wish to do with her time, talents, and money.” Pakaluk writes that part of a mother’s self has to die, to remain forever unrealized, for her to place herself at the service of new life.
As for the benefit side, these women spoke of “how their children had saved their lives, saved their marriages, saved their souls. By their own accounts they had been saved from immaturity, loneliness, selfishness, and uselessness.” Pakaluk heard “stories about babies who had fixed a family problem, cured a health issue [especially depression], or comforted a suffering person.”
They believe their personalities and capacities have expanded. This expansion, in turn, somehow opened them to receive gifts of love and sacrifice from their own ancestors, gifts whose meaning had remained inaccessible until unlocked by their own choice to participate with those ancestors in reaching toward the infinite.
One mother described her children as a “key to infinity,” referring to the endless succession of generations:
Everyone’s searching for identity. Tattoo yourself, pierce yourself, take on another religion. [But] everybody’s got ancestry. What a way to honor your legacy and your line. That to me is being a part of infinity, to continue a chain. So, what better a way to form an identity? No regrets. Not a one. This is way harder now than [life] was then, but I have inner peace in my life that I didn’t have then. I was searching. I’m not searching now.
When we compare such language with the incentives available to policymakers—subsidies, tax credits, lengthening of maternity leave—the incommensurability ought to be obvious. A vast cultural sea-change has taken women away from childbearing, preparing them from earliest childhood for lives patterned after those of men. And since children are an “experience good,” today’s women literally do not know what they are missing out on. Many do sense, however, that something is missing from their lives, if only when it is too late.
The family, as Aristotle knew, is logically and historically prior to political association, so in looking for political fixes for what ails it, we are using something weaker and more contingent to try to shore up something fundamental. The natural direction of causation dictates that our family life ought to have a positive influence on our social and political lives, not the other way around. Many of Pakaluk’s interviewees appear to understand this: they “believe that the sustained effect of living with needy young children for an extended period of life fosters other-regarding virtues necessary for civic friendship: empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial.”
Considering the religious dimension childbearing has for most mothers, we are led to ask whether positive change might come from this direction. As our discussion already makes clear, this will not be primarily a matter of doctrine or church attendance. Nor is a religious revival the sort of thing that can be engineered from the outside, or merely for the sake of increasing fertility. However, just as policy can discourage fertility even where it cannot promote it, a closer look reveals that policy can stifle religion even where it cannot foster it—and such negative interference can be politically done away with.
Freedom of religion is not merely the right to spend an hour a week in church: the education of the young was formerly an essential aspect of nearly all religious traditions. As the author writes: “The massive system of ‘free’ public education—a government cartel designed to compete against religious schools—represents a drastic violation of religious liberty.” Fewer than seven percent of American children now attend religious schools, and their parents are forced to pay extra for the privilege. The author closes Hannah’s Children with a call for
emancipating religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education. Religion isn’t truly free if it can’t effectively assist families in passing on faith and tradition to their children. Just as muscles atrophy with underuse and bones lose their density, religion boxed into a tiny corner of private worship, stripped of all its other traditional functions, is no true religion.
Counter-Currents readers will be able to think of other high ideals that might inform the education of our young once the monopoly of a hostile state is broken.
On a personal note, this author has sometimes been criticized for overemphasizing the negative traits of contemporary Western womanhood. Pakaluk’s approach of focusing instead on the women who are doing things right has much to commend it, and at least makes for a pleasant change. We can only hope that the proportion of such women will rise above five percent before our civilization collapses entirely.
https://counter-currents.com/2024/10/the-womens-resistance/
Celebrity worship is widely mocked and deplored, but usually without noting one of its more obvious features: it is almost entirely a female phenomenon. It was not really “people” who were fascinated with Liz and Dick or Cher and Gregg, it was women. Many seemed to take a greater interest in these celebrity couplings than in their own marriages.
The explanation is that the wealth and fame of the persons involved correspond to aspects of female sexual desire largely absent from its male counterpart. Men may find a beautiful actress or model attractive, but her wealth and fame do not help constitute that attractiveness; they are a mere effect of it. For women, it is different. Liz and Dick are interesting and attractive not merely because they happen to be good-looking, but precisely because they are rich and famous. The female celebrity worshipper thinks, “What do I and my stupid, mediocre husband matter in comparison with these glamorous people I can only worship from afar?” For women, the best romance and sex can only take place at the top of the hierarchy of wealth, fame, and status. Their own love lives are dull and uninteresting by comparison. Celebrity gossip, in short, is a kind of sexual fantasy for women, a partial equivalent of what pornography is for men—although it does not carry the same opprobrium.
Apart from this illusion created by the female sex instinct, of course, Liz and Dick are not really all that special, just a rather ordinary man and woman who happen to have become rich and famous working in the entertainment industry. But women’s sexuality prevents them from seeing what was obvious to this author as an eleven-year-old boy.
https://counter-currents.com/2025/04/sex-and-sex-talk-in-the-1970s-3/
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