Sexual Utopia in Stockholm

You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Den sexuella utopin vid makten here.

2,962 words

F. Roger Devlin delivered this talk in Stockholm on May 27, 2023 to mark the publication of the Swedish translation of Sexual Utopia in Power (Den sexuella utopin vid makten) by Logik Förlag.

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.

I started writing about sex 17 years ago because I was dissatisfied with the existing critical writing on the Sexual Revolution. There was plenty of it, but it was superficial. Much of it consisted in laments over the passing of traditional sexual mores: “Isn’t it awful that couples have sex before marriage? Isn’t it awful that some girls are promiscuous? Isn’t it awful that young men try to score with lots of girls instead of being responsible and starting families?” The only practical proposal most of the critics offered was for everyone to start going to church again. But Christian churches have changed along with the rest of society, and very few are willing to enforce lifelong monogamy on the women in their pews. They would lose too many members.

The second and more important fault I found with most such criticism is that it combined intense concern for the protection of women with a complete failure to understand them. The usual diagnosis made of the Sexual Revolution by American conservatives is that it represented a victory of men over women. The underlying assumption here, of course, was that women want marriage while men want sex. The Sexual Revolution allegedly increased the amount of sex available to men while making it harder for women to find husbands. A kind of melodramatic narrative arose in which innocent women who only want good husbands have been reduced to helpless playthings in the hands of heartless cads who are now free to use and discard them. This storyline is almost irresistible to a certain type of male writer, because our sex’s natural instinct to protect women is extremely powerful.

Now, I have nothing against the male protective instinct. Sometimes women do need men to protect them, especially if the government is importing hordes of Somali and Pakistani rapists. But I found it hard to swallow the assumption that heterosexual, non-raping white men were the party primarily at fault for the erosion of monogamy. The reason for my skepticism is simple. As I state at the beginning of Sexual Utopia in Power, healthy young men produce about 12 million sperm per hour, while women produce about 400 eggs over the course of a lifetime. The difference is so large that it is hard for us to imagine. And it should be obvious that it gives women an enormous advantage over men when it comes to mating. They control the supply of a scarce resource; men merely represent the demand side. Men are unlikely to be primarily responsible for any breakdown of monogamy simply because they do not have enough control over it.

Women’s greater power over human mating is the reason sexual self-control has always been prized as an essential feminine virtue. It is, of course, also good for men to be continent, but the human race has always understood that the most practical way to enforce monogamy is to concentrate on getting women, specifically, to practice it, since this forces men to practice it as well. This arrangement may not be perfectly fair to women, but it should be remembered that in most matters unrelated to sex, men have usually been assigned greater responsibilities than women.

Discouraging any undesirable practice must focus on cutting off the supply rather than the demand. If you want to end drug abuse, you go after the dealers, not primarily the individual users. This should be common sense, but in matters of sex it seems to have been forgotten. I understand that here in Sweden it is legal for a woman to work as a prostitute, but illegal for a man to hire her services. Whatever is going on here, it is not a serious attempt to stop prostitution. The Swedish authorities may simply be more interested in punishing men.

In any case, whoever fails to understand the fundamental reality that women represent the supply of sex while men represent the demand is bound to get everything else about sex wrong. It would be like theorizing about economics with no understanding of supply and demand. And the common narrative that men have been freed to take advantage of helpless women represents a failure to grasp this basic biological fact about sex. It was the expression of a natural — and to some extent praiseworthy — desire to protect women, but it fundamentally misrepresents what is really happening.

So what does happen when socially enforced monogamy breaks down? First of all, the result is never “promiscuity.” Promiscuity literally means a lack of discrimination, or random mating. Human mating can never be truly promiscuous or random because of a second unchangeable biological fact of life: Some people are more attractive than others. This serves a eugenic function. A good-looking young woman with clear skin and symmetrical features is likely to be low in mutational load, and therefore more likely to produce a lot of healthy, fertile offspring. A man who has been conspicuously successful in status competition with other men is likely to be good at providing for such offspring. In both cases, the system of differential attractiveness is imperfect. Woman may have harmful mutations that are undetectable in their pretty faces, while jet-setting men may not always make the best fathers. But other things being equal, this is how sexual selection works.

Because of differential attractiveness, the pattern that emerges following the breakdown of monogamy is never random, but instead Darwinian. It is essentially identical to what we observe in primate packs, where females compete to mate with the most dominant males, while males compete for dominance partly to get access to more females. And here we run up against another extremely common but fundamental error about the Sexual Revolution. A Darwinian mating system does not increase the total amount of sex available to men over what it is under monogamy. It merely distributes it differently, concentrating it heavily at the top of the hierarchy. A small minority of men can occupy the fertile years of two or three women with occasional affairs or one-night stands on the side. A much larger number of men closer to the bottom of society are more or less out of the mating game. This is a dangerous and socially destabilizing system. In countries where polygyny is institutionalized, such as in the Muslim world and West Africa, young, low-status bachelors are prone to forming gangs that engage in criminal behavior. The best way to make such men productive members of society is to give them a stake in the future by making it possible for them to become fathers. That is the whole point of monogamy.

In other words, monogamy was never meant to restrict the amount of sex available to men, but to provide sex — and, more importantly, children — to as many men as possible. Under monogamy, the most attractive men are eliminated from the pool of possible husbands early on, usually by the most attractive women, and ordinary women who wish to marry must chose fairly ordinary men. But in the long run, that hardly matters. One of the advantages of marriage is that you do not have to be glamorous to make a success of it.

The Sexual Revolution did not, then, remove the constraints on male sexuality, as most traditionalists imagine. For most men, it made those constraints more onerous. Instead, it liberated female sexuality, freeing more women to pursue the highest-status men. The obvious result of such freedom is the situation we have heard women complaining about for the past 50 years or more: the alleged impossibility of getting men to “commit.” Women conclude from this that men are selfish and mean. But it should be obvious that the real problem is simple arithmetic. It is inherently impossible for every woman to have a monogamous relationship with an exceptionally high-status man, and this would hold true even if all men were saints.

Thus, once again we see that the narrative that paints men as the villains of the Sexual Revolution is mistaken. The breakdown of monogamy has made life harder and lonelier for most men, no less than for women, but there is little public discussion of this, for a number of reasons. First, men do not like to complain — especially about their failures with women. Women have no such hesitancy; they are happy to complain about men for as long as they find a willing listener. (There are evolutionary reasons for this sex difference which I will not go into here.)

Second, there is no female counterpart to the male protective instinct. Women are usually content to imagine that men are better off sexually than themselves, in part because the few highly successful men occupy almost their whole field of vision. Men, on the other hand, simply love to pose as the protectors and champions of women. It is a delicious and almost irresistible form of self-flattery to think of other men as wicked abusers of women’s trust. At least in America, male writing against the Sexual Revolution is positively dripping with such sanctimony. One of my main concerns in writing the essays in Sexual Utopia in Power was to demonstrate that this is largely unjustified. The majority of men are not heartless seducers. They like women and mean well by them, but they do not understand them very well. They want to believe women are looking for morally upright men to marry rather than lusting after those with the highest status. They prefer to believe that only their own sex is prone to being led astray by sexual desire. It is a pleasing and edifying illusion, and I have been attacked by more than one man as a woman-hater for puncturing it.

You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.

Indeed, one of the most important functions of monogamy is to allow men with no understanding of female sexuality to find wives. In the absence of socially-enforced monogamy, men have to know how to seduce women, and most simply do not. This is another mistake the moralistic traditionalists make: portraying ordinary young men as master seducers. Most young men have no idea what they are doing with women.

But these are just a few of monogamy’s advantages. Others include the raising of paternity confidence, which allows for the uniquely human phenomenon of fatherhood — and fatherlessness is a large contributor to crime and other forms of anti-social behavior. Monogamy reduces competition for mates between those of the same sex, strengthening social cooperation and neighborliness. One especially important form of cooperation it strengthens is that between men in wartime: Other things being equal, a monogamous tribe is likely to defeat a polygynous tribe on the battlefield. Also, by making it easier for both sexes to find and keep a mate, it leaves them with more time and resources for high-investment parenting. And it creates stable family relations, which provide the healthiest and most predictable environment for children to grow up in. Each of these points could be expanded on at great length, but that goes beyond my purposes today.

Instead, I would like to talk about the maladaptive expressions of the sex drive caused by contemporary sexual confusion. One obvious example is pornography addiction among men. But here as well, the more important effects may be found in women. Normal women tend to be happiest when behaving in evolutionarily adaptive ways: marrying in their late teens or early twenties, bearing children, and devoting themselves to the well-being of their families. This is also, obviously, best for their children and the future of society as a whole. But the institutions that encouraged and supported such behavior have broken down. I understand that the average age of a Swedish woman at her first marriage is now over 30, and it is similarly high in much of northern Europe. Most of these women do not practice chastity before marriage, with the result that they fail to bond properly with their husbands once they do marry, and that is one reason divorce is so common. Moreover, female fertility peaks at around 22 or 23, and no change in sexual customs can alter this biological fact. This is why we find below-replacement fertility in Europe, sometimes reaching the alarming depth of 1.2 children per woman.

It has been interesting to watch the interplay between our sexual dysfunction and the concurrent immigration crisis. When Angela Merkel admitted about two million foreigners into Germany in 2015, German women showed up at train stations and border crossings with signs welcoming the newcomers. If there were any men holding up such signs, I did not see photos of them. And these were no doubt some of the same women who would eventually be raped or killed by the invaders.

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.

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