In a previous entry, a reader commented that it was impossible to reverse the destructive course of sexual liberation because the age of marriage and child-rearing is now relatively late. People can’t wait to have sex until they’re 30 and it is no longer possible, for economic reasons, to get married earlier.

I responded that there are a number of social and economic remedies to this, but I forgot to mention another way people can marry sooner: by becoming more resourceful with a single income. Here a reader explains it well.

Gail Aggen writes:

I was sitting with a group of fellow baby-boomers and younger folks, discussing current events. I pointed out how the fertility rate among Americans, has, but for the Hispanic immigrants, fallen below sustainable levels. Europe is in even worse shape, as I am sure people know. I voiced my somewhat flippant opinion that the best thing that could happen for America would be to bring all the soldiers home so they could make lots of babies (within the context of marriage, of course). This would save all that blood and treasure and do more to protect our country from our enemies (who are procreating at quite a clip), than remaining in the Middle East. Just my opinion of course.

One of the ladies, my age, replied by asking me, “Well, how could they afford to support all these children?” That is a fair enough question, and here is the answer.

We have never been so rich in material goods, including food, as we are today. Even if you live in an apartment or trailer in this country, you are better off, in terms of living conditions, food security, sanitation, and access to health care, yes to health care (free or otherwise), than most of the people living in the world and all of those who went before us. So sensible people who don’t have resource-sucking problems like alcohol and substance abuse, gambling, or shopping compulsions certainly do have the ability to raise families.

Yes, society and the economy are prejudiced against the one-income family, but if one of you learns how to cook and one of you can learn basic car maintenance, and both of you learn how to economize on energy consumption and in other areas, you can successfully raise a happy, healthy family. The most liberating thing is when you learn and accept that you cannot have most of the things that you do not need.

I can personally attest to this. We have five children, now aged between 16 and 25. My husband is a high school graduate who spent 20 years in the military as an enlisted man, and I have stayed home the vast majority of our married life (28 years). Our children comment on their childhood in quite a positive light, remembering the good food, and being allowed to make tents in the house out of sheets and towels, and dig holes and build forts in the back yard. I’m really thankful that they have happy memories, as I certainly remember all the mistakes I made. But I did let them play and imagine and invent, and I was there for them. I admit to getting a lot of fulfillment out of stretching my husband’s paycheck, even being able to occasionally hire cleaning women whose husbands outranked mine! And I am proud that we have done our part to keep Social Security afloat by producing these little American workers!

My point is that it is possible for people to marry and have children before they are 35 years old, for heaven’s sake. And I commend you for addressing the issues which would make things a whole lot better for families, i.e., actually producing goods in this country and women leaving the work force to make room for the would-be heads of households – men. I grew up in the 50’s when this was the norm, and I remember the mothers as being queens of their households. They also had a vibrant social life, and even had time to rest in the afternoon!

People need to stop whining about their rights and self-esteem and get back to what actually works for people. As for what not to do, everyone should read that article on your blog, written by the man who describes the white underclass in Britain (10 years later, they are us). There is the man who should get a Nobel prize, because he has put his finger on the very problem plaguing Western civilization. It is not the economy, or lack of resources, or even Islamic fascists, it is our LIFESTYLE that is dooming us and driving us literally to extinction.

Laura writes:

Excellent points. I especially like Gail’s assertion that having children is not simply the path to personal fulfillment but a form of national defense and a protection against further economic decline for our nation in the future.

In my article earlier this week, Principal No. 1 of Traditionalist Home Decoration, I looked at how people can approach home interiors on one income.

A reader writes:

I really enjoy your blog and even though I don’t always agree with your viewpoints I find them to be refreshing. I have never commented about your website but I just wanted to share with you something that you might find interesting. 

In the conversation you are having stemming from the comments from your reader Joel where he talks about late marriages and waiting to have sex until marriage, he states a common misconception. The high age of first marriage seen today is not unique to the 21st century. I see this often stated in conversations dealing with teen abstinence, usually stating that its abnormal or unrealistic for the twentieth century, but the reality is teenagers in the West prior to the 20th century were rarely ever married or having babies and one can infer from that that they were rarely having sex as well. Research by John Hajnal in the 60’s showed that marriage in Western Europe normally occurred in one’s twenties. These links (I hope they work) show the age of first marriages being as high as 30 during parts of the 17th century and changing quite often due to varying economic and social conditions. See here, here, here and here.

Laura writes:

Thank you for sending these interesting statistics, an important reminder that controlling, and delaying the fulfillment of, sexual desires is far more possible than is commonly believed today. We tend to assume people will somehow spontaneously combust if they don’t have sex in their early twenties. As far as I’m aware, no one has actually died from sexual repression.

Karen Wilson writes from England:

Sexual abstinence before marriage is the norm in almost all non-Western cultures except black Africa. In fact in most cultures dating is taboo unless for the purposes of marriage when it is confined to potential partners who have been vetted by parents. The sexual liberalism of the West is an abnormal state and seen virtually no where else. My Nigerian colleagues regularly say that no one is as promiscuous as white people, and that is saying something! 

I work with large numbers of physicians who come from Asia, the Middle East and Africa. A lot of Middle Easterners and Asians have never had girlfriends or boyfriends and don’t have any relationships until they get married. I can’t say that they are abnormal or disturbed in any way. In fact I would say that they are generally better balanced than white people. They don’t get involved in the frenzied dating scene and constant making and breaking of relationships. They conserve their energies for the one. Most of them are shocked when they arrive in the West. One Indian OB/GYN noted after doing a ward round on the labour ward in a London hospital that not one of the 15 labouring women was married. She asked me why that was so. I had to say that I was so immune to the situation that I barely noticed any more. For her it was shocking, each case a social catastrophe. Another noticed that the hospital shop/ newsagent was “full of magazines with naked women,” ie Cosmopolitan, and wondered why this was necessary and even tolerated in a hospital. We get so sanitised to these things, we begin not to notice until outsiders point them out. But why exactly are these magazines in a place for sick people? Their whole ethos is counterproductive to that of a hospital. But our culture is so degraded that we have become sanitised to the effects of this propaganda. 

It is also the least educated segment of the population who are the most promiscuous and suffer the most from its consequences. The reversal of sexual liberation will require a return to the promotion of family and a rejection of promiscuity in its entirety. A massive task given there is virtually no political will to do it.

Laura writes:

In the West, we need not only to reject this early promiscuity but embrace family formation. The most educated and promising portions of the population are not  replacing themselves. 

Gail Aggen continues:

We are being undone by the belief that each child actually allowed to see life needs to be outfitted with designer clothes, strollers that cost as much as a Volkswagen, expensive pre-schools, and a Harvard education.  Children are therefore limited because otherwise rational people believe they need these things,and also because adults do not want to share themselves and their resources, a truly modern “sensibility”.

Currently, among Americans of non-Hispanic ethnicity, the fertility rate is around 1.1 (as in white Europe), with Hispanics it rises to 2.1, a rate that makes the current population barely sustainable. Statisticians will tell you that we cannot recover from a fertility rate less than 2.1, CAN NOT. That is another way of saying that we become extinct.

I do not care if you are a Republican or a Democrat, white, black or Hispanic; if you believe in anything that resembles a way of life based on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman principles and philosophies, and you do not, as a couple, have at least three kids, you can kiss your culture good-bye. The big question will be whether our grandchildren are speaking Arabic, or Chinese as they hoe corn and harvest wheat for the new regime.

As I said at the beginning of my response, I believe we are in this sorry state because of technology, prosperity and self-centeredness. Technology reduced the need for labor-intensive tasks. In Puritan New England, families had on average, 13 children. They had to have this many so that enough would survive infancy to do the hard work of carving out a life in the wilderness, producing food, shelter and clothing, and the next generation, thus sustaining their colony and their future. Things of course changed. They got better.

Technology, then prosperity. Then folks had time to look around, and pursue some pleasure. They started to acquire stuff. Nice houses, shiny cars, along with children surviving to adulthood, indeed a blessed thing. But one thing led to another, to another. Then to Hugh Hefner, then to the pill. The same year that brought us Vatican II (a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water if there ever was one), and the removal of prayer from schools. Followed by the sexual revolution. Followed by legalized abortion and women flooding the work force. Concurrent with the full flowering of feminism.

So now we have the enlightened classes who are pro-themselves and anti-child. In my opinion, they are full of feminized men and really scary women. And the underclass, which is pro-itself, but tends to produce more children. Unfortunately, these children are more likely to suffer because of the poor parenting they receive. And so it goes, downhill from there.

One more thing is sneaking up on us. Because of waiting so long to reproduce, and probably because of environmental factors, fertility itself is waning. Testosterone levels in American men having been dropping substantially in the last 20 years and researchers are attributing this to an unknown environmental factor. Artificial birth control and STD’s can wreak havoc on a woman’s fertility, and therefore they are having problems, too.

In the 50’s and 60’s we saw that in the Soviet bloc, everybody lived in tiny apartments, with mother and father both working for the glory of the state. Religion was suppressed, along with the concept of family. Children were naturally limited because of the need for both mom and dad to work. Wages were low and consumer goods were cheaply made and largely unavailable. Only the Party bosses had automobiles. People in those countries were told they had been liberated to live like this. Like worker bees in a hive. We felt sorry for those people.

America, with its freedoms, its strong families, hard-working men, children who had been mothered, and churches everywhere, felt really bad for those poor people living in those socialist, communist regimes.

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