clearspira wrote: ↑Sat Jun 24, 2023 8:29 pm
And as for Friends With Benefits, don't you think that it is actually incredibly likely the more we move away from traditional relationships and marriage in real life that we will have a free love future? In fact with Starfleet's medical tech combined with its post-scarcity society, it takes away the two obstacles that make causal sex a bad idea: STDs and limited access to contraception. The days of staying with one person your whole life and shackling yourself with a ring are already dying, my friend.
Though you'd think advances in technology would make Friends With Benefits obsolete. If you're only after the physical sensations of sex, not trying to build intimacy with another person, then whatever sexual pleasure someone else can give you, futuristic sex toys and VR pornography can probably duplicate and surpass.
Like, it used to be common that, whenever people had parties, the hosts and the guests would sing songs or play instruments to entertain everyone. But that's largely become a thing of the past since we can now stream or download music from the most talented performers in the world.
I dunno. I think even with all the technological recreation, there's something about humanoid on humanoid interaction that you can't replicate. Much like how live concerts persist despite the existence of recorded music.
"Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it."
— Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
clearspira wrote: ↑Sat Jun 24, 2023 8:29 pm
And as for Friends With Benefits, don't you think that it is actually incredibly likely the more we move away from traditional relationships and marriage in real life that we will have a free love future? In fact with Starfleet's medical tech combined with its post-scarcity society, it takes away the two obstacles that make causal sex a bad idea: STDs and limited access to contraception. The days of staying with one person your whole life and shackling yourself with a ring are already dying, my friend.
Though you'd think advances in technology would make Friends With Benefits obsolete. If you're only after the physical sensations of sex, not trying to build intimacy with another person, then whatever sexual pleasure someone else can give you, futuristic sex toys and VR pornography can probably duplicate and surpass.
Like, it used to be common that, whenever people had parties, the hosts and the guests would sing songs or play instruments to entertain everyone. But that's largely become a thing of the past since we can now stream or download music from the most talented performers in the world.
FWB might actually be normal in the future. If you eliminate the health concerns like STDs, the want/need for a second person to share the financial load, free medical so marriage loses that advantage and that general feeling of being content living in a Utopia, then FWB might sound better than marriage or even just dating.
I doubt dating will get any better in the future. Except for perhaps better interactions between the two people. Or not.
clearspira wrote: ↑Sat Jun 24, 2023 8:29 pm
And as for Friends With Benefits, don't you think that it is actually incredibly likely the more we move away from traditional relationships and marriage in real life that we will have a free love future? In fact with Starfleet's medical tech combined with its post-scarcity society, it takes away the two obstacles that make causal sex a bad idea: STDs and limited access to contraception. The days of staying with one person your whole life and shackling yourself with a ring are already dying, my friend.
Though you'd think advances in technology would make Friends With Benefits obsolete. If you're only after the physical sensations of sex, not trying to build intimacy with another person, then whatever sexual pleasure someone else can give you, futuristic sex toys and VR pornography can probably duplicate and surpass.
Like, it used to be common that, whenever people had parties, the hosts and the guests would sing songs or play instruments to entertain everyone. But that's largely become a thing of the past since we can now stream or download music from the most talented performers in the world.
FWB might actually be normal in the future. If you eliminate the health concerns like STDs, the want/need for a second person to share the financial load, free medical so marriage loses that advantage and that general feeling of being content living in a Utopia, then FWB might sound better than marriage or even just dating.
I doubt dating will get any better in the future. Except for perhaps better interactions between the two people. Or not.
For dating to improve it will require an end to "men are the askers, women are the asked." It won't though. I don't think women want it to end - that aspect of patriarchy seems to have been cherry picked as being perfectly OK.
I disagree. That kind of distinction will dissolve if we break down traditional gender roles, and that will happen if transgender identities become normalized. The less we stick to rigid definitions of gender, the less hold this kind of script will have on our interactions.
"Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it."
— Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
I think the idea of "normalized" friends with benefits or a marriage (or at least commitment) free future are very far off base and for many compounding reasons.
One is that human beings are evolved/designed (I never know what verb to use for this sort of thing) to raise children in committed pairs. Of course we know that this is not anything unique: there are lots of species in the world which mate for life or otherwise care for their children in paired family units; human beings happen to be one of them.
Now of course most human societies have embraced this over the millennia and tried to encourage and support it, sometimes by forbidding or tabooing other arrangements but also often by providing benefits like tax breaks for marriage. A lot of people don't realize it but much of this developed in human society because the stability that came with raising children in committed pairs was important for the stability of society at large. Put differently, when people did have children but not raise them in a nuclear family unit it tended to create problems for and weaken that society and so governments tried started trying to encourage or to enforce these sorts of relationships. Contrary to common belief a lot of the sexual/lifestyle norms that come from "traditional" society weren't just a matter of religions imposing taboos and in fact a lot of what we might loosely categorize as "non-committed mating structures" were often pretty normal or common in ancient societies. We didn't move away from them because of taboo, but it evolved because committed pairs led to stronger societies.
With modern research methods, we are able to see why. I won't belabor this point because it's not all that necessary as there's a huge amount of data which shows the better results kids have when raised in not only committed pairs, but specifically married ones and lots of data which shows the worse outcomes for kids which are missing one or the other parent.
It's always important to remind when mentioning this that none of it is a moral commentary on single parents or children of single parent households. We live and grow up in the circumstances that we do and try to do the best we can in those circumstances. Some single parent homes are vastly better than some "traditional" homes. The statistics can only talk about large scale trends rather than specific cases.
It's especially noteworthy is how much of this research is stuff we're seeing even in more recent times, as embracing and supporting "alternative" approaches is increasingly popular. We're getting this information even when so many are inclined to wish for the opposite, which makes it all the more striking.
For these (and the below) reasons I think that we may very well see a short term move towards the sort of "less nuclear" society, but I don't think it will last terribly long. Many historical societies were already a lot closer to that than many people realize and we moved away from that because the nuclear/paired approach worked better.
There are biological reasons I think this is true, too. There's a reason that even in our modern society where just about everything is accepted and tolerated people almost always wind up in committed relationships eventually (whether marriage or a less "official" long-term romantic relationship): the fact is that people simply like them. People enjoy the companionship of someone with whom they are intimate. People strive to find their "soulmate." Lots of people have lots of no-strings attached sex when they're younger but they tend to move towards more committed relationships eventually because "falling in love" actually has many biological factors at play with it. The reality is that the idea of "empty sex" wearing out it's welcome is a real one and it's based on biological factors including hormones. Without going into all the science of it, over time unattached sex tends to produce a desensitization effect similar to substance use such that it can be less and less satisfying. This is not, by the way, an opinion I am expressing, but a matter of endocrinology. Meanwhile, sex in committed relationships tends to do the opposite.
In other words, just like today there is always going to be unattached sex but just like today people who have unattached sex are more often than not always going to move towards committed relationships of some kind, not because of what society tells them to do, but because of what they want based on their basic biology.
Heck, we've all seen TV shoes and movies about people who try to have casual sex or to be friends with benefits but get attached. They're often but not always comedies, and the reason these sorts of stories work is the same reason most comedy works: it's rooted in reality. It IS easy to get emotionally attached like this, and while I'm a long-standing defender of the idea that that you can be friends with people of the group you'd normally be attracted to, I also admit that there's a reason lots of people say/believe that you can't: there are biological drives which push us to bond in a committed way with such people.
Then there are factors which sort of bridge the anthropological and biological aspects of this. For instance, did you know that a female body starts to "adapt" to the sperm of a long term partner, increasing the odds of not only conception but also of a successful pregnancy?
In any case, I want to be clear if I haven't already that I'm not trying to comment on any moral or ethical questions surrounding this topic. I'm simply saying that there are lots of reasons (and I cut it a bit short as it's gotten quite long as it is) why I don't foresee the standard "committed romantic relationship" model as disappearing in the long term. It will have its ups and downs over time, but over the long haul I think it will remain as by far the most common.
I'm going to call bullshit, both on the biological angle and the strong societies angle. The funny thing about natural law and biology that it doesn't have to be externally enforced, it just happens.
I'd argue that nuclear families are an aberration, made possible by an unusual amount of middle-class prosperity at a very particular point in history in a particular section of Western culture. The norm for child-rearing, across distance, culture, and time, is communal, inter-generational parenting. "It takes a village" and all that.
If you're going to make such sweeping claims about the fundamental nature of parenting and relationships, I'm going to actually need to see some evidence rather than being reassured that there's too much evidence to bother with.
"Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it."
— Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
I also want to note here that just this week news was released about a completely synthetic embryo without mother or father. We can now literally remove men and women from the reproductive process. Add to that the idea of artificial wombs (which aren't far off) and very soon you will not need a partner to start a family - or indeed, not have the burden upon you to continue our species whatsoever.
You may think that's unlikely. I on the other hand am looking at the huge amounts of women who are freezing their eggs until their 40s because they've got other things to do with their lives. We're already not having kids. The idea of breeding centres may seem the reserve of dystopian fiction, but like I said, we can do that NOW. How long can countries like Japan plummet in its birth rate before drastic action?
So just to recap. If a world has no STDs, easy contraception, children without pregnancy, a falling marriage rate, the end of the nuclear family. What is now the point of having a long term partner?
