I often ask my readers to consider the many problems we face in Western Civilization and to answer the question: Are we thinking about the harmful messages society sends to young women? Are those messages and what we’re telling them is virtuous actually harming them? At what point do we look at what we believe is righteous, proper, and even admirable, and realize it is killing us?
Feminist protest source
When Our Values Become Harmful: The Danger in Believing
There might be any number of specific elements of our culture that we could apply this query to, but the one that comes most often to my mind, and the one that is most problematic to answer, is our messaging to young women. The way those messages have changed over the past two generations, and the negative impact they have had on humanity, cannot be overstated. Bluntly, we are killing ourselves and believe we are doing what is right. Again, this raises the question: At what point do we recognize that what we passionately hold to be correct and of benefit is actually foolishness and vanity? Does the entire human species need to collapse into barbarism before we make corrections?
My question is specific to the images that we promote to our girls of what to aspire to and how they should live their lives, and I confess to having tremendous mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I want my girls to get an education and have lives of fun and happiness. I want them to enjoy professions and success. On the other hand, I realize that those virtues are messages of extinction for any species. We can’t tell young women not to get married and start families in their teenage years and expect the Law of Unintended Consequences not to punish us for suggesting something that has never been the norm for humanity, and is controverted by math and biology.
The specific experience that brings this to my mind is that I wrote a story about a modern man who finds himself isolated on a distant planet, where a primitive indigenous culture faces extinction due to a genetic dysfunction in males. The women had been praying for a man to be given to them, since all of the males are dead. It is a very interesting read, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. As with all of my books, I am descriptive of the truth of how people live, including their sexual relations. Let’s face it, people like reading stories where there are natural and healthy sex scenes between the adult characters.
The challenge is that the world of my story is tidally locked, meaning it is in a constant relationship to its star. One side is dark, one is light, and life can only exist on the band that wraps around the planet between those two opposites. This is actually common, similar to our moon. As a result, there is no measurement of time as we know it. The inhabitants relate everything to natural events, such as eating when you are hungry, sleeping when you are tired, and mating when your biology determines you are ready. I intentionally wrote the story to eliminate any arbitrary reference to age.
In my story, the girls get married and have babies when nature makes them ready, and the other women decide to couple them with a man… You know, like it was on Earth for the past 250,000 years, minus the past 60. In my novella, everything in society revolves around survival. I won’t get into the specifics of the story, and it is much more involved than the generalization I gave you, but now I’m faced with where to publish this because if you write about a natural, indigenous people, you can describe that the girls are married and having babies, but not that they had sex. Humans are just bizarre.
The problem is defining what an “adult” is. For almost all of human history, right up to the last generation, women were betrothed, or engaged if you will, in their early teens and married and had children in their mid-teens. My grandmother married at 13 in the 1920s and had my father when she was 14, and no, she wasn’t from Appalachia or pregnant at her wedding. My mother-in-law was 13 when she got married. I’ve known many girls who got married at 15 and 16, those being in the 1970s. In the 1950s, 17% of girls married before age 18, and in the 1970s, that number was still 12%. According to the census data, in 1960, 4% of girls married BEFORE age 16.
I know that many of us would be quite upset if our 15-year-old daughter came home and stated that she was getting married. The problem is that they aren’t; they are just running around town and having babies without marriage. Not only that, but conversely we face an extinction-level crisis of infertility with no indication that it will end before there is a complete collapse of civilization.
Today, we have decided that girls can have sex and bear children at those ages, but they can’t marry. It might be frowned upon, but I had friends whose daughter was on a 15-year-old softball team from which half of the girls got pregnant. Literally half. I had good friends whose 16-year-old daughter came home and announced that the government came to their health class in high school and instructed them how to fill out paperwork for State support if they got pregnant. She and her best friend decided they were tired of parental control and found silly boys to inseminate them. Good-looking 16-year-old girls have no challenge seducing silly boys of the same age. The two girls were soon sharing a state-paid-for apartment, on food stamps, and getting welfare payments. Over the next few years, in order to ensure continued support, my friend’s daughter had three children by different men.
It wasn’t legal for her to get married, but the government paid her to have children. It is an industry, and they were just doing a good job of marketing.
I think we know the horrible expectations for kids raised by single moms, and yet 15.3 million kids in the USA are among that demographic.
In 2023, there were more than 140,000 births recorded in the United States for girls between the ages of 15 and 19. There were approximately 4 million girls in the United States aged 13 and 14; an estimated 30,000 of them had babies.
So, my point is that we seem to be sending bad messages and providing poor examples for our kids.
The athletes and entertainers who our girls idolize are almost universally single into their 30s, unmarried or divorced, and without children. Right now, the number one hit on the country music charts is “Be Her,” by Ella Langley. I want to be clear: I think she’s an amazing talent, and I love her music. Therein lies my dilemma. I love the entertainer, but the subject of her song drinks, smokes, is independent, and doesn’t need any validation or worry about the past or future. Conversely, the subject woman is described as being a lover, mother, and wife who talks to Jesus and her mother constantly. The question of those conflicts does not seem to be of concern, and those latter comments are almost a throw-in to justify the initial list.
What message does this send to girls when many of her songs edify smoking and drinking? She is 27, single, and has tattoos. Yes, I know my objections are somewhat generational, but that is my point. I really enjoy her music; she is very appealing, but I find myself wincing at the horrible messaging. I could voice the same criticism of other entertainers and athletes.
Where are the Amish women, or even just traditional wives who are idolized by our media, education system, and our girls? Where are the messages telling girls to forgo college and corporate careers and instead focus on being great moms and wives, thus ensuring the future of our race?
Not there.
To further understand the depth of the issue, I think it is imperative that several concepts and cultural movements be understood, primarily cultural relativism, feminism, and cognitive dissonance.
Cultural Relativism and Toxic Tribalism:
Cultural Relativism is the concept of endorsing a person’s beliefs, values, and practices from the context of their own culture, rather than judging them by other standards. The most significant criticism of cultural relativism — particularly its moral variant — is that it hinders the ability to condemn universally harmful practices that lie within that paradigm.
Toxic Tribalism is the conjoined twin of Cultural Relativism, where strong feelings of loyalty to one’s group and the conviction that it expresses righteousness produce an “us versus them” mentality that ultimately views opposing points of view as being “evil.” Rooted in human evolution, cultural bias manifests as intense in-group allegiance and can lead to prioritizing that group’s emotional interests and beliefs over reason and logic.
Feminism
This is defined as the belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests. The concept focuses on equality of power and position rather than the value of roles and emerged in response to systemic legal, economic, and social disparities that women argued violated their basic human rights.
This paradigm shift profoundly transformed what Western society believed to be virtuous by shifting women’s roles from primarily domestic to public, political, and professional arenas. Through widespread legal reforms, cultural shifts, public education policy, and cultural media advocacy, it redefined gender dynamics and fundamentally altered our social and economic fabric, creating a new source of cultural relativism.
The benefits of feminism are usually stated as:
Fairness
Economic growth; expanding the tax base
Workplace equality
Expanded educational opportunities for women
Civil and political rights, especially voting
Challenging rigid gender norms
On the other hand, along with those new rights came profound issues when women, in essence, adopted traditionally male roles and behaviors. Among those are:
Destruction of the family unit.
Hyper sexuality and the normalization of promiscuity
Declining fertility rates from birth control and abortion
Undermining and denigrating traditional gender roles
Societal polarization and gender wars
Workplace imbalance by focusing on gender goals instead of merit
Diminished Male/Female Interaction
Declining female happiness: The paradox of an increase in freedom and at the same time dissatisfaction with their lives compared to women who elected to be full-time homemakers.
Cognitive Dissonance
This is the mental distress that arises from holding contradictory beliefs and is deeply shaped by culture. When faced with facts that contradict deep-seated cultural or ideological beliefs, people experience dissonance, discomfort that can result in a range of negative emotions, primarily anxiety, guilt, regret, anger, and shame, alongside general psychological discomfort and tension.
Research shows that rather than changing their attitudes, individuals often rationalize and justify their actions or beliefs to fit their cultural worldview. The result, especially in the world of social media, is the polarization of society, essentially creating Us-and-Them social segregation. The greatest challenge here is that polarities often become echo chambers of justification.
Summary
The reason I bring these concepts into the conversation is to help you understand just how deeply embedded the problem is in our culture and system of government. We are completely committed, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and legally, to a series of beliefs that we hold to be virtuous and even holy, but that are, in fact, unsupportable by math, biology, or history.
As a result, we have come to a point where certain deeply held beliefs, cultural practices, and systemically promoted ethical standards are destroying us. Even though we are beginning to realize that our celebrated virtues are actually contributing to the destruction of society, indications are that we aren’t changing our paradigm fast enough. We are at most 75 years from complete collapse, and in truth, it will happen far sooner than that in some of the major nations on Earth.
Math and Biology, as I often say, don’t care how you feel about your virtue.
We are starting to see and hear dissenting conversations like this one, but the behavior and social messages from the bulk of our culture aren’t changing fast enough. Our schools and governments are industries, creating what amount to marketing messages that encourage behavior that can only lead to existential failure. There is no way to succeed on our current path, and as time works against us, we are doubling down on our behavioral errors.
As I publish this article, it is July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States. That celebration is almost eclipsed by the wedding of our culture’s reigning queen, an event which some experts estimate cost upwards of $50 million. I’m happy for them, and she seems like a nice person, but she is 36, liberal, just getting married, and has no children. What she does have are 500 million followers on her social media accounts and the idol worship of millions of young girls who aspire to be her.
Holding her up as something young girls should aspire to be like is a disaster.
Is there a solution? Yes. We can change our society and move away from debt-based fiat monetary systems, career politicians, campaign funding, and ever-growing deficits. We can eliminate income and property taxes and limit federal government spending to 10% of GDP. State governments should be limited to 5% of the state GDP.
This would eliminate 70% of our government and lower taxation to make it more attractive for women to return home.
We can greatly reward stay-at-home moms, making it financially attractive to be married, fertile, and stable. Those benefits should increase with the longevity of the marriage.
Limiting how much money a politician can make outside of their salary while in office might be a place to start. There is no possible good that can come from a politician making hundreds of millions of dollars when in office, then constructing $850 million libraries to honor them when they leave.
We can embrace female education and encourage home schooling while at the same time preventing teenage female carousing, and preach early teen betrothal, teenage marriage, and actual traditional family relationships, which haven’t existed in our society for 2,000 years.
Finally, we can return to poly families and limit male reproduction to the most deserving of our men. That won’t happen until, once again, parents arrange marriages for their daughters. Humans are the rare species that rewards mediocrity with reproductive activity.
Will we do those things? No, almost certainly not. I’m sure that your response to my even suggesting them triggered your cognitive dissonance. No, we won’t change, not until after the collapse, at which point we will once again be focused on survival and sustainability rather than hedonistic pleasure and sensory experiences.
So, I ask again: When does what we hold to be virtuous become recognized as harmful? Further, even if it becomes recognized, how do we deal with the doubling down on those messages that results from cognitive dissonance? What happens when our religious, cultural, and governmental beliefs and structures are built around and committed to an unsustainable group of values?
I have not been able to come up with a proactive answer that would have any chance of success. I guess that means the only path we have is to pass through the collapse.
About The Author
I’m the author of nine published novels and have seven more in process. I am also the instructor of the Udemy Course, Becoming an Author: The Master Class Series. In that course, I share practical advice on writing, publishing, promotion, audiobook production, and marketing. Learn more at vscampbell.com or explore my Udemy course if you’d like to learn a complete system for becoming the most prolific author of quality literature. Don’t be one of the 95% of authors whose work is rejected due to a lack of merit. These skills can be learned. For the first ten sessions of the course, and to get the rest of the classes in Becoming an Author: The Master Class Series, use this discount coupon and pay only $19.99 for a $150 value! You can save thousands of dollars by learning to handle every aspect of authoring your work yourself, rather than hiring editors and audio production professionals.
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