(This thread is almost precisely why I am having Second, Third and Fourth thoughts about pursuing Academics as a career.)
Hey, my apologies if you feel things have floated off into cloud-cuckoo-land.

For the record, I suspect (like you) that for most people most of the time, monogamy is the best course for each of them, personally, given the culture around them. (That's the same thing, in game-theoretic terms, as saying it is an equilbrium strategy for most agents...or in RJO's terms, saying it has a high equilibrium frequency in the population, in at least one population equilibrium...equilibria are frequently "mixed" by the way, meaning that several strategies coexist in stable population frequencies...so monogamy could be the majority strategy and non-monogamy could co-exist with it as a less frequent one.) There's no contradiction between that view and the other things I said above.

At any rate, when I originally wrote down my list of something like "the four horsemen of modernity" and used the phrase "sexual revolution" to name one of those horsemen, what I really had in mind was not changes in sexual behavior per se but instead changes in the economic and political status of women. Poor choice of words on my part. I really am trying to generate light rather than heat, and I'm sorry if I did the opposite for you. I will try to keep it cool.

It is interesting that the presumed breakdown of sexual mores in the West is very heterogenous, and highly related to education. If you look at the least educated women in the U.S. today, you see all of the phenomena that the media have taught us to expect: High teenage and out-of-wedlock births, single-parent families, high divorce rates, etc. But among the most educated women, the trend toward such things has actually reversed in almost every respect: Divorce rates are falling, etc. There is a recent story about this here:

http://www.economist.com/world/na/di...ory_id=9218127

This suggests to me that the "pathologies" normally associated with the sexual revolution in the West may be more pathologies of (lack of) education and prospective lifetime wealth...or at the very least, whatever pathologies may have been unleashed by the sexual revolution, they may also be mitigated by good economic oppportunities for young women.

I don't think cultural subversion has to disturb mating norms. Nor did I ever mean to argue in favor of disturbing them in some massive way.

I did mean to argue that some intuitions about what constitutes "moral" intercultural contact seem flimsy to me...that they aren't as clear as some folks seem to believe. Obviously it pays guests to have good manners, and in order to do that, you have to know something about your hosts. If this is all we mean by being culturally sensitive, my grandmothers knew that and I endorse it. But when I have dinner company, I expect that sometimes sparks will fly. Also, as a guest I am not above subterfuge in trying to get my host to see my viewpoint, or to try the tasty but perhaps strange-looking Muhammara I have brought over for an appetizer. Is such subterfuge immoral?