6. How do they prevent overpopulation?
If it's set in the modern world, overpopulation is a myth. The planet could support 40 billion with no problem. Truth told, you are now living at the Apex of human civilization. Unless Germany figures out how to use those artificial wombs on humans, human population will peak somewhere around 8-9 billion, then start to crash.
Unfortunately, it's a common misconception how civilization works. Take for example a business. The owner does a time-motion study and discovers 20% of his work force is responsible for 80% of the output. He does the calculations and figures out he could fire 80% of the sales force and maybe lose only 20% of his profits. Makes sense. So he makes sure to fire the least productive 80% of his work force.
His company collapses within a year.
Why?
The 1%/50% and 80/20 rule or the square inverse rule is all basically the flip side of the 'Lazy Ant Syndrome'. In every ant colony, there are always 'lazy ants'. They do nothing. So, scientists, in an experiment, removed the lazy ants. Every time, the lazy ant was replaced by a new lazy ant out of the colony. They kept going until the colony collapsed. It was rather shocking and unexpected. The colony just fell apart one day. Bam. the ants started to scatter as the queen died and there was no replacement. It made no sense.
The BOTTOM of any social structure holds up the rest of the structure. You fire 80% of your work force, the work force will reorganize itself into a new 80/20 situation AUTOMATICALLY. It's hard to explain why, in just one post, but it boils down to the fact every human is 46 coin flips at birth, and thus one of the most random things ever created. Anything based on random number generation become a bell curve in large groups. These bell curves are absolute. You can't just lop of the bottom 80% and keep the most productive 20%. Of the remaining 20%, 80% will BECOME lazy ants, if it survives at all. You can't get rid of the bottom 80% and keep 80% productivity. You lop off the bottom 80%, the culture collapses, and everything falls apart.
The Elite of Planet earth THINK that the world is full of useless eaters and we need to 'Get the population down' to 'Save the planet'. Those useless eaters HOLD UP THE VERY STRUCTURES THAT LET THE 0.1% OF HUMANITY LIVE IN OPULENCE. China instituted its one child policy and now they are maybe 30 years out from complete and total collapse. The attack on the family by socialist propaganda to 'reduce the surplus population', well... it'll be okay for those people who were around when they started cutting back, but eventually the whole thing will restructure itself... and it won't maintain the same standard of living, I can promise you that.
This is nothing new. If you study history, it's happened time and again. The only difference is, whenever a society tries this 'experiment' they basically fuel the experiment by burning through that society's stored up surpluses. In the past, the experiments collapsed quickly because science had not advanced to the point where they could store up great amounts of surplus for a society to coast along on.
In the modern age, we have VAST amounts of surplus, but we have NOT reached the point of being a post-scarcity society. It LOOKS like that from the top. but we're not anywhere NEAR that. And these idiots think we can get rid of the little guy, the loser, the incels, the social misfits, the guys at the bottom and everything will be FINE. Because they think that we have THE SCIENCE NOW. WE KNOW SO MUCH MORE THAN THOSE IDIOTS OF THE PAST. IT WILL WORK THIS TIME. The People Of The Past Were All EVAL, Racist,Sexist, Phobic, Ista, whatever... WE ARE MUCH SMRT!
No.
No, we are not.
No, It will not work this time.
It will turn out exactly like every previous time. Except this time, instead of it being only one local region, it'll be the planet, because of globalization.
But it's okay. As bad as it sounds, we'll have one massive crash and burn, but we'll also recover faster. This is going to be like a... 20-100 year dip. Eventually we'll recover and, who knows? The research into fusion is working quite nicely. Hot fusion finally produced more energy than it consumed. If we can just get real fusion power going, maybe we will finally reach a post scarcity society and all this Utopia Bullshit can finally become a reality.
But Overpopulation? No. We don't have an overpopulation problem. We have a DISTRIBUTION problem. We have localized governments becoming socialist, burning through surplus supplies to keep promises they never should have made to stay in power, and people suffering for it. Governments in an attempt to fix things, create artificial scarcity and then claim the problem they created can only be fixed by more Government.
And so the wheel turns.
Point to a US city in crisis, and I'll show you a local government run by socialists in some way shape or form. Point to a starving African Nation, I'll show you to a history of wealth/land seizing and redistribution that destroyed the local agricultural sector.
As for what this has to do with the original topic, A Sex Positive Society?
We live in a sex positive society. Sex Positive means, sex is no longer treated as a sacred act to be treasured, but as a transaction. Sex Positivity is basically what happens when you start seeing sex through a marxist lens. Once you knock down those sacred taboos, then more follow.
If marriage means nothing, and is really just the manifestation of Men's oppression of women by legalizing rape and making the women symbolic slaves of the patriarchy, then why do people have hang-ups about having sex with children? Isn't the social stigma against Pedophilia just another form of oppression? Children Should Be Allowed To CHOOSE WHAT THEY WANT.
And, before you tell me I am strawmanning, I am basically quoting someone I had a debate with on their youtube channel. Selectively quoting, mind you, but this is an actual position held by people who embrace the extremism of the left these days. If you accept the basic philosophy, this is the logical conclusion.
Two Rules to live by:
1. If it feels good and it's easy to do, chances are it won't have a positive effect on your life.
2. If it's hard to do and involves deferred gratification, chances are it will have a positive effect on your life.
I understand we're talking about smut here, but the original OP wanted to add realism to his smut world. His smut world has been tried before, on smaller scales, time and time again. In any group significantly above the Dunbar empathy limit, that did NOT do gatekeeping, that social experiment always crashed and burned. Free love isn't free. Or rather Free love isn't Love.
Nothing annoys me more than the phrase, 'Love is love'. Really? So it's okay If I have sex with your mom while I make you watch?
BUT LUV IS WUV!11!1!1
No. It's just the blurring of lines and the destruction of language so that it muddies the water to the point people don't know what it going on enough to form a coherent argument against insanity. I could explain the actual biological reason for why this happens, but that's outside the scope of this post.
The best way to form the world the author is trying to write is to simply go with 'MAGIC'. Make it a highly magically world with true post-scarcity and then put a 'god' in charge who makes sure that certain lines are never crossed. That way you can just use handwavite and flobottium to just declare that things are a certain way because it's That Way. Make sure you clarify all the rules in the first chapter so the reader only has to swallow the massive pill of suspension of disbelief once and then live with whatever rules you set up for the rest of the book.
Humanity is a VERY messy beast, psychologically. Most of the taboos and religions that existed for thousands of years exist because IT WORKS. I'm an atheist, BTW, but that doesn't change the fact that societies that embraced 'tradition/religeon' thrived and societies that were like... well... the way things are today... didn't.
Women are human beings and Men are human doings. If a man isn't doing something, what good is he?
Society is BUILT on the backs of men who sacrifice. Men want something for their sacrifice. They want SEX with a WIFE who takes care of them. They want children with said wife they know are their own and that they aren't raising some other man's kids. This is how it's worked for 12,000 years. Break the pattern, things fall apart. Call me a reactionary. Call me Sexist. Call Me whatever you want, the facts are the facts. There are far more societies that followed this pattern and thrived than the handful that tried the opposite and failed. And don't tell me "It's because they were primitive and didn't know better."
Every society thinks it's the MOST EVOLVED SOCIETY EVAR and because of that, they thought they could 'do it better'.
(Spoiler: No... No they couldn't)
I did a lot of research into how societies function and how sex is a part of society before I started work on FTS and IWS. In order to have the two 'reverse morality' worlds I have, the only believable scenarios I came up with were 'Because Magic' in the case of FTS, and in the case of IWS, it's a crapsack world. Seriously. IWS is a fuckin' hellscape. Pure Fridge Horror. It's nightmarish when you take cause and effect to its logical conclusion. It's a world of reversal morality where women are the sexually aggressive one who are the gatekeepers to relationships and the men are the gatekeepers to sex and reproduction, but the shoe horning I had to do to make THAT the LOGICAL outcome? *shudder*
But Hey, there's a first time for everything! Maybe humanity has finally evolved to the point society won't implode because we changed the rules on how men and women interact and it'll all work out
just fine.
As for the OP, go the Magic and Hand wave route. You do not want to actually try to make a realistic free sex society. Every time I tried to find an example to base it on, anything over 250 people ended... badly. Hell, most of the groups under 250 people ended badly as well, its just there are a few examples of small communes where the situation worked. They had three things going for them:
1. Everyone knew each other and as such it is a whole lot harder to stab someone in the back when you know their name.
2. The groups all had the same beliefs and ideologies. The groups in question made sure to teach these beliefs to the children produced as well as to newcomers.
3. They gatekeeped the fuck out of the situation. If you just let anyone into your free love group, you will get bad actors who will abuse the situation. If someone doesn't follow your beliefs, don't let them in. If someone is shown to have 'fallen from the path', they got kicked out.
The problem is, you really can't scale this up. People can only have empathy and care about so many people before it's too much. The Dunbar empathy limit is real and once your group grows too large, it will factionalize. Once you start getting factions, you have people caring more about what group a person is in, than them as an individual, and at that point, any group based on 'free love' is doomed to fail. Basically, you get a civil war.
Cults are a wonderful example. I suggest if you are serious about this topic, to do research into cults. Love bombing, for example, is such an insidious thing.
Take someone away for a weekend up to a week. Show them absolute joy and acceptance. Show them how utterly wonderful it is inside the cult. Then, ABANDON THEM. Drop them back in their shitty lives. Every moment away from the cult will be like an itch they cannot scratch. Then they come back asking for more. Then... they are told the price of admission. And over time, the price just gets higher... and higher... and higher...
Quite fascinating. Not connected to the OP's original concept, of course, but if you are actually interested in this sort of world building, I think any writer worth his salt should study uncomfortable concepts. Knowing how a cult preys upon the weak is a very useful set of concepts that can be applied to any sort of abusive relationship you might wish to construct.
And what is a story without conflict?