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So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Short answer: categorically, yes.
Long answer: What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?
The broad cultural shift of the 1960s and 70s which led to the institution of no-fault divorce, the rise in divorce rates and fall in marriage rates, the removal or at least weakening of the expectation that everyone would get married and have children, the destigmatization of illegitimate children and promiscuity, the increasing acceptance of non-traditional forms of sexual expression such as homosexuality and transgenderism, the general decoupling of sexual activity from procreation, and the increasing prominence of women in the workforce, among other things.
For a conservative, obviously these are bad things in and of themselves, but surely "the outcome of the sexual revolution was disagreeable to conservatives" is an uninteresting fact since that was clear from the start, and no one ever expected it would not be. So "the sexual revolution failed" must mean "the sexual revolution failed on its own terms."
It's certainly not clear to me, anecdotally, drawing from my own life experiences, that these changes were a failure or bad things, very much the opposite. So I would need a larger, data-driven argument to convince me.
Well what were the sexual revolution's own terms?
If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.
Really the only successful goals are the destructive ones. Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters. And birth rates are cratering along with the quality of mates for both sexes.
I could go on about how life for sexual minorities was actually better before the advent of a tolerance that amounts to mandatory political membership and/or straight up extermination under the guise of acceptance but I feel like these are petty anyways. The lives of 90% of the population are much worse precisely in the ways they were supposed to get better.
But I guess women are now forced to toil too. So there's that.
Case in point: student debt is a modern form of the dowry system, but instead of the money going to her father it goes to college administrators...
That would be bride-price, not dowry. More than token bride-price is normally a feature of polygynous societies where demand for brides exceeds supply - the market value of a wife in a Malthusian society with a monogamy norm is negative (dowry being a payment from the bride's parents to the groom, or in India his parents) because there are more women than men who can support a wife.
In other words, in our society, women entering marriage with debt is stupid.
Ah, we call it mahr in our (Muslim) system, it's money given by the Groom's family to the Bride's family to provide for her in case the marriage doesn't work out for her, it's a sort of insurance no different to how a college education is insurance for a woman since she now has the skills to work for herself and be able to live a decent life if the union with her husband goes south (yes, in reality I know modern college education is nothing of the sort, but that's beyond the point here, we care about the intention, not the results).
The standard dowry you mention the woman's family gives the man's family is actually Haram.
Islam, of course, permits polygyny (although I understand it is rare in most Muslim societies). Both Christianity and Hinduism prohibit it, meaning that dowry was near-universal among landed-class Christians and continued into the early industrial era, and is still a live issue in India.
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I don't think transgenerational rates of self-reported happiness or mental illness are particularly reliable measurements, for a number of reasons. Someone in the 30s probably wouldn't even think to diagnose themselves with 'anxiety' or 'OCD' while someone in 2023 with the very same symptoms would. As for happiness, it's not obvious that this is measurement invariant. To use an extreme example, if you asked a medieval peasant and a 20th century accountant to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 - 10, and the peasant said '6' and the accountant said '5,' this is very weak evidence at best that the accountant would be happier living the life of the peasant.
Even if you take such measures at face value, Western Europe has not seen similar decreases in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction as the USA, despite undergoing the same and in some cases even more extensive liberalization of sexual mores. This is also true for suicide rates, which have been steadily dropping in Europe for decades as they've risen in the US. Unless Americans are uniquely susceptible to the negative effects of the SR, it's mostly something else.
The institution of no-fault divorce seems to have resulted in a large drop in female suicide rates and domestic violence. That's a pretty clear case of improving the condition of women.
Even granting young people having less sex is a bad thing (weren't people complaining about teen STD and pregnancy rates forever?), this trend seems to have started abruptly in the 90s, so blaming it on the SR is dubious unless you can demonstrate some kind of delayed-trigger mechanism.
I'm unsure what you're referring to here. What is so complicated about relationships today?
I disagree these are bad things. There's nothing actually preventing anyone who wants to from getting married. Most of the poor outcomes of children of single mothers (income, education, crime, etc.) don't manifest in the children of widows, so the much-touted disastrous impacts of raising a child outside of a two-parent home seem to be mostly down to confounding.
Birth rates have been cratering since way before the sexual revolution.
I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.
Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963. We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past. Even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.
I don't think the data is worthless but I think it's highly problematic for the reasons mentioned. It's extremely hard to control for all of the other potential factors at work.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people can dissolve relationships they don't want to be in, I think that's generally a good thing. The alternative to being divorced usually isn't being in a good marriage, but being in a bad one. I'm not convinced the purported terrible effects on children are all that large or relevant net of other factors.
I'm not sure what you mean by "school success." More people go to school than ever before. Certain test scores have dropped since the 60s (but others haven't), but way more people take tests like the SAT than they did back then. Alcoholism is significantly lower today than it was in the 70s. Druge use appears to be worse, yes.
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A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.
Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.
Well then I ask again: what are its own terms? What looks like a success and does the current situation look like it?
I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.
I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.
Look, you have to choose:
Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).
Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.
You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).
The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.
You'll note that I never claimed either that correlations means causation.
Social projects do not get to have control groups. All claims of success or failure, or indeed all plans for society, have to be judged on their actual outcomes instead of their theoretical consequences.
Unless you want to dispute the observations I'm stating, the sexual revolution is a failure. On its own terms. Which is the proposition I'm originally commenting on.
Whether it could have been successful were it not for other factors and whether the failure is inherent to its recommendations is frankly irrelevant, since we don't live in hypotheticals and all political recommendations have to be about the present set of humans in the present set of conditions.
These are not incompatible observations at all. People are having less sex. Most of the sex that's being had is casual and outside of formal bonds.
That is what you're responding to -- a causal claim.
Yes, you avoided ever stating any of your observations were causal, but you're responding to a question about causation by citing correlations. Your comment is either implying your correlational claims are evidence of the causal claim or it is a non sequitur.
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I know too little about the topic at hand to have a meaningful opinion on it, but the discussion here reminded me of something like this, as well. Part of the responsibility of any social or political project is being robust against malicious and/or unexpected forces that come about to throw a wrench in the system. If some unexpected technological advancement or sabotaging entity successfully throws the movement off course, then the failure rests entirely on the people pushing the movement, in not taking the correct precautions or not making the correct adaptations.
I'd also say that the whole time span excuse seems either misguided or, I suspect, just motivated reasoning. If we posit that the sexual revolution started around the 60s, it would follow that the first generation of people who grew up in that environment had kids in the 80s-90s, which means that the first generation of people who grew up raised by people who grew up in that environment were entering their young adulthood in the 00s-10s. It would make perfect sense for such a society-wide transformation to have different effects on people who saw the transformation as adults, on people who saw the transformation as kids but were raised by adults who were accustomed to pre-transformation, and on people who only knew life post-transformation, raised by people who mostly knew life post-transformation. This can't be extended indefinitely, of course; at some point, the multiple generations of people living better lives makes it clear that whatever issues that came after must have been extrinsic (which then gets to the previous paragraph, that failing to account for extrinsic, unpredictable factors is just as much a failure as any other), but given what we know about the human lifecycle and societies, 2 generations seems well short enough a timeframe to draw a direct line.
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