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A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.
Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.
So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.
What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
Am I correct in this assessment?
The problem here is once again that humans are manifestly not equal, some people are better than others at certain tasks, and those that are better will always be able to exploit a situation for personal utility more than those who are worse. This is fine. The issue begins when society notices these differences and starts meddling to try and reduce the gap between the high and the low, imposing large costs on everyone and in general making everything worse.
Some people are quite capable of not getting emotionally attached through casual sex, these people by and large tend to be either psychopaths or high decouplers. I'm going to ignore the psychopaths for the rest of this post. If you have two high decouplers who have mutually agreeable no strings attached sex with each other and then go their separate ways then no damage has been done to either of them while they're both better off. And since these are high decouplers we're talking about you don't get any residual damage through "alpha widowing" etc. to whoever they eventually settle down with, a high decoupler woman can separate out the two things and doesn't confuse the calibre of person they can get for short term stuff vs a comitted relationship and a high decoupler man doesn't mind settling down with a high decoupler woman who slept around because he can be secure in her promise of commitment to him without regard to whoever she slept with before.
However if you are a low decoupler (like the majority of people) then casual sex has a massive cost on your psyche if you are female, men are comparatively protected because of their innate id's desire to sleep around, but even then, looks fade and as a man you'll eventually lose your ability to get what you were able to get in your youth, and this realisation, or refusal to accept this change, can seriously damage you and by extension, the people you are close to at that time, when you come to terms with it. In this case you get those famous graphs of how eventual divorce rate/cheating risk/marital dissatisfaction rate goes up with partner count. Such people should absolutely avoid casual sex, considering it as a drug no different from cocaine or heroin.
The optimal version of the advice society gives is probably something like:
This here would be a far superior version of dating norms to have over the current "as long as everyone consents, go wild!". Unfortunately it requires acknowledgeing that some people are better suited to benefit from sleeping around as they are innately better at mitigating the potential costs, therefore the optimal amount of sleeping around for them to do is higher than the optimal amount of sleeping around for someone who's likely to feel the costs more acutely, and so modern western society will never acquiesce to it, preferring instead for the low decouplers to perpetually suffer (or if things get real bad, force everyone, including high decouplers, into restrictive social norms) rather than acknowledge that there is a difference between the high and the low.
And before you ask, I consider myself as a high decoupler who does not sleep around, mostly as a matter of principle. I've had rationalist type people tell me in the past I'm just hurting myself (and I agree with them to an extent) and I should let loose, even suggesting mutual acquaintances they were sure I would be able to bed. However my upbringing instilled very strongly in me that by virtue of my high station in life I have an obligation to act as a role model for the rest of humanity, and sleeping around for personal pleasure is really not being a good role model when you consider the destructive effects it has for most people long term.
This presupposes that decoupling is actually a good thing, and that "high decouplers" are better off because they can decouple sex from anything meaningful.
Sex is a very powerful tool, and decoupling it from anything it can harm might be better than recklessly destroying your life with it, but it also decouples it from anything it could be used to build.
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Which also requires honesty on the part of the person asking that question; a low-decoupler who just wants to have sex damn any other principles (self-respect, religious beliefs, etc.) might force themselves into emulating a high-decoupler and be damaged later because they didn't fully understand or were lying to themselves about who they actually were.
(Which is how low-decouplers mentally model, and justify marginalizing, native high-decouplers in the first place. By contrast, high-decouplers don't understand what "taking damage" in this way because they literally can't.)
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Replace "sleeping around" with basically anything that is both risky and potentially rewarding. Some people will be better at learning to ski than others because of a combination of body type/composition and personality. Others will be better soldiers, firefighters, BASE jumpers, etc.
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I'm skeptical of the difference between high and low decouplers. I'd say high decouplers probably just repress their emotions well, but haven't looked into it.
Is there psychological literature on decoupling as a personality trait?
(Disclaimer: I wrote this before I read the articles in the sibling comment to this one.)
I self-test regularly; I know what I am, and what I am not.
(There are a bunch of weird side-effects that I've noticed in addition to this, and it inherently makes social interaction more difficult since "be normal" is not a free action to anywhere near the same degree that it is for others. But I've known this to be true for as long as I can remember to the point where I'm pretty sure it's something you're born with- some people are capable of both developing the emulation layer you need to function successfully and becoming properly aware it's just emulation, and some are not. I think we call those capable of neither "low-functioning" these days.)
I think there's a difference between a low-decoupler wishing they were a high-decoupler, and a native high-decoupler, and it can be difficult even for people who are high-decouplers to know which is which, especially because people who aren't native can still express native traits (by confusing the sum of a bunch of traits for being a high-decoupler in a particular area, by being overwhelmed with some emotion like lust, etc.) only to find out that actually, no, they aren't and now they're bad or tainted forever or something.
Plus, having enjoyed the fruits of being a high-decoupler can create trust issues when interacting with low-decouplers later even if no other risks manifest themselves, so...
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So the idea behind high/low decoupling comes from this post here:
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/
That link has a lot of references at the bottom of the article with psychological studies, but reading the article itself should give a decent idea. Cognitive Decoupling is a well defined thing, it seems to be Keith Stanovich who came up with the idea in the first place two decades ago, he has book chapters like: http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_files/Stanovich_West_Toplak.pdf which discuss the idea (but are quite long to read and mostly of interest to people in the field, they aren't written for a general audience)
This article builds upon that idea, applying it to the Harris Kelin spat a few years ago:
https://everythingstudies.com/2018/04/26/a-deep-dive-into-the-harris-klein-controversy/
It's a bit long but a good read.
If you want stuff more directly relevant these are good:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/
https://drossbucket.com/2018/04/08/the-cognitive-decoupling-elite/
Note that high decoupling isn't the same as high IQ. The two are highly correlated, but that's not the same as being identical.
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What seems strange to me with progressives is that after rejecting most Christian values that constituted the backbone of Western civilization, they still hold on to some of them arbitrarily.
'Kinkshaming' is bad, sex work is good, but rape is still some kind of immense evil. Raping a sex worker should be seen as a variant of theft and assault. Raping a promiscuous person some kind of assault, depending on the circumstances.
If it's up to a Christian person not to be offended by porn, drag shows, Pride parades, and all of the other almost inescapable manifestations of progressive values, why can't a feminist put the awkwardness or repulsion of unwanted sex aside?
As the joke goes, statistically, 9 out of 10 people enjoy gangrape. Rape is not your thing, it does not mean that you have a right to deprieve other people of their fun.
I think I did see some European progressives defending immigrant rapists to the tune of 'they don't know it's wrong, it's their culture', aside from that rape still seem like a big taboo. Another exception seems to be with the topic of transwomen in bathrooms/prisons.
Now that every progressive woman is probably using anti-pregnancy contraptions, the worst outcome of rape seems to be some discomfort, especially if the receiving end does not struggle.
At a time where suggestions are made to abolish police forces or to provide financial reparations, would it be so crazy to include physical reparations to those who have unfairly been deprived of physical affection?
I don't think this is an example of progressives holding on to a particular Christian value arbitrarily; rather, I think it's the case that rape-as-a-major-bad-thing fits particularly cleanly into a philosophy organized around an oppressor/oppressed dynamic coupled with avoidance-of-harm as a major value. A Christian who retains the values of his heritage would agree that rape is a particularly bad thing, but his philosophical basis is different (e.g. the strong should protect the weak and sex is sacred).
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Another facet of this morality problem of the modern-Westerners-in-Christian-skinsuit is regarding children. If you do not care whether your children grow up to stay chaste then enter Christian-opposite-sex-marriage-for-life, then...
Surely if a child is old enough to make important social decisions about their sexual identity, or taking artificial hormones, why would they not be old enough to engage in sexual practices?
Why would it be immoral for you to make your child available to adults that may want to engage in sexual practices with them, or initiate them to sexual practices, like the government is doing with sex education? Why are they offended about being labelled a groomer? They should be able to proudly reclaim the g-word like sex workers the w-word and rappers the n-word.
Aside from this extreme example related to children, why do progressives sometimes complain about age gaps in relationships? Isn't dating an older man empowering? It's ageplay, it's domination, it's a kink, why do they shame?
Good point.
As someone concerned about juvenile transition, and who also thinks the AoC is too high, I think I can actually use both the modus ponens and modus tollens versions of this.
(More generally, I think the big issue with the AoC debate - or to be more accurate, non-debate - is the one Scott described in the Eighth Meditation: "older person wants to have sex with younger person" is seen as creepy, and for most people advocating for a lower AoC means getting tarred with that brush, which keeps anyone respectable from doing it and prevents the Overton Window equilibrating. In theory, 13-year-olds could advocate for AoC 13 and get away with it, but only for 3 years before it becomes a millstone should they continue; this makes it really hard to assemble a solid bloc, particularly after taking into account the likely reaction if one attempted to recruit teenagers to advocate for lowering the AoC. Still, the Internet probably helps somewhat with this issue.)
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I mean...isn't raping a sex worker pretty similar to robbery, plus or minus a biohazard? Same for raping a promiscuous person...that seems to map to aggravated assault. Both of these are considered felonies; it's legal in most of the US to shoot a robber or someone who is attempting to kill or maim you.
And notably, under pre-Christian law codes raping a prostitute was generally a not particularly serious crime punished with a fine.
There is a difference between theft and robbery. Even the criminal underworld understands this. Robbers use force or the threat of force to steal shit; I would think that someone that's raping a sex worker is doing the same...using force or its threat.
Yeah, this is kinda 'funny' as a joke, but if applied seriously it's the sort of logic that would downgrade kidnapping if the victim ever went on business trips, or stabbings if the victim donated blood.
That seems like the most central example...the kidnapper is at least presumably doing so for personal gain or ransom, but the stabber isn't trying to rob blood from the victim at knifepoint.
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Yeah, either sex is A Big Deal or it is Not A Big Deal. You can't have it both ways. If you think it's Not A Big Deal then please explain why rape should be punished worse than forcing someone's mouth open and spitting in it.
Don't play with your words like that. The archetypal sex act isn't the same as every conceivable sex act.
Ok, but then you need to explain what is it about rape that makes it a Big Deal beyond mere assault that does not apply to forcibly spitting into someone's mouth. It can't be the sex itself if you think that typical sex on its own is not a Big Deal.
Spitting into someone's mouth has far less likely a chance to give them psychological and physical damage. Insofar as harm is a thing we use to decide if something is a big deal or not, rape can be differentiated from forced mouth-spitting.
Sure, replace spitting in someone's mouth with violently beating them up and then spitting in someone's mouth and the problem reemerges, as violently beating people also has a large chance of causing psychological and physical damage. However society still see's a rapist as someone morally worse than someone who commits grevious bodily harm on someone before spitting in their mouth, the legal penalties may be similar, but there is a stigma attached to being a rapist that is not given to someone who harshly beat up his victim.
Probably because consent is the thing that people are assuming in the case of sex being "not a big deal". It's not a blanket statement about all sex, just like pro-lifers not being blanket pro-life in every situation.
Sure, but there is normally no consent in getting violently assaulted either. Compare to someone using Karate moves at you in a dojo when you're sparring vs them using the moves to assault you by surprise at 11pm as you walk home. We still don't see the Karate attacker who spits in your mouth after beating you up as being as bad as a rapist.
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But the whole question is over why any conceivable sex act would in fact be a big deal, with the argument being that some people play both sides of the question for tactical advantage.
I agree, there are people who debate/discuss in bad faith. What I reject is the notion in the comment I responded to that you couldn't say "it depends" in response to "is sex a big deal or not?"
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This is not the case. Progressives are indifferent to how much you do it from the standpoint of ideology, but nothing would prevent social drama playing out through ideology. Take care to differentiate between power plays through belief and genuine ideological conflict.
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I disagree that this is about moral value, or even specific to sex.
Instead, I think people are unhappy because they've noticed that time has passed. They haven't built the life they imagined. And they're starting to notice doors closing to them, simply because of the march of time.
This feels like a betrayal because society "promised" them that the opportunities of youth would always be open to them. People were free to dabble at different life paths for as long as they liked. There would always be time to choose later.
The key quote, for me, is from Sylvia Plath:
Plath's idea is that all of the options are good. They're just mutually-exclusive. Picking one means giving up on the rest, if only because people only have so many hours in a day, and only so many years in each season of our life.
Society's lie was that women never had to pick one option. They could do it all. They could devote themselves to a career AND build a warm home with kids. They just had to do the career first and the kids could come later. They could spend decades dating AND enjoy a life-shaping marriage. They just had to do the dating first and the commitment would come later.
The problem is simply that humans are mortal. Time passes. We age. Options go away.
The anger we're seeing now is that women who wanted to raise families put it off. This is probably partly because commitment is scary, and partly because every major outlet in society has spent the last 20 decade celebrating women-with-careers and single women.
I'll certainly agree that a woman in her mid-30s faces a tough dating market, especially if she wants to have kids in the near future. But I think it has relatively little to do with the number of partners, and simply has to do with the ticking of a biological clock, and the pool of partners.
To show why I think this is "Time" and not "Number of Partners," imagine 3 similarly-attractive female friends. One traveled and worked an intense job; she'd have a one-night-stand every couple months. Another did serial dating; her relationships lasted 2 or 3 years a piece. The third married; she and her husband had a happy, if childless, marriage until he died tragically a few years ago.
Assuming the women are now 35, the first woman might have had 90 partners (a one-night-stand every couple months, over 15 years), the second woman would have around 6 partners (a new boyfriend every 2 or 3 years, for 15 years), and the third would have had 1 partner. This is vastly different dating experience.
If "Number of Partners" mattered, I'd expect them to have very different experiences when they all started their search for a potential husband. While there might be small differences, I think they'd all find the dating market to be pretty challenging and certainly harder than it was when they were starting out in their 20s. So, time seems like the most important thing.
Some people just lost the roll of the dice after freezing their eggs.
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As long as you can frame this as something done by men to women you can sell this to progressives without issue.
Sex is something men-as-class want to acquire from women-as-class at the lowest price possible; therefore, merely seeking to buy it (incentive: for the lowest price, or seeking the best value [beauty, youth, new
inbox] for that price) inherently devalues all sex (and why women treat other women putting sex on sale as harshly as they do, and why women-as-class treat men the way they do should they fail to begin their negotiations with the concept the price is infinite).In other words, it's the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it, get out of my shop/no lowballers, I know what I got" disgust emotion trigger- you don't have to sell this to progressives, they already know it intuitively.
This isn't unique to sex, of course- all market goods work this way (when a seller prices a good to move, it means other sellers will be left out unless they "devalue" [from their perspective] what they think that good is worth.
When feminists say "porn is exploitative" and "all sex is rape", this dynamic is what they're getting at- the former because it means that women for whom having sex is a job [that pays a wage] now have to compete with free. Just like how moving industry to China devalues the average American man because now he has to compete with slave labor. "All sex is rape" is just a specific version of the general "all work is slavery", which is why the former emerged from the latter (and why the two often go hand-in-hand).
This doesn't ring true at all. Many of those feminists are against sex work too.
It seems more based on on the very conservative idea that women need friendship, support and other things from their partner, which require a lot of effort from the man, but that porn teaches men that they can get sex from women without providing these things. Not: "she had sex with me because I put a lot of effort into the relationship", but: "here's your pizza, sex?"
Should have been slightly more clear on what I mean by "a job that pays a wage", since what you've said is exactly what I meant:
Yes, these are the wages. The work is sex and the other things men need from their partner.
Relationships are ultimately transactional, even though it's at least slightly offensive to acknowledge that fact, as the more a relationship is treated this way by its participants the less likely it is to survive. (One only need look at marriage vows: through an economic lens they are a contract by both parties that says "I hereby disclaim the right to find a better match if for any reason this transaction should become unbalanced by internal or external circumstances".)
And in doing so, porn drives down the market price for sex (from "she had sex with me because I put a major amount of labor in and/or signed a contract saying I'd never back out, since virginity doesn't grow back" to "30 minutes or it's free"). So does sex work, for the same reasons- plus it puts an explicit price on sex, which heavily disadvantages sellers who benefit from price discrimination, and that requires the price for sex to be illegible to work properly.
(It's not just porn and sex work that affects the market price for sex, of course- at a population level, marital rape laws are an effort to get better working conditions, age of consent and public decency laws are an effort to impose a higher minimum wage, and ex post facto rape laws work the same way as consumer protection laws do, and all of those powers can be used and abused in the same ways. Sure, things can be much different at an individual level, but microeconomics and macroeconomics are two different fields for the same reason.)
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As @raggedy_anthem says below, the sexual revolution was mainly about sexual freedom for men, and any consequences - positive or negative - for women weren't something its proponents cared much about.
This is illustrated by a very simple example:
What does the average young woman in the modern West get out of having casual sex with strangers? Even from a purely secular, progressive, non-trad and non-religious perspective, what does she get out of it?
The man gets status and pleasure, he both finishes and gets to feel like a man, he gets the respect of his peers (provided she's pretty), has succeeded in the classic masculine task of seduction etc. He is 'empowered', if that word means anything. The woman gets neither status (even in the most progressive, anti-slutshaming circles there is no positive status in fucking around as a woman, and there certainly isn't in general liberal modernity) nor pleasure (very few women will have an orgasm in the average one-night stand)1.
The classic response is "attention", but again modern women have no more attention from men than their equivalents did 100 or 1000 years ago; they are simply now expected to put out (at their own risk, and again for no gain in pleasure or status) for the same amount of attention they always received. So what exactly has improved?
In general progs are loathe to admit flaws in "the sexual revolution" because "the sexual revolution" is wound up with a lot of other social change that included the decriminalization of homosexuality, divorce liberalization, abortion law liberalization, interracial marriage laws being repealed, the civil rights movement in general, and the peacenik hippie vibe that forms a core cultural component of the post-Stalinist post-orthodox-marxist left that emerged in the West from Khrushchev onward and in which many older progressives literally grew up (true especially in Western Europe) even if their politics moved from far left to social democratic over time.
In reality, they needn't be so sure that everything's related. While some ultra-radical leftist organizations preached 'free love' (which as a slogan was often not primarily or even substantially about promiscuity of course) or practiced forms of non-traditional sexual relations, the majority of the sexual revolution was a product of 'mainstream' western capitalist organizations who were often roundly opposed by leftists or hippies, if only for their capitalism. It wasn't 17 year olds in 1965, it was men in their thirties, forties and fifties who ran advertising agencies, hollywood studios, magazines and so on, and who were lawmakers at that time. Young women weren't the predominant political force at that time, or even close. Hugh Hefner was born in 1926, he was 42 in 1968. And sex-negative or anti-promiscuity feminism of the 'second wave' variety began relatively early in the 'sexual revolution', it wasn't merely a 'backlash' to it.
The sexual revolution represented to some extent (as raggedy says) an offer from these older men to younger men of unlimited free pussy (and not just from docklands whores or slutty stage actresses or otherwise 'fallen women', but from all young women, or at least a much larger proportion), if they were willing to do what it took to get it. This appealed to the risk-taking appetite, the gold prospector mentality, among men, especially younger men, for whom a chance of getting rich is often preferable to guaranteed mediocrity. This is why it is sometimes interesting when men complain that the sexual revolution means many men struggle with women while a few 'chads' do very well; this may or may not be true (and to the extent that it is it is in substantial part a consequence of the sexual revolution), but it's also the exact kind of incentive that men often seem to like.
Some men, and I think this is in part behind some of the 'incel' subculture or identity, have seemingly realized that the sexual revolution's free for all buffet clearly often applies primarily to the highest status/most attractive men in a kind of highly unequal romantic economy. But that doesn't mean they didn't 'want it'. Many Western men (even many people here, I have found) are essentially temporarily embarrassed chads who are merely upset, if they are upset, that they're not on top of the sexual hierarchy of men, not that the sexual hierarchy exists. It is a problem of position for them, rather than one of system.
1 While (many) women obviously enjoy sex, a cursory glance at even the smuttiest romance fiction easily leads to the conclusion that simply having sex, even with a very attractive man, is not really the attraction for women in the way the inverse is for men. The dirtiest, horniest Kpop boyband or One Direction fanfiction invariably involves the ultimate outcome of a serious, committed relationship where the male lead - even or especially the 'bad boy' archetype - commits to the self-insert girl protagonist, tells her she's the most special girl in the world, the love of his life, no other girl is like her, and usually even explicitly commits to marrying her. In the end, the authors know their readership actually wants to imagine the outcome of their hero's journey as a happy, monogamous family life married to Harry Styles and raising their kids together. Most young women are not, even 50 years after the sexual revolution, fantasising about fucking around, which is pretty telling.
I think you've badly misread the motivations and yet are still accurate on the details.
The core promise that liberalism tries to sell to it's adherents is one of absolute freedom. The mantras of how "you are your own" and "who are they to judge me" are what draw people to become liberals. Freedom from judgment, freedom from responsibility, freedom from consequences, because self-expression and self-actualization are the greatest goods. When a liberal suffers a negative outcome it's almost never the result of anything they did, it's "structural" forces or malicious acts on the part of the out group.
The sexual revolution is simply a logical outgrowth of liberal attitudes. I see users in both this thread and the prior going on about how pursuing casual sex and instant gratification is of no moral consequence and my response is simply "that is where you are wrong".
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This is an excellent insight, and yet another example of a rebellion against "modernity" that is in fact rooted in the same soil as that against which it rebels.
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Maybe social capital and/or wisdom? The ability to tell stories that are shocking and titillating? It doesn't seem like much but it may be something in some cases.
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Hedonistic sex with an attractive man she otherwise wouldn't be able to have sex with? Just a wild guess. I get that women are mostly not interested in casual sex for its own sake, but I'm sure most/many of them prefer to live under social norms which at least provide that as an option.
I'd rephrase it thus: the promise of the Sexual Revolution to men was mostly that average men will get to have lots of fun sex, either casual or not-so-casual, with average women before marriage. That too turned out to be a lie, I think. I don't want to discuss that further here, because it's a subject for another discussion.
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Do you have any pieces of evidence to back this up? I've always known sexual liberation to have sprung forth from women's liberation movements as a means of freeing women's sexuality from the heel of men's control, and all the sources I can find seem to support this. It seems to require some justification to suppose that, despite the sexual revolution happening coincident with women's liberation and promoted by a lot of the same people that it's actually men who did it.
I mean, I've long suspected that something like this would happen—backed by seemingly naked reasoning that since it's benefiting men at the expense of women (it isn't—we're just blind to social costs to men in general), that it must have therefore been perpetrated by them. And, like, not all feminists were thrilled about it. It's exactly what I imagined while doomdreaming in English 3 all those years ago, which is weird.
You have never set foot in or read any thinking generated by any incel community—please stop spreading misinformation about what they believe. They have been unambiguously skeptical about the sexual liberation and its consequences for reasons similar if not identical to yours for over a decade now—far before it became a borderline mainstream curiosity—back when they were a nameless, nascent subculture on r9k 1.0. I don't know how long you've been woke on this, but chances are good that's longer than you.
Anyways, while I'm feeling so goddamn ahead of the curve, I'll share my next prophecy: I see little skirmishes going on right now between fringe groups on Twitter about pornography use and how comparable it is to sexual promiscuity in terms of how debasing to one's sexual purity it is. This argument is the future. Right-wingers don't yet know it, but in the coming years they will be joining forces with feminists on this topic. As sexual mores continue to tighten here in straightsville and monogamy becomes more in vogue again, pristine male virgins will start to wonder aloud why they are being asked so expectantly why they aren't hitching it with ran-through born again virgins. Since for many cultural reasons we can't turn the clocks back to virginity being a female-only phenomenon, we'll be in need of a modern, horse-driven-car-frame solution, which this false equivocation offers.
"You defected too, anon."
I simply don't understand how it's possible to persist this belief in a post-Fifty Shades world. Then again, it's become clear to me how impossible it is to dislodge highly load-bearing beliefs with facts, even it's something like the best selling book ever written by human hands. I'd say "excluding religious texts", but it's unclear to me that Fifty Shades of Gray isn't the religious text for the female sexual id. I suppose it's easy for me to see it that way, because I was never burdened with the Female Sexual Purity myth. You see, my secondary stomping grounds as a curious teenager was Tumblr, and if you knew where to look (which I did), you could hear what teenage girls were saying when they thought no one was listening.
And let me tell you, it's rather difficult to maintain an image of girls being somehow "less sexual" or even "more pure" by the time you're not even surprised any more to stumble across a thread with dozens of them waxing licentious about all the ways in which they would love to let fictional video game villain Sephiroth Ragnarok destroy their pussy. I was well aware at the time that a lot of this was essentially femmechismo—girls' locker room talk—but we've never let such considerations get in the way of how we perceive boys and men.
What wasn't as clear to me at the time was how universal this sort of thing actually was and is—but then, of course, Shades happened.
They already have - there was an unholy alliance between radfems and religious conservatives against porn.
I've seen them agree that it's bad, I haven't yet seen them agree that watching porn is like being sexually promiscuous.
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They get married in the Shades series, which seems to support the theory that a woman’s fantasy includes marriage.
They weren't married before or after all the fucking they did in the first novel, which is the one that sold so well.
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Yeah I agree, this doesn’t contradict what I’m saying.
You mention this a few times when actually it’s a perfect example of what I’m saying. In Fifty Shades, a plain young woman becomes the obsession of a handsome billionaire who will stop at nothing to make her his. The S&M is merely set dressing on top of this eternal romance plot, which is essentially Cinderella. The franchise of Fifty Shades ends with the main character happily married to Mr Grey and pregnant with their second child lmao, it’s the epitome of what I’m saying.
The telling thing is that smut for women almost never involves a large number of sexual partners for the protagonist. Like Fifty Shades, the fantasy for woman is one man, not many - and almost never more than two in a love triangle. Almost no romance novels involve the protagonist going out and sleeping with many men as the narrative of the book, this isn’t generally appealing to women.
Yeah, but in most of their fantasies and in the fanfic they read, Sephiroth is in love with them / their boyfriend etc etc etc. They’re not fantasising about getting pumped and dumped by him, they fantasise about him falling in love with them, or with a male stand in for them in the case of Yaoi stuff.
Sigh.
This is what you said. Incel subculture hasn't "seemingly realized" the consequences of the sexual revolution. They were always aware of it; it was a defining element of their understanding of it since day one.
They absolutely, positively, do not "want it".
They absolutely, positively, do not view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed chads".
They absolutely, positively, are not upset that they are not "on top of the sexual hierarchy, not that the sexual hierarchy exists."
They absolutely, positively, not concerned about "position, rather than the system itself".
It's actually incredible, because while there is a lot of variety in what the communities believe, your accusations represent perhaps the inverse of the positions that actually unite them.
Are you serious?
Christian Gray is a combo ATM + Sex Robot. If this is the caliber of "romance" men need to match to stop the sexual rat-race you describe, I humbly rest my case.
That's funny, I don't recall reading that part.
Yes I am also aware that women do this in addition to fantasizing about getting railed by strongest, fittest men that they can imagine. When men do something like this, it's called a Madonna/Whore complex.
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As far as I'm concerned, my view is that the Sexual Revolution was mainly driven by women, not men. It's not something I feel like discussing here in detail right now, but for now I will offer this as food for thought: I find it self-evident that men initiating casual/premarital/extramarital sex with women only becomes socially sanctioned behavior (within limits) if it becomes a socially accepted reality that at least a significant minority of women is down for something like that.
Right, and if you zoom out, you find a near 1:1 correlation with female empowerment leading to libertine sexual values—what with the most male dominated societies on Earth stoning people to death for sex out of wedlock.
This is also difficult to explain if you think Men Did It.
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I’ll sign in with @Goodguy and @Gillitrut: this isn’t a framing I’ve heard from progressives. Support for the Sexual Revolution is almost orthogonal to complaints about abuse or privilege. Women’s lib remains quite popular up until the point where it affects one’s own sisters or daughters. That’s a difference in risk tolerance.
Honestly, “the Revolution hasn’t gone far enough” isn’t something I see much in general. If I’m feeling optimistic, I’d say that’s because the Soviet “fifty Stalins” gave us pretty good antibodies. At the very least I think it’s recognized as a weak argument. We’re in an age of post-post-irony, and full-throated endorsement of anything is, uh, “cringe.”
Again, I'm not a bit surprised that you haven't heard it from them - after all, 2rafa was describing unstated views. On my part, I've seen self-proclaimed progressives state such views, but only online.
To add to this, I think the unstated nature of it is not only that they don't state it out loud, they don't state it in their own conscious thinking, because their brains have protections in place against consciously thinking such things, regardless of what they believe. This isn't a particularly progressive thing though, it's just a universal human thing that acts on all aspects of life, not just sexuality or politics, and it's the rare human who can even notice when they do this, much less actually combat it.
But it's pretty easy to conclude this based on seeing the way the consent framework gets awkwardly shoved into any cases where a woman is dissatisfied with some episode of casual sex - or more broadly the patriarchy oppression/oppressed framework gets awkwardly shoved in where women are dissatisfied with a life that's filled with casual sex - that whatever they're getting at is something that's shaped very similarly to whatever the religious conservatives are getting at with their talk about "honor" and "disgrace" and whatnot.
But that's not true. The highly online world is not representative of reality. In the broader world, even progressive women only bring up consent after a woman has dissatisfying sex a tiny fraction of the time.
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Most people totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution will never be able to entertain the notion that those mores harmed them. They may look around them, at their peers, and see the damage. But their own decisions will always be above reproach, because SLAY QUEEN!!
It gets particularly bad when the consequences are just manifestly obvious to everyone except them. Among the moms at my daughter's school, it's a fucking train wreck. Even only getting their side of the stories, it's a horror show. One woman can't hold down a job, can't hold down an address, and was in some sort of situationship with the guy she was staying with. All she had to do was not also fuck the felon ex partner/father of her daughter while she fucked the guy she was living with, and she couldn't do it. Cause nobody can tell her what to do. So then she was homeless again. Cause it's not like felon baby daddy had a place she could stay.
Then there is the woman who shameless adopts every upper class luxury belief she can, which coincidentally enables her to adopt an uninvolved wine mom poly lifestyle. She wonders why the other moms don't like her, when she casually drops lines like "It's really hard for me to not fuck my kid's friend's dads". And it's not like her kids are thriving either. All her children have some pretty significant developmental delays which signal neglect IMHO.
Oh, and local to me, an actual, no joke, camwhore ran for a state legislature seat. When it came out that she was having sex on a camwhore site for money, she started threatening to sue people for distributing revenge porn. Keep in mind, this was content, free content publicly available, that she produced and distributed herself. Naturally all the liberal local news outlets took her claims about it being revenge porn at face value, and hid in the middle of the article in a throw away line that she had, in fact, been a camwhore. The rest of all the articles implies by omission and the constant use of "revenge porn" that these were private videos illegally obtained and distributed.
The flip landscape for men couldn't be more stark. Men cut in half by divorce, parental alienation, jail if they can't afford the blood from a stone the court mandates for them. And the response is always "Well, if you didn't want to have kids, you shouldn't have had sex." Consequences for men are the one thing conservatives and liberals seem able to agree on.
Yes, and? Men and women are different, so the "landscapes" will be different.
And what's wrong with responding to men that way?
Along with pretty most any stable, settled society I've heard of. Maybe the reason so many people, across time and space, ideologies and political affiliations, all come to agree on this point is because they're converging upon reality?
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Reminds me of an actual case from a previous job. Woman is shacked up with and has baby by guy who is not, let us say, a sterling citizen. He gets sent to jail. She immediately takes up with his father and gets pregnant by him. Everybody in the office was going "Yeah, that's gonna be interesting when he gets out". No wonder incest porn is a growing trend; that's some "my kid's half-sibling is also my half-sibling, which also means they're siblings and nephew/uncle as well" brain twisting going on there.
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I think I'm as progressive as anyone and I'm pretty confident I don't believe "that casual sex ... devalues or dishonors [women] in some way." I'm not sure I know any progressives that do believe that. Neither the linked comment nor yours provide any evidence that progressives do believe this so forgive me for being a little skeptical that it's true.
I mean, if you view (a) and (b) as binaries that society is either like or not then sure, we aren't there. But if you view (a) and (b) as spectra that societal norms can be closer to or farther from I think it would be pretty hard to argue we're not much closer to (a) and (b) today than we were pre-Sexual Revolution. Sure, maybe the Sexual Revolution (in the sense of particular events that occurred in the 1960's and 1970's) weren't enough to get us all the way there, but my perception is they started us down this path that we continue on towards those outcomes.
Everyone wants to think the promised revolution ending in utopia will happen in their lifetimes. Almost half of Christians polled by PEW back in 2013 thought Christ would return to Earth in the next 40 years. Naturally it's disappointing when you find out that the fruits of the promised revolution may not be happening while you would be alive to experience them.
I think it's less about the binary/spectrum binary and more about the possible/not possible binary. Placing (a) and (b) in a spectrum still presumes that a society in which (a) (I'll just use "(a)" from now on for brevity) achieved is possible. Or, more realistically, that a society in which we are close to (a) and therefore enjoy some of the fruits of (a) and do not suffer more pains than the fruits due to not quite being at (a), only close to it, is possible.
I suppose I recognize this is substantively a value judgement but I think our current being closer to (a) than we were historically has been clearly worth it.
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I'd argue that these actually turned out far more true than many critics at the time would have ever imagined. Shaming against sluts has decreased dramatically, men have repressed their concerns about sexual history, men have started to do much more housework and childcare, etc.
The two great errors were:
The claim that sex with someone whom you were not committed to with is fun and healthy -- the claim that it is not inherently sinful/disordered/"bad for your psyche"/"bad for your soul". This claim is false -- sex is very likely to create an emotional bond, and so when you create that bond without permanent commitment a woman is setting herself up for great hurt and distress. It also makes it harder to pair-bond in the future, which makes women less likely to find or create successful marriages.
The claim that "consent" is the critical thing that society needs to police. Sex doesn't work that way, it originated before we could even talk, and it is simply more natural and preferable to use body language. Many women like playing a bit of cat and mouse, like giving some token resistance, and don't like being explicit. What women want is "it just happened." Meanwhile, explicitly "consensual" sex can still be traumatic or greatly regretted. It gets even worse when "consent" is expanded so that women cannot actually consent to sex with more powerful men. But this is a problem because power is something that inherently something women find attractive. So women cannot consent to men they are most attracted to? Or women can only consent to sex with men who they attracted to for reasons of the genetic lottery (looks, height), but not to men who earned their attraction by working hard and gaining status? This is all a giant mess. The "consent" framework wrongly says that society shouldn't police a handsome guy who attracts and pumps and dumps a fully consenting women. However, it should ban, say, the relationship that made my good friend's life possible (his dad was a professor, his mom a grad student on the same team, they married and had a very long, fruitful, and successful relationship). IMO, what should matter is seduction with intent to marry. I'm fine with a professor going after a grad student or a boss his secretary, but if he wins her heart he better marry her.
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(1) Now you too can fuck like a man - no strings attached sex, no emotional attachments, no pregnancy fears, no need to save yourself for marriage! (2) This will have no downsides at all, because the Double Standard will be blown out of the water in the new era of equality and free love! (3) Er, what's all this stuff about body counts?
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If we're going with unstated promises then I think it's far deeper than what you outlined here. The core of the Sexual Revolution was a nihilistic view that told young people generally that there was no greater power or value system out there to worry about. Do what you want, live for the moment, none of it matters anyway. Our technology has made us so great (birth control) and the world is so terrible (cold war) that really the best thing you can do is just live for your own momentary pleasure, and focus on that instead of anything more disciplined or serious.
I'm not trying to strawman here - this idea is genuinely the philosophical underpinning of the sexual revolution as far as I can tell. Driven by the rise in our technological prowess mostly, especially birth control and media technology.
I suspect that much of this drive to short term pleasure is also a means to blot out the repressed fear of death. Without a religious afterlife to buffer yourself against your own inevitable demise, I'd posit you have to play an increasingly intense shell game of managing that fear through other means.
I wonder how much WWII and penicillin contributed to that; I don't think that it was any accident that we saw things getting a bit more conservative when AIDS started being concerning for straight people. Imagine what our mores would be like if we had no effective tests or treatments for AIDS. Syphilis was more or less the semi-diet AIDS of its day.
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There's some element of overgeneralisation here (not every Sexual Revolutionary was a nihilist) but it's literally the end of The Rocky Horror Picture Show:
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The big idea of sex-positive feminism is that women should be able to pursue sexual pleasure in the same way men do (ignoring the fact that men who pursued sexual pleasure freely were considered rakes and being shot by the girl's father or brother was a real risk). From this perspective, the sexual revolution has failed because women are not in fact getting off on the casual sex they have been liberated to have - the "orgasm gap". The Big Lie of the Sexual Revolution was that women were leaving a lot of sexual pleasure on the table pre-Revolution by abstaining from casual sex. At a marginally more cynical level, it was that the average 20-something woman was leaving a truly humungous amount of sexual pleasure on the table, because she could get X amount of casual sex if she wasn't sexually repressed, and a man getting X amount of casual sex was a superstud.
If you can't admit that men and women are different in ways which mean that normal women were never going to get off on the kinds of casual sex available in a competitive sexual marketplace, then the cope is to blame men for being selfish and inconsiderate in bed. This is a big part of why the "campus rape crisis" and related debates about sexual ethics are so insane - the mischief the sex-positive feminists actually want to deal with is poor technical performance in the bedroom, but the only language they have to deal with it is consent.
Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s - I first came across it in PJ O'Rourke's 1994 book All the Trouble in the Word
Didn't that unholy alliance get going in the 1970s?
Very possibly - I wasn't around.
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A problem here is that the religious conservatives who are allowed to speak in mainstream outlets under their real name have to make concessions to feminism in order to not get cancelled. So they have to argue that the real problem with feminism is that men will take advantage of women. They have trouble arguing directly that hooking up is a sin for women, a sin that many women will indulge in if allowed, and that women must be policed too, and not just men. However, these conservatives who making the socially acceptable right-wing argument, aren't actually accurately representing what the typical right-wing conservative man actually deep-down believes.
This is similar to the "Democrats are the real racists" trope that mainstream conservatives (at the National Review, etc.) get trapped in. To avoid cancellation, they can't just argue that affirmative action is bad because it is bad for whites. They have to make the argument that affirmative action is bad because it is actually bad for black people, because of "mismatch" or the "soft bigotry of low expectations" or because it won't prepare blacks for the "real world." Ultimately, these arguments do not work (the left can just extend affirmative action entirely through a person's career) and the conservative ends up just ceding the moral high ground to the left.
To be fair, that's been the Catholic Church's stated position for opposing birth control since the 1960s. See below the relevant section of Pope Paul VI's Humane Vitae:
I agree with them too. I used to work in university dorms. It was always the guys on the look out and pushing the issue. Stranger assaults were always guys too. Birth control further enables the worst behavior in men.
Exactly. Since America conquered achieved world hegemony after World War II, the Catholic Church leadership have wanted to avoid cancellation (ie, losing non-profit status, having Catholics being auto-excluded from being members of the bar, being dis-invited from all establishment media, and also Catholics just generally not wanting to seem like fuddy-duddy "bad guys" by the standards of progressive morality, etc. etc.) and so have tried to put a more modern/feminist spin on long-standing teachings. So in the past 60 years, the Catholic Church has emphasized the angle of "we are actually the real feminists because sexual sin is a case of men hurting women,"
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The Catholic Church has like a dozen reasons for opposing birth control in the same list, and one of them is ‘women are dumbasses and lots of them will get pregnant anyways, only they’ll be with guys that won’t commit because birth control moves sex earlier in a relationship’. This is a true argument but it is not a feminist framing.
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No, the unpopularity of sin/policing rhetoric isn’t due to fear of cancellation. It derives from the general loss in status of religion. Hardline stances are unappealing when people can just…opt out. Go to communities which held on to that status—Salt Lake City, the Bible Belt—and you’ll find that they still have strict rules.
I grew up in the vicinity of Bob Jones. They had no qualms about their strict limits on interaction between the sexes. This is a school which, decades earlier, chose to pay back taxes rather than allow interracial dating.
That's...the same thing.
How do you mean?
I am arguing that religious authorities are pushed into softer stances because of ideological competition. Higher mobility and increased secularity has made it easier to opt out of religious communities and go somewhere you won’t be called a whore, etc. Thus the societies which still have strong prohibitions are those with the most cost to leaving.
I think this is distinct from the concept of cancellation, which to me implies that the authority chooses not to speak for fear of personal consequences, especially sourced from the general public. When BJU maintained their ban on interracial dating, the consequences were tax exemptions and court cases rather than picketing. This was possible because their detractors had almost no leverage over the supporters.
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Yep, the idea that women having sex freely should be something to be celebrated because it's bringing equality in how society sees men vs women sleeping around ingores the fact that regardless of how far back you go, men sleeping around, though punished far less than women sleeping around, was still considered a vice, and the fact that the vice wasn't punished much does not mean that it was not seen as a vice (see gluttony for another example).
You absolutely can't interpolate from there to "women sleeping around is if anything a good thing as they break free from the shackles of patriarchy because in the past men were freely able to do that" (ignoring all the risks etc. that you mentioned men had). Men sleeping around in the past was always seen by society as a bad thing, even if society accepted it as a fact of life that you couldn't do anything about, what sex positive feminism wants for women is something that men as a class never had even under the yoke of the strongest patriarchies.
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I'll only add that religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists have rather different things in mind when they speak of the "degradation of women".
They largely agree on what the extremes of "degradation" are and long have. They disagree on what exactly the solution is, both because radfems are unwilling to consider biological (eg. psychological) differences between men and women beyond sex and reproduction, and because trads think the entire genie of modernity and related developments can be viably returned to the bottle.
"Radical feminist" doesn't just mean "strong feminist", it refers to people like Firestone or for a relatively low-key example Greer who root their feminism precisely in biological differences between the sexes (and tend to find current trans ideology repulsive and/or incoherent as a result, thus the TERF abbreviation). It could not be further from the truth to say they are unwilling to consider biological differences. Though it would be nearly as far from the truth to suggest they're a significant part of the "woke" social movement you're deploring.
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All that is old is new again. Or, more likely, never changed. But it still sticks out to me that this is pretty much identical to one of the contemporary primary modes of induction into prostitution. Maybe substituting meth or crack for alcohol.
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True, but that's not what I had in mind.
Religious traditionalists believe that the sexual degradation of young single women spiritually ruins them as prospective wives and mothers, which are their proper roles, plus it brings shame to their entire family, but especially their fathers and brothers.
Sex-negative feminists not only do not believe any of that, they are outraged by anyone even making such points.
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I don't think this is correct. The "only language they have to deal with it is consent" is a real problem for them, but the idea that, say, MeToo would not have happened if Harvey Weinstein was a better lay strikes me as absurd. I doubt you'd also see misguided attempts to get back at men, if that's what was happening.
Meh. I'm not religious, and only conservative for a very particular definition of conservative, and insert mandatory "there are always some crazies out there" disclaimer, but I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding this perspective that Trads have in common with RadFems. It's not about the act in itself being degrading, it's about it being deeply intimate, and cheapening it is what is degrading.
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I'm not convinced that 2rafa is right. I have not gotten the impression from progressives I have personally known, both men and women, that they think casual sex is a bad deal for women. This viewpoint might be unstated because the majority of progressives simply do not hold it, not because they hold it but do not wish to admit it.
And I think that the belief that the Sexual Revolution went haywire at some point is even less common among progressives than the belief that casual sex is a bad deal for women.
Regarding the promise of the Sexual Revolution, I think that probably the more common progressive belief is that to the extent the promise has not been fulfilled it is because the Sexual Revolution has not gone far enough, not because it is inherently incapable of fulfilling those promises.
Progressive women who come to hold this view usually don't do so until they're in their 30s, I assume, which is an important caveat here. With regard to progressive men, I'm sure the whole issue doesn't even occur to them unless they have younger sisters, or daughters.
I have a younger sister with whom I am close. My mother tried hard to keep me from becoming promiscuous; it went horribly right. My dad was against casual sex, believing it was foolish and irresponsible. Always thought it was a bad deal and basically like BASE jumping or some shit. Was never interested in it myself until age 26 or so, and only then in order to gain some kind of wisdom or some shit like that.
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It probably is an important caveat, but I have known a number of progressive men and women in their 30s, 40s, and older, so I am not basing my opinion just on interacting with progressives in their 20s.
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The original case of feminists revolting against the consequences of the sexual revolution was oversexualization. Back in the 90s I remember feminists railing against women feeling pressured to look good and be sexy as one of their main points. The fact that the world is a zero-sum game and women that show more skin get more attention doesn't seem to register with them. They created a world with no norms or rules for dress, and blame patriarchy for women dressing in the polar opposite way of how the patriarchy wants women to dress.
If women can do whatever they want with their appearance some women are going to realize that translucent yoga pants gets them ahead in life compared to dressing modestly. Being super slim, investing heavily in looks and obsessing over one's instagram can be a better ticket up in life for a young woman than a university degree. When one woman wears a thong bikini to the beach, she gets the attention. The other women follow, and soon the women in a bathing suit looks out of place. The sexual revolution created incentives for oversexualizing oneself, and women followed the winning strategy. The women who don't sleep on the third date and don't post sexy pictures or do conture makeup lose in the heightened competition.
Feminists seem to want to abolish competition and thereby the need for competing. Women can dress how they want, post what they want on instagram and sex themselves up as much as they want. Yet they are not going to use this competitively to try to get ahead. The idea seems to be to blame patriarchy. If men just followed women who dressed modestly and didn't have attractive bodies on instagram as much as they like attractive women, then women could dress like they want and not have to compete. If men's attraction for women was random, women could do what they want and still get an equal opportunities dating market. Their fundamental enemy is that men's preferences are not random.
There seems to be a trend among gen z feminists to simply drop out and embrace the fact that they can't win a zero-sum game. They dress like Billie Elish, have short hair and nose rings and seem to proudly state that they are dropping out of the arms race. Meanwhile, the other half of women are trying to outmanoeuvre eachother by wearing increasingly thin gym outfits.
Making the rules of sexual competition either less or more permissive does not necessarily make the sexual competition less or more fierce. Do men nowadays really perceive there to be a greater difference in attractiveness between the least and the most attractive women than men 200 years ago perceived? To be honest, I am not sure. I am not very well read in the history of sexuality.
I think that there is a pretty common trope in fiction of depicting very intense sexual competition between women even in the supposedly more puritan society of 18th-19th century Europe, isn't there? But I don't know to what extent this trope is grounded in reality.
I also have no hard data but my guess would be that yes, they do see a greater difference between the most and least and attractive women than they did 200 years ago.
Part of it is that, for better or for worse, people have a lot more autonomy than they did back then. There are a lot more fat people and a lot more marathon runners. Competition in everything is more fierce in almost every aspect of life but I think especially in fitness. Professionals from the 1950s would look like amateurs today, much less 200 years ago.
Back then the women you knew would all eat the same diet and do the same work and none of them exercise. Some of them will have better genetics and some were more skilled with makeup but that's about the extent of it. Today you're comparing between land whales in sweatpants vs instagram models who have a scientifically a crafted diet and exercise regime, expensive makeup, cosmetic surgery and photoshop on their side.
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Why is your conclusion that it was all a lie? You are aware that attitudes, especially about sex, hardly move on a linear, one-dimensional scale. History is about things changing in many ways, some good and some bad and many unforeseen. It's about context and tons of interactions with contemporary events. This is extra true in this case because as you start to allude to, these expectations were largely unstated -- and that's because the Sexual Revolution wasn't particularly intentional. There's some early links to feminist movements in the creation of the birth control pill (1960) due to its then-controversial moral implications, but research was heading in that direction anyways and I think that a lot of the movement was simply an intersection between that invention, which allowed wider scale lower-consequence sex (very important!), the happenstance of Vietnam War counterculture already starting to go full steam ahead, and an already-rising incidence rate of what Wikipedia rather blithely calls "non-traditional sexual activity" that had started back in the early 50s. In other words, the Sexual Revolution was more a thing that happened rather than a directed or conscious movement.
Truth be told however, a lot of stuff was happening for women in the 1960s and thereabouts. I feel strongly the Sexual Revolution should be treated as its own thing, but all that stuff makes it hard to be totally certain. Specifically, you had traditional Second Wave Feminists focused on legal stuff and equality, you had a more hippie-based cultural movement, and you had some radicals hanging around as well, as well as some other political events. There were a lot of big legal things happening including sex being allowed into movies and books more, equal pay pushes, and you are correct, a lot more talk about gender roles.
And that's where I think you're succumbing to a bit of presentism. "Normalizing" both the act of sex (particularly unmarried sex) and discussion about sex is by definition contextual. We use the word differently today. Normalizing to someone in 1965 might mean that it's now normal to talk about sex in casual conversation and a heightened awareness of sexual activity, including queer stuff. Whereas in point a above, you say that it's about not shaming each other and not having unfavorable impacts. That's not really what the promise was, if there even was one. The conversation was just getting started, in the public consciousness. So talking about it being a lie just doesn't make sense.
Part b might be a valid criticism of second wave feminism, but not the sexual revolution. And it's one I wouldn't be so quick to declare as false. Certainly some feminists declared that loosened gender roles might be better for everyone, but I think the language was (and should be) more of a moral and legal question about rights than an explicit "I Offer - You Receive". In other words, it isn't fair nor just to force (societally and legally) certain roles and restrictions on women because they are people too, even on the off chance it makes society overall worse. And again, here I believe you are projecting what is actually intended as a third/fourth wave feminism criticism onto the second wave. Both the claim about men having no issue doing traditionally female-coded things as well as the activism behind it doesn't historically line up at all with the Sexual Revolution. I would say that for example, a push to accept house-husbands didn't really start to bloom until maybe the 2000s.
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In a strict sense, it's true that this "turned out not to be true". Women are not completely free to be exactly as promiscuous as they please without it impinging upon men's opinions of them in any way.
On the other hand, I think the promise of the sexual revolution was partly fulfilled, in the sense that women are more free to experiment sexually without social stigma than they were prior. I've met very few men in my life who've said that they would never date/marry a woman if they knew she wasn't a virgin. Attitudes towards premarital sex have liberalized dramatically.
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Where do you see this view expressed, that isn't at the very least "post-left"? My impression is that getting a progressive to acknowledge something went wrong with the Sexual Revolution is like nailing jello to a wall. Even if they agree that current sexual dynamics are unhealthy, they can't bring themselves to put the blame on the Sexual Revolution. It's still patriarchy, internalized misogyny, or what have you. The revolution has not gone far enough! If you admit things in the past might have been better in any regard, that would imply we might need to roll some things back, and be more careful with future changes - we can't have that!
IMO, it's not even that, it's "The Wall wasn't built to keep women locked in, it was built to keep men out". "Sexual freedom" isn't in women's interest because they aren't unrepentant coomers the way men are. If The Wall falls, it is women who will find themselves pressured to do things they don't want to do, not men (see also: my recent anecdote on the "third date is when you sleep with the guy" rule, and the post that provoked it). Gender roles are more tricky, but I think even there what I said applies. Sure, they might be restrictive, but at least half of the reason they were there was to give women a domain they can rule over according to their preferences, so they don't have to deal with men's bullshit.
Mainstream progressive (i.e. sex-positive) feminism is happy to acknowledge that women are not getting off on the casual sex available post Sexual Revolution - they just blame men for it rather than reconsidering whether the Sexual Revolution was a good idea.
I see this sort of attitude as being very common in progressive circles. The idea is always that our movement was failed, not that we failed. The idea that it is the responsibility of any particular political movement to adjust its messaging and political power plays to acclimate to the sociopolitical landscape that exists so that more people are convinced to join the cause and to help it just never seems to occur to them. The argument is always some variation of "We did everything right, it's just those damn XYZ people holding us back." Which strikes me as akin to a colonel saying "I did absolutely everything right when I ordered my men to rush that hill; those damn enemy combatants with their machine guns in bunkers are the ones at fault here."
You're not seeing it from a consequentalist standpoint, which is probably the one the people complaining that their movement was failed are taking. I think there's an important distinction because technically the people they accuse of holding them back aren't seen as enemy combatants in the context of making the world better. They might be adversaries in the context of getting a policy implemented internally, like that colonel might be a big fan of human wave style tactics while another colonel is arguing in favor of softening the enemy up with artillery, both arguing and trying to convince the brass of approving their preferred tactic, bickering and going as far as doing some political manuvering to try and edge out the other, but still fighting on the same side of the war. So their accusation is not that their tactic would have worked but for the enemy, but that they are being machine-gunned in the back by the other colonel who would be putting winning his small argument about tactics (disapproval of sexual liberty) over the overarching goal of winning the war (of making life better for everyone).
Whether the argument is accurate or not is different, but the accusation is of sabotage, not of facing resistance from the enemy.
No, it's because I'm seeing it from a consequentialist standpoint that I see the notion of one's sociopolitical movement as having been failed instead of being a failure as wrong and, to be honest, rather absurd. To wit:
Whether or not the accusation is of sabotage or resistance from the enemy, it doesn't change the fact that the colonel's soldiers are now dead, and the hill hasn't been taken. The colonel's job, in this metaphor, is do what it takes to take that hill, taking into account any obstacle that gets in the way, whether that be enemy combatants or sabotaging fellow colonels or incompetent underlings or anything else. If a colonel sends his men to rush a hill only to get shot in the back by people he assumed was friendly, then clearly that colonel failed due to believing that those people were friendly and wouldn't shoot his men in the back.
And in the realm of sexual sociopolitics, I'm rather skeptical that the progressives considered the conservatives to be people mostly on the same page and with similar ideas about what "victory" looked like, just with different ways to get there. From my experience as a progressive living around progressives, we tended to see conservatives, both in sexual matters and in others, to be closer to enemy combatants with very different - almost incomprehensible in its absurdity - ideas of what a good world looked like, than fellow-travelers who would sabotage us for just having some disagreements about the details. And, again, either way, if we only get 90% of the way there instead of 100% because of enemy combatants or sabotage that my movement didn't properly take into account and work around or defeat, and as a result we end up with a situation that's significantly worse than 100% (whether it's worse than 0% is another matter; it's certainly possible, and it's certainly true for some subsets of the population), then that's clearly the responsibility of my movement for failing to properly account for our adversaries, whether they're enemy combatants or sabotage.
If you zoom out far enough, sons and daughters living happy fulfilling lives is what everyone is after. At least, for people who invest themselves into social policy making with impacts on that kind of timescale. There isn't really any personal gain to be made, the people who pushed the changes that led to the current environment are by now too old to personally benefit from it.
My point is not that the colonel who cannot ever manage to implement his strategy is worthy, but that it's a fair complaint if another person ostensibly working for the same objective is actively making things worse for no other reason than to not see him succeed. If the other colonel really was shooting his country's troops in the back, pointing it out to the brass is not pitiful whining, it should be investigated and that colonel arrested and tried for treason. If, in progressives' mind, conservatives are making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives, they should make that case to the population as best they can so that the population rightly shuns conservatism. It's not argument I can see them making convincingly, but they absolutely should try it if they truly believe that conservatives are that nasty and petty.
Yes, they (we) should make that case as best as they can, and if and when that case fails to convince people to shun conservatism to the extent required to actually defeat conservatism, then that is a failure on their (our) part. And indeed, as best as I can tell, we have tried this method for decades at this point and have largely failed to convince people; we do convince individuals and groups here and there, but we also lose people due to the same methods, and for what we're discussing, we need massive net wins, not wins and losses mostly offsetting each other or even just a slightly higher win-rate than loss-rate. We weren't failed by a populace that didn't rightly listen to us in shunning conservatism, we failed the populace by not giving them the arguments that convince them of the truth of conservatives making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives.
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Indeed. Very obviously they will not even address the Sexual Revolution, as such. They will pin the blame on the male sense of entitlement, toxic masculinity, consumerist pop culture etc. But that's not the point.
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That's pretty much what I said, wasn't it?
It's not the Sexual Revolution that's to blame, it's the patriarchal toxic masculinity making men selfish in bed. Please don't look at the sex satisfaction by number of sexual partners surveys!
Also, while feminism will take the "orgasm gap" as a yet another convenient stick to beat men with, it's hardly the core issue even for sex-positive feminists.
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It is typical of any revolution. The idea is that everyone is going to be free and liberated and we will have utopia. The reality is when traditions and norms are removed, we get a massive behavioural sink. People get the freedom to act shortsightedly and selfishly. The response is twofold, one group says the revolution should be rolled back while the other group claims the revolution was sabotaged and the saboteurs need arresting. The problems might be recognized by both sides, the issue is that the solutions are incompatible. The feminists want to have total freedom for women but use state power to ensure that men don't act in self interest. Conservatives want to go back to sexual dynamics run by traditions and norms rather than a one controlled by state power.
To clarify, this has to be a question of degree not kind. It's been a very long time since the state played no role in shaping sexual dynamics, e.g. through marriage and divorce laws.
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