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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?
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.
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 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.
I believe that as much as I believe that guys watch PornHub for the plot.
The key thing to observe here is that Twilight, the version without the hot sex, was outsold by Fifty Shades, the version with the hot sex.
Are you going to tell me that the romance was that much better?
Yes, there are a thousand differences between the two novels—but let's not be silly here. Porn isn't a feature you take or leave with a piece of media. It's either primarily what you want or you don't consume the material. It's not a matter of statistical chance that the most popular piece of women's media ever is such a hardcore piece of smut.
Sure, and there's no Fifty Shades for men. Girl lust and boy lust don't look exactly the same but there's no reason to think that one is inherently more conducive to monogamy than the other.
Okay, so what's your point in objecting to anything I said? Well that's obvious: because you do disagree that women are no more pure in their sexual intent. You just spent the previous paragraph praising the virtues of women's sexual gaze, how it's all about relationships and all that. We're talking about non-monogamy and its consequences for the human race. You posted about how specifically men's sexual vices are destroying our societies—the vice of sexual liberalism and the men who pushed it for their own gain: the gain of having less attached sex with women. The gain that men got at the expense of women. Men's ill-gotten gain against women.
Do you think I'm stupid?
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