This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Sexual Revolution Goes To Hell
There was a conversation a month back about the Sexual Revolution and its (Lady) Discontents, probably highlighted by this later-QC'd @WhiningCoil post:
[cw: some links NSFW, albeit more in the sense of Comedy Central late-night comedy sense. Also some media spoilers.]
Apropos of nothing, has anyone here watched Helluva Boss? 'Adult' comedy, freely available on YouTube. It stars the Immediate Murder Professionals, a trio of imps who've gained access to the living world and have offered their services to
get revenge'resolve problems' there for damned sinners who can pay. Ostensibly, the show is about the trio's new business as marginally-competent assassins, with the moral and neurotic Moxie, joyful berserker Millie, and wacky boss Blitzø ("the o is silent") going into the world and slaughtering someone. In practice, this ends up more a framing device; many episodes don't involve paid murder, and those that do it's not the actual challenge.With a few exceptions most individual episodes instead focus more on relationships between the denizens of hell. The three main cast have that awkward mix of professional and casual common to small business (not helped by Blitz's clear desire to make a 'new family') sometimes jumping wholesale into stalking, Millie and Moxie have to juggle a marriage that's a lot more tender and reciprocal than either their parents nor Hell in general tolerates, so on.
That expands with the secondary cast. Blitz's access to the living world depends on a magical grimoire given in exchange for a transactual relationship with the demon prince Stolas, and for the first season neither are quite sure exactly how much emphasis goes on the 'relationship' in 'transactional relationship'. He also runs into a series of current or past
loverssexual partners with their complaints about him. Blitz's adopted adult daughter Loona is desperately looking for someplace to belong after a unpleasant childhood in Hell'spoundsorphanages but is unwilling to risk vulnerability. Moxie has... issues with his own Family and knows that he doesn't measure up by the standards of Millie's parents. Stolas' biological daughter Octavia is desperately looking for someplace to belong while her parents go through an unusually messy divorce. Eventually a number of the Seven Deadly Sins get involved, so on.There's a song spelling it out, diegetically as a drug trip..
As necessary disclaimer: it's gay. Really gay, even by furry-adjacent standards: there's one male/female active relationship among the main cast, and it's constantly going back to the same pegging joke. If you're a fan of the ladies, you're going to be stuck looking at fandom works or the not-on-YouTube sister show Hazbin Hotel, which does have a lesbian couple in focus. I don't know that I could call it good; while there's some decent comedic moments and fluid action scenes, there's sometimes too much emphasis on the cringe in cringe comedy, the musical numbers are hit-or-miss even if you can swing to their sometimes bizarre genre selections, and the characterization could stand to be more consistent. It's never quite Ren And Stimpy gross-out comedy, though some of the gorier fight scenes can get close, but neither is it exactly high-brow. The series as a whole has been trying to make a lot of commentary on economic and social class without serious introspection on its own assumptions, or even how that commentary it does present comes across.
((And I'm sure someone like @HlynkaCG can probably break down better about a Red Tribe take on the spirital ramifications of modern culture framing and worshipping literal demons as parallels for and paragons of modern society. Or of 'heaven' being paperwork and Minnesota Nice.))
Buuuuuuuuut because it's 'adult' and focused on relationships, a lot of it's about sex, and that part is very much written toward the id and superego of those "totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution". The show leads are the bisexual Vivienne Medrano and the gay Brandon Rogers, and the advertising and focus is very much down bad for exactly what you'd expect from that. That's not limited to sex -- one of the better musical numbers revolves around a two-minute long sequence of flipping the bird off to an abusive boss, culminating in a series of giant neon signs, including literal sign language for 'fuck off', the pilot has a particularly unsubtle joke about American healthcare provisioning -- but it's very much spread throughout the ethos. Of the main cast and the secondary cast, only one person (Millie) doesn't have Daddy Issues.
Helluva Boss is 'woke' in the sort of way that its authors would consider 'woke' to be a compliment. To its credit, that's at least sometimes subtle: we do some awkwardly-placed Deaf Culture-rep or a character awkwardly pointing out to his father that bisexual and gay are different things, but there's also a few trans characters (and Blitz-the-o-is-silent is probably meant as a deadnaming metaphor) or more subtle discussions about triggering trauma that you'd have to pay attention to catch. (It helps that the writers are willing to throw some on-the-nose jokes the other direction).
((It's worth spelling out that, where Hazbin Hotel discusses consent and undesired sexual violence with the characters Angel Dust and Valentino, it doesn't really feature among the reoccurring cast for Helluva Boss: the closest matters have been comedic and near-instantly resulted in violent response. Instead, the show portrays sexuality as a tool for the characters, either figuratively with many separate characters squicking out the villainous Striker to discomfort him, or in the more literal sense of skewering attackers through the skull with a motorized and pixelated dildo.))
There's actually a lot of discussion here about how modern (and thus post-sexual-revolution) norms are, in the story's setting, literally damning. "He's had four tongues inside him at once, which, like, good for him!... but he's giving off not-ok vibes" is the most clearly overt situation where the show can't quite disavow people who want to fill every hole they've got, but it can recognize that sex won't fill and often detracts from figurative ones. There's clear contradiction between more 'presentable' sexuality and less such (cw: lots of pixelated dildos, loud, se2 spoilers). STDs exist, in-universe. One of the last straws for that Two Minutes Notice song is the promotion of an entertainer as a sex object that is at best degrading and at worst invites or encourages aggressive stalkers, a topic of prolonged discourse in fandom spaces that's somewhat complicated by the number of people who literally get off from fascimiles of their body or their characters being 'used'. An early-season joke about fandom response to Loona is slightly awkward in contrast to around 15k not-always-on-model images over at e621 that I won't be linking. Though at least the character's explicitly in her twenties.
((The showrunners are probably not considering these conflicts solely as a theoretical exercise. The original voice actor for Stolas was dropped between the pilot and the first season, at the same time certain 'allegations' were going around of Totally Consensual But Also Bad things.))
A lot of the show's answer is to highlight and exaggerate the faults in 'traditional' sexual norms. Whatever sympathy the fandom came up with for Stolas' wife before her reveal -- after all, he was cheating on her! -- faltered when Stella actually appeared, lessbecause she'd wanted Stolas murdered , and more because thing was a loveless arraigned marriage between complete jerks: the extent each of the two hate each other more than they love their child is stated explicitly. While it's the worst of the arranged marriages, it's not the only one we're presented with, and that the others look marginally better only damns them with faint praise (one has the 'bride' tied up, gagged, a shotgun pointed at him). Even where couples are 'traditional' in the 1920s-1980s sense of Love, True Love, there's a lot of outside culture demanding response that doesn't actually fit, such as Millie's parents finding Moxie insufficiently manly or Hell's culture heavily stigmatizing interclass relationships (in this case, between higher-class princes or Sins and lower-class imps). In the setting, even literal cherubs can't really think of love as separate from a bunch of horny teenagers.
But Helluva Boss is struggling to create and draw together a healthy sexuality after the sexual revolution, and as a response to the sexual revolution rather than just those 'traditional' norms. A good number of those criticisms are very likely inspired by personal experiences, and many viewers see and relate to the show in that framework. A bit of that is drawing very heavily from Women's Fanfic Circles of Idealized Relationships, where everybody 'really' just needs sufficient support followed by Just Admitting Their Feelings And Letting People In (something something Found Family), or is disposable and untouchably evil (and there are a lot of disposable assholes). Other parts are more serious. If relationships are increasingly likely to touch between work and play, what extent can a transactional relationship or one with disparity of power be healthy, or can such a thing ever leave those fetters behind?
That's not to say the show has answers. It's not even clear that it's entirely grappled the scope of the questions: like a lot of shows with complicated romantic relationships, there's a fan-favorite solution that's almost impressive for how much it's joked about compared to how little it's presented in any serious sense, even if only to point out where and why it wouldn't work. Some few of the protagonist's flaws are their own, but there's little space or consideration for what would be necessary to grow beyond them, or to produce a next generation that could easily exceed them.
I think it's still relevant to say that they've noticed the skulls.
So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Short answer: categorically, yes.
Long answer: What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?
The broad cultural shift of the 1960s and 70s which led to the institution of no-fault divorce, the rise in divorce rates and fall in marriage rates, the removal or at least weakening of the expectation that everyone would get married and have children, the destigmatization of illegitimate children and promiscuity, the increasing acceptance of non-traditional forms of sexual expression such as homosexuality and transgenderism, the general decoupling of sexual activity from procreation, and the increasing prominence of women in the workforce, among other things.
For a conservative, obviously these are bad things in and of themselves, but surely "the outcome of the sexual revolution was disagreeable to conservatives" is an uninteresting fact since that was clear from the start, and no one ever expected it would not be. So "the sexual revolution failed" must mean "the sexual revolution failed on its own terms."
It's certainly not clear to me, anecdotally, drawing from my own life experiences, that these changes were a failure or bad things, very much the opposite. So I would need a larger, data-driven argument to convince me.
Well what were the sexual revolution's own terms?
If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.
Really the only successful goals are the destructive ones. Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters. And birth rates are cratering along with the quality of mates for both sexes.
I could go on about how life for sexual minorities was actually better before the advent of a tolerance that amounts to mandatory political membership and/or straight up extermination under the guise of acceptance but I feel like these are petty anyways. The lives of 90% of the population are much worse precisely in the ways they were supposed to get better.
But I guess women are now forced to toil too. So there's that.
Case in point: student debt is a modern form of the dowry system, but instead of the money going to her father it goes to college administrators...
That would be bride-price, not dowry. More than token bride-price is normally a feature of polygynous societies where demand for brides exceeds supply - the market value of a wife in a Malthusian society with a monogamy norm is negative (dowry being a payment from the bride's parents to the groom, or in India his parents) because there are more women than men who can support a wife.
In other words, in our society, women entering marriage with debt is stupid.
Ah, we call it mahr in our (Muslim) system, it's money given by the Groom's family to the Bride's family to provide for her in case the marriage doesn't work out for her, it's a sort of insurance no different to how a college education is insurance for a woman since she now has the skills to work for herself and be able to live a decent life if the union with her husband goes south (yes, in reality I know modern college education is nothing of the sort, but that's beyond the point here, we care about the intention, not the results).
The standard dowry you mention the woman's family gives the man's family is actually Haram.
Islam, of course, permits polygyny (although I understand it is rare in most Muslim societies). Both Christianity and Hinduism prohibit it, meaning that dowry was near-universal among landed-class Christians and continued into the early industrial era, and is still a live issue in India.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think transgenerational rates of self-reported happiness or mental illness are particularly reliable measurements, for a number of reasons. Someone in the 30s probably wouldn't even think to diagnose themselves with 'anxiety' or 'OCD' while someone in 2023 with the very same symptoms would. As for happiness, it's not obvious that this is measurement invariant. To use an extreme example, if you asked a medieval peasant and a 20th century accountant to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 - 10, and the peasant said '6' and the accountant said '5,' this is very weak evidence at best that the accountant would be happier living the life of the peasant.
Even if you take such measures at face value, Western Europe has not seen similar decreases in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction as the USA, despite undergoing the same and in some cases even more extensive liberalization of sexual mores. This is also true for suicide rates, which have been steadily dropping in Europe for decades as they've risen in the US. Unless Americans are uniquely susceptible to the negative effects of the SR, it's mostly something else.
The institution of no-fault divorce seems to have resulted in a large drop in female suicide rates and domestic violence. That's a pretty clear case of improving the condition of women.
Even granting young people having less sex is a bad thing (weren't people complaining about teen STD and pregnancy rates forever?), this trend seems to have started abruptly in the 90s, so blaming it on the SR is dubious unless you can demonstrate some kind of delayed-trigger mechanism.
I'm unsure what you're referring to here. What is so complicated about relationships today?
I disagree these are bad things. There's nothing actually preventing anyone who wants to from getting married. Most of the poor outcomes of children of single mothers (income, education, crime, etc.) don't manifest in the children of widows, so the much-touted disastrous impacts of raising a child outside of a two-parent home seem to be mostly down to confounding.
Birth rates have been cratering since way before the sexual revolution.
I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.
Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963. We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past. Even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.
I don't think the data is worthless but I think it's highly problematic for the reasons mentioned. It's extremely hard to control for all of the other potential factors at work.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people can dissolve relationships they don't want to be in, I think that's generally a good thing. The alternative to being divorced usually isn't being in a good marriage, but being in a bad one. I'm not convinced the purported terrible effects on children are all that large or relevant net of other factors.
I'm not sure what you mean by "school success." More people go to school than ever before. Certain test scores have dropped since the 60s (but others haven't), but way more people take tests like the SAT than they did back then. Alcoholism is significantly lower today than it was in the 70s. Druge use appears to be worse, yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.
Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.
Well then I ask again: what are its own terms? What looks like a success and does the current situation look like it?
I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.
I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.
Look, you have to choose:
Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).
Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.
You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).
The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.
You'll note that I never claimed either that correlations means causation.
Social projects do not get to have control groups. All claims of success or failure, or indeed all plans for society, have to be judged on their actual outcomes instead of their theoretical consequences.
Unless you want to dispute the observations I'm stating, the sexual revolution is a failure. On its own terms. Which is the proposition I'm originally commenting on.
Whether it could have been successful were it not for other factors and whether the failure is inherent to its recommendations is frankly irrelevant, since we don't live in hypotheticals and all political recommendations have to be about the present set of humans in the present set of conditions.
These are not incompatible observations at all. People are having less sex. Most of the sex that's being had is casual and outside of formal bonds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know too little about the topic at hand to have a meaningful opinion on it, but the discussion here reminded me of something like this, as well. Part of the responsibility of any social or political project is being robust against malicious and/or unexpected forces that come about to throw a wrench in the system. If some unexpected technological advancement or sabotaging entity successfully throws the movement off course, then the failure rests entirely on the people pushing the movement, in not taking the correct precautions or not making the correct adaptations.
I'd also say that the whole time span excuse seems either misguided or, I suspect, just motivated reasoning. If we posit that the sexual revolution started around the 60s, it would follow that the first generation of people who grew up in that environment had kids in the 80s-90s, which means that the first generation of people who grew up raised by people who grew up in that environment were entering their young adulthood in the 00s-10s. It would make perfect sense for such a society-wide transformation to have different effects on people who saw the transformation as adults, on people who saw the transformation as kids but were raised by adults who were accustomed to pre-transformation, and on people who only knew life post-transformation, raised by people who mostly knew life post-transformation. This can't be extended indefinitely, of course; at some point, the multiple generations of people living better lives makes it clear that whatever issues that came after must have been extrinsic (which then gets to the previous paragraph, that failing to account for extrinsic, unpredictable factors is just as much a failure as any other), but given what we know about the human lifecycle and societies, 2 generations seems well short enough a timeframe to draw a direct line.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link