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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?
The ideal of the Sexual Revolution was free love (no need to get married to have sex, no need to be married to cohabit), removal of shame and secrecy around sex, removal of jealousy etc. because now anyone could get sex so nobody needed to be possessive, all the drama around sex would disappear because the prudery and disapproval and hypocrisy would be done away with. Now you could control your fertility (and medicine seemed to be on the verge of making STIs no more troublesome than having a cold), so no pregnancy unless you wanted it (and hence no babytrapping/shotgun marriages/unhappy marriages where there were more kids than you could afford).
Women would be equally as liberated as men, so that the double standard would be done away with. Being sexually experienced would no longer be something shameful, but something desirable. Now that we understood the drives behind human instincts, due to psychology and psychotherapy and evolutionary psychology and so forth, we could finally understand what we wanted and why.
Sexuality was now separated from reproduction, and it was understood that the purpose of sex was for fun, enjoyment, and pleasure. Casual, no-strings-attached sex and sex that wasn't straight missionary vanilla sex was all the rage.
People would be happier and healthier and more fulfilled. Everything would be open and sunny and happy.
How do you think that worked out in reality, given the rise of the "incel"?
Has the number of incels actually risen? Or has the proliferation of social media allowed sexless men to form virtual communities of their own?
https://web.archive.org/web/20181113130908/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/:
"Increasing number of people are sexless" is not synonymous with "increasing number of people are incels", but it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which the former is wholly uncorrelated with the latter.
But is it the sexual revolution's fault? How did the same values change from 1971 to 1991?
Who said the sexual revolution ended in 1991?
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Teen pregnancy rates between the two sexual revolutions were shockingly high, so clearly lots of teens were having intercourse before 1971.
Yes; the vast majority of which was within the confines of a marriage. You could just get married at 18; you’d already have been an adult for a few years by then by the standards of the time anyway. The “high school sweetheart” is not a meme for no reason.
“Teen sex” is not actually the correct metric.
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Fairly well.
The stigma on pre-marital and promiscuous sex did significantly decrease. None of my friends or family of a similar age that I can think of are virgins, unless some of them are lying, and that's not scandalous or anything anybody thinks about too much. It hasn't prevented a lot of them from entering LTRs or even getting married. STIs and pregnancy are much less problematic and dangerous than they used to be, and pregnancy in particular is completely a choice these days. All that came about as promised.
Obviously it has not created a paradise on earth, and none of the problems it promised to take care of have completely disappeared, but so what? What has? It seems to me clearly better than what preceded it.
There have always been a minority of people, mostly men, who through no fault of their own will probably never find a romantic relationship or even have sex, but it's not clear to me that number has actually significantly increased in recent years (because I think a lot, if not a majority, of incels online are not actually 'truecels'). The so-called 'sex recession' began abruptly in the late aughts, early 2010s, so I would need an explanation on why the SR only had such an impact fifty years after its beginning. What is the proposed mechanism of action here? The standard answer is, "all the women are fucking chad" but that isn't really backed up by any data.
The decrease in stigma surrounding sex is definitely there, but that doesn't mean it is clearly better than what preceded it. The de-stigmatization came from a glorification of sex and we are seeing the consequences of it in the modern over-sexualized society. As the people adjusted to the ideal of not judging anyone for their sexual escapades, they did so with a firm belief in value of true love and the institution of marriage, that enabled them to uphold the agreement and restrictions that come with it. Now on the other hand the glorification of sex has gone so far, that this value has eroded. Don't get me wrong people still value and want the security that comes with a monogamous relationship, but are more unwilling to put up with the sexual restriction that come with it. That is what is currently eroding any faith men and women have in love, which in turn is encouraging them to see the opposite sex as an object.
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Are you an atheist?
Functionally. I'm not conversant enough with philosophy of religion to say God doesn't exist, but I'm 99% all revealed religions are false.
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Yeah, the rise of incels seems to be the strongest evidence you can get that the sexual revolution failed on its own terms, rember, it promised to bring cheap, easy and free sex to all who wanted it, not just women.
I'm honestly unsure about the whole notion of "inceldom" but certainly there are people out there who were raised on the promise of "everyone can have love and sex; everyone has a right to love and sex; you deserve love and sex" and, for whatever reason, they're not getting that. Of course they feel aggrieved and cheated.
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I don’t think it’s actually good evidence.
The term basically correlated with the rise of the Internet, which from its start was an extremely nerdy space. Geeks complaining about getting girls is not a new phenomenon. Does it predate the sexual revolution? I would assume so, but I could also believe the transition from manufacturing and agriculture to service led to a segmentation of men. Then that’s really hard to separate from the postwar booms in sex equality and in contraception.
Either way, I think the term “incel” has gotten more popular due to its sneering value. As the Internet became more mainstream, its social games got further from weird subcultures and closer to high school. The nerdy virgin is a natural target! So I’d expect to see the concept skyrocket in popularity whether or not there were actually more sexless men.
Again, I’m not arguing that sexual dynamics are unchanged. I’m saying that if the term “incel” didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent it.
Agree that the term ‘incel’ is basically just a replacement for ‘nerd’ at this point, but pre-first sexual Revolution norms probably did advantage intelligent but not particularly charming or good looking men at least relative to today and probably relative to the ‘chads’ of the day. Now of course it also seems reasonable to point out that it doesn’t appear that anyone wants to go back to them except for a minority of fundamentalists.
Now I don’t think that post first but pre second sexual Revolution norms were a stable equilibrium but it does seem worth pointing out that setting our sexual norm clocks to 1950 AD would not benefit geeky men very much. Setting them to 1890 AD might, but I don’t think that’s what incel redpill types wanting to undo the sexual revolution actually want.
I wonder.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about Lord Byron, but pre-feminist society was clearly not immune to the sexualization of wealth and power. There were still haves and have-nots; it’s just that the haves were almost never women or poor. The rake was traditionally a nobleman. Catherine II of Russia is the leading example of a woman getting her pick of lovers, and it led the British to note her “masculine force of mind.”
This raises the question: if Lord Byron was boinking all the eligible ladies and chambermaids, were they removed from the marriage pool? Was his hypergamy creating a class of forlorn bachelors?
Or, for a darker version—did mass male casualties, as in the Napoleonic Wars, leave a cadre of incel women?
I think not, but can’t be sure why. Perhaps the have-nots just kept a stiff upper lip and devoted their lives to God. Or perhaps the necessity of a husband made for more slack in the system. Still, I find it hard to believe that today’s incels face a harder dating market than various historical periods.
I’m pretty sure that the rigid class structure of, say, the regency era created a relief valve by allowing scandalized women or men who couldn’t find suitable brides to marry below their station. Of course, one has to imagine that it’s more efficient for everybody to just pretend that one of lord Byron’s conquests ‘didn’t go past kissing, I swear’ in a lot of cases, too.
It seems like in general that the existence of mistresses is a similar phenomenon, and one should note that mistresses were almost never from the same social class as their married lovers. Hypergamy was an accepted method of upwards social mobility for both men and women(although with restrictions on it).
Your other point- about the napoleonic wars- seems well taken. I’d assume that yes, there were lots of French women who became prostitutes or lived with their sister and brother in law or whatever because they couldn’t find a husband, but that leads me to the general question of how well did higher male mortality rates balance out with deaths in childbirth? Unfortunately what the marriage market was like is only really documented towards the end of the period, when maternal mortality was in sharp decline.
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To identify the strongest evidence there is, I suggest going back to the comment that started this all: "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". The fact - and I think it's safe to treat this as fact at this point - that average, mainstream liberal women, and I imagine many of their male hangers-on as well share this view and are willing to voice it, although mostly anonymously - again, we're talking about average normies, not incels - says a lot.
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