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So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Short answer: categorically, yes.
Long answer: What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?
The broad cultural shift of the 1960s and 70s which led to the institution of no-fault divorce, the rise in divorce rates and fall in marriage rates, the removal or at least weakening of the expectation that everyone would get married and have children, the destigmatization of illegitimate children and promiscuity, the increasing acceptance of non-traditional forms of sexual expression such as homosexuality and transgenderism, the general decoupling of sexual activity from procreation, and the increasing prominence of women in the workforce, among other things.
For a conservative, obviously these are bad things in and of themselves, but surely "the outcome of the sexual revolution was disagreeable to conservatives" is an uninteresting fact since that was clear from the start, and no one ever expected it would not be. So "the sexual revolution failed" must mean "the sexual revolution failed on its own terms."
It's certainly not clear to me, anecdotally, drawing from my own life experiences, that these changes were a failure or bad things, very much the opposite. So I would need a larger, data-driven argument to convince me.
Well what were the sexual revolution's own terms?
If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.
Really the only successful goals are the destructive ones. Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters. And birth rates are cratering along with the quality of mates for both sexes.
I could go on about how life for sexual minorities was actually better before the advent of a tolerance that amounts to mandatory political membership and/or straight up extermination under the guise of acceptance but I feel like these are petty anyways. The lives of 90% of the population are much worse precisely in the ways they were supposed to get better.
But I guess women are now forced to toil too. So there's that.
A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.
Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.
Well then I ask again: what are its own terms? What looks like a success and does the current situation look like it?
I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.
I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.
Look, you have to choose:
Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).
Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.
You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).
The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.
You'll note that I never claimed either that correlations means causation.
Social projects do not get to have control groups. All claims of success or failure, or indeed all plans for society, have to be judged on their actual outcomes instead of their theoretical consequences.
Unless you want to dispute the observations I'm stating, the sexual revolution is a failure. On its own terms. Which is the proposition I'm originally commenting on.
Whether it could have been successful were it not for other factors and whether the failure is inherent to its recommendations is frankly irrelevant, since we don't live in hypotheticals and all political recommendations have to be about the present set of humans in the present set of conditions.
These are not incompatible observations at all. People are having less sex. Most of the sex that's being had is casual and outside of formal bonds.
That is what you're responding to -- a causal claim.
Yes, you avoided ever stating any of your observations were causal, but you're responding to a question about causation by citing correlations. Your comment is either implying your correlational claims are evidence of the causal claim or it is a non sequitur.
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