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A couple weeks ago I had an argument with people on here about the Sexual Revolution, and its terrible effects on society, or lack thereof. Just about everyone except me was in agreement that the SR was a bad thing.
My thoughts and responses to objections were scattered throughout the thread, so I decided to collect them and make a brief and incomplete case as to why the SR, and the social revolution of the 60s in general was not a bad thing, and most of its purported deleterious impacts are overstated, wrongly attributed, or nonexistent.
Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?
Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.
I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?
But suicide rates have also been rising in the US for a long time, so it’s fair to say people becoming unhappier is a real phenomenon. The trend is actually worst among young-ish adults. Here’s a tweet from middling right-wing e-celeb Indian Bronson blaming this trend on the usual right-wing bogeymen.
The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally.
It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US.
Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.
Suicide rates back this up. Over the same time period that suicide rates have spiked among Americans, especially American youth, they’ve declined in western Europe
It seems that everybody being atomized gay atheists hasn’t made Europeans more depressed or suicidal.
What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.
There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.
What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.
Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.
As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.
If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce, people being gay, and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves, so from a conservative perspective, the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one. But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.
When I have this argument elsewhere someone always hits me with “oh so you think everything is great, huh? You think this degenerate feminist deracinated hellscape we inhabit is a paradise, don’t you?” People on here are not generally that abrasive but anyway, no, I don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.
This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.
I think it’s very damning when critics-of-critics of the sexual revolution rely on the same flawed arguments.
“The alternative is women not working or very young marriage (as in 1950s America)”. Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West. Women worked in substantial numbers outside the home in Western countries since the middle of the Industrial Revolution, a hundred years before the sexual revolution. The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think. Similarly, the Saudi birth rate collapse of the 1980s and 1990s happened while native female labor force participation was extremely low (suggesting, again, that women working was not the primary cause of falling birthrates).
“It’s not that bad”. Yeah, but it’s not that good, either. As I’ve argued before, and as more ‘feminist’ critiques of the sexual revolution by people like Louise Perry discuss, women don’t really get anything out of casual sex. They get neither status nor (in almost all cases) pleasure, so why do they do it? For the same currency (male attention) that women have always received, except previously they didn’t have to put out for it. That, not “women in the workplace”, is the sexual revolution. What benefit did 13 year old girls passed around between adult rockstars as groupies in the 1970s get from this glorious state of affairs? Again, seemingly very little.
There is something to @BurdensomeCount’s occasional suggestion that some people (typically smarter and higher status than usual, although they are not close to a majority even among that group) are able to successfully decouple sex and relationships. It would be unfair of me not to say that I’ve met women (and of course men) like this. But it’s also clear to me that they’re far from the majority, and policy around vices must take into account how most or many people respond to a thing. There are long term functional heroin users able to maintain some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, but they are in the minority. I won’t speak for men, but most women I know who’ve had lots of casual sex with strangers don’t seem to have benefited from or enjoyed the experience, and many regret it and say they would advise their own daughters against it.
These don’t seem to be imaginary problems. Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner. I think this is what most women want. Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system. But even many men suffer from the emptiness of single life, and men seem to, as @Questionmark says below, struggle on their own too.
More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.
Most people (and yes, I include myself in this) don’t particularly desire a great deal of individual liberty. They want a clear, well-trodden path, a route that works, a comfortable life, ‘traditional’ happiness in the form of a stable community and family. They don’t want to have to set out in the world on their own without a map and to figure out everything for themselves.
Look at the interminable number of TikTok and Instagram gurus. The Tates and the Female Dating Strategists. The Hustle Bros and the Girlbosses. What are their (often very young) audiences looking for? Someone to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. They represent an organic rejection of personal freedom, of individualism, which is aberrant and dysfunctional.
Have you watched the show Fleabag? One of the reasons it resonated with so many young women is that it’s about this. Of course its creator is a liberal feminist, she doesn’t even really understand the implications and the true theme of her own work (this is not unusual of course). But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence. Here’s the monologue.
Of course, the scene is subverted (she later sleeps with the priest); I consider it unlikely the writer even consciously understood the impulse she was describing. But I also think that in the moment it’s so, so real, more than the creator knew while writing it.
Agree with this analysis, although I'm not sure what to do about it. Virtually all progress comes from this group, and I find their arguments coherent and compelling. Yet at the same time, I cannot deny that for many, this does not work and is not what they want. This is most apparent in free speech advocacy. Back when tech was not just created by but run by nerds, there was no censorship or moderation. You could say whatever you wanted - getting banned wasn't even a thing. But once the plebe hordes arrived, they demanded that the internet not be that way, and now you have some longhouse marm listening in on your teamspeak when playing Overwatch, making sure you don't say any mean words or you get a banslap. And the plebes like this! They think it's progress and celebrate it! To the extent that there's any disagreement among them, it's not over the censor button itself, but slapfighting over who is the one in charge of the censorship.
While my disdain is not exactly concealed, I do acknowledge that for many, freedom doesn't work that well. You let them eat whatever they want and they just stuff themselves until they're like a fn balloon. You let them buy opiates and they turn themselves into a zombie infestation on the streets. It's completely ridiculous, but I cannot deny that this is objectively what happens for a good chunk of the population. Whatever I may think of their epistemics and philosophy, the results speak for themselves: being denied the freedom to fuck up objectively improves the lives of many. Further, whatever elegant philosophical foundation high-decoupling freedom advocates have, de facto their policies are Darwinian accelerationism: "If the plebes want to eat until they bust, well then so be it, let them bust." But judging by the fertility stats, we've already accelerated to a degree that may well crash the entire species. However beautiful I may find the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, I am at least clearheaded enough to concede that the collapse of the species is a bad thing, and whatever caused that should probably be reconsidered.
Where this leaves me, I don't know, other than to say annoyed and unsettled. I don't want to be subjected to their petty nonsense, but I also don't want humanity to collapse, so... I don't know, maybe stuff them back in their matrix pods while I walk free? But of course there's little room for that in my philosophy, and advocating so is a stain on my soul.
Maybe if we could set it up in such a way that they're technically putting themselves in the matrix pods while I walk free... ponders
Does your ideology support the notion that it's better for billions to have lived free than -illions to have spent their lives in chains?
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This leads me to something I've noticed. Plenty of people, when confronted with this sort of conflict between political system and population, rather than rethink the former, instead set out to "fix" the latter. Once, there were the Communists attempting to create the New Soviet Man. Now, I see plenty of people looking at what you've pointed out above, and arguing that we need only keep papering over the cracks and spinning the plates just a little while longer, until Inevitable Technological Progress allows us to "fix" humanity to be long-term compatible with our political system — whether that's by replacing human governance with a godlike AI singleton, Aubrey de Grey making us nigh-immortal, or using CRISPR and exowombs to engineer the New
SovietLiberalManPerson of Self-Determined Gender (as a Tumblr mutual keeps insisting is just a few years away). No matter which way, it seems that for them, Man is made for The System rather than The System being made for Man (a view which, as I've previously noted, goes back to Plato at least).More options
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Maximum individual liberty is alienation from others.
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I was actually less precise/nuanced than could be desirable in the response you're pointing at. That is, to an extent, unavoidable when discussing such an enormous country.
In a sense, the Sexual Revolution is here/ongoing in India. If you average over the entire place, then of course it's going to be very conservative compared to the West.
If you average over major cities, it's going to be significantly more liberal. Dating and casual sex is hardly unheard of, and in more liberal places like college or uni, entirely unremarkable. I speak VERY broadly, there are colleges, down in the south, where you can get expelled for holding hands with the opposite sex, even off campus.
It might be slightly frowned upon, but for the average middle/UMC Indian, be it a boy or girl, your parents won't disown you for bringing a new partner home, and as an independent young professional living in a city, you're largely immune from any negative consequences of sleeping around.
Quite recently, my ex of many years unblocked me, and I discovered she's going through what could be described as a belated hoe-phase, and I had to treat her for STDs (no judgment, I broke her heart, I'm more miffed at her terrible taste in new partners and what that might say about her dating me), and she's experienced some of the downsides of the SR as might be entirely unremarkable from examples in the CWR thread. Such as a fling with a 35 yo dude who asked her if she was amenable to poly/an open relationship.
Another point of pushback is that India has liberalized, especially since women began entering higher education, and were enabled to work independently in most of the same jobs as men. We simply began from a nadir in terms of gender equality, but going from Victorian norms to 1950s America in the same period America went from the 50s to uh, whatever the date is now, is still an enormous change, and smaller exclaves have achieved total parity.
The directional trend is robustly liberal, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So if you ask whether the empowerment/employment of women lead to loosening of sexual norms, then India should not be taken as a counter-example, we started from a more conservative position and we still moved left.
*Illustrative observations:
Tiny village in bumfuck nowhere? If you get caught dating, you're getting yelled at, or punished, or potentially beaten up (or very rarely honor-killed).
Middle class or UMC in a major city? Dating is frowned upon before college, because it distracts from your studies, once you're there it's no big deal, at most you are discouraged from sleeping around too much as a girl, for reputational concerns. Not even that big a deal, my slag of an ex from med school won't face any real issues when she's looking to settle down. Her mom didn't, and she was infamous as the class pony if the muttered complaints from my parents are factual, and she ended up marrying a judge. (Different exes)
Rich? Do whatever the fuck you want, and unless your family is hidebound, it doesn't matter.
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To your second point, I see this argument get bandied about endlessly, and it almost always fails to take seriously the way I see critics of the SR conceptualize the matter. This is the same error feminists always make against those who advocate a return to the 1950's, when they castigate men by saying that it was never a utopia. A claim I never saw any man ever make. The choice isn't necessarily between good and bad. It's between bad and 'worse'. The common error is to assume to there's some kind of 'solution' out there that we simply have to get to, that appeases all parties involved, and there isn't. You simply have to 'tolerate' certain things. Women aren't exactly the happiest they've ever been either, living in the richest and most emancipated society that's ever existed in the history of the human species. That either goes to show that:
Their happiness isn't very stable and shouldn't be shown too much regard.
If they're going to be unhappy no matter how you have it, there are better ways to structure society and better uses to put them to.
This is why I've always looked at liberal/progressive ideology (and indeed Leftism broadly construed) as a snake that eats its own tail. A lot of these kind of freedomhead's espouse values such as "unity!" and "solidarity!" in their philosophical lexicons, but it rings hollow on the inside.
"Solidarity!," doesn't carry with it the same intimacy with others as the spirit of "nationalism!" and love of one's country does. Saying "let's all go to the community center!" doesn't have the same ring to it as saying, "let's all go to Church on Sunday!," and be told about our place in the cosmos.
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Too bad they've been priced out of it by factors mostly beyond their control (yet they're quite obviously still fans of it, as indicated by their politics). If we took a hatchet to the educational-managerial complex and levelled it hard enough that it resembles what it was in 1950 [so that you were considered an adult by your society far closer to when it biologically occurs, with all the financial opportunities thereof, without needing to even graduate high school and university was only for the actually smart people] , you'd see men and women getting good jobs then married in their late-teens-early-twenties again as was normal in those days ("high school sweetheart" isn't a meme from that time for no reason).
But we don't have that, and said education system currently forms a massive form of "corporate" welfare for women-as-population, so apart from being able to offshore those lower-skill jobs to China- like we did to men in the '80s- good luck clawing that back from an electorate wholly dependent on it. (Same thing for HR positions- it would take a significant amount of legal reform to pop that bubble.) It'd probably take a war that explodes most of China for that to happen in the US again, but half of the male Chinese population dying overnight would probably end up causing 500 years of Chinese world domination 50 years later so maybe that's not great for American interests.
Thus the obvious conclusion: the need to impose taxes on the excess amounts of virtue those people have. Anyone who wants to freely exercise that intrinsic power deserves to get shot up just as surely as those who make more than an average amount of money do should they get any idea to keep it. The liberal argument is the same as it's always been- lower taxes on virtue has had massive economic benefits and given us basically everything in the modern world- and the traditionalist-progressive argument that we should not have that if it gets Society further away from the moral fashions (usually one's parents' conception of God, but in the last 400 years it's been capital-P Progress carrying the day) is convincing to some people who... have also been on the back foot in terms of dictating socioeconomic policies for 360 of the past 400 years (that said, almost all of those 40 years have been within the last 100- 1920-1940, 2014 to today, and the other one was 1800-1810 confined mostly to Europe).
Considering society at large has been effectively continually inflating punishments for Outer Party members (the section of society most likely to need this as a release valve), this is another "it could work, but prices are too high now". Fines were good enough proxies for taxes (though it's worth noting people don't see fines as such), not sufficiently ruinous, and inconsistently-enforced enough that this way of levying them was probably OK, but fines have far outpaced inflation and State capacity has grown to such an extent that being able to make a case is a few clicks away (extended to the average citizen by means of Twitter mob), and the temptation to do this is pretty obviously there (considering all Western states spent the last 2 of 3 years overusing exactly that ability).
As always, the problem is that society itself (and its governments, charged with executing its preferences) has shown itself to be an incredibly untrustworthy judge of what should and shouldn't be taxed- it is probably not an accident that, for those 360 years, the states with the lowest such taxes were the most prosperous compared to the rest of the world; the worst one could say is that it's coincidence.
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I just want to say that I really enjoy your writing and your perspective.
Most times on the Motte people only respond when they are in disagreement (often about one detail of a long post). On rare occassions I think it could help to simply say "good post". So... good post!
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It's less that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores than that technological advancement undermines the property relations upon which traditional marriage and patriarchy in general was built, which in turn creates an environment conducive to liberalization of sexual mores and to increasing participation of women in the labor force.
Is it worse than what came before? I don't think so.
Women don't have to have casual sex, and in fact most women don't have casual sex. Average number of life sex partners is something like 6, and those tend to be long-term partners in a relationship, not bar or tinder hook-ups. Casual sex is more common than it was in the 50s, but it's not really that common.
This data is naturally very confounded. I can't find the stats at the moment so I guess you should have lower confidence in what I say next, but promiscuity sex only leads to lower satisfaction among those who believe promiscuity is wrong. So if you think promiscuity is wrong, don't be promiscuous. It's true that married people generally report being happier than unmarried people, but that is also extremely confounded, the evidence that it's a long-term effect is shaky, and the effects are small anyway.
What does it mean for married life with kids to be more meaningful or less empty than the contrary? I'm not religious, so I don't think Jehovah or Allah or anyone else has prescribed that as the "correct path." What do I have to believe in order to believe that there is some kind of real 'meaning' or 'fulfillment' in traditional life that is not found elsewhere? When e-trads talk about the meaning, happiness, fulfillment etc. of getting married and having kids I just have to wonder what they're talking about. I don't live in a cave. I have seen married couples with kids, many of them close up. Some of them are happy, sure. Some of them are hilariously miserable. 50% of marriages end in divorce, and I highly doubt 100% of the other 50% are happy. It seems like most people who get married aren't actually satisfied with the way their life turns out.
I say all of this as someone who does not live a particularly hedonistic life by most standards. I don't drink or smoke weed or use any harder drugs. I like reading books, hanging out with my friends and family, exercising, and arguing with people online, most of which would be unobjectionable to even the most conservative conservative. But I still think I have benefited from the revolution, because if it hadn't been for that, there's a real chance I'd be married with kids on the way by now, and if not now, then almost certainly within the next decade, which is something I don't want in the slightest.
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I'll reply in a separate comment because it's a subject that deserves more scrutiny.
Can you please explain why you keep repeating this ludicrous claim with no basis in reality? Have you ever even seen an incel in your life, either online or offline?
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I swear this is like the 50th time you’ve brought this up on this site since it started, because you’re eager to bring it up whenever the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution are discussed. Ok, I get it, or at least I think I do – you’re a feminist woman after all, and that entire cultural hellscape in question just disgusts you to the core. But let’s look at this objectively.
Based on what accounts are available on the ‘baby groupie’ phenomenon, it appears it was pretty much confined to the Sunset Strip area, and 99% of all the attention it ever got was due to two of these groupies being willing to give interviews about their activities in order to get their 15 minutes of fame. And according to the Wikipedia articles on them, even these accounts are contradictory, which raises the obvious question of how far these girls were actually willing to go sexually, and just how much they lied and embellished. Either way, I’d be very surprised if the number of these baby groupies ever exceeded 100 in the entire US, in other words, it was completely negligible. (‘baby’ is an important qualifier here obviously)
On the other hand, if I want to play sociologist and give a reasonable explanation as to why all this even happened, I’d say this: there were numerous veterans returning from World War Two and the Korean and Vietnam Wars suffering from PTSD, which, combined with the overall decrease in parental supervision in general due to social upheaval, drove many teenagers to run away from dysfunctional and traumatizing households, permanently or intermittently. Also, pop music turned into a huge and commercialized cultural phenomenon, plus rebellious behavior and drug use was socially normalized in the ‘60s. It was also much easier to have a transient lifestyle before the digital age. But again, none of this is directly related to the Sexual Revolution.
I think the teenage groupie phenomenon is overstated for sure, but it's an interesting slice of history.
There was an incredibly brief period of history (basically the 1970s) when premarital sex was destigmatized but upper-middle class children still had freedom from helicopter parents.
I agree, but I doubt these baby groupies came from upper-middle class families.
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I’m so non-feminist I believe that women shouldn’t have the franchise and their college attendance should be capped at some low percentage of the total, and ‘13 year old groupies getting passed around as communal toys’ is disgusting and enraging to me. So throw out the accusation if you’d like.
I agree that one definitely not need be a feminist or a woman in order to reject such forms of degeneracy. However, feminists and non-feminists in my view tend to have, as demonstrated by your comment here as well, rather different ideas as to what the degradation, exploitation and ruin of women entail as a phenomenon in a sexually permissive society. It occurred to me that 2rafa's arguments about this issue are distinctly feminist in character.
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Incredibly well said, AAQC'ed. This line of thinking is something I've believed for a long time without being able to put into words exactly. As much as I love @BurdensomeCount and his excellent trolling, he is definitely the exact type of person our modern, atomistic society is set up to serve.
And while individual liberty is overall a good compared to the previous system of tyrannical monarchies, I absolutely agree we've taken it too far. Perhaps if we could find a situation where individual liberty was allowed but sort of looked down upon or difficult to achieve, that would be far better. That way only those extremely motivated to pursue liberty will achieve it, while the majority will be "stuck" with traditional modes of life that likely fit them better, and help balance out their negative inclinations.
I aim to please!
My tax slips disagree...
Ahh yes well I forgot you were in the UK - they seem to have issues with the whole liberty thing...
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