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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.
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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