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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 don't care about individual level self-reported happiness. You agree with this later in your post. I care about generative social functioning in a free society.
(First of many "don't put words in a conservative's mouth" notes). No, it's not that "women belong in the kitchen." It's that life is about tradeoffs and with ability comes responsibility. Women are more than free to work the demanding careers they chose. If they find themselves in male dominated fields, they have to compete. They cannot ask for a separate set of rules. As a society, we shouldn't trade new options for old ones; being a stay at home Mom should be viewed as well as it was before, not as a traitors action to the Boss Babe lifestyle.
Apples and oranges. Europe, until the last decade, was still interconnected pockets of monocultures. The U.S. was not. Which leads me to....
Yes, because in a monoculture with massive social safety nets, it's a lot easier to comfortably raise a child as a single parent. Before the knee-jerk "well maybe american social safety nets should get larger!" Please look at real European growth rates. Socially, look at the social-mobility history of Europe vis-a-vis U.S. since end WW2. Social dysfunction is, indeed, rare when social authoritarianism and stagnancy are the rule of the day.
APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.
I would argue that this is a point in favor of pre-SR norms. The entire concept of permanent monogamy in marriage is that it moves past the natural order of one male impregnating a whole bunch of females. It prevents the Hobbesian state of the sexual marketplace from occurring. This stabilizes society. It is impossible (as your own statistic clearly state) to deny that the number of sexless and single men has gone up since approx 1980. I see this as a slow regression back to the wild and brutal state of the sexual marketplace.
It has, was, and always will be real. The whole point is to minimize it.
Difference alimony being paid and judgement rendered. "Actually, too many dudes are too poor to pay anything. They're getting off scott free!" Isn't the counterpoint you want to lead with.
I appreciate you stating your caution upfront. Single study, old etc.
Sure do.
("don't put words in my mouth" volume 2) Sure don't. Small-c conservatives don't care about sexual orientation at all. Sexual behavior is different, and that's independent from orientation.
Yup.
The SR itself, no. The 40+ years of obivous societal decay ... I'd say that's more .... convincing.
Agree! Which is why I'm not actually a reactionary (despite their often above average memes). Anyone who recommends a direct, linear, return back to the actions, rituals, even dress of traditional pre-SR society is looking to break-off to start their own communitarian organization. The Amish have been owning the game on that from the jump (play on, players). What conservatives / tradtionalists today are trying to do is (1) Get people to admit that the SR was on-net bad and (2) Devise ways of using traditional / conservative values to devise ways of change for a more stable society. (In the American context, this has to respect individual liberties etc. which is why I'm nowhere near the pseudo-fascist American torysits etc.)
Yep. It isn't possible to "retvrn."
Conservatives / traditionalists have not provided an adequate response to technology. I will grant that. It is interesting, however, that most of the breathless "social media is the devil, tech companies are the new overlords, AGI needs to be hyperregulated right NOW!" comments find their origin the the modern liberal/progressive left.
That’s fine. But these statistics are often marshaled to make a conservative point. That’s not to say you, individually, have done that.
It is an article faith among some that modern society shames or devalues motherhood, but is that actually true beyond the extent to which women’s entry into the workforce inherently devalues motherhood? I’m not sure the mass-shaming of SAHM is actually real. If traditional motherhood is viewed as inferior to being a career woman or whatever, I think that’s simply a consequence of the fact that women’s work and the woman’s ‘sphere’ in general has pretty much always been considered inferior to that of men. The ‘women aren’t less-than men, they just have different roles’ line that is common among modern conservatives is really itself a historically recent anti-feminist rear-guard action. For centuries most thinkers had little compunction about saying simply that, yes, women are just inferior to men. It’s why historically, women who distinguished themselves in primarily male fields such as science or statecraft were often lauded (often specifically by being compared to men) while overtly feminine men received very much the opposite reaction.
So the real cause of self-reported unhappiness and suicide rates is racial diversity? That would be a different argument, since you can have social/sexual libertinism without racial diversity and vice versa.
Do you think it’s the case that the children of single mothers do poorly without a father but would do fine with one, while the children of widows do fine either way? That’s certainly possible, but I can’t really think of a way to test it.
It’s debatable this is really the “natural order.” Polygamous societies are actually not especially common, even among hunter-gatherer tribes. And where they exist, they’re generally the result of male sexual preferences being enforced upon women rather than vice versa. Very few women want to be in a harem.
Maybe? Slightly? It’s certainly not clear there’s some inexorable trend towards mass inceldom.
It empirically isn’t.
The number is for alimony awarded.
If someone is secretly homosexual but never acts on it and stays in the closet his whole life then he might as well not be homosexual. When I talk about “people being gay” I mean people being gay in a way that is apparent to you and society at large.
Can you be more specific?
Plainly I don’t think it’s true.
What would this look like, concretely?
Not the person you replied to, but really the only people I see framing it this way are afraid of conceding to their political opponents that they've been on point on a fairly pressing matter for quite a long time now.
Conservatives (and yes, I could myself among that camp) are simply 'factually correct' about the worries surrounding the SR. Ideology need not come before statistics or pragmatism on this point, it just finds itself more at home under the conservative umbrella because they're often the only side that's even willing to acknowledge it's a problem in the first place.
Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point. What's your empirical evidence to the contrary? Because it 'certainly' isn't obvious to me...
Well if the Soviet Union was any indication, I don't think that turned out very well. Their SR was even more libertine than the American one was.
In Iran you can get executed for adultery, so at least there's a start.
Studies that try and infer historical reproduction rates from facts about the Y chromosome have an obvious flaw: that chromosome can only be here today as the result of an unbroken chain of male reproducers. Contrast this with females who pass an X chromosome on no matter the circumstance. There is naturally going to be less genetic variation among Y chromosomes than X chromosomes because any variations from men who had only female children are not going to be present to examine, even though these males had children! So we're comparing genetic variation among the men who had an unbroken series of male children back into history with the genetic variation of women who had any children at all. Obviously there is more diversity in the latter than the former.
Right. I'm aware of over-relying too much on such aged and inferred models. But what other data is there to trust about that timeline? It's better than trusting mine or anyone else's independent and unqualified speculation.
If there's a lack of reliable data to form an estimate, then the rational response is agnosticism, not using unreliable data.
In absolute terms, sure. In a shade of gray and probabilistic sense, no. Just because some data is unreliable doesn't mean it's completely unreliable. If you can't make 'any' use of it, fine.
In this case, I think the worry is that you should expect apparent divergence between the data for the two populations (men and women) to be different because of a selection effect, so there's no reason to infer that the divergence is actually a property of the populations (rather than your samples). It's like estimating the number of bats in two forests, but measuring one forest at night and the other in the day.
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I believe this was intentional, since it’s a better way to tease out the causal/marginal effect of divorce than looking at average outcomes.
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