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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.
The overall highly online right's position on these issues is somewhat incoherent. I understand of course that the highly online right is made up of many people, so a degree of incoherence is inevitable. It is hard enough for even one person's political opinions to be coherent. Yet I think it might be interesting to examine some of the contradictions anyway.
First
The highly online right-wingers maintain that women were happier before the sexual revolution and that this counts as a mark against the sexual revolution. Yet they would not judge many other social phenomena mainly based on whether those had increased happiness. These are the same kind of people who like to glorify war, struggle, endurance in the face of opposition, maturity, a cool-headed and objective look at reality, providing for the tribe, and other such stereotypically "adult man" things.
Now, when a boy grows up and stops believing in Santa Claus, and then has to go make his own living, the boy might become less happy as a result. But none of these highly online right-wingers would argue that becoming a man is a bad thing because men are less happy than boys. They understand that becoming an adult man should be judged by other things in addition to just whether it makes a person happy. Yet they are not willing to look at the sexual revolution in the same light.
Ok, so maybe (if the phenomenon of decreased happiness is even real, which as To_Mandalay points out it might not be) women are less happy after the sexual revolution. Can't this just be explained by the fact that after the sexual revolution, women have more responsibilities, are much more present in the workplace, and have to navigate a more complex sexual landscape than before? But if a boy becoming less happy when he turns into a man is not necessarily entirely a bad thing, then why would a woman becoming less happy when she goes into the workplace be entirely a bad thing that needs to be reversed? For the boy and the trad woman alike, the increased responsibilities and stresses are one price of the greatly increased power and freedom that they come into once they become men and modern women, respectively.
Second
The highly online right-wingers tend to glorify evolution and eugenics. They delight in poring over genetic anthropology theories, presenting HBD arguments, and using genetics to explain why some groups of people are more successful than others. In light of this, the idea that there is something bad about 20% of men sleeping with 80% of the women seems a bit contradictory. Isn't that just evolution in action?
"Ah", some might argue, "but it is not eugenic or good for society for women to sleep with bad boy rappers and violent criminals. That is not the kind of eugenics I favor!". Sure, I understand that point of view. But then you are not saying that there is anything eugenically bad in principle about 80% of men going relatively sexless, you just disagree about which kind of 20% men the women should be picking.
In any case, the idea that there is something bad about most men going mostly sexless sits in unhappy contradiction with the highly online right-winger's typical tendency to glorify evolution, power, and success. As usual, the highly online right is split between a craving for socialism (sexual in this case, economic in other cases) on the one hand and a glorification of power, strength, and individual success on the other.
Even moreso, isn't it based on exactly nothing?
I recently saw a tweet referring to some study (I think?) suggesting that it's more like that 20 % most sexually active men have a lot of sex with 20 % most sexually active women, about 20 % of men and 20 % of women have basically no sex at all, and the rest tend to just pair up to monogamous relationships. Bit too tired to find it at the moment, though, so I'm not basing this on very much, either. However, I'm not sure I've seen anything suggesting that the supposed 20/80 ratio is anywhere close to reflecting reality, even among the younger age classes.
I think it's just people generalizing their localized experiences and you're probably right that there are no research/studies/analyses that show that literally 20% of all men are sleeping with 80% of women.
That 20/80 ratio or the sentiment around is probably more grounded in reality if you localize to something like online dating (which is only has a small subset of the population) or perhaps specific dating scenes.
For example, if you look at Tinder, "it was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.". Of course, Tinder is not representative of men and women in general, or even dating apps in general but it is one of the most popular ones out there. There is also a similar analysis on Hinge which found that "the bottom 50% of men combined, which represents 1/3 of the total Hinge users, only receive 1% of the total likes." I also remember reading similar discrepancies in data from OK Cupid but I can't find the exact article right now. So at least in the world of online dating, there are big winners and losers amongst men.
There are some studies on the human genome that suggest that throughout human history, more women reproduced than men. I've heard some ratios around before like 80% of women and 40% of men, or twice as many women as men, but I skimmed through the study and I couldn't find the actual author make those specific number claims, only that "these results are most consistent with a higher female effective population size." So some evidence more women reproduced than men, but in terms of the ratio it's hard to say. There's this other study saying 8000 years ago 17 women reproduced to every 1 man, but that's 8000 years ago when civilization did not even begin to develop.
If you look at more modern data, though, roughly 80% of both men and women reproduce. Monogamy has become the norm and as a result, it's not surprising roughly equal numbers of men and women are reproducing. It is only data up to 2010 though and data strictly on reproduction and not on dating/sex, so maybe the tides are changing. I feel like the idea of polygamy/cuckoldry have entered the mainstream consciousness more in recent years, and there is also the idea of women setting for men they didn't want when they were younger as they become older and have fewer options.
Also, something to consider, it's likely that the people you'd want to date/marry are already out of the dating market (because they can easily find a partner). In other words, the people you come across often who are single/available are likely heavily skewed towards the type of people that are not desired in a relationship. So if you're actively dating and trying to find someone, on average the people you meet are worse than the average person because all the suitable partners are not part of the potential partner population anymore. This can lead to an incorrect conclusion about the population as a whole.
This is the inescapable factor about the dating market that really blackpills me.
The worse-than-average partners are the ones you have a higher-than-average chance of encountering on a randomly selected date. The more you try to filter these people out, the more incentive they have to bypass your filters. And thus the more they color your perception of what the potential options out there are 'really' like.
And I've seen it play out myself. Almost all my close friends have been married (seemingly happily) around 10 years now, and they're all great people and great partners... and they all got married (and dropped from the dating pool) during or shortly after college, which means the people who are left as I've gotten older are the ones who DIDN'T get married or couldn't maintain it.
Which is to say, people less suited to relationships in general.
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