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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 was writing a more detailed response and I lost my comment so I'm going to summarize my main points without diving too much into detail. Lesson learned I guess to draft longer posts outside of the website...
I did talk about a possible explanation for the 'paradox of declining female happiness' but to summarize my point was that "feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men." I don't think its any surprise that having to work a career is not fulfilling for many women. There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.
Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.
And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source (on page 5 of the document):
There is some additional data to consider regarding the impact fatherless homes have. Source is a right-biased group but they have kindly provided sources for their stats.
There is additional research suggesting young boys fare significantly better raised with single fathers compared to single mothers. According to Dr. Warren Farrel in his book "Father and Child Reunion," "even when the father and mother had equal income, the children who were with their father full time - boys and girls - did better than those with their moms full time... a study from the Journal of Social Issues found that boys who lived with their fathers after divorce were friendlier, had a higher degree of self-esteem, were more mature, and more independent. Boys who lived only with their moms grew up to be more demanding and tended to develop coercive relationships with their mothers. At least for young boys, they do need a father (or male) figure in their lives. Obviously having both parents is even better.
The blog post here is actually quite thorough and worthy of a read. It's probably the best source you've found as a counterpoint to the blackpill/doompill narrative. I will point out the data being used by the author has also been addressed by professor Nicholas Wolfinger and he says "we shouldn’t declare the sex recession over based on just a single year of data—especially a single year that relied on new survey methods—and a fairly small sub-sample of 229 respondents." Still an interesting point of discussion to consider and brings some attention to some more recent statistics/trends that I previously was not aware of.
I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to your post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.
I agree, I don't think it's ever possible to turn back. But I also think it's important to acknowledge the issue. I'm not sure what the fix could be, but it does seem like many people push back against the blackpill/doomerpill narrative and then deny it outright. Perhaps and likely they are exaggerating their claims but there is also an element of truth to their narrative. You can't even attempt to solve a problem if its existence gets denied.
Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Fixed. It's a graph.
The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.
I can concede that child support is a drawback of modern society for men (though it seems child support is awarded to only about 60% of custodial mothers, which while a majority, is actually lower than I expected). Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.
People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.
I'll check later to see if if I can find any graphs/stats but if I recall correctly it's mostly older middle-aged single women who are committing suicide the most among females in the United States. It's usually at that stage in life where if a woman has been unable to secure a partner and a family all she has to show for it is a career which as I explained in my post is not really fulfilling for many women, at least to the degree that it may be fulfilling for men.
Thanks!
It's been difficult to find similar studies of impact of single parent households in the European countries, most are based on US data, but this study has some statistics on European countries. An important caveat the study points out: "because single parents in the United States differ from their European counterparts on a variety of social and economic characteristics (Gornick and Jäntti, 2011), it is difficult to generalize from Europe to the American context." When possible, they did acknowledge/try to account "for a variety of demographic and economic variables" so, on a statistic on childhood accidents from single mother to non-single mother homes they did find that there was no statistical significance once they accounted for other factors. I tried to put below some examples below where they did not call this out:
Consistent with these observations, studies have shown that youth from single-parent households have an elevated risk of being homicide victims in Sweden (Weitoft et al., 2003) and the United States (Winpisinger et al., 1991).
Studies have shown that children living with single parents are especially likely to think about or attempt suicide in New Zealand (Donald et al., 2006; Fergusson et al., 2000) and the Netherlands (Kienhorst et al., 1990). A large-scale longitudinal study in Sweden found that youth (boys as well as girls) living with single parents were more likely to commit suicide than were youth living with two parents (Weitoft et al., 2003). Similarly, a study from Denmark found a link between parental divorce and completed suicide among children and youth age 10—21 (Agerbo et al., 2002). Whether a similar link between single-parent households and youth suicide exists in the United States is unknown.
I'd like to point out while the paper does say "In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school." they used a p-value of 0.001 which is extremely robust. If their criteria was a p-value of 0.05 as is standard in academic literature it's possible the other dimensions for widowed mothers would also be considered significantly different based on the criteria as defined in the study. Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.
In some metrics yes, in others worse, It's quite hard to pinpoint anything in regards to an overall evaluation but I think most people would be in agreement that modern life is better for any demographic solely due to technological advancements. Is it possible to have a society with a culture from the past with newer technology? Hard to say, considering social media and the internet have such as huge influence on modern culture.
Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."
Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.
That's probably correct because like most things in life, reality is complex and there are likely many factors that go into play. I do think the sexual revolution did play a role but if I had to make a guess I would probably put its impact at explaining maybe at most 10-25% of the total causes that have an impact on the drop of happiness of women in the United States.
Yes, it would be good to have more research on this, but I doubt there would be many studies that try to explicitly study this. Usually, anything that can produce results that can be used as a counterpoint against a leftist viewpoint of the world doesn't get produced often out of academia, because it's usually the humanities/social studies/psychology departments producing research/studies on these kinds of topics, and those departments are heavily biased towards democrats/marxists/socialists. It could also be the actually skilled people in academia are putting their efforts into researching other topics.
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