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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.
All good things should be going up by default, as technology advances and more wealth is created. There's supposed to be more and better food, art, housing, more leisure time and so on. If life expectancy is plateauing (declining in the US presumably due to COVID), if people are getting fatter and more depressed, if murder rates are rising... that's a bad sign.
If good things are actually going down despite material improvements, then we're faced with a pretty confronting set of explanations:
Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining. If that's not a disaster, what is? IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility. Hundreds of millions never born and a declining civilization is bad enough to condemn the Sexual Revolution, putting everything else to one side.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-gender-equality-lower-fertility
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.
This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.
As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.
It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.
Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.
idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.
At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.
I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.
IIRC this is driven by a smaller percentage of the population having more of them, so it should be more than balanced out by a declining share of the population owning guns.
But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.
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