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Notes -
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.
My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.
There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.
Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that
This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.
IIRC this is as much about switching to smaller bullets(the ones progressives ostentatiously hate are actually less lethal than what they replaced, old timey criminals used sawn off shotguns, magnum revolvers and .45s. Today they use 9 mm handguns and ar-15s, which shoot smaller less lethal bullets) as it is improving emergency room medicine.
The archetypal "Saturday Night Special" was a shittyass .32 (or even .25!) revolver for a hundred years -- magnum revolvers were expensive and thus a good choice for Dirty Harry but not for somebody who probably needs to throw the thing in the river every so often.
True, but being limited to card-table guns (in a 400-dollar budget) impose 3 important limitations on the average gangoon:
The fact that it's always the Tec-9 specifically being targetted by "assault weapon" legislation isn't entirely out to lunch, because it was the first gun ever to hit the market that solved all of those issues at once for the average criminal- 200 dollars, 32 rounds, concealable enough, was completely impractical unless it was held properly, and in a caliber of sufficient power to actually take advantage of modern hollow-point projectiles (note also that the vast majority of legislation targeting this pistol came a few years before one of the most famous crimes would be committed with them, though that gun didn't really enable that crime in the same sense it did the average late-80s criminal).
Technically speaking, since the average affordable crime gun is currently either a shitty Taurus or Kel-Tec semi-auto (if you actually care about concealment) or a Hi-Point (if you don't; this is the famous "Glock 40") these restrictions did actually set the average affordable crime gun back quite a ways. The modern service handguns are generally more effective than these, but they're also twice the price on the legal market; likely more on the black market. And when you don't have 1000 dollars to your name to afford one it's essentially unattainable.
(The counterargument is that "average affordable crime gun" is also necessarily "the best self-defense option available for the poor", but reducing firepower for both criminal and poor alike is... politely, something about which bipartisan consensus can generally be achieved. More charitably, if criminals have less then the poor, who are overwhelmingly the target of criminal activity in the first place, "need" less to be on equal footing.)
The point being that swapping some five shot Webley knockoff for a Hi-Point or a Tec-9 as a common crime weapon is unlikely to have been responsible for a decrease in shooting deaths -- I think that we agree?
My point is that the two are not quite the same class of weapon- I think the criminal stock of the latter ramping up may have added a confounding increase at the time it was prevalent, so a decrease after that (when the common weapons for criminals downgraded to Hi-Points instead- if you consider that a downgrade I guess, heh) might not be as completely due to modern medicine.
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