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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.
IIRC this phenomenon is mostly driven by, as Dave chappelle puts it ‘I don’t have a girlfriend, but there’s a lady who’d be very upset to hear me say that’(or something to that effect), not ‘Chad hoarding’.
The norms between the two sexual revolutions are not a stable equilibrium, and no one wants to actually go back to them anyways.
And that’s the rub- there were two sexual revolutions, one in the roaring twenties and driven by courtship moving outside of the woman’s family settings, and one in the sixties and driven more by feminism and the decline of censorship. The second sexual Revolution could only have occurred in an environment where the first had happened already, and would have been driven by something if it wasn’t for feminism and declining censorship.
You can, if you want to badly enough, go back to pre-first sexual Revolution norms. It doesn’t work great for the conservative Christians who insist on calling it courting instead of dating, but probably a lot of that is because it needs to be updated to modern social technology(after all, it works a lot better for Orthodox Jews). But most people don’t want to do that, so we’re stuck where we are.
Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.
I think most of the disparity between young men and women is driven by women dating older men, for what it's worth. In a highly simplified model, if women all date two years older, and you've got an age cohort that's twelve years wide, you immediately get a 17% gap, as the men in the bottom two years have no eligible partners. That does assume that men can't date women younger than 18, but it does a good job of explaining why the large gap in the youngest cohort pretty much disappears in the next youngest cohort.
I think a lot of these guys are actually being monogamous, they’re just not offering the kind of commitment we associate with it.
Would it be possible for you to elaborate? Most of the guys I know who have been in such situations are only monogamous in so far as "having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time" could be stretched to only mean "someone who does not partake in group sex."
I think there are a lot of guys who women think are in a relationship, but the guys aren't having sex with anybody else because nobody is directly approaching them, and the woman is good enough. Ironically, this is far more likely than what many online MRA/incel/PUA types are worried about, which is a chad swooping in and stealing your girlfriend via Instagram DM's or whatever.
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