The Sexual Revolution Has Failed

William Voegeli has written a seminal account of what happens when you politicize sex. In part it concerns the sexual revolution that arrived in America during the Vietnam War. In larger part, it concerns the predations of one Bill Clinton, and the way that his enablers, led by his wife, created an environment where it became commonplace for men to harass and exploit women for sex.

For my part I would add that we should not overlook the influence of one John F. Kennedy, liberal icon and serial sexual predator. After all, Bill Clinton was nothing but a poor man's John Kennedy.

Mixing sex and politics was not a good thing. If your moral compass about sex involves whether or not you want to save or to undermine a presidency, you have no moral compass. Pretending that men and women were the same, that women wanted sex as much as men did, contributed to the massive confusion that surrounds the issue. If women no longer want to marry young, they will be induced to fill their college years and young adulthood with a series of meaningless sexual encounter... ones that will protect them from the dread marriage and family.

As we speak, some part of the media has taken its eyes off of what matters in the world in order to drool over an accusation that Donald Trump had a consensual one-night-stand more than a decade ago with a porn star. In the past such women were described as being of ill-repute. Now they are martyrs for the anti-Trump cause. The women (and men) who fought like rabid dogs to protect Bill Clinton from accusations of rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse are now wondering whether Donald Trump used protection.

It ought to be clear that those who defend women selectively do not care a whit for the women or their honor or their dignity. If they cared about women’s dignity they would not be trotting out harassment victims and porn start to make debating points against politicians they do not like. And they would not be encouraging women to expose themselves to the world… attitude that does not elicit respect for women’s minds and professional achievements.

Under the aegis of those who were conducting the sexual revolution, sex became weaponized and politicized. If accusations of sexual impropriety threatened a politician who supported feminism, it needed to be defended. If they threatened a politician who rejected feminism, it needed to be denounced.

Now, with the #MeToo movement, the revolution has set about eating its own children. It has come down hard on Bill Clinton’s children. The media moguls, Hollywood tycoons, commentators, reporters, talk show hosts and television stars have been taken out and sacrificed to the gods of political correctness. It’s supposedly a way to empower women. It’s a way for women to take back something they had been induced to give away for free. So, we understand the impulse. But, we also know that talking about sex all the time and talking about female sexuality all the time... while destroying men’s lives… is not going to achieve the goal. It will make women a threat in the workplace. And it will incite men to punish women for what they have done to men.

Voegeli sums it up well and clearly:

The sexual revolution has followed its logical course to a place that growing numbers of people find sad and ugly. That revolution’s objective was a new moral regime, neither censorious nor hypocritical, in which consensual sex outside marriage was every bit as licit as sex within it. Before the sexual revolution, a man wasn’t supposed to have sex with a woman unless she’d taken his last name. Fifty years after the revolution, it’s increasingly common for a man to have sex with a woman without ever learning her last name. The sexual revolution has yielded the “hook-up” culture or, as Vanity Fair described it, the “dating apocalypse.” Not only are sexual “partners” not required to commit to each other, the hook-up demands that the transitory, transactional partnership must disavow any possibility or hope of commitment. As a result, one writer lamented, “It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option.”

Criminalizing sexual behavior is not going to help the cause. Clearly, Voegeli is right to say that the sexual revolution has failed. The personal is not political. And unless we depoliticize the personal and the sexual, we are not going to solve the problem.