The Sexual Devolution

Bari Weiss, impresario of an estimable site called The Free Press, sponsored a public debate in downtown Los Angeles last week. The topic: has the sexual revolution failed? 

The short answer is: yes it has. It has failed women, by causing them to cheapen their sexuality. But it has also failed men, for discarding their sense of moral responsibility for the consequences of their coital episodes.

The participants were Claire Boucher and Sarah Haider, arguing that it succeeded, and Louise Perry and Anna Khachiyan, who argued that it had failed.

Now, to clarify the issues, one Andrea Mew, from the Independent Women’s Forum, has proposed that the sexual revolution has failed women, because it succeeded. For my part I was impressed by Mew’s analysis. 

Otherwise, I emphasize a point that seems largely to have been overlooked. Given the chance to talk about sex, few people emphasized the other side of the equation: the revolution. 

Going back as far as Friedrich Engels, Marxists have wanted to enlist women as members of the vanguard of the revolution. And they have wanted women to damage their family relationships, the better to destroy capitalism and patriarchy.

The sexual revolution was not about producing more exquisite pleasures for women, or even for men. It has been one front in a larger battle, to overthrow the current socio-economic order, to produce social incoherence and to install a new Communist horror.

So, if we ask whether the sexual revolution succeeded, we also need to ask whether it has undermined the social order and set us all on the road to socialism?

If you think that this was all about women or all about better orgasms, you risk missing the point. It was about advancing a political cause, on the backs of women. 

So, Mew articulates the false promise behind the sexual revolution. It was designed to entice women into sacrificing themselves for a cause. It offered access to more consequence-free sexuality, the better to make women more like men.

In turn, this would allow women to delay marriage and family, because they could have all the orgasms they wanted without being tied down to a man and children.

The sexual revolution promised to free women from oppressive stereotypes that locked us out of many educational and career opportunities and forced us to act as sexual gatekeepers in a world where chastity, marriage, and motherhood were expectations rather than choices.

In truth and in reality, in the sixteenth century, marriage became more of a choice than an expectation. The overthrow of arranged marriage, the most common form of marital exchange, was designed to produce a more coherent and cohesive social order. When women and men could choose their spouses, women would be less likely to cheat and men would be less likely to sire bastards outside of marriage.

The sexual revolution was more devolution than revolution. It separated the sex act from the process of reproduction. That means, it made it easier for women to retreat from the consequences of coitus, in roughly the same way that men did.

The obvious point, namely, that society has often considered that men bear a responsibility for the children they sire, gets lost in the feminist haze. Through that haze, male sexual experience is the gold standard, largely because men can more easily disavow the consequences of their sex acts. 

And yet, if all sexuality is reduced to a quest for enjoyment, then sex  has devolved into its least common denominator.

Mew explains it well:

This movement for sexual empowerment has been exceedingly effective. Think back to its original goal. Feminists yearned to sever the act of sex from the process of reproduction. Feminists sought to redefine marriage from its institutional model predicated on obligation to one’s family to a romantic model placing emotion on a high pedestal.

Of course, connecting marriage with romance has a long and distinguished history. It began with the medieval practice of ritualized adultery, where married women took adolescent lovers. It became part of the marital equation when Martin Luther and his followers were excommunicated in the early sixteenth century. 

As I have noted in the past, when considerations of property, power and prestige were removed from the marital equation, the only thing that was left was-- marrying for love. This was certainly not a feminist invention.

Moreover, feminism has never really been in the business of promoting marriage. It placed career ahead of family and marriage and love. Perish the thought, but it has promoted promiscuous sex, that is, hook-ups, because the more a woman engages in these the less she will feel any need to marry young. Marrying young is the bane of feminism.

In another sense, feminism has been telling women, after Engels, that once they are financially independent, they will be able to marry for true love. 

Mew explains the new ethos and rejects it:

We’ve dissolved the sanctity of holy matrimony for a narcissistic quest for radical self-love. Relationships between men and women that lack commitment or even a baseline understanding of serving one another with joy are unfulfilling. They render us addicted to a drug-like sense of validation, of which we’re given regular hits within the internet’s self-obsessed attention economy.

The feminist sexual revolution has wanted to make women more like men. This, Mew suggests, has deprived women of their sexuality:

We’ve effectively desexed women, pulling us further and further away from centuries of evolution and human nature in order to level the biological playing field.

This has been called women’s empowerment. Men had gone along with the new revolution because it provided them easier access to cost-free sex. And yet, it came with a price tag-- women no longer really needed men, to protect or provide for them. Deprived of their social roles, men felt lost, if not useless.

Thus, by Mew’s analysis, the sexual revolution did not merely free women from their duties to family. It deprived men of the duty to protect and provide for women within a family context.

Men are no longer required to cultivate masculine virtues. Commitment, self-control, and a duty to provide and protect are effectively discouraged by the proliferation of casual sex. In essence, we’re rewarding men with intimate access to our bodies and asking for nothing in return. If we no longer gatekeep our sexuality, and contraceptives or abortions reduce the risk involved with promiscuous behavior, is it any wonder why many modern men turn toward a life of hedonistic pleasure, finding it in porn, pop culture, or weed?

Here Mew makes an interesting point. The sexual revolution has caused sex to devolve into its most vulgar aspect. And this led to the feminization of Western world. 

This has caused men to weaken themselves, because that is the only way they can make women feel strong and empowered. Detaching sexuality from responsible parenting, as in the hook-up culture, has not served men well. It has been something of a devil’s bargain, a movement toward decadence, and an exaltation of overly feminized men.

Again, men, especially white men, do not have an incentive to work harder to compete, because they are subjected to discrimination. They have been relieved of parental and especially paternal responsibilities. In return, they have been granted as much sex as they want, whenever and with whomever. Call it a devil's bargain....

The sexual revolution led to an over-feminization of the Western world. If speech offends us, we lean on the feminine trait of agreeableness and silence it. To raise up the “weaker” sex, we rely on dogmatic diversity and inclusion agendas in lieu of merit. To repress the “oppressor” sex, men must self-flagellate and become their weakest selves.

Mew does not believe that we should return to tradition, because that would require more women to spend more time at home and less time in the executive suite. 

Yet, there are not a dozen different formulas out there. We have discovered that the sexual revolution has produced social dislocations and broken homes. It has undermined social cohesion and left most people adrift and forlorn.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so it is said, but human beings cannot long function in a society that is broken and disorganized, where people do not know where they belong, what they owe to whom, where their responsibilities lie. Anomie, anyone?

The result has been long lines of college students signing up for counseling. Social dislocations, even when they are papered over with hookups, produce emotional distress.

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