Dear Friends,
There are a number of new people at the moment. Welcome! I’m sharing a fraught, meander-y post on the sexual revolution and feminism. FYI: posts here tend to be more along the lines of thinking-out-loud than traditional polemical essays. At the partner site
, my friend has a lyrical, far-less-grim-than-it-sounds post on ‘Morbid Reflection.’Best,
Sam
YEAH, YEAH, THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
There’s a single question burning on everybody’s lips; on the tip of everybody’s tongue. Which is of course whether or not the sexual revolution failed.
This is one of these meta-media topics that’s very difficult to walk back to the actual world. My Substack feed at the moment is lighting up with people who are outraged by the response to the Free Press/FIRE-moderated debate on the sexual revolution in L.A. “When I’m being told that an event that happened before my very eyes — I was at the debate on Wednesday, sitting close to the front — was fundamentally the opposite of what I witnessed, I get enraged,” writes
. “Being lied to is maddening. Being lied to under the guise of credentialed analysis is unforgivable.”Daum is responding to a pair of snarky articles in the LA Times and New York Magazine on the debate. Kerry Howley, just luxuriating in her own snark, writes for New York Magazine:
The question ‘Has the Sexual Revolution Failed’ contains within itself a number of other questions (failed at what? Failed whom? Why are we talking about this?), precisely none of which were answered Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where 1,600 plaid-skirted e-girls and be-khakied normies and the aspiring canceled paid as much as $165 a seat to hear a British ideologue, a deft Dimes Square shape-shifter, an ex-Muslim podcaster, and Techno Mechanicus’ mother debate the resolution.
And the debate was held as the culmination of a series of articles that The Free Press in particular has been pushing — by Louise Perry, Bridget Phatasy, etc — contending that narratives of sex positivity fly in the face of biological reality. “At the time, I would have told you I was ‘liberated’ even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain — I’m empowered,” writes Phetasy, a former sex columnist for Playboy.
Everything here gets kind of meta and kind of snarky. There’s a debate about The Free Press. “Real journalism? How about some truth in advertising: The debate’s title should have been ‘Agitating for Followers: the Art of Calling Attention to Oneself While Saying Absolutely Nothing,’” writes Lorraine Ali in The Los Angeles Times, referring to the debate’s controversial organizer Bari Weiss, and Daum is absolutely right to say that this is absurd. Live panel discussions can often meander and go sideways. Some driftiness wouldn’t serve as an indictment of The Free Press. “Weiss and the others onstage might be more interesting and less malevolent than the Tumblr-trained, establishment-approved cultural arbiters want to admit,” Daum writes.
Which is a great way to put it. There’s a center-right space in the discourse that’s collapsed (blame Dubya). Bari Weiss is doing a great deal to rejuvenate it, and it’s just myopic of liberal critics to fault her for doing so. As Daum writes — and is, I’m sure, not exaggerating — “I have seen entire dinner parties fall apart at the mention of [Bari Weiss’] name.”
But none of that is the central issue. It’s a real question whether the sexual revolution has failed; and, as a text poll from before the debate attests, of course it has. Across America, in the period of the sexual revolution, divorce rates have skyrocketed; families are broken; MeToo has provided ample evidence that all sorts of abusive behavior gets condoned under the banner of sexual license; women (if you trust social science) have become significantly unhappier since the 1970s; men are clearly going through a serious existential crisis; and Tinder (which has has monopolized the dating market) might as well be an evolutionary biologist’s lab practical. And probably as a result of all of that we’re, as Kate Julian writes in The Atlantic, in the midst of a severe “sex recession,” in which more and more young people seem simply to seize up at the idea of sex, retreat into their phones, opt out of sexuality altogether.
At the moment I’m in a different country. I had the experience this week of witnessing a very traditional wedding, and it really hit me how drastically sexuality has receded from the center of our social system. The wedding was really fun. There were tons of people there and there was the very clear sense that it was sort of the pivotal event of everybody’s life. It became very hard not to think about everything that was different in Western relationships. We had little notion of two families coming together — of a vested social support in the relationship. Little sense that the extended family would be critical in raising children. (In the case of the traditional wedding I was witnessing, the bride and groom were ridiculously young, but in a sense that wouldn’t matter — it was understood that childrearing was a communal activity and would be conducted largely by grandparents, by the rows of in-laws lining up to make speeches to each other.) And gone too was the sense that love and marriage were at the center of everything. In the traditional country, the first question anybody asks me is the number of children I have. Nobody really cares about the country’s unenviable GDP, about its raft of political problems. They feel bad for the West — for its declining birth rate, for its loss of social cohesion.
The feeling I had at the traditional wedding was that it was like we in the West were playing gin rummy or something, decided to fold up all the hands we had and start again from scratch. I had a conversation the next day and was discussing the laborious work of the poly community in building up ‘ethical non-monogamy’ and everybody I was talking to was amused at how much it sounded like a rudimentary form of the rather baroque rules for polygamy that were entrenched in the more traditional society.
So what have we gained in return? Well, maybe a certain emotional honesty. When I read work from the bad old days, say from the 1950s, what strikes me is not that people weren’t getting laid — if you read people like Henry Miller, Boris Vian, or for that matter Alfred Kinsey, it seems like the society had a perfectly robust sex life but that it was cloaked in shades of hypocrisy: people pretended to be family men but cheated; or there were advanced arts of looking the other way (not least in gay life, ‘marriages of convenience,’ etc). That same pattern holds even for famously repressive societies like Victorian England — My Secret History gives some idea of what was really going on — and that’s been my experience as well in ostensibly conservative cultures.
The sexual revolution ushered in a period of an almost childish, idealistic interest in wondering if it was possible to fulfill one’s sexual desires without harming anybody else. I would think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Diva, Tom Jones, even James Bond, etc, as vast experiments on the principle of promiscuity. Is it possible to work out a complicated sexual code like Tomáš’ and still be a person with integrity? Is it possible to, like Tom Jones, believe that “one woman was always better than none” and nevertheless have a perfect, untrammeled love for Sophie Western? It’s a complicated set of questions, and the sort of x-ray answer to it is, I believe, to be found in the relationship deep history (not to mention psychic scars) of just about everybody born between, say, 1945 and 2000.
The answer, I think, is that jealousy turned out to be an intractable obstacle. The really utopian endeavors of the polyam community notwithstanding, there was just no real route around jealousy or possessiveness. Certain biological exigencies got in the way of the most elevated (and also most self-serving) talk of the ’68-influenced libertines — and Tomáš ended up with Teresa. “He died as Tristan not as Don Juan,” as his one-time paramour Sabina wryly observed.
But when The Free Press, for instance, hosts a debate on the sexual revolution, that’s not really the question on the table. The actual question is whether feminism failed.
That’s the subject of, among others, Lilian Fishman’s coruscating, wonderful, too-close-for-comfort novel Acts of Service. In the novel Eve finds herself in a hopelessly unequal and nonetheless sexually satisfying polyamorous relationship. She finds herself subpoenaed as part of a civil suit against her paramour Nathan, and the lawyer, finding Eve obstinate, finally plays her trump card. “Would you call yourself a feminist and what does that mean to you?” she says. And Eve says, “It means an awareness of difference. A commitment to this awareness and to acting in accordance with it. Nathan has made me very happy. It’s served me as much as it’s served him — maybe even more.” Olivia, the other member of the triangle, is even more implicated than Eve. She’s in defiance of the dictums of MeToo, sleeping with Nathan even though he’s her boss. “Are you still seeing each other?” asks Eve in the thick of the lawsuit. “Oh yes,” says Olivia. Meaning: all the time.
What Fishman is saying is that something about the perfectly-wonderful principles of feminism broke against the exigencies of women’s sexual response. That’s not to say that she’s condemning feminism exactly. Feminism comes to seem like a tactical maneuver in the millennia-old war of the sexes. Women get tired of “voting indirect,” in Thornton Wilder’s phrase, or of “the problem without a name,” in Betty Friedan’s. Pussy power isn’t good enough; and the annuities on chivalry tend to run out. So women enter the work force in vast numbers. Women’s wage-earning powers rise to a degree that would startle Lily Ledbetter. Men undergo some sort of clear crisis of purpose — and have only Richard V. Reeves and (if they really snap) Jordan Peterson to console them for it. Average childbearing ages go way up, fertility rates go way down, at least among the PMC, and women have far greater negotiating power in public space but without exactly affecting the fundamentals of the dating market. As Fishman’s heroine, Eve, admits, “The primary fantasy that followed me everywhere in which I was lined up in a row of a hundred girls. Opposite us was a man who scrutinized us. After about thirty seconds he pointed, without equivocating, at me.” And that’s, I would say, roughly the consensus of my generation — a triangulation between first, second, and thrid-wave feminism — an unambiguous agreement that women can do absolutely anything they want, whether it’s radical politics or motherhood, but that there are adamant non-negotiables in the dating market and the iron laws of attraction. Gen Z, meanwhile, is pushing things to the point of logical absurdity and seeing if gender itself isn’t a malleable concept — with, of course, society-wide seismic results.
So what do I think? Well, I guess that the sexual revolution was a very interesting experiment. Even if the manipulators, the “playboy or operator types,” got in early, there was something deeply well-intentioned about it. And, like any good experiment, it was interested in its own results. I don’t agree with Louise Perry’s atavistic conclusion that “mother is always right” — that, as Perry actually writes, you should “hold off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months” and “only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children” — but I do think that jealousy is not to be underestimated and that the biological differences between men and women are not bridgeable through political rhetoric. I’m not completely ready to just nod along to anything that anyone born pre-1950 tells me or to join the enthusiastic crowd at the traditional wedding — I’ll always believe that the attempt to express one’s authentic sexuality is a worthy ideal, however many real-world problems interfere with it — but, yes, I can agree to an abiding sense of disappointment. The sexual revolution wasn’t what the ’68ers thought it would be. Feminism was far from utopia; at best, it was part of a zero-sum game in which women gained significant ground.
I guess what I really believe is that these things happen in waves. The period around the 1850s was an era of surprising sexual liberation (as much of Whitman’s writing attests). The 1880s was a period of deep repression (the combination of Queen Victoria and Anthony Comstock). The early part of the 20th century swung back towards sexual looseness and relative power for women. The militaristic ‘40s and ’50s brought the world back in the other direction. (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, usually cited as the foundational text for feminism, is, if you actually read it, mostly an elegy for the happy era before the GIs came home.) Now we’re in a period of feminist ascendancy but sexual puritanism. Nobody’s exactly happy with their dating apps or with their moralistic workplace. What I would hope for is — in the perennial cycles that these things go through — a slight turn of the needle. Back to a greater acceptance of the myriad forms of sexuality (and an understanding that people’s sexual drives don’t always necessarily correlate to their moral compass) without somehow believing that greater sexual openness means that we all get to live in San Francisco in 1967 or that we can resolve any of these problems within any of our lifetimes.
The traditional marriage with the extended family creates as close to a kinship setup as is possible in our modern age and, when it works well, pays big dividends to long term happiness.
That setup, however, does not require pre-marriage chastity.
Thanks for this thought proving post.
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about
Enjoyed the essay; lots to think about.
I don't think I can agree with the positive assessment of Bari Weiss; or maybe it just is that a rejuvenated 'center-right' space is not one that I find intellectually honest or welcoming to genuinely exploratory discussions.