The Sexual Revolution Is Over

It’s impossible to know when this “revolution” began with any precision, but perhaps we could date it from the publication of “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey’s two famous studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey conducted hundreds of interviews and concluded from these that most Americans’ private sexual practices differed sharply from their professed beliefs about sexual morality. Holding as he did to a crassly Darwinian worldview in which men and women are highly developed animals and so merely animalistic in their appetites, Kinsey believed Americans could achieve greater happiness and fulfillment only by expressing their sexual urges without deference to arbitrary cultural and religious rules. Except, of course, the rule of consent. That one had to stay.

Kinsey’s many critics, then and since, have pointed out the laughably unscientific nature of his research, but it didn’t matter. The second half of the 20th century in the United States is the story of the slow collapse of a broadly Christian cultural consensus on sexual morality.

At least one sensible way of understanding the ongoing succession of men credibly charged with sexual harassment and assault is that LMen, especially men of a hubristic bent and in positions of authority, were only too happy to discard the old rules governing the expression of their appetites, but those rules were put in place over many centuries in large part because such men were apt to behave like beasts without them. Setting aside morality and ontology, Kinsey’s presupposition that men are animals isn’t entirely wrong.

The counterargument to this interpretation is the one made by my liberal friends: These things have always happened, only now it’s reported. It’s not an unreasonable point—men have forced themselves on disinclined women since there were men and women. This is the experience of Pamela Andrews in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, and of Tamar, half-sister of the loathsome Amnon, in the Book of Second Samuel.

The question, though, is whether these things happen more frequently as a result of the dissolution of sexual mores. Such a thing is perhaps unknowable in a strict sense, but the important thing is this: It looks and feels like men behave badly much more often than they used to. It’s hard to believe that Harvey Weinstein would have dared to engage in the systematic abuse of women if he had achieved his fame and wealth in the 1890s rather than the 1990s.

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Chappaquiddick - the truth

Sorry, Ansari: a praxeologist looks at the latest scandalette

The leading edge of the sexual revolution give women options they didn’t have before; its completion has taken away many of the choices they used to have by trapping them in a sexual-competition race for the bottom.

“Grace” behaved as she did because she doesn’t have a realistic option to hold out for romance before sex; women who do that put themselves at high risk of not getting second dates, there are too many others willing to play by the new rules. So she has to do sex instead and hope lightning strikes.

Couple this with the fact that as women get on average more educated there are fewer hypergamically-eligible males at every SES, and you have the jaws of a vicious vise. It’s especially hard on high-status women and low-status men. The main beneficiaries are high-status men, who often behave like entitled assholes because the new rules tilt the playing field in their favor even more than the old ones did.

As an old married guy and 5 decades out of the dating pool, from what I read this seems spot on to me.

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Loneliness, Libertinism, Anxiety: Recollections of a Peace Corps Volunteer

I’d been in the United States Peace Corps for all of 48 hours when I received my first bag of taxpayer-funded condoms.

In the Peace Corps, they don’t waste time with foreplay. This was in 2002, when I was stationed at a health sanatorium north of Tashkent, one of 50 Volunteers in training. After dinner on our second day, we were ordered to report to the clinic for the first of several rounds of vaccinations. First came the needles and then came the candy, but along with the sweets I was given a brown paper bag.

I looked. “Oh, thanks,” I said, “but I don’t need this.” I handed it back. “You should take them,” the nurse assured me. “Just in case.” I blinked.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I set the bag on the table and left the room. “I’ll omit the slap this time,” I thought. “But consider yourself lucky.”

...

Over my two years in the Peace Corps, I would get many more openings for that cinematic slap. It’s the only place I’ve ever worked where one steps up to a conference check-in desk expecting to receive a room key, welcome folder, and bag of condoms. There was, to be sure, a method to this madness. For the most part, the Peace Corps was a magnet for educated, unwed twenty-somethings with broadly left-leaning views. Our Washingtonian handlers wanted us to spread goodwill abroad, but in an Islamic society, a recent-college-graduate approach to the bodily appetites was likelier to spread resentment and venereal disease. Thus, an implicit compromise was struck. We were not technically forbidden to have sex with locals, but we were urged to be “culturally sensitive” at our assigned work sites.

Then, periodically, we were summoned to conferences at health sanatoriums deep in the mountains, where we were issued condoms and left largely to ourselves for a couple of days. Some Volunteers started referring to these scheduled get-togethers as “shore leave.” “Shore leave” was more or less what one would expect. The scheduled sessions mostly seemed like an inconsequential appendage to the (ahem) night life. Ironically, in establishments meant to restore health, the air seemed to be permeated by this raw, unmediated collision of appetite and loneliness. Both were intense.

The carousel of beds, bodies, and beer bottles precipitated a different kind of culture shock for a young religious conservative. I didn’t find it liberating; I found it foul. Even so, the chastity soapbox looks monstrously unappealing when you’re 22, a freakish ideological outlier, and 12,000 miles from home.

I settled into a pragmatic routine. Following my ritual refusal of the condoms, I would open a Peace Corps conference by quietly looking for a roommate agreeable to a no-sex-actually-in-the-room rule. (I wasn’t terrified of being raped, but I do prefer to have a wall between myself and the closest copulating couple.)

Books and solitary walks infused some sanity into the next few days, and I completed my term of service in 2004 without ever availing myself of the free condoms, free therapy, or free trip to Planned Parenthood. (Under George W. Bush’s administration, the Peace Corps couldn’t pick up that particular bill, but we were promised that we would be delivered directly to the doorstep should relevant circumstances arise.) I won’t betray personal secrets, except to say: Some fared worse.

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Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame

Robert Stacy McCain has a long and interesting essay on the culture.

Bruce Jenner in an alernative universe.

Second Thoughts on a Sexual Revolution

Bud Norman

Sit-coms, hip-hop records, television advertisements, magazine covers, “reality shows,” late night cable programming, all the fawning attention paid to that naked fat woman from HBO’s “Girls,” entire departments of modern academia, along with the rest of our culture, including the more up-to-date churches, all proclaim an age of unfettered sexual freedom and endless bacchanal and infernal bickering over the proper terminology and protocol to make it all go smoothly. People who used to explain themselves to strangers in terms of their occupation or denominational affiliation or number of children now identify themselves by their sexual preference or “gender identity,” any sexual predilection, no matter how arcane or disconcerting to normal sensibilities, now has a web site and a lobbying group and “community” of like-minded people to provide encouragement, and the Roe v. Wade decision and an Obamacare law that mandates contraception and abortifacient coverage for everyone from nuns to Baptist businessmen and a host of other public policies make it all official, and anybody who admits any discomfort with this state of affairs is routinely dismissed from polite conversation as a blue-nosed puritan.

So far as we can glean from the snippets of boisterous conversation we involuntarily overhear from the fashionably hirsute fellows and their tattooed but otherwise comely young women companions in the next booth at a coffeehouse where we drink beer and grouse about foreign policy and economics and baseball with a gray-haired pal of ours, and from the often tragic gossip we can’t avoid despite our best efforts in our infrequent social encounters elsewhere, as well as the conspicuous lack of non-political and non-sports conversation we share with our gray-haired friend, it doesn’t seem to be working out very well for anyone. As we read the news, with agedly skeptical eyes unaffected by modern pharmacology and largely immune to the blandishments of Madison Avenue, we find further confirmation that no one out there seems genuinely satisfied with the situation.

That campus “culture of rape” that the young woman with the mattress and the Senator from California and the editorialists at the big papers and the rest of the feminist establishment are so worried about doesn’t seem to be so much an epidemic of college boys forcing themselves with brute strength onto unwilling young innocents as it is a widespread regret with the consensual albeit slightly reluctant “hook-up” encounters that have become so common since universities stopped being in loco parentis and started being simply loco....

Nor do we believe that the former Bruce Jenner will likely find genuine satisfaction by having his penis and testes amputated, no matter how comely he might appear through the miracles of Vanity Fair’s photographic and make-up and air-brushing experts. That’s not just our admittedly uniformed opinion, as even a doctor at Johns Hopkins University, which was once the first hospital in America to perform “sex-change operations,” argues that the procedure doesn’t really change a person’s sex, tends to result in a suicide rate 20 times that of the general population, and is no longer done at his institution because some patients’ claims to be “‘satisfied’ but ‘still troubled'” are “an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.” The social consensus seems to be otherwise, what with the all-powerful ESPN sports network awarding the former Bruce Jenner its “Arthur Ashe Courage Award” rather than to an Iraq War veteran who became a successful athlete and “Dancing on the Stars” competitor despite the double amputations he endured from his service to his country, but we don’t think that will work, either.

All that blather about people basing their self-esteem and personal identities on their sexual predilections seems equally futile, as a person’s occupation and numbers of children and denominational affiliation will ultimately have more important social consequences, and little of the rest of it makes any sense from our admittedly straight white Christian Republican conservative perspective here in the middle of America. Straight white male Christian Republican conservatives in the middle of America that we are, over the years we’ve had a number of dear friends who were homosexual or bisexual or something for which we’re not even sure what the currently polite terminology would be, but all had admirable attributes we found in common which seemed entirely unrelated to either their sexuality or ours. They seemed to find something in common with us as well, and some valuable friendships have resulted, so we are inclined to believe that social interactions are best conducted on such terms. By now we are inured to even the most lurid tales of heterosexual and homosexual and bisexual and whatever your might call it behavior, and you don’t even need to couch your back alley encounter in terms of “love,” as the homosexual lobby and broader sexual freedom movement routinely does, but we can’t help noticing that the tellers of these tales never sound genuinely satisfied, and that the fulfillment of their overwhelming sexual desires has come at the expense of some noticeable measure of dignity, dispassionate analysis, common sense, simple courtesy, and other higher impulses of the human soul. This surely marks us as blue-nosed puritans, but we suppose we’ll just have to declare that an oppressed identity and start a web site and hire some lobbyists and find a community of like-minded individuals to encourage such anti-social tendencies.

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