I just don't think this is in contact with the reality of how the economy (or most of these kinds of markets, including the market for sex and marriage) function. For instance: women control something like 75% of discretionary spending and are disproportionately catered to accordingly in advertising and in most retail, educational and social environments.
But that's just advertising and retail spending. There is a huge amount of implicit subsidy that women receive via these advantages in these other spheres of life, and now that women also earn the majority of college degrees, one could expect the advantage to grow - or at least not shrink.
Just how much of the economic and social markets do women need to control in order to feel satisfied? It's a bit baffling to me that all of these gains have been made and yet there still seems room for complaint.
And to the extent that men gatekeep marriage, the perverse incentive of what typically happens to a man in a divorce or family court cannot be understated: men get shredded routinely in those venues (although there have been some improvements) and this is hardly a function solely of no-fault divorce. Our society is geared towards advancing the interests of children via their mothers, which is a good thing... but a rational man takes this into account before consenting to marry a woman who can, on a whim, take his house, children, and half of his stuff.
The advice I've given my son is to never marry a woman whose goal is to be a stay-at-home parent, and that he should only marry a woman who is capable of supporting herself in the lifestyle she's accustomed to.
Oh, no no. The "who really has it worse men or women" game can go on all day. Especially when you want to take the question in some global sense, factoring all possible things.
This was not a grievance post. Press your counter-grievances against someone who is excoriating men as a group, which I have not done.
My point Rachel is not to say "oh, poor men" but to point out that men and women's revealed preferences are different and it doesn't make much sense to me to propose that women have a kind of false consciousness about what their preferences consist of - or that society has somehow "tricked" women into accepting more premarital sex via the device of the pill.
It's just possible that this a new equilibrium enabled by the liberation of women's preferences.
OK, fair enough. I didn’t quite catch your drift. So I do think it’s interesting to see how women’s revealed preferences come out in our era of greater choice. With respect to sex though we seem to have a lot of cultural change that women didn’t necessarily want and don’t appreciate and it’s one of those things where new options can simply take old ones off the table; once you *can* have infertile sex, is the man agreeable to fertile sex anymore? And attendant obligations?
Not meaning to suggest it’s really all about men’s preferences; clearly it’s complicated. But almost no one foresaw all the changes in the wake of the sexual revolution and few are wildly delighted by the place we’ve gotten to now.
I feel like there's a "why premarital sex is actually wrong" hole in this argument.
The Sexual Revolution was, above all, about making the social world safe for premarital sex. If, in fact, premarital sex isn't wrong, then Christianity is false. If it is wrong, then why?
I know of no cogent arguments against premarital sex that aren't what would be called "sexist," by people who use that word. The case for chastity is downstream of an understanding of the sexes that tradition taught knew, feminism lost, and sociobiology can restore.
To see the Sexual Revolution as permanent today strikes me as analogous to seeing communism as permanent in 1980. It's in deepening crisis. After communism came capitalism. Sometimes the way forward is the way back.
People define “the sexual revolution” in different ways and obviously the definition could matter. If “a world less safe for premarital sex” necessarily counts as improvement, we may have achieved it! Young people are by all accounts having less premarital sex. It’s not because they’re embracing chastity; it’s because they’re lost in their virtual worlds, taking to chatbots or random strangers online and probably masturbating to porn. I guess “less sex” doesn’t mean “less safe for sex” but actually I think that’s also true. Because #metoo, “campus rape culture,” general concern about “toxic masculinity” and the potential for women to victims of sexual exploitation. Is that “rolling back the sexual revolution”? Surely not. “Fewer female victims, more male ones” isn’t what conservatives wanted. More loneliness and isolation wasn’t the goal.
What we want is chastity, committed marriage, thriving family lives. So if anything that realizes those conditions counts as a “rolling back” then I’m for it, and believe it is genuinely possible. But I wouldn’t normally describe what I want in that way, because I think people who say that generally think that 1) social breakdown, falling birth rates, scrambled gender roles etc are overwhelmingly the consequence of mistakes that simply require correction, and 2) if they are corrected, that will probably result in a return to a world that resembles 1950s America far more than I expect any realizable future to do.
I think a revitalized culture and family life will require a great deal of adaptation, not just correction. And the result will probably be somewhat different from what any particular group today wants or expects. In which case it probably won’t feel natural to call it “rolling back the sexual revolution.” The way out is not back, but through.
Re: "I think people who say [to roll back the Sexual Revolution] generally think that 1) social breakdown, falling birth rates, scrambled gender roles etc are overwhelmingly the consequence of mistakes... and 2) if they are corrected, that will probably result in a return to a world that resembles 1950s America far more than I expect any realizable future to do."
I'm interested in where the self-confidence of that last statement comes from. How would you make a guess what futures are realizable? I think Chesterton's view was more like "lots of things are possible; work for what you want," and he insisted in the right to choose any historical society for his template.
We've discussed this before, but it's interesting to circle back to it with the discussion anchored in the idea of Christendom and an agreed belief in Christian resilience. It might be too big an ask when you're busy with a book project, but sometime I'd like to hear (a) what Christian-compatible model of gender relations and family you would prescribe if you could (for people often want advice, after all), and (b) how/why you think your recommended model would be compatible with incentives and instinctive desires at the societal level.
Fifty years ago in Russia, if you were brainstorming an autopsy of Christendom, a top contender would be that people realized the moral truth and necessity of socialism and so Christendom died. Your "the way out is not back, but through" has the same vibe of provincial complacency to me... but, who knows?
Socialism/communism is rooted in a political ideology. I want a free society and a culture rooted in a true anthropology. And if we do want a reinvigorated “pro-family culture” and re-embrace of chastity, I think those really have to be your priorities; nothing else makes sense. If you pick a historical period and announce “I want to re-up that!” then *you* become the ideologue, which could do real harm, but more likely will just lead to your being widely dismisses as a reactionary crank. Why should women make life choices based on your preferred historical period? Why should you or anyone be empowered to make them?
Considering that women have had fewer life choices historically than men, I think it’s fairly reasonable to expect that we have more to learn about what they genuinely like/want under conditions of freedom, than we do about men. Though we’re still learning lots about both sexes, certainly! Revealed preferences definitely aren’t a reliable guide to human anthropology, and yet, *given that reality* (that women’s choices have historically been pretty constrained) I think it’s only reasonable to expect that a greatly expanded range of choices will reveal some surprising things about them. And a desire to learn new things, and figure out the best way for both sexes to thrive, is perfectly compatible with real disapproval and distress at the ugly aspects of the sexual revolution.
I keep getting this feeling that I'm listening to the Gorbachev of the Sexual Revolution. There are a lot of bad things about capitalism: the inequality, the insecurity. Couldn't they keep the guaranteed jobs and living standards and the equality, while also getting freedom, high average living standards, and technological progress? Well, no, as it turned out. Capitalism is a package. The inequality and insecurity are downstream of freedom and upstream of high living standards and technological progress. The good and the bad go together.
Family values might be similar, in that some things which were always a burden to some, and which it's currently fashionable to regard as unacceptable, are actually the necessary flip side of chastity and of loving, stable families. Or maybe not... but history is not encouraging for the compatibility of feminism with healthy family culture, and I don't see any particular theoretical reason to believe in it either.
Two key questions get to the heart of the matter:
1. Why should people be chaste?
2. How can society make men and women better, more appealing mates for one another?
Solve (1) and (2) and you've charted a course back towards a healthy family culture. I'm curious how you'd answer them.
Sorry, that was an accidental post… but I’m almost done. I think I was raised with some fairly moderate and homeopathic forms of gender fundamentalism, not really by our parents but in our Mormon community. It was terribly aggressive. We weren’t chastised for being too athletic or good at math, or told that boys wouldn’t like us if we were too intellectual or didn’t giggle enough. There was a lot of active effort I think to maintain the desired social model without becoming actively repressive. For instance we were encouraged to get bachelors degrees but reminded several times that this would help us “teach our children in the home,” and I do remember being told by at least few people that we should go in with the expectation that “four years of college is enough” and perhaps choose majors with the “teaching children in the home” goal in mind (eg not careers). We got some “inspiring stories” about women who thought they wanted careers and eventually recognized that domesticity fulfilled their true nature. So clearly there was a sort of struggle here to uphold the breadwinner/homemaker model without putting us in burkas. To be clear, I don’t see this as some manipulative or repressive game; I think the people I have in mind were themselves trying to answer these questions and were trying to do what they thought was best for us and our future families. But even this fairly mild form of gender fundamentalism sets definite expectations for girls, not only in terms of their life choices but in terms of their *nature*. They *don’t want you* to discover that actually, you really would be pretty happy working as an engineer. That is discouraged.
On the red-pilled right today this clearly goes much, much further than anything I experienced! But it’s not like I didn’t already know that gender fundamentalism can do this. I saw plenty of it in the Arab world.
Once men have that idea that it is “society’s” job to provide “wives that are appealing to them” there’s no natural limit on what demands can be made of girls, or the extent that male insecurities can be translated into the expectation that girls self-immolate in deference to their emotional needs. You see plenty of that among the embittered young men of the populist right, who seem to jump straight from “men and women are different” and “a life of domesticity is good and fine” to “we’re perfectly entitled to set the terms for what we think women should be” and “if a girl dreams of anything other than domesticity she is clearly The Wrong Kind and not worth it.”
So. Whether or not women should be doctors, they should be permitted to be excellent. To have complex natures and a wide range of dreams and interests. To explore their natures as human beings without being obliged to reframe everything in terms of their prescribed familial/communal social role. That’s my deeper interest here. It’s not just about wanting to see women in the board room.
Relatively unmentioned here is the fact that as time has gone by you've seen an overall decrease in the quantity of marriage but an improvement in the durability of those marriages from the dark days of the 70s-80s, which brings me to the concept of a different triangle: the three-legged stool of marriage compatibility.
I think it's fair to say that people desire a partner in marriage (and I do mean a partner, not a subservient or passive role-player) and so aspects of financial, emotional and sexual compatibility take precedence when people consider whether or not to take on a partner - and women have in addition to this (naturally) demanding standards for men which have been demonstrated to lean towards hypergamy.
So, if you are a woman who not only wants a man who meets the criteria of the three-legged stool but also is (generally) an economic or social peer or superior, this automatically truncates the dating pool of men to a relative nub, especially when the median woman now seemingly has a bachelor's degree.
I'm not saying that the marriage and fertility crisis is solely the fault of women, but when women serve as the gatekeepers for both marriage and sex and their preferences are catered to in every aspect of society, it's hardly surprising that they've gotten what they wanted - but perhaps that isn't making them happy after all?
Mark Regnerus’ research suggests that men are the main gatekeepers of marriage. If you ask men at 20, sexually speaking, what they want (lots of casual sex, serial monogamy, marriage) they’re likelier to get it over the next decade than women. He does say that women are the gatekeepers of sex, and basically his advice is to be more stringent at that to neutralize men’s marriage market advantage. But I think you’re seriously overestimating the extent to which this is “a woman’s world.”
Christianity is about premarital sex? I have to tell you, the primacy of sexual politics versus radical financial egalitarianism that permeates Christian discussions, versus how often that comes up throughout scripture OT and NT… is one of the reasons that I found myself drawn inexorably away from the community of believers when I was fairly young.
Rape is not like premarital sex, which seems astoundingly obvious, and indeed is far closer to a violent power imbalance than merely “sex”.
And in fact condemnation of rape is a far closer lesson on the sexual side of e g Sodom and Gomorrah than the things that particular story is most weaponized for (though of course Ezekiel makes it clear it TOO was far more about the cruel lack of care for the poor and needy).
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
If you want things to be as they were, things will have to be very different than they were.
It’s the essence of conservatism, really. Figuring out what has to change in order for the things we love most to stay.
I just don't think this is in contact with the reality of how the economy (or most of these kinds of markets, including the market for sex and marriage) function. For instance: women control something like 75% of discretionary spending and are disproportionately catered to accordingly in advertising and in most retail, educational and social environments.
But that's just advertising and retail spending. There is a huge amount of implicit subsidy that women receive via these advantages in these other spheres of life, and now that women also earn the majority of college degrees, one could expect the advantage to grow - or at least not shrink.
Just how much of the economic and social markets do women need to control in order to feel satisfied? It's a bit baffling to me that all of these gains have been made and yet there still seems room for complaint.
And to the extent that men gatekeep marriage, the perverse incentive of what typically happens to a man in a divorce or family court cannot be understated: men get shredded routinely in those venues (although there have been some improvements) and this is hardly a function solely of no-fault divorce. Our society is geared towards advancing the interests of children via their mothers, which is a good thing... but a rational man takes this into account before consenting to marry a woman who can, on a whim, take his house, children, and half of his stuff.
The advice I've given my son is to never marry a woman whose goal is to be a stay-at-home parent, and that he should only marry a woman who is capable of supporting herself in the lifestyle she's accustomed to.
Oh, no no. The "who really has it worse men or women" game can go on all day. Especially when you want to take the question in some global sense, factoring all possible things.
This was not a grievance post. Press your counter-grievances against someone who is excoriating men as a group, which I have not done.
My point Rachel is not to say "oh, poor men" but to point out that men and women's revealed preferences are different and it doesn't make much sense to me to propose that women have a kind of false consciousness about what their preferences consist of - or that society has somehow "tricked" women into accepting more premarital sex via the device of the pill.
It's just possible that this a new equilibrium enabled by the liberation of women's preferences.
OK, fair enough. I didn’t quite catch your drift. So I do think it’s interesting to see how women’s revealed preferences come out in our era of greater choice. With respect to sex though we seem to have a lot of cultural change that women didn’t necessarily want and don’t appreciate and it’s one of those things where new options can simply take old ones off the table; once you *can* have infertile sex, is the man agreeable to fertile sex anymore? And attendant obligations?
Not meaning to suggest it’s really all about men’s preferences; clearly it’s complicated. But almost no one foresaw all the changes in the wake of the sexual revolution and few are wildly delighted by the place we’ve gotten to now.
I feel like there's a "why premarital sex is actually wrong" hole in this argument.
The Sexual Revolution was, above all, about making the social world safe for premarital sex. If, in fact, premarital sex isn't wrong, then Christianity is false. If it is wrong, then why?
I know of no cogent arguments against premarital sex that aren't what would be called "sexist," by people who use that word. The case for chastity is downstream of an understanding of the sexes that tradition taught knew, feminism lost, and sociobiology can restore.
To see the Sexual Revolution as permanent today strikes me as analogous to seeing communism as permanent in 1980. It's in deepening crisis. After communism came capitalism. Sometimes the way forward is the way back.
People define “the sexual revolution” in different ways and obviously the definition could matter. If “a world less safe for premarital sex” necessarily counts as improvement, we may have achieved it! Young people are by all accounts having less premarital sex. It’s not because they’re embracing chastity; it’s because they’re lost in their virtual worlds, taking to chatbots or random strangers online and probably masturbating to porn. I guess “less sex” doesn’t mean “less safe for sex” but actually I think that’s also true. Because #metoo, “campus rape culture,” general concern about “toxic masculinity” and the potential for women to victims of sexual exploitation. Is that “rolling back the sexual revolution”? Surely not. “Fewer female victims, more male ones” isn’t what conservatives wanted. More loneliness and isolation wasn’t the goal.
What we want is chastity, committed marriage, thriving family lives. So if anything that realizes those conditions counts as a “rolling back” then I’m for it, and believe it is genuinely possible. But I wouldn’t normally describe what I want in that way, because I think people who say that generally think that 1) social breakdown, falling birth rates, scrambled gender roles etc are overwhelmingly the consequence of mistakes that simply require correction, and 2) if they are corrected, that will probably result in a return to a world that resembles 1950s America far more than I expect any realizable future to do.
I think a revitalized culture and family life will require a great deal of adaptation, not just correction. And the result will probably be somewhat different from what any particular group today wants or expects. In which case it probably won’t feel natural to call it “rolling back the sexual revolution.” The way out is not back, but through.
Re: "I think people who say [to roll back the Sexual Revolution] generally think that 1) social breakdown, falling birth rates, scrambled gender roles etc are overwhelmingly the consequence of mistakes... and 2) if they are corrected, that will probably result in a return to a world that resembles 1950s America far more than I expect any realizable future to do."
I'm interested in where the self-confidence of that last statement comes from. How would you make a guess what futures are realizable? I think Chesterton's view was more like "lots of things are possible; work for what you want," and he insisted in the right to choose any historical society for his template.
We've discussed this before, but it's interesting to circle back to it with the discussion anchored in the idea of Christendom and an agreed belief in Christian resilience. It might be too big an ask when you're busy with a book project, but sometime I'd like to hear (a) what Christian-compatible model of gender relations and family you would prescribe if you could (for people often want advice, after all), and (b) how/why you think your recommended model would be compatible with incentives and instinctive desires at the societal level.
Fifty years ago in Russia, if you were brainstorming an autopsy of Christendom, a top contender would be that people realized the moral truth and necessity of socialism and so Christendom died. Your "the way out is not back, but through" has the same vibe of provincial complacency to me... but, who knows?
Socialism/communism is rooted in a political ideology. I want a free society and a culture rooted in a true anthropology. And if we do want a reinvigorated “pro-family culture” and re-embrace of chastity, I think those really have to be your priorities; nothing else makes sense. If you pick a historical period and announce “I want to re-up that!” then *you* become the ideologue, which could do real harm, but more likely will just lead to your being widely dismisses as a reactionary crank. Why should women make life choices based on your preferred historical period? Why should you or anyone be empowered to make them?
Considering that women have had fewer life choices historically than men, I think it’s fairly reasonable to expect that we have more to learn about what they genuinely like/want under conditions of freedom, than we do about men. Though we’re still learning lots about both sexes, certainly! Revealed preferences definitely aren’t a reliable guide to human anthropology, and yet, *given that reality* (that women’s choices have historically been pretty constrained) I think it’s only reasonable to expect that a greatly expanded range of choices will reveal some surprising things about them. And a desire to learn new things, and figure out the best way for both sexes to thrive, is perfectly compatible with real disapproval and distress at the ugly aspects of the sexual revolution.
I keep getting this feeling that I'm listening to the Gorbachev of the Sexual Revolution. There are a lot of bad things about capitalism: the inequality, the insecurity. Couldn't they keep the guaranteed jobs and living standards and the equality, while also getting freedom, high average living standards, and technological progress? Well, no, as it turned out. Capitalism is a package. The inequality and insecurity are downstream of freedom and upstream of high living standards and technological progress. The good and the bad go together.
Family values might be similar, in that some things which were always a burden to some, and which it's currently fashionable to regard as unacceptable, are actually the necessary flip side of chastity and of loving, stable families. Or maybe not... but history is not encouraging for the compatibility of feminism with healthy family culture, and I don't see any particular theoretical reason to believe in it either.
Two key questions get to the heart of the matter:
1. Why should people be chaste?
2. How can society make men and women better, more appealing mates for one another?
Solve (1) and (2) and you've charted a course back towards a healthy family culture. I'm curious how you'd answer them.
Sorry, but this is an important clarification: I meant to say that Mormon gender fundamentalism WASN’T terribly aggressive. Dang auto-correct.
Sorry, that was an accidental post… but I’m almost done. I think I was raised with some fairly moderate and homeopathic forms of gender fundamentalism, not really by our parents but in our Mormon community. It was terribly aggressive. We weren’t chastised for being too athletic or good at math, or told that boys wouldn’t like us if we were too intellectual or didn’t giggle enough. There was a lot of active effort I think to maintain the desired social model without becoming actively repressive. For instance we were encouraged to get bachelors degrees but reminded several times that this would help us “teach our children in the home,” and I do remember being told by at least few people that we should go in with the expectation that “four years of college is enough” and perhaps choose majors with the “teaching children in the home” goal in mind (eg not careers). We got some “inspiring stories” about women who thought they wanted careers and eventually recognized that domesticity fulfilled their true nature. So clearly there was a sort of struggle here to uphold the breadwinner/homemaker model without putting us in burkas. To be clear, I don’t see this as some manipulative or repressive game; I think the people I have in mind were themselves trying to answer these questions and were trying to do what they thought was best for us and our future families. But even this fairly mild form of gender fundamentalism sets definite expectations for girls, not only in terms of their life choices but in terms of their *nature*. They *don’t want you* to discover that actually, you really would be pretty happy working as an engineer. That is discouraged.
On the red-pilled right today this clearly goes much, much further than anything I experienced! But it’s not like I didn’t already know that gender fundamentalism can do this. I saw plenty of it in the Arab world.
Once men have that idea that it is “society’s” job to provide “wives that are appealing to them” there’s no natural limit on what demands can be made of girls, or the extent that male insecurities can be translated into the expectation that girls self-immolate in deference to their emotional needs. You see plenty of that among the embittered young men of the populist right, who seem to jump straight from “men and women are different” and “a life of domesticity is good and fine” to “we’re perfectly entitled to set the terms for what we think women should be” and “if a girl dreams of anything other than domesticity she is clearly The Wrong Kind and not worth it.”
So. Whether or not women should be doctors, they should be permitted to be excellent. To have complex natures and a wide range of dreams and interests. To explore their natures as human beings without being obliged to reframe everything in terms of their prescribed familial/communal social role. That’s my deeper interest here. It’s not just about wanting to see women in the board room.
Relatively unmentioned here is the fact that as time has gone by you've seen an overall decrease in the quantity of marriage but an improvement in the durability of those marriages from the dark days of the 70s-80s, which brings me to the concept of a different triangle: the three-legged stool of marriage compatibility.
I think it's fair to say that people desire a partner in marriage (and I do mean a partner, not a subservient or passive role-player) and so aspects of financial, emotional and sexual compatibility take precedence when people consider whether or not to take on a partner - and women have in addition to this (naturally) demanding standards for men which have been demonstrated to lean towards hypergamy.
So, if you are a woman who not only wants a man who meets the criteria of the three-legged stool but also is (generally) an economic or social peer or superior, this automatically truncates the dating pool of men to a relative nub, especially when the median woman now seemingly has a bachelor's degree.
I'm not saying that the marriage and fertility crisis is solely the fault of women, but when women serve as the gatekeepers for both marriage and sex and their preferences are catered to in every aspect of society, it's hardly surprising that they've gotten what they wanted - but perhaps that isn't making them happy after all?
Mark Regnerus’ research suggests that men are the main gatekeepers of marriage. If you ask men at 20, sexually speaking, what they want (lots of casual sex, serial monogamy, marriage) they’re likelier to get it over the next decade than women. He does say that women are the gatekeepers of sex, and basically his advice is to be more stringent at that to neutralize men’s marriage market advantage. But I think you’re seriously overestimating the extent to which this is “a woman’s world.”
Christianity is about premarital sex? I have to tell you, the primacy of sexual politics versus radical financial egalitarianism that permeates Christian discussions, versus how often that comes up throughout scripture OT and NT… is one of the reasons that I found myself drawn inexorably away from the community of believers when I was fairly young.
It's also true that Christians should be more generous and less inclined to selfish consumerism. So thanks for that reminder.
It's about a lot of things, but love and responsibility is one of them.
When people run the “sex is trivial, why do you care so much about this” line I sometimes ask: Would you say that to a rape victim?
Sex matters.
Rape is not like premarital sex, which seems astoundingly obvious, and indeed is far closer to a violent power imbalance than merely “sex”.
And in fact condemnation of rape is a far closer lesson on the sexual side of e g Sodom and Gomorrah than the things that particular story is most weaponized for (though of course Ezekiel makes it clear it TOO was far more about the cruel lack of care for the poor and needy).