The Sexual Revolution: Why?
In discussing this provocative article titled “Marriage is for White People”, Michael Williams asks:
Why was there a sexual revolution? Why did no-fault divorce become popular? Why do so many women do everything for a boyfriend they would for a husband? My belief is that these women were also acting rationally within a system — the patriarcal system — that was collapsing and no longer meeting their needs. It’s my belief that a genuine and loving patriarcal system is best for society, but a tyrannical, oppressive, smothering partriarcy will push women to “rebel” against it (for lack of a better word).
Why the sexual revolution? That’s a big question.
The main answer is technology. Societies are sets of rules that a group of people can follow to their mutual happiness and perpetuation. Those rules work only in given circumstances. If the circumstances change, then the rules usually must change, too.
For example, suppose that you have a prehistoric tribe in which the men hunt big game as a major source of food. The tribe’s social structure, religion, and stories will all focus on hunting. But then suppose that the herds die out for whatever reason, and the tribe must learn to cultivate grain to survive. That change in food source will lead to corresponding changes in most aspects of the society.
Twentieth-century technology stripped away some pretty deep foundations on which our society was based. Consider how very differently reproduction worked 100 years ago:
- Infant mortality was high, so women spent more time pregnant to produce a family.
- Maintaining a home involved an immense amount of work. There were no clothes washers, clothes dryers, dishwashers, refrigeration, vacuum cleaners, automatic stoves or ovens, etc.
- Abstinence was the only effective way to not have babies.
- There was no sure-fire way to know who the father of a given baby was, aside from a woman’s reputation for fidelity. Consequently, women guarded their reputations fiercely.
Now all that is gone. Machines now do the work that once filled most women’s lives. Contraception allows women to decide when to conceive. Advances against disease mean that they can be pretty sure that their infants wouldn’t die in the first year, which means that the women don’t need to spent as much of their lives in pregnancy. And women no longer have the old incentive to guard their reputations, because they can identify their babies’ fathers cheaply and accurately.
It was the machines that set women free from housework, not a bunch of angry protestors. Women didn’t rebel against patriarchy; they just needed to fill all the free hours and years that technology gave them. Technology changes the world; social movements are mostly epiphenomena.
Our society is like a sturdy building hit by an earthquake of technological change. Today we’re struggling to find a way to reinforce the old building, or build a new one. We need new rules for men and women that will satisfy all involved while perpetuating society. But we face two big problems: 1) Many of our citizens have no interest in perpetuating society. Their only interest is hedonism. 2) The technological change hasn’t stopped yet, and isn’t likely to stop any time soon. It’s hard to lay a solid foundation during an earthquake.
Technology changes the world; social movements are mostly epiphenomena.
I think you are overstating things a bit. I don’t disagree that technological changes play a huge role, but they aren’t as deterministic as you make them sound. Part of the sexual revolution was rooted in Marxism, including the idea that men and women were interchangeable. Technology allowed that concept to even be feasible, but the idea itself didn’t have to be accepted. Of course Marx’s ideas were a response technological changes affecting society - but I think that’s the point. There is an interplay between ideas and technology. Technology doesn’t just “happen” - we make collective decisions about what types of technologies to pursue, and the ideas around which societies are built have profound effects on the ability to produce new technologies. Take the U.S. on one hand, and the Arab world, on the other. Then look at China, which is basically trying to bridge the two worlds of poor agrarian society and modern hi-tech society.
Phrasing the situation as you have absolves us of our moral responsibility to make judgements about how to use technology.
Comment by Mike S. — March 30, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
I think you are mistaken. For one thing I’m pretty sure it wasn’t cheap and reliable to determine a child’s father back in the sixties. Or for that matter in the preceding decades when the sexual revolution was occuring on the fringes of society. The sixties didn’t pop out of nowhere, you know. Fidelity is essential to a strong family. Strong families are the antidote to Marxism. Marxists understood this all too well and consciously sought to break down the traditional family in order to weaken Western Civilization’s resistance to their radical philosophy.
Comment by Sam — March 31, 2006 @ 7:39 am
I completely agree that Marxism is a huge factor in the Sexual Revolution. In fact, I had started writing about it as the second factor, but left it out of the post for brevity’s sake. And maybe Marxism had more of an effect then technology in the sixties. That’s hard to say.
You’re right, Sam, that the genetic testing didn’t come until later; I would guess the eighties. The Pill was the big step in the sixties. Probably some advances in condom reliability, too.
I focused on the technology because Marxism’s influence is waning, but technological change is accelerating. We can win the war of ideas and build a stable ideological base for the country, but we can’t stop technological change.
It would be interesting to find and study a society that somehow missed out on Marxism but still had full access to the key technological advances. Japan, maybe?
Comment by BenBateman — March 31, 2006 @ 10:48 am