Nigeria Content Online

My column today
makes what I hope is a non-utopian argument for why social
conservatives are right to welcome the recent evidence that American
teens and 20-somethings are waiting somewhat longer to have sex. And it
pivots, in part, off this post from Dana Goldstein, in which she argues
1) that premarital sex has always been with us, 2) that even if people
are sleeping together more casually than they did generations ago, it’s
just because they’re marrying later, and 3) that anyway, there’s no
need for anyone to feel “anxious about 50-year macro social trends that
have brought about unprecedented gender equality and personal
fulfilment.”

I take up the
first two points in my column, arguing that it makes a huge difference
not only whether people have premarital sex, but how early and how
often and how casually, and that this is what social conservatives
think changed for the worse starting in the 1960s (and has changed for
the better, albeit on the margins, more recently). But I think it’s
worth saying something about the third question, because it’s crucial
to the debate over how we should think about the sexual revolution and
its consequences.

Did the social
trends of the last 50 years bring about “unprecedented gender
equality”? Absolutely. Did they bring about “unprecedented personal
fulfilment”? Well … for some people they did. But it’s very easy to
find indicators that paint a more complicated picture. Female happiness
has dropped since the 1970s, despite enormous female economic gains.
Marital happiness has dipped as well, even though fewer people get
married and it’s easier to leave an unhappy union. And then of course
there’s the impact of higher divorce rates on children’s psychological
well-being, the impact of rising single parenthood on child poverty,
and so forth.

The crucial
question, to my mind, is whether all of the social changes that swept
America in the 1960s and the 1970s are a package deal. Writers like
Goldstein seem convinced that everything goes together – that the
cultural shifts that have made our personal lives more unstable and
(possibly) less fulfilling are inextricably bound to the shifts that
made female equality a possibility, and then more or less a fact. Hence
their reflexive hostility to the idea that anything could have changed
for the worse in American sexual culture: To suggest that the general
welfare might be enhanced if teenage sexual activity were a little more
stigmatized or divorce a little harder to get, in their eyes, is to
implicitly suggest that women belong in kitchens and finishing schools,
rather than boardrooms and the Senate. It’s the slippery slope in
reverse: Many progressives and feminists have committed themselves to
an absolute defence of everything that changed during the sexual
revolution, out of a fear that one concession will cost women every
gain.

Needless to say, I don’t think this is the right way to look at it.
The connection between feminism and sexual permissiveness strikes me as
historically contingent rather than strictly necessary, and the
economic and social gains that women have made since the 1960s seem
robust enough to endure – or, more likely, continue apace – even amid a
reconsideration of some of the social changes that accompanied them.
Yes, an ethic of sexual restraint can be turned to patriarchal ends,
but so can an ethic of sexual permissiveness, as anyone who’s hung out
in a frat house for any length of time can attest. And the fact that
smart feminists like Goldstein feel compelled to act all blasé about
the pornography industry, lest they give an inch to the forces of
reaction, seems like one of the more regrettable aspects of the
contemporary cultural debate.