Time for Sex

By Crispin Sartwell

On today's commentary page, as is traditional, we take a break from war for a bit of sex.

A reconsideration of the "sexual revolution" (henceforth SR) has been in full swing for twenty years. Traditionally, the SR dates from the early sixties, when the Pill entered wide circulation, to the early eighties, when the AIDS epidemic confronted us again with the abyss: the connection of sex and death.

Conservatives, it is fair to say, never much cottoned to the sexual revolution, and the most recent revisionist salvo from the right is the book "Modern Sex: Liberation and its Discontents," a set of essays from the Manhattan Institute that blames the SR for all the ills to which the flesh is heir, and then some: skyrocketing divorce rates; out of wedlock births; men abandoning the mothers of their children; general disintegration; teen pregnancy; teen violence; teen oral sex; and perhaps most disturbingly of all, disco.

Now, though I lived through the SR in all its glory, I am a rather odd person to rise to its defense. I myself have always had a rather extreme bent toward monogamy, with occasional lapses into celibacy. I am in a position to say that the sexual revolutionaries in their zeal at times made of promiscuity an ideology and an oppression. I actually spent much of my youth feeling backwards and defective for failure to pursue the profound human liberation of zipless fornication. "If you can't be with the one you love, baby, love the one you're with."

There was a similar ideology about drugs, the Little Red Book of which was the lyrics of the Beatles. At a certain point in the seventies, if you didn't ingest psychoactive substances, you were uptight, old-fashioned, and counter-revolutionary. This view had an untold cost in minds and lives. When we reached the point at which self-indulgence appeared morally required, my generation achieved an ecstasy of self-deception.

However, the arguments in "Modern Sex" and elsewhere that blame the decline of Western Civilization on the SR are a tissue of fallacies. The most elementary problem is what logicians call "direction of causation."

It is probably true that a shift in sexual practices coincided, for example, with increased divorce rates. But it does not follow that the practices caused the divorce. The divorce rate might have, in part, caused the promiscuity, or some third factor might have caused them both, or they might not be directly causally related.

Since all the same trends have been blamed on the removal of prayer from the schools (also 1963), it is obvious that one needs more than correlation to show causation. For that matter, we might as well blame the fashion for pillbox hats, or the introduction of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

At a minimum, there were dramatic demographic changes in which all of these trends were embedded. For example, the basic shift of family structure to include two wage-earners - which was at least as much driven by economic as by social factors - induced a global change in the role of women.

And the myth of a prelapsarian paradise of faith and love is surely overblown. Promiscuity, faithlessness, decadence, and dance music were not invented in 1963. Part of the effect of the SR was simply to allow people to be more honest about what they actually were doing. Sexual practices changed much less than sexual discourse.

But the critics of the SR have one value that I think is worth fighting for: At least in my experience, sex without love can be empty and demoralizing. However, that is true whether you're having a tawdry one-night stand or loveless, meaningless sex with the person you've been sleeping next to for a decade.

If you can't be with the one you love, honey: ditch.

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