This is a Carousel guest piece by an anonymous attendee of the Free Press debate in Los Angeles featuring Grimes and Anna Khachiyan
I went to the Free Press debate this week—and while entertained, I can’t say that the debates participants answered the core question: has the sexual revolution failed? Failed at what? And failed whom? These are the core questions a debate has to answer. At the start, we saw widespread agreement on what enabled the sexual revolution: namely, the pill and a change in public morals around sex. But here was where the debate started to go off track.
No one engaged with what the pre-Sexual Revolution moral paradigm entailed—monogamy. Louis Perry, the strongest at the debate, did state that all non-monogamous societies are definitionally polygamous, but we did not get a coherent account of what the Sexual Revolution was fighting against. What was monogamy? And why has the West historically preferred it to polygamy?
I will give you my concise definition. Monogamy is the limiting of all sexual relations to one man, one woman. It is an ideal—and it has never actually existed in any society on earth. (There’s a reason we call prostitution the oldest profession ) But it was the ideal that society’s incentive structures all pointed towards. Pre-marital sex, prostitution, and homosexuality all existed in the pre-Sexual Revolution world, but regardless of the level of social tolerance—in the original sense of the world—they were never actively promoted.
The one-man-one-woman-for-life paradigm meant women caught having premarital sex were whores. Women who became pregnant before being married were expected to marry the father of their children, regardless of if it was a life match. It meant homosexuals were expected to suck it up, get married, and procreate regardless of preference. And prostitution or “sex work” as people like to call it today was either illegal or formally consigned to the fringes of society.
The claims of the Sexual Revolution were that these outcomes were much worse than society understood. Illegal abortions harmed women! Consent defined by civil and religious law did not adequately protect women from marital rape. The difficulty of obtaining a divorce trapped women and children in dangerous and life threatening situations.
I’m not going to disagree with any of these propositions. They are all true. But to answer the question of whether or not the Sexual Revolution failed we do not have to answer whether or not the legal, cultural, and religious structures in place to promote monogamy had negative externalities. We have to grapple with whether or not the negative externalities of the pre-Sexual Revolution culture were better or worse for society than the negative externalities of the post-Sexual Revolution culture.The answer to that is resoundingly that our current externalities are worse, seemingly across all fields which the Sexual Revolution has touched.
Your Sexuality is Humanity’s Concern
First, let’s touch on rape. Unlike abortion, which has a wide cast of demonic proponents who revel in infanticide, rape doesn’t have any public advocates. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are (Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, I’m looking at you)—nobody likes a rapist. In the pre-Sexual Revolution days, there was a clear bright line. If you raped someone’s mother or wife or sister or daughter, you didn’t call the police. You hung the man from a tree. This was how the taboo was maintained in a culture where both premarital sex and rape were immoral.
The reason I pull premarital sex into the mix is because premarital sex is the cover under which rapists operate. The number of female friends and family members who have confided in me that they have been raped is beyond troubling. It is horrifying. And the worst part of the matter is it’s entirely unclear if the men raping them even know they are doing it. Pre-Sexual Revolution consent was marriage. Before the Law, Family, and God you gave consent. Despite Sarah Haider’s insistence that the pre-Sexual Revolution era had no concept of consent, it is the current status quo that has no model of consent.
I remember in college, some lesbian feminists were going around promoting the “affirmative consent” model. They offered pre-drafted contracts and encouraged us to sign them before any and all touching. The irony that our pre-Sexual Revolution had a contract model for consent (again, marriage is a contract of consent) was lost on them. Later, one of the lesbian feminists would confide in me that she too had been raped. And this was why she was so adamant about these contracts. When she was in high school, her girlfriend would come over to her house—sometimes gasp! unannounced. When her friendly parents would invite her girlfriend to dinner, she would sometimes play footsie with her beneath the table. This happened on multiple occasions. The lesbian feminist had not affirmatively consented to the footsie and it made her uncomfortable that it was surreptitiously in the presence of her parents. This was her rape.
I asked her, so you told her to stop coming over and playing footsie and she just refused? No, she replied. Did you ask your parents to stop inviting her to dinner? No. Did you break up with her? Eventually. .
The law cannot prevent nor adjudicate these claims because by virtue of their subjective, interior nature—they have no objective proof. Because of their subjective, interior nature, things that were not rape in the past can become rape in the future. This is how we got Believe Women as a slogan. Because in this scenario, there are only two options: believe the man or believe the woman.
This leads directly to the first huge negative externality: an incoherent sexual culture that oddly combines much more rape than the misogynist past; much less sex than our prudish ancestors ever had. In a cultural model, that has no coherent model for consent, the only way to avoid being raped or being a rapist is to avoid sex altogether.
Now, the argument against my position is going to go something like my body, my choice. But a maximalist libertarian position for female sexual rights is fundamentally anti-social in the same way that a maximalist libertarian position for Second Amendment rights is laughably incoherent. No, everyone does not have the right to a nuclear weapon. No, every woman does not have the right to spread physical and psychological disease, to produce endless unwanted children. The consequences of both are broad social and civilizational suicide. Only fools and children believe these retarded things.
In this way, the Sexual Revolution was always built on faulty premises. It has a false understanding of sex as a fundamentally private matter. But of course, it is not private at all. Sexuality is a fundamentally social matter. Because it is through sex that we reproduce society. Your sexuality is all of humanity’s concern.
666
Secondly, let’s touch on abortion. The other large concern we heard much about at the debate. Anna Khachiyan is correct that there is broad social agreement on abortion, and that most of the controversy is driven by extremist activists on both sides. After the dust settles, the United States will likely land somewhere near most European states, which in broad strokes restrict abortion after 12-14 weeks unless there is a compelling medical reason involving the health of the mother or the baby.
Ironically, this is not only a contemporary preference, it is also the historical preference. Before the 19th century and the emergence of modern medicine, even the Catholic Church thought abortion, in their historical terms, “before the quickening”—before the fetus’ movements can be felt—was acceptable. Time is a flat circle, folks.
Sarah Haider contended that before legal abortion, unwanted children were an unfortunate side effect. I have no doubt this is true. My childhood neighbor gave a child up for adoption in the 1930s. As was done back then, she was sent away to have her child. They were later reunited and resolve their complicated relationship. It was a happy ending to a sad story that few unwanted children get.
But the problem with this position (again we are contending with female subjectivities that prioritize their own desires over all others) is not the unwanted children. The problem is bad parents. This is an issue of people with low moral character. Traditionally, society has shamed people of low moral character into complying with legal, cultural, and social morality. Why society should roll over here and prioritize the preferences of bad mothers is a mystery to me.
Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with good parents. But why should we deal with this persistent and unresolvable problem by killing the children born into this difficult circumstance? The historical precedent is we use social stigma and if that doesn’t work, carceral punishment, on people who harm others.
As the debate went on, the proposed solutions to the Sexual Revolutions numerous second order effects (the rise of porn, the conflict between motherhood and career, dysfunctional dating markets, incels, etc.) had a consistent character. Porn is bad. But what can we do about it? Being a full-time mother and a full-time career woman is a logistical impossibility. Big daddy government should give me childcare. Women feel icky about using the government to legislate pro-social outcomes. Instead, they would like the government to subsidize unworkable situations.
It’s not a surprise then that the end result of the Sexual Revolution and its concomitant movement, Women’s Liberation, have left us in a situation of social free fall. As women have poured out of the nurseries and into institutions, the broad credibility of these institutions have collapsed. The three least feminized institutions, the police, the military, and small business (which can’t be bullied into hiring unqualified women by discriminatory anti-male legislation), are the only institutions that still have broad social support. Though as we have seen with the recruitment crisis after the military began instituting the new female crusade, Wokeness, they too will fall unless we change course.
Women’s full participation in the workplace is so profoundly at odds with human flourishing that dynamic capitalist South Korea will not demographically survive the 21st century. Meanwhile, authoritarian, poverty-stricken North Korea marches on into the future. This should give us pause.
We have instituted a regime of discrimination against men at all levels of society. Rather than have sex-segregated schools staffed with men capable of dealing with young boys specific developmental and educational needs, we drug them with powerful stimulants that have lifelong negative health consequences. Sorry, Jimmy, you’ve just got too much energy and it’s stressing out Miss Lady. You have to take meth every morning or you can’t go to school.
Grimes complained about the literacy crisis America now faces. What is it? Close to half of fourth graders are illiterate. Who exactly is running the schools? Who is running the Department of Education? Who is churning out degrees for low IQ “Education Majors”? Women. Who came up with the nonsense whole word way of teaching reading? Women. Oh, it’s been disproven for quite some time. We have (male) neuroscientists who can show you on a brain scan exactly why, but the “Dr.” Jill Bidens of the world have their shiny certificates and if you don’t kowtow to them you’re just a meany! Probably a Nazi, too!
To invert the popular phrase, women are trash. They are loath to hear this. Despite their constant badgering about man as a class, they will tolerate no such fair play. As Anna Khachiyan said, women do not like accountability. They all have their own excuses, each theoretically special and unique, as to why just because they aren’t to blame for their own decisions. The harsh reality is the patriarchy is just female scapegoating. It’s unhappy women who demand they face no consequences for their own freely made decisions.
It’s not like women actually like the situation in its totality either. Broadly, women want more women in the workplace. But when you dig into the statistics, they personally prefer their boss to be a man. We see this pattern again and again. Women want what would be best for them personally. But when they encounter the social consequences of that preference at scale, they immediately appeal to authority. It wouldn’t be feminist to call daddy or hubby, so appeals to our new pater familias, the Federal Government, will do.
Women’s desires are impossibilities. The recent article in The Free Press on our dysfunctional dating markets underscores this. Six, six, six. Literally the Mark of the Beast. Everyone woman wants a man above six feet tall, making over six figures, with at least a six inch cock. The problem is: these men don’t exist. Only 15 to 20% of women will find what they want. The rest are doomed to single motherhood and spinsterdom.
As in much of American life after the libertarian turn of the boomers, things only work for the top 20% of the population. The problem with a society that is dysfunctional for the remaining 80%, is that it is just a dysfunctional society. Things that do not work do not continue. And whether women like it or not, the consequences of this arrangement are rushing at us fast. A whole concrete wall of consequences.
The 80/20 World
I enjoyed the debate. It was fun, lively, entertaining—and despite my critique of the positions here, I am going to laud the participants and Bari Weiss, the organizer, for hosting it. But, at the end of the day, I saw no solutions put forward, no difficult trade-offs grappled with. Like the distribution of female IQs, the contestants’ positions clustered in the middle.
And why should we expect a discussion predicated on female subjectivity to really get to the root of the issues. All five on stage are married if not partnered. They have children and enviable careers. In the 80/20 world, they are firmly ensconced on top. But I can’t take you seriously unless you are willing to use that social position to promote the public good, to accept that perhaps your enviable position involves some noblesse oblige. We wouldn’t want an individual woman to face ruin. Better society as a whole be ruined instead.
And so we round back to the bigger problem, women have not been raised to sacrifice. They have no concept of duty. Allowing them to lead society, without expunging such a mindset, is civilizational doom. When we look out at the emerging demographic crisis, where every country’s population is shrinking save some outliers in statelets of the African Sahel, what else can we expect? The insistence that more money from Daddy Government will incentivize women to have more children is easily disprovable. The generous welfare states of Europe have not lifted the birth rates.
My position is ban abortion after the quickening. Ban pornography and prostitution on the Internet. Imprison men who don’t pay child support. Discriminate against all unmarried and the divorced in all public and private employment. And if men must—allow it only to exist at the fringes of society in red light districts.
Now Grimes thinks all this out of hand. According to her, we will find the solutions to the Sexual Revolution. Big Daddy Government may not have worked, but worry not, dear reader, Big Daddy AI is on his way. She doesn’t know how this will happen, what it will look like, or the consequences of this new theoretical social revolution. Mere optimism is enough for her. For me, mere optimism is not enough. I don’t let my Uber drivers speed towards a concrete wall, and cross my fingers for them to swerve.
In the end, we need to be realistic about the road ahead. The likelihood of any of my positions being implemented is vanishingly small until we undo the regime of anti-male discrimination the Sexual Revolution (and Female Liberation) has ushered in. I can already hear the cries. I’m not a walking womb. But the unfortunate reality is, yes, you are. The social function of a woman is to be a “birthing person.” To avoid this fundamental fact of life is to not only betray yourself, your family, and your ancestors. It is a betrayal of humanity and the future.
Until we find firmer ground and enable a pro-social post-Sexual Revolution society, woe be upon the man who argues for the common good.