Lecture 10: Responding to the Sexual Revolution

Draft final lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences": How do we restore order to the relations between men and women?

This is a draft of my tenth and final lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture.

Here I consider how we should respond to the Sexual Revolution — especially in light of the failure of most of the opposition (discussed in Lecture #9).

Please keep in mind something about these lectures and especially this one. They are an academic exercise and part of a program of undergraduate and public education. Unlike today’s media academics like Jordan Peterson, I believe that the classroom is for instruction. I have never believed in using it as a platform to inflict my personal opinions on students, and I refrain from doing that here. As a professor of politics, I believe that it is a perfectly legitimate academic role to expose and criticize the abuse of political power, but I do not have the right to impose my preferred political agenda on students. Instead I try to impart information and points-of-view that will focus attention on the most critical questions and elevate the quality of debate. This is also consistent with my conviction that no constructive purpose is served by issuing my own wish list of measures that I would enact if endowed with a magic wand but that have no hope of being enacted. Here I try to offer practical suggestions that are consistent with the values of most people in democratic societies and are likely to have the most positive results with the least disruption.

Comments, suggestions, and questions welcome.

Here is an updated outline of the series as a whole:

General Outline

Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences

Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville

Scope of Lectures:

1. Introduction to the Sexual Revolution

2. Sexual Ideology

3. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:

   Contraception, Abortion, Homosexualiy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues

4. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:

   Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues

5. Exporting the Sexual Revolution: Great Power Foreign Policy, NATO, the European Union

6. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations (Procedures, Sex Education, AIDS, Development Assistance)

7. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution II: Human Rights

8. Effects of the Sexual Revolution

9. Opposition to the Sexual Revolution

10. Responding to the Sexual Revolution

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Lesson 10

Responding to the Sexual Revolution

Source Texts:

• Stephen Baskerville, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (2024), Conclusion

• Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007), Conclusion

• Janice Fiamengo, The Fiamengo File (Substack site, https://fiamengofile.substack.com/)

Further Readings:

• Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (Regnery, 1996).

• Helen Smith, Men on Strike (New York: Encounter, 2013)

• Mark Smith, “Religion, Divorce, and the Missing Culture War in America,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 125, no. 1 (Spring 2010)

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10

Responding to the Sexual Revolution

In this lecture, I present some tentative conclusions and offer some recommendations for how we should respond to the Sexual Revolution. I promised at the start to refrain from expressing my own opinions. Here too, I will avoid compiling a “wishlist” of what I would do if I were appointed global dictator. I will try to offer practical and realistic suggestions for how we should approach and ameliorate some of the unintended or negative consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Here too I will limit myself to what we should do as citizens – as participants in free and democratic countries. I will not preach about private morality or offer advice to private individuals about their sex lives, though I certainly do believe that those with appropriate callings should do that as well.

I stress that these are my own views, and I do not insist that students agree with them. But perhaps they will serve as starting points for more extensive debate.

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A few people seem to believe that the Sexual Revolution has brought nothing but benefits to themselves and society and that the only response needed is to continue the “progress” and push the frontiers forward, with further innovations: removing more restrictions on sexual freedom and imposing more severe restrictions on those who resist or disagree.

Yet, as I indicated previously, the Sexual Revolution – like most experiments in radicalism – has brought unforeseen consequences. Even those who instigated it, and many others who acquiesced in it, have been surprised and even shocked at the results. Others object as well to the intended consequences.

One currently salient example shows how even sexual revolutionaries can find their own principles used against them. A bedrock feminist principle has always been that different social positions of men and women arise from assigning artificial “gender” roles that are “socially constructed” – that is, they are created and perpetuated by arbitrary social conventions and customs or by religious norms having no basis in rationality, and they serve only to restrict women from freedoms and privileges to which they are entitled. Yet when “transgenderists” push this principle to its logical conclusion, claiming they can reject “gender” altogether by “identifying” with the opposite sex or another “gender” – to the point where they adopt the characteristics (appearance, attire, mannerisms, even physical features) associated with the opposite biological sex, with some even claiming to change their biological sex itself – some feminists begin to recoil. When biological males, invoking these “transgender” principles and claiming to “identify” as women, demand access to venues reserved exclusively for women, feminists are among the first to object. This applies both to venues where men and women have long been separated by social consensus, such as public washrooms, but equally to protected realms created by feminists themselves, such as sporting competitions from which men are excluded to ensure that women can win. (I leave out the question of whether “separate but equal” is a valid principle in sexual relationships.) Yet transgenderists are simply invoking the same innovative principles first propounded by feminists themselves.

When even feminists object to the results of the Sexual Revolution – and when feminists are then joined strategically by conservatives in opposition – this suggests that we are teetering on the edge of sexual chaos and nihilism.

Accounts abound today that those who were intended as the primary beneficiaries – women – are profoundly unhappy, and young women especially seem to be trapped in a state of existential revolt that has no end. Meanwhile, the so-called “manosphere” is exploding with resentment, with men complaining about unjust treatment in the judiciary and other public forums and apparently on the verge of a counter-revolution.

Is there some way to restore sexual law-and-order?

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Some developments in the Sexual Revolution, however lamentable, clearly fall within the realm of personal practice and privacy. While at one time they may have been restricted by civil authorities, few today are willing to reinstate such restrictions, and it would probably be unwise to try. Matters such as sexually provocative attire, birth control, and private sexual practices and relationships among consenting adults are now considered matters of private life by most people and largely off-limits to government intervention.

That is not to say that they are off-limits from personal intervention and even private pressure – from family members, friends, churches, and even other private individuals and public figures. In liberal democracies, people are indeed free to live their private lives as they choose, so long as it “is not hurting anyone” (as the phrase goes). But other people have an equal right to express their views about such lifestyles and to have that expression of views protected by the full force of the law, rather than encountering restrictions on their freedom of speech under the pretext that their beliefs, convictions, and opinions is “hurtful” or “hateful” to others or constitute “hate speech”. No one has a right to be immune from criticism or hurt feelings or to silence others.

Other controversial matters involve third parties and cannot be simply presumed to be “not hurting anyone”. Abortion obviously. So much has been written on this controversy that I will not enter into it here, and I have no advice for those who have argued for or against its legalization, except to say that opponents may be ignoring the larger ideological context we have examined.

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Some consequences might also be described as non-political and not directly subject to amelioration through public policy.

One is the fall in birth rates. Whether caused by women entering the workforce and postponing childbearing or by men, in effect, boycotting marriage and families because of the injustices of involuntary divorce, this has bedeviled efforts of governments to reverse it. Some governments’ response – in effect, paying people to have children – has failed.

Two problems that may have been exacerbated by the Sexual Revolution, have also eluded government remedy: pornography and prostitution. Pornography – which has critics among both the feminist left and the conservative right – seems beyond government reach short of censorship, which makes many people uncomfortable. Prohibitions on prostitution are likewise perennially difficult to enforce. The feminist solution involves a legally and morally questionable combination of legalizing its sale (relabelled “sex work”) but criminalizing its purchase (often relabelled “sex trafficking”).

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Some obvious abuses of power are subject to straightforward remedy, remedy that would certainly command the support of most citizens. The epidemic of accusations of various “gender crimes”, including offensive speech, is easily remedied, given the right leadership. Citizens have a right to know that knowingly false accusations of criminality will be punished and that they will not face criminal prosecution for their beliefs and convictions.

Accusations of supposedly violent acts like child abuse and domestic violence can be resolved simply by adjudicating them as crimes, so that the accused are afforded standard due-process protections, true offenders are duly punished, and the innocent are left in peace. Allegations of nebulous matters of belief like “homophobia” should be covered under existing protections for freedom of expression.

There is no excuse in free societies for knowingly false accusations to rage out of control, for citizens to be accused of transgressions which defy clear definition and proper adjudication, and for statutes against “hate speech” and “hate crimes” to infringe their freedom of expression and religion.

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But the most serious matters remain unresolved.

I believe that the central and most serious consequence arising from the Sexual Revolution relates to the status of marriage. Oddly, this is neglected by almost everyone, and it eludes a few half-hearted attempts to resolve. Yet I believe it offers more hope than any other measure for stabilizing society and ensuring civilization survival, if only we approach it honestly and forthrightly.

The ease with which same-sex marriage was enacted in multiple countries indicates that conservatives have been unable to confront threats to the integrity of marriage effectively, despite making it a top priority. Their rhetoric rang out with eloquent tributes to “the sanctity of marriage”, but their rapid defeat indicates that they may not have had an effective understanding of the challenge.

The conflict over same-sex marriage was a symptom of larger problems more than a problem in itself. It indicates how marriage had already been debased and weakened long before this controversy arose.

This is worth making very clear, because of misunderstandings about marriage arising from both sides.

Advocates for same-sex marriage were correct when they argued (in the words of The Economist) that “The weakening of marriage has been heterosexuals’ doing, not gays’, for it is their infidelity, divorce rates, and single-parent families that have wrought social damage.” While these advocates neglect to mention that this “social damage” has been wrought by other sexual revolutionaries, traditionalists’ attempts to take the moral high ground were seriously undermined by their inability to answer this point. Some marriage advocates, like Michael McManus of Marriage Savers, did forthrightly insist that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.” The push for same-sex marriage was a symptom of how debased marriage had already become and would not have arisen otherwise. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.” Though gay activists cite their very desire to marry as evidence that their sexuality is not inherently promiscuous, they also acknowledge that that desire arises only by the promiscuity permitted by the weak terms of marriage today. “The world of…heterosexual hookups and 50% divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” Andrew Sullivan pointed out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us.” Homosexuals were correct that it was not they but heterosexuals who first devalued marriage, but they then used this fact to rationalize devaluing it further. Feminist Stephanie Coontz noted that gays are attracted to marriage only in the form adulterated by heterosexual divorce: “Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”

The point here is that extreme innovations like same-sex marriage, that conservatives are helpless to prevent, are rendered possible only by previous innovations that conservatives themselves permit and fail even to challenge. They might profitably therefore look within at their own failures before they dwell on the sins of the left.

Given this consensus by both advocates and opponents of the Sexual Revolution about the dynamics that continue to propel it forward, it is clear that the only solution to this conundrum is to reinforce heterosexual marriage: The simplest, most effective, and obvious way to prevent further innovations in sexuality and family matters is to make the marriage agreement a legally binding contract. Here too, there is simply no excuse for a society to, effectively, “abolish” marriage using the nihilism of (so-called) “no-fault” justice. Until we are willing to make marriage binding in law, there is no point in trying to contest or arrest the other demands of the Sexual Revolution. Further innovations will continue. Trends like transgenderism are only the beginning.

Making the marriage agreement legally binding does not mean that people could not divorce. It means that spouses who remain faithful to the marriage contract have the assurance that they will be secure in their homes, with their property, and above all, with the care, custody, and companionship of their children. It means that, as with any other contract, the party that breaks it must accept the consequences of his or her actions and cannot impose those consequences on the other spouse and the children.

This also means that the marriage contract will be restored to its role as the guarantor of parental authority and parental rights. Parental rights and authority are traditionally conferred by the marriage contract. As long as this agreement is inviolable, parental rights and authority will be inviolable as well. If the marriage contract can be dissolved at whim, and with no consequences, state officials will have an entree to intervene in the family and the private sphere of life, take effective control of the children, and abrogate the rights and undermine the authority of parents.

No measure could do more to restore the integrity of the family and correct the most extreme excesses of the Sexual Revolution. With this measure, the other consequences of the Sexual Revolution could be brought under control. Without it, the Sexual Revolution will continue to take us into realms we can hardly imagine.

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If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.