Lecture 2: Sexual Ideology
Draft second lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences"
This is a draft of my second lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, to be sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture.
Sexual or “gender” ideology is a term and concept that is gaining currency in recent years, and it conveys what is driving the Sexual Revolution.
Again, the lectures will be aimed at undergraduate level university students and the general public.
I shall look forward to your comments, questions, criticisms, and suggestions, before preparing the final version.
Here is a tentative outline (revised), describing the series as a whole:
General Outline
Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences
Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville
Scope of Lectures:
Introduction to the Sexual Revolution
Sexual Ideology
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:
Contraception, Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:
Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues
Exporting the Sexual Revolution:
US Foreign Policy, NATO, European Union
Globalizing the Sexual Revolution:
United Nations, Council of Europe, and Human Rights
Effects of the Sexual Revolution
Responding to the Sexual Revolution
To be determined…
The Future of the Sexual Revolution
Lesson 2: Sexual Ideology
Source Texts:
Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017)
Further Readings:
Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007)
Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (Angelico, 2015)
E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (Fidelity Press, 2015)
Janice Fiamengo, The Fiamengo File (Substack site, https://fiamengofile.substack.com/)
William Collins, The Empathy Gap (LPS, 2019)
2: Sexual Ideology
At the start, I said that the Sexual Revolution is a true political revolution. It is true that it has not involved a violent insurrection that overthrows one government and replaces it with another (at least not yet). Perhaps because it has been instigated largely by women, there has been little violence against the state (though violence has been used). But while the major revolutions have launched insurrections, the truly defining feature of radical politics, if not a full-blown revolution, is that it is driven by an ideology: a coherent system of radical ideas, demanding political change, and driven by a self-fulfilling doctrine. "A true revolution needs ideas to fuel it,” writes a historian; “without them there is only a rebellion or a coup d'état.”
The most important ideology driving the Sexual Revolution is feminism, which we will explore in depth. Some also refer to “homosexual-ism” – not homosexual practice itself, but homosexual political advocacy, framed as an ideology. More recently, “transgenderism” has also emerged as an ideological force. Together, these comprise “gender” or sexual ideology.
Sexual ideology is not easy to understand – even more so than other political doctrines. It shares roots and bears resemblances with previous leftist ideologies, such as Marxism, but it is different in important ways, and it must be understood on its own terms. Its professed aims do not necessarily describe accurately its actual effects or even its true goals. Rhetorical slogans and manifestos may disguise its true aims – and it may disguise them even from the people who are advocating them. Like any revolution or radical movement, this one has consequences that may not be intended, even by the radicals themselves.
Like other ideologies, its two most basic demands are for freedom and equality: specifically, sexual freedom and equality between the sexes and for other groups that identify themselves in terms of sexuality. But in each case, the demands are more complicated than they first appear, and they can even be deceptive and contradictory. I will consider each of these in turn.
Freedom
Like almost all political ideologies, sexual ideology promises and demands freedom, in this case sexual freedom. This freedom is from both official, government-imposed restrictions and unofficial, culturally imposed moral and religious norms. In this sense, sexual ideology begins from a stance of libertarianism: Sexual behavior is a personal matter, we are told, and what people do in the privacy of their home or bedroom is none of the government’s or anyone else’s business.
This basic principle has gained widespread sympathy. If this were all there is to the Sexual Revolution, then we would have little need to bother with it further.
Among its foremost and minimal demands, the Sexual Revolution has claimed certain rights, among which are the following:
the right to have sexual relations outside wedlock and to cohabit with the opposite sex;
to attire oneself publicly in a sexually alluring or provocative way;
to produce and patronize public nudity, sexually explicit acts, and profane sexual language in public forums like artworks, performances, and media;
to renounce traditional “gender roles” (so-called) and not be bound to responsibilities traditionally assigned specifically to men and women, and to adopt behaviors and roles associated with the opposite sex;
to engage in homosexual and other forms of unorthodox sex;
to be free from “discrimination” because of either one’s sex or one’s sexual practices – including discrimination not only by governmental authorities but also by private individuals in matters like employment, education, and business relationships.
This minimalist, libertarian side of sexual ideology is sometimes referred to as “moderate” or “liberal” feminism or other sexual ideology. Here again, it quickly met with widespread sympathy and success, which continues today. It especially appeals to the young and those with liberal opinions on other political issues. People who sympathize with these demands have increased their influence in culture and politics as a result. It is resisted mostly by older people, conservatives, and religious believers, who find their status and influence decreased as a result.
Some demands made under the name of freedom have provoked more controversy. Freedoms claimed to use contraception, to abortion, and to divorce-on-demand have met with varying degrees of resistance – though they too have been mostly successful. We will examine these controversies in due course.
As with other ideologies, more extreme versions emerged alongside this “moderate” feminism. From the earliest years, more radical sexual militants also expressed aspirations to abolish marriage and the family. Some expressed extreme resentment and animosity toward men, religious believers, and heterosexuals. More recently, transgenderist ideology has claimed the right to change “genders” by practices such as cross-dressing. Now, even more extreme claims are being made, such as the power to change biological sex by bodily alterations (even in minor children), and to have such changes recognized in law. (These too, we will examine shortly.)
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Yet, alongside their demands for freedom, most revolutions also have another, corollary side: a side that can be described as authoritarian and is often repressive and violent. The French Revolution began by proclaiming the Rights of Man, for example, but it quickly degenerated into the Reign of Terror.
This is also true of the Sexual Revolution. Some traditionalists are fooled into thinking that the Sexual Revolution is entirely a matter of sexual licence, which they deplore but which they also cannot do much to change. This myopia has cost them dearly. For sexual ideology involves more than libertinism. The inseparable corollary is authoritarian. This side of the Revolution is often neglected, but it may be even more consequential.
The freedoms demanded by sexual radicals turned out to come with new rules governing sexuality. Sexual morality was not wholly discarded, but traditional sexual morality was replaced by a new morality – or perhaps more accurately, an ideology – regulating sexual conduct.
Important differences characterize this new sexual regulation. While some restrictions were imposed by government authorities (almost all of which have long since been removed), traditional sexual morality was mostly formulated and enforced by moral approval or disapproval exerted by voluntary associations like the family, churches and other religious bodies, and the community. By contrast, the new sexual codes demanded by the radicals involve crimes that are defined, and criminal punishments that are inflicted, by the state machinery: police, courts, and prisons.
This seeming paradox – demanding and even celebrating unrestricted sexual freedom, combined with new sexual regulation and demands to punish an assortment of new sexual crimes and sexual criminals who partake of the new freedom – these two sides of sexual ideology are neither contradictory nor accidental. Together, they create a powerful dynamic that constitutes the essence of its quest for power.
A few examples:
Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of “rape” in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual. (This is especially rampant in the military and universities.)
Demands for access to workplaces, universities, the military, and other previously male venues (accompanied with equally strident demands to engage there in female-only activities, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding) invite accusations of sexual “harassment” against the men when sexual relations inevitably develop (and often turn sour), regardless of who initiates them.
Cohabitation and “no-fault” divorce are demanded to liberate women from “patriarchal” marriage but quickly generate accusations of male abandonment (even when the woman severs the relationship), as well as domestic “violence” and “child abuse,” in order to procure custody of children and the financial awards and assets that accompany them.
Defiant declarations that women do not need men for financial support quickly give way to demands to arrest and incarcerate (without trial) men who do not provide women with adequate income in the form of alimony or child support.
Assertions that women do not need men for protection soon produce hysterical outcries for intrusive police powers, innovative punishments, and expanded penal institutions to punish ever-proliferating and loosely-defined forms of “violence against women,” even when no physical contact or threat of it is involved.
The proclaimed right to raise children outside wedlock and without fathers to protect and discipline them soon turns into demands to prosecute adolescents and even children for “bullying” one another and eventually for real crime.
The demanded right to engage in homosexual acts and public sexual displays translates almost automatically into the power to arrest or otherwise stop the mouths of preachers, “bullies,” and anyone else who objects or ridicules or impinges on homosexuals’ “feelings” or “pride”.
Demands to legalize prostitution feed hysteria to find and prosecute unnamed “sex traffickers.”
The demanded right to engage in homosexual acts and public sexual displays translates almost automatically into the power to stop the mouths of preachers, “bullies,” and anyone else who objects or ridicules or impinges on homosexuals’ “feelings” or “pride”.
The right to breastfeed publicly without government restriction becomes the power to punish employers who impose limits in private workplaces and individuals who privately express discomfort.
Demands for unisex bathing and toilet facilities in university residences lead to… – well, any young man lacking the intelligence to detect the trap awaiting him there may not belong in a university in the first place.
This is the central paradox of radical sexual ideology: Even as it demands ever-greater sexual freedoms, each new freedom comes with a corresponding criminal punishment. The result is an assortment of new crimes and new definitions of crime – all of them involving sexual and family relationships: “rape,” “sexual assault,” “sexual harassment,” “domestic violence,” “stalking,” “bullying,” “child abuse,” “sexual slavery,” “hate crimes,” and more. These new, loosely-defined and loosely-adjudicated crimes have politicized law enforcement and criminal justice, rendered the law vague and subjective, by-passed and eroded due process protections for the accused, and criminalized and incarcerated vast numbers of people who could not possibly have understood that they were committing a crime.
Equality
The second broad demand by sexual militants after freedom – and one also shared with previous revolutions – is for equality, or what is now called “gender equality”. At first, this meant equality between men and women, but it has since been expanded to equality between heterosexuality and homosexuality and other forms of sexual unorthodoxy.
This demand is especially elusive and difficult to understand. Unlike demands for equality between social classes or ethnic groups, it involves equality between groups that are inherently and inescapably different in ways that cannot be changed – or that they themselves do not want to change. Does gender equality require women to serve in the military? In combat? If not, is this “discrimination” against men? If women have a right to abortion on demand, do men also have a right to demand abortion or some corresponding or equivalent right? (What is equivalent?) If a government enacts a law to prevent “Violence Against Women,” does that law not apply in all respects to men? If not, does that violate the principle of “gender equality” and constitute “discrimination”? (And this is aside from the more basic question that isn’t violence against women already a crime, along with violence against everyone else? Does such a law therefore violate the traditional and more fundamental principle of the “equal protection of the law”?) If heterosexuals have the right to marry one another and start families, do homosexuals have the same right? If persons of the same sex can marry one another, can more than two of them marry one another? If homosexuals cannot produce children together, does “equality” require that they have a right to adopt other people’s children? What if the original parents do not consent to the adoption? Or what if the original parents do not agree to the removal of their children in the first place?
These questions have not always received clear or satisfactory answers, and sometimes they have not been answered at all. This has led some to claim that demands for “equality” are in reality demands for power. Some allege that feminists want “equality” without “discrimination” for themselves when it increases their power, but they also want the power to deny equality and to discriminate against people who disagree with this acquisition of power: men, religious believers, heterosexuals, traditionalists. This opportunism and absence of fixed principles was popularized by George Orwell, in his fable Animal Farm, when he wrote satirically, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
This is a common occurrence with political ideologies. At first, they profess what seem to be fixed principles, but soon they become dedicated more to acquiring power, and then they willingly sacrifice their principles when offered the possibility of acquiring more. In his classic work on Communist ideology, Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas wrote,
Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism. Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations, the nation and the people, their history… – all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.
In the next lecture, I will discuss some of the specific changes this ideology has achieved.
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.
'This is the central paradox of radical sexual ideology: Even as it demands ever-greater sexual freedoms, each new freedom comes with a corresponding criminal punishment.'
For males. Corresponding punishment for MALES. Not for the Almighty Victims (females). That is the whole point of weaponizing the justice sistem, after all. To use the institutions of the State to control, demean, and punish the males of our feminist societies, for their crime of being toxically male and not sufficiently under the power of the nearest female.
What the past 150 years of increasing female empowerment yielded was government, courts, media, education, and religion as tools of the feminist establishment. A gynarchy, in all but name.
True, though some women do fall afoul of the matriarchy, if they refuse to tow the party line. And sometimes the roles are reversed in family court, and the woman loses her children through literally "no fault" of her own (often the father is a lawyer). But I agree: The women are seldom criminalized and jailed by false accusations or child support, though I would not preclude the possibility. The point is not men versus women but justice versus injustice.