Lecture 5: Exporting the Sexual Revolution

Draft fifth lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences"

Mar 01, 2025

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

Here I explain how western countries export their innovations in sexual politics through their foreign and military policies or through western intergovernmental organizations like NATO and the European Union. (Global organizations, like the United Nations, I will save for the following lectures.)

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:
Introduction to the Sexual Revolution
Sexual Ideology
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:
Contraception, Abortion, Homosexualiy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:
Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues
Exporting the Sexual Revolution: Great Power Foreign Policy, NATO, the European Union
Globalizing the Sexual Revolution I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations (Procedures, Sex Education, AIDS, Development Assistance)
Globalizing the Sexual Revolution II: Human Rights
The Churches and the Sexual Revolution
Effects of the Sexual Revolution
Responding to the Sexual Revolution

Lesson 5

Exporting the Sexual Revolution

Source Texts:

● Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017), part IV
● Stephen Baskerville, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (Arktos, 2024), chapter 5
● Martin van Creveld, Men, Women, and War (Cassell & Co., 2001)
● Elaine Donnelly, “Constructing the Co-Ed Military,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, vol. 14 (2007)
● Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster (Regnery, 1998)

5 Exporting the Sexual Revolution

Like other important political trends, the politics of sexuality and the family has been globalized in recent decades. In fact, it has been globalized far more rapidly and thoroughly than most others. Arguably it has been on the vanguard of globalization generally, driving it in ways that are then applied elsewhere. Sexual issues now occupy – even preoccupy – the attention of the foreign policy machinery and militaries of the most powerful western countries, especially in the Anglosphere, like the United States, Britain, and Canada. It is from these countries that the Sexual Revolution is largely exported.

Foreign policy establishments and international organizations are easily radicalized (“woked”, in today’s terms) because they are largely insulated from the scrutiny of domestic constituencies. Agendas that arouse domestic opposition can be promoted abroad with less resistance. That is why they have become increasingly preoccupied with “redefining” global security, military readiness, trade policy, and more in terms of “diversity” and “inclusion” and, perhaps most elusive to resist, “gender equality”.

Sexual Foreign Policy

Like other civil servants, diplomats are required to be non-partisan, politically impartial, and ideologically neutral. They are also prohibited from involving themselves in the domestic politics of other nations. Yet the foreign policy apparatus of the United States and other western governments has for years treated feminist and other sexual ideology as if it is settled and official government policy. Dissenting opinions are not acknowledged or permitted. US embassies openly promote “gender equality” and sponsor “gay pride” events, and ambassadors participate in “gay pride” parades. They take positions on internal controversies within their host countries that involve sexuality. Even more remarkably, US government officials actively intervene in the internal politics of other countries by funding feminist and homosexualist pressure groups (“NGOs”). American and British agencies themselves effectively operate as feminist and homosexualist pressure groups within the internal politics of other nations – an activity that, ironically, they may not legally pursue within their own borders.

This tendency became especially pronounced during the Obama administration – ironically, at the same time when that administration was largely silent on atrocities like the massive slaughter of Christians in the Middle East. More recently, the Biden administration has also aggressive promoted sexual ideology. It appears that the Trump administration is now curtailing these policies, though we have yet to see what will happen.

Development assistance programs like USAID and FCDO work to “empower” women and homosexuals in other countries. Strikingly similar to domestic welfare programs, they effectively separate women and children from men and keep them dependent on financial assistance. (USAID was recently required to curtail its operations by the incoming Trump administration, and it may be effectively abolished.)

The Welfare-Warfare State

The radicalization of foreign policy has been fairly visible. Less apparent has been the sexualization of the institution that undergirds and enables foreign policy and provides its leverage: the military.

One of the most remarkable diplomatic developments since the Cold War is the increasing militarism of the western Left. Ironic for anyone raised during the antiwar agitation of the 1960s (which actually accompanied the emergence of the Sexual Revolution). Throughout the Cold War, the antiwar Left hated military institutions like NATO, and blamed them as instruments of US and Western “imperialism”. “Militarists” (so-called) were among the original villains of the New Left, though recently they have been replaced by (so-called) “misogynists” and “homophobes”.

Now soldiers who are thus labelled are called upon to sacrifice their lives in distant theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq -- not to defend their homes and homeland but for ideological causes like women’s and homosexual rights that cast them as killers and even connive to seize those same homes in their absence.

In fact, the Left’s current infatuation with military affairs is the culmination of longstanding trends beneath the media radar screen that have retooled the military from a fighting force into a bureaucratic machinery serving domestic constituencies and providing “career opportunities” for desk-bound functionaries such as lawyers.

Under pressure from the sexual Left, an evolution similar to what we saw with the welfare bureaucracy has also taken hold in the military, security, and law-enforcement bureaucracies. Like the welfare state, the security state went from being a temporary expedient created to address a specific urgency – in this case, the hegemony of the Soviet Union – to becoming a machinery for permanent ideological governance. “Deep State” principles pioneered under welfare were expanded using military and security policy.

Comparisons between “the welfare state and the warfare state” may seem counter-intuitive. Yett long-standing politicization of the military has transformed it into a welfare system of its own. The fastest-growing sector of military enlistees is now women, though many are not soldiers but clerks and lawyers. With sexualization, the military has become a magnet for single parents seeking benefits. Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness writes that “Funds spent to sustain stable families have…attracted thousands of young custodial single parents.” Budgets originally devoted to supporting servicemen’s families increasingly go to subsidize homes devoid of servicemen or any other fathers. “In the military, generous education, housing, and medical benefits serve as an almost irresistible magnet for single parents with custody,” Donnelly adds. “Gender-based recruiting quotas increase numbers of deployable mothers even more…which allows single parents with custody to sign up for deployable positions.” Already highly bureaucratic, the military becomes less of a fighting force and more a system of job creation and social welfare. “The military is rapidly expanding the number of child-care facilities to accommodate the growing legions of dependent children,” Brian Mitchell observes. “The cost of caring for everyone’s children has already eaten up funds for other projects.”

This, of course, is only one problem created by sexualization. Since the 1970s, military strength and integrity have been seriously compromised. Standards have been lowered to accommodate women, and women have been exempted from requirements for men. “No sooner did many women begin to enter the armed forces during the 1970s than their presence started giving rise to endless, and continuing, trouble,” writes Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, who details (what he calls) “the damage that feminization is causing both in fiscal terms and from the point of view of fighting power.” He writes that women have far higher rates of attrition, greater need for medical care, higher rates of nonavailability, lower rates of deployability, and less strength, endurance, and overall physical capacity. In training, less is expected of female recruits, standards are lowered both for them and for men in a pretense at uniformity, and resentment is inspired by men toward women and one another. Women require extensive accommodations in battlefield situations, alterations in military structure and organization, and expensive technological changes. Weapons and equipment are redesigned so women can use them, even when the results are inferior. Prior to deployments, many women become pregnant and are excused from duty. When combat commences, commanders are “flooded with requests from female soldiers for transfers to the rear.” With little fear of punishment, women simply refuse to participate in training exercises and battlefield operations, desert their posts, and break down in tears.

Predictably too, flirtations, romances, sex, and pregnancies quickly develop and further undermine effectiveness. This in turn provides the material for further politicization – which also parallels welfare politics. Accusations of gender crimes against servicemen (which recall, also originated in welfare) have exploded become routine: “sexual misconduct,” “sexual harassment,” and more. Even more than in civilian life, the romance and indulgence create opportunities for accusations of sexual crimes against not only men but also against military values. Rather than being presented as a breakdown of both standard military discipline and traditional sexual morality, the hanky-panky is “judged by newer, feminist standards.”

Extended witch hunts have driven decorated men from the services, including senior officers with distinguished careers: according to Mitchell, “men who were expert in performing their military missions, men whom the [services] had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to train, men with decades of experience, who had been tested in combat, and who had offered their lives in the service of their country.”

Throughout the West, van Creveld recounts, “Hundreds of regulations aimed at defining, preventing, and punishing ‘sexual harassment’ were instituted.”. “In one military after another, ‘hot lines’ were opened to enable female soldiers to inform on their male comrades behind the latters’ backs.”

According to Donnelly, “The same officials simultaneously promote the deliberate exposure of military women to extreme abuse and violence in close, lethal combat, where females do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help fellow soldiers survive.”

As with the welfare state only more so, the military’s necessarily authoritarian logic makes it the ideal prototype for the “Deep State.” Military discipline offers a unique machinery for social engineering. By necessity, military men are required to follow orders without objecting, and disobedience is severely punished. This provides an ideal mechanism to indoctrinate soldiers in political ideology, without possibility of dissent, using military orders backed with harsh punishments.

Intergovernmental Organizations

But where the Sexual Revolution has been promoted most assiduously – even obsessively -- is in the major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): NATO, the European Union (EU), United Nations (UN), Council of Europe (CoE), and others. In fact, even organizations whose mandates have nothing to do with family policy or sexuality devote huge attention to it: NATO for example, and organizations devoted to economic policy like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In this lecture, we will discuss NATO and the European Union. Further discussion of globalization in the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations will be saved for the following lecture.

NATO

The politicization of NATO is especially striking, because it is a military alliance devoted ostensibly to collective security and military defense.

Yet NATO is more than a military alliance; it is also an “organization” that some believe is now searching for a new purpose that will justify its continued existence since the end of the Cold War. One result is that NATO has become a conduit for spreading liberal-left ideology, including sexual ideology.

For some policymakers, NATO expansion into new regions – notably East-Central Europe – is imperative, not to enhance security, but to disseminate and consolidate ideology. Since the 1990s, NATO became the vehicle for spreading increasingly sexualized versions of leftism: “redefining” global security and military readiness in terms of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and, most elusive to resist, “gender equality”.

The European Union

European nations increasingly follow the American ideological lead, though most of their foreign programs connected with sexuality are subsumed within the framework of the European Union (EU).

Like NATO, the original mission of the EU has been increasingly challenged and modified in recent years, and it too seeks a renewed purpose in sexual liberation. As one observer notes, “The EU has exhibited a lopsided focus on egalitarian and anti-discriminatory policies in the areas of human life and sexuality.”

The EU is mandated to enact policies only within its jurisdictional “competence.” It was founded on the principle of “subsidiarity,” meaning that governing authority rests at the most local level of competence whenever possible, and that the default authority remains with the member states. Yet subsidiarity is often ill-defined and, according to one study, “practically ineffectual on social policy matters.”

The European Union has no competence to legislate family policy or family law, which falls within the authority of member countries. Yet it is constantly pushing back the boundaries of its jurisdiction and has long involved itself in family and private life. A major driver of this “competence creep” is sexuality. “Gender policy has a dominant role in the moral regulation of Europe,” Maciej Golubiewski writes, “and gender equality principles are increasingly embedded in its founding documents.”

The EU usually justifies its forays into families and sexuality as promoting “human rights,” specifically efforts to eradicate “discrimination” against women and homosexuals and to promote the expansive field of “children’s rights.”

The EU funds activist groups, so-called “non-governmental organizations” that are engaged in advocacy for sexual freedom, which can receive up to 70% of their funding this way. Yet when they operate on funds supplied by the EU it is no longer clear how “non-governmental” they really are.

The irony is that these quasi-governmental bodies actively undermine their competitors, the institutions that do constitute autonomous, non-governmental “civil society”, such as families, churches, and local community groups.

In the next lecture, we will explore how the process takes on global dimensions through the United Nations and other global bodies and actors…

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.

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