I have argued for the necessity of a third alternative in the culture wars. If ever there was an issue on which this is desperately needed, it’s sex.
The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, in whose aftermath we all live, billed itself as an attempt to sweep away the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism it attributed to the previous era. Yet it turned itself into a twisted mirror image of that very Puritanism.
This sort of thing happens all the time, on both the left and the right: the other side draws a caricature of you, and you “defy” them by embracing the caricature. The advocates of the Sexual Revolution agree that sex is dirty, filthy, disgusting, meaningless, impersonal, and brutishly physical—but they’re for it! The symbol of this, in my mind, is when I occasionally see a come-on for “adult” website, usually in a spam e-mail, with a sales pitch along these lines: “This is the filthiest, nastiest, most disgusting site on the Web!” Who sells their product this way? Who sells food by advertising the filthiest, most disgusting restaurant in town?
And then a show like “Girls” comes along and says: sex is also awkward and ugly and fraught with emotional confusion and insecurity. Great! Where can I sign up?
So what went wrong?
What Went Wrong with the Sexual Revolution
The Sexual Revolution was not just about removing artificial impediments to sexual enjoyment. What it advocated was not merely sex without guilt, but sex that is “zipless,” i.e., “without emotional involvement or commitment.” It is sex without meaning, context, consequences—or human connection.
This is quite perverse, when you think about it. You have a movement that says it is in favor of sex, which then tries to empty sexuality of all value and significance. They seek to liberate sex by trivializing it.
One of the consequences is the well-documented death spiral of the pornography addict who needs more and more stimulation—something weirder, more shocking, more over-the-top—just to get the same level of arousal, like a drug addict who acquires resistance and needs higher and higher doses. When sex is trivialized and deprived of meaning, people have to find some way to fill the emptiness. Some of them will try to make it up on volume.
This also explains what I find most disturbing about the recent “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon: the assumption that you have to make sex weird, forbidden, kinky, and dangerous in order to make it really interesting.
But this is a consequence of the core premise of the counterculture. The Sexual Revolution invariably defined sexual liberation negatively, as a form of opposition to a traditional morality that it was trying to tear down. In practically every variant of its mythology, there is the priggish authority figure that we are all out to shock. (Until we reached the point, somewhere between the emergence of Madonna and that of Miley Cyrus, when there was no remaining way to shock anyone, and it all became hopelessly boring.)
Sex Has Become Politics, to Its Demise
In this as in many things the counterculture’s self-serving portrait of the previous era was cartoonish. Prior to the 1960s, there were plenty of portrayals of sex as something that could be a lot of fun, not to mention glamorous and romantic, without any compulsion to inflate it into a warped caricature in defiance of some authority figure.
But after the 1960s, liberation wasn’t just about enjoying sex. It was about sticking it to The Man.
All of this leads us to the dead end of the Sexual Revolution, in which sex has become all about the least sexy thing on earth: politics. It’s no longer about defying joyless authority figures, because there is no authority figure more joyless than the campus feminist. Instead, it’s about “smashing the patriarchy.”
A great example of this is the cultural left’s ambivalence about gay marriage. It was advertised as a way for homosexuals to embrace the joys of a meaningful, committed long-term relationship. But now some of its own advocates are restlessly admitting that their actual goal was simply to tear down traditional marriage and do away with the institution.
Sonny Bunch recently quoted a Soviet filmmaker who criticized a Sergei Eisenstein film because “There was no socialist element in it.” Read Bunch’s summary of this Social Realist theory of art:
Doesn’t that perfectly describe the modern left’s culture war on sexuality? Sex is treated as an instrument for a political end. Your sex life may not be politically correct if “there is no social justice element in it,” as decided by whatever arbiter of social justice is loudest on Twitter this morning.
