Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, meaning that history’s unfolding is most plainly seen in retrospect. With all due respect to Herr Doktor, some moments are so transparently situated at a cultural crossroad that they illuminate history even in real time. Improbably enough, the MeToo movement seems to be one.
As anyone following events can see, the ongoing sex scandals that gave rise to MeToo are more than just placeholders in the news cycle. They reveal a shift in the cultural plates of the last half-century and demonstrate the many ways in which that shift has changed American families, workplaces, romances (and lack thereof), politics, and culture. Unlike our forerunners in 1968, those of us living today have access to something they didn’t: 50 years of sociological, psychological, medical, and other evidence about the sexual revolution and its fallout. Thanks to the MeToo movement, the time has come to examine some of that evidence.
Such an examination is not theological or religious or even necessarily philosophical. It is empirical, based on objectively derived evidence and data. Over a hundred years ago, a Russian writer was sent to report on the facts of what transpired inside a slaughterhouse. After setting them down in detail, he added this immortal line: “We cannot pretend that we do not know this.” The meaning of what Leo Tolstoy wrote then is plain. Once the facts of any event are admitted to the record, to pretend we do not see them is to sin by omission and, figuratively speaking, against truth itself.
And so it is with the sexual revolution. Following are five facts about the revolution’s impact that are by now empirically incontestable—five truths that the record of the past half-century has established beyond reasonable doubt.
First, the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception, beginning in the 1960s, followed by widespread legalization of abortion, has radically changed the world in which we now find ourselves.
This is an important countercultural point. Over the years, a great many people have claimed that sex is merely a private act between individuals. They’ve been wrong. We know now that private acts have cumulative public effects. Individual choices, such as having children out of wedlock, have ended up expanding the modern welfare state, for example, as the government has stepped in to support children who lack fathers. The explosion of sexual activity thanks to contraception has been accompanied by levels of divorce, cohabitation, and abortion never before seen in history. And as the MeToo movement shows, the same shift has contributed to a world in which on-demand sex is assumed to be the norm, to the detriment of those who resist any advance, for any reason.
Second, the revolution is having deleterious consequences—and not only on the young—in the form of broken families and the attendant disadvantages conferred by fatherless homes, as has been excruciatingly well-documented by social scientists for many decades. Over half a century into the sexual revolution, the human damages at the end of life’s telescope are now also visible. Today, for example, one of the most pressing, and growing, issues for researchers is the plight of the elderly, who face the challenges of aging amid shrunken, broken, and truncated families.
Google “loneliness studies” and you will find a sociological cottage industry in every supposedly advanced country in the world—France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Portugal. Many social scientists now call this phenomenon an “epidemic.” To mention just one example, toward the end of last year, the New York Times published a harrowing story about what the so-called “birth dearth” looks like in old age: “4,000 lonely deaths a week. . . . Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell.”
It is critical that we not avert our eyes from this tragic picture and what it tells us about the impact of the sexual revolution. Fifty years after the embrace of that revolution’s principles—undeniably because of that embrace—atomization and severely reduced human contact is spreading across the planet.
Third, the libertarian conceit often embraced by the sexual revolution’s supporters, that pornography is a harmless activity, is no longer viable. The damages caused by pornography are legion: Pornography use is frequently cited as a factor in divorce cases; therapists report increased demand for treatment for pornography addiction, including for children. Is it any surprise that many of the stories to emerge from the MeToo moment seem drawn directly from the narratives of pornography?
After all, at the root of all these stories of harassment and abuse is this: men forcing themselves in various ways upon women who did not want their attentions; men who have insisted, sometimes plaintively in their public apologies, that in their own minds, the acts were consensual. As one public figure caught up early on in the scandals put it, “I always felt I was pursuing shared feelings.” Here was Charlie Rose, one of the most prominent television journalists of his generation, a CBS co-anchor with an eponymous show, accused by many women of acts that, if true, are manifestly awful and clearly violated the women’s consent. And his self-defense is the one offered by many other figures lately disgraced who insisted they thought their behavior was welcome. Even former president Bill Clinton had the temerity to tell PBS NewsHour in early June, “I think the norms have really changed in terms of what you can do to somebody against their will.”
Where do otherwise sophisticated and knowledgeable men learn such obtuseness, such emotional unintelligence? Surely the credit belongs in part to pornography, which, like the revolution of which it is a bastard child, has become ubiquitous. Pornography deforms individual relationships and works its way like invisible ink into the scripts and expectations of our time.
Fourth, we can no longer pretend that the sexual revolution operates in any other way but as the world imagined by Socrates’ interlocutor Thrasymachus: It empowers the already strong and makes the already weak even more vulnerable.
This is true, for example, of the young women recruited for so-called egg harvesting, who put their own fertility and health at risk either to keep their own future childbearing options open or to earn money for selling their eggs. It is true of the women and children exploited, drugged, beaten, and otherwise abused who are now victimized once more by the frightening effort to normalize prostitution as “sex work.” And it is true of the young women damaged by the diseases acquired from buying into the promise of sex without consequences. Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise.
This same empowering of the already-empowered is also behind gendercide, the killing of millions of unborn female babies around the world precisely because they are girls. To defend abortion on demand, without restrictions, is effectively to defend gendercide, since abortion is the means for enabling this pernicious practice.
Finally, the MeToo movement offers an opportunity to bridge ideological divides as the traditional cheerleaders of the sexual revolution reckon with the empirical record. The recent scandals have produced powerful new evidence for everyone to weigh. What are the two common denominators among the alleged offenses? One was the assumption that all women are sexually available at all times—what might be called the sexual revolution’s first commandment. The other is that many exploitative men have taken cover in venues closely identified with pro-revolutionary politics: Hollywood, mainstream print, radio, and television journalism, Silicon Valley—and even the New York attorney general’s office.
Yes, cads and brutes have always been with us; yes, accusations shouldn’t be lodged cavalierly and need to be assessed carefully; and yes, as the examples of Fox News and other workplaces have revealed, harassment and accusations of harassment aren’t just a progressive thing. Even so, it is undeniable that a disproportionate number of the prominent men brought down by these scandals have been identified with—and sometimes indistinguishable from—a political worldview that enthusiastically embraces the tenets of the sexual revolution. Indeed, many proudly wore their feminist credentials on their sleeves.
These men infiltrated important cultural precincts under the false flag of being “pro-woman” and succeeded because they were seen to be on “the right side” of the abortion debate. Wolves in Planned Parenthood clothing, they used pro-abortion politics as protective cover for harassment and exploitation, just as Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who advocated for legal abortion many years before Roe v. Wade, also did in his lifetime. As feminist Susan Brownmiller put it in the New York Times after Hefner’s death, dissenting from the fawning eulogies about his purported feminism, “The reason Mr. Hefner supported abortion was not from any feminist feeling; it was purely strategic.” And so, it would seem, is the enthusiastic support for abortion exhibited in the public lives of many of the men accused in today’s scandals. Whatever their personal political views, women need to be aware of a pattern the MeToo movement has confirmed: Being pro-abortion and being pro-woman aren’t the same thing.
What the MeToo moment proves above all is that the time for magical thinking about the sexual revolution is over. Until now, many people simply accepted the realities of the post-Pill world as non-negotiable facts. It’s time to challenge that worldview as one that lacks moral and intellectual maturity. One of the first prominent men to fall from grace, a former editor at the New Republic, exited public life with the line “I will not waste this reckoning.” Nor should people along all points of the political spectrum waste the opportunity to reckon with the massive experiment in chaos and confusion that made these scandals possible in the first place.
