At some point in the fall of 2017, when nearly every day brought news of another famous man disgraced as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct, I remarked flippantly to a liberal friend that the sexual revolution had not worked out the way we were told it would. “Oh, come on,” he responded. “Women were always treated this way. It’s only now that they can speak out about it.” I made the same point to others of a secular or liberal disposition and got more or less the same response each time.
It’s impossible to know when this “revolution” began with any precision, but perhaps we could date it from the publication of “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey’s two famous studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey conducted hundreds of interviews and concluded from these that most Americans’ private sexual practices differed sharply from their professed beliefs about sexual morality. Holding as he did to a crassly Darwinian worldview in which men and women are highly developed animals and so merely animalistic in their appetites, Kinsey believed Americans could achieve greater happiness and fulfillment only by expressing their sexual urges without deference to arbitrary cultural and religious rules. Except, of course, the rule of consent. That one had to stay.
Kinsey’s many critics, then and since, have pointed out the laughably unscientific nature of his research, but it didn’t matter. The second half of the 20th century in the United States is the story of the slow collapse of a broadly Christian cultural consensus on sexual morality.
At least one sensible way of understanding the ongoing succession of men credibly charged with sexual harassment and assault is that it’s the highly predictable consequence of the revolution begun by Kinsey and his fellow libertine ideologues. Men, especially men of a hubristic bent and in positions of authority, were only too happy to discard the old rules governing the expression of their appetites, but those rules were put in place over many centuries in large part because such men were apt to behave like beasts without them. Setting aside morality and ontology, Kinsey’s presupposition that men are animals isn’t entirely wrong.
The counterargument to this interpretation is the one made by my liberal friends: These things have always happened, only now it’s reported. It’s not an unreasonable point—men have forced themselves on disinclined women since there were men and women. This is the experience of Pamela Andrews in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, and of Tamar, half-sister of the loathsome Amnon, in the Book of Second Samuel.
The question, though, is whether these things happen more frequently as a result of the dissolution of sexual mores. Such a thing is perhaps unknowable in a strict sense, but the important thing is this: It looks and feels like men behave badly much more often than they used to. It’s hard to believe that Harvey Weinstein would have dared to engage in the systematic abuse of women if he had achieved his fame and wealth in the 1890s rather than the 1990s.
It’s for that reason, I think, that public discussions of sexual misbehavior by men have become hopelessly confused. The old rules oppressed women, we’re told, but they also shackled men; now we want some rules back, for men anyway, but it’s never clear which ones or why. Under the sway of the sexual revolution, we were taught that restrictions on sexual relations are irrational and oppressive, manifestations of ancient prejudices, yet meanwhile the rules governing workplace sexual harassment year by year become more voluminous and complex. College campuses are places of license but also places of endless debates about rape, harassment, and the shifting lines between consent and coercion.
The controversy over allegations against Brett Kavanaugh brought these contradictions into sharp relief. Most of the high-profile politicians, entertainers, intellectuals, and journalists recently brought down by credible allegations of sexual misconduct—not all but nearly all—have been left-liberal elites. Those politicos and pundits who deplored their conduct in liberal media venues did not, for the most part, have partisan motivation to assail them as monsters.
With Brett Kavanaugh it was different. A disclaimer: I happen to believe Kavanaugh is innocent of the uncorroborated allegations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford, and the other allegations brought against him appear to me laughable. I also happen to think many Democrats, for all their bluster, don’t care one way or the other: They were not interested in nailing Kavanaugh for sexual assault; they were interested in blocking him from the Supreme Court. Their interest in Ford’s allegations was primarily instrumental, not substantive.
Even so, the allegations against Kavanaugh seem to have provoked America’s liberal elites into launching an unwitting attack on the culture of sexual license created by their ideological forebears. Day after day in the New York Times and Washington Post we read accounts of the follies and dangers of youth culture in the 1980s. When Kavanaugh produced his calendars from 1982, the year of the alleged encounter, left-wing pundits scoured it for evidence of sexual allusions. In Kavanaugh’s 1982 yearbook he wrote, “Anne Daugherty’s—I survived the FFFFFFFourth of July.” To which Democratic activist and lawyer Michael Avenatti responded, “We believe that this stands for: Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F— them, Forget them. . . . Perhaps Sen. Grassley can ask him.”
Never was a 17th-century New England Puritan so pruriently inquisitive about the possible sexual misadventures of a teenager.
Even now, with the country’s liberal journalists combing through Kavanaugh’s early life for any hint of peccadillo, few if any of today’s elites will question the premises of the sexual revolution. They will continue to insist that their interests lie only in harassment and assault and not in cultural norms. But eras don’t end according to the facile arguments of day-to-day punditry. What matters is the conclusion millions of Americans will draw from this seemingly never-ending succession of ugly accusations and revelations.
Liberal intellectuals may defend the heritage of sexual liberation if they like, but it will be hard for them to do that while they’re tut-tutting the high school party culture of the 1980s; and in any case very few literate Americans are likely to conclude from these unlovely catastrophes that the baby boomers who gave us Woodstock and the Summer of Love had it right all along. Young parents are far likelier to want something better for their children than a world full of sexual aggression and recrimination—a world in which one uncorroborated accusation can bring the nation to an acrimonious standstill.
The idea that a society like ours can never pull back from its accustomed libertinism is not grounded in history. Britain of the 1820s and ’30s was far more libertine than Britain of the 1870s and ’80s. There is evidence that concupiscent behavior was commoner in the American colonies of the 1720s than it was after the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s. Already there is evidence that sexual activity is down among teens from what it was a generation ago—evidence, perhaps, of more time spent on social media than in physical gatherings, but also, perhaps, evidence that their parents—the kids who grew up watching Porky’s and MTV—have rediscovered the virtues of reticence.
What comes next probably won’t be some 21st-century form of Victorian public morality. But neither, if I’m right, are we likely to advance further into the realm of sexual chaos urged upon our society by young radicals a half-century ago. Everything comes to an end, including revolutions.
