Is it Time for a New Sexual Revolution?

24:46And it's not difficult to find women raging against a culture of casual sex.

24:52Ross Douthat:But then also people are still falling in love and getting married, right? And they are getting married and falling in love less often than they did 40 or 50 years ago. But the marriages that are made have tended now to be a bit more durable. The divorce rate is down somewhat, right? So you have kind of people who do get married are selecting into marriages that are, you know, reasonably long lasting, are more egalitarian, right? Men do more housework and spend more time taking care of children and so on. And again, there are the compensations of professional success and independence, right? I mean, how do you wait for those?

25:34Ross Douthat:Like, maybe the price of professional success and education is just a little more hetero pessimism. And maybe some people will just opt out. Right. And they're allowed to. Yes. That's fine. And clearly there are people who are, despite all of the ways in which we have redesigned the default life course, such that it is no longer the standard sequence to be essentially match made by your community and then to get married and have children all this default. There are people who are nonetheless doing that. One thing that I would say, though, to feminists, to fellow feminists, is that if we can't find a way of encouraging a feminist way of having children, like if feminist cultures turn out to be cultures that cannot reproduce themselves, then the political project dies within a generation.

26:46Ross Douthat:This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent.

27:23Ross Douthat:It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

27:48Ross Douthat:Just what you were talking about with heteropessimism, right? Yeah. There's just much more hostile discourse between men and women coming from the feminist left, obviously coming from a kind of masculinist right. Yeah. And this, I think it's the negativity that is really striking to me. And again, lots of this, maybe especially in the States, but I'm sure in the UK, as well has focused on men and male alienation. But there was a really good essay in the New Statesman, sort of left of center, right, British publication about female alienation that sort of women are moving left out of a kind of profound cultural alienation, deep pessimism about the whole social structure, like sort of hostility to capitalism and hostility to young men seem to go together.

28:42Ross Douthat:And then you have obviously something very powerful happening with younger men who are sort of deep into forms of right-wing politics that are like, you know, sort of tangled up with misogyny as well as forms of racism and antisemitism. How much of this do you think is just digital conditions? Like just as the pill was a revolution, like how much of it is just the internet is bad for relations between men and women? I think quite a lot. One of the things that the internet does is that it exposes what the other sex is saying about you all the time. Okay, go on. Yes. No, this is something that say more about what that means.

29:24Ross Douthat:So what would previously have been locker room talk or would have been women gossiping amongst themselves is public and exposed in a way that it was never historically. And I think that that type of talk ought to be private. It's perfectly normal and natural for people to have mostly homosocial kind of friendships and to say vulgar or unkind things in private. But now, of course, the internet blasts this out into the public domain. I think that is part of the problem. I think also, and this has been much commented upon, the extent that the internet encourages people to double down on their ideologies is also part of the problem.

30:08I'm sure that this is a big part of what's going on with young women.

30:15Young women are very mimetic. I mean, human beings are very mimetic, but young women I think are more mimetic. So for instance, young women are often the originators of new slang. They're very sort of socially sensitive and fashions and so on often originate among young women. And that ability, which is both good and bad, is turbocharged online because the internet is this remarkable tool for mimesis. Hence why I think you see actually greater political radicalization among young women than among young men. Obviously, the young male political radicalization is more commented upon because younger men are more dangerous.

30:56It's probably the main reason that we're more worried about violence that they might commit. I think the manosphere is unlikely to encourage young men to be violent and dangerous. I think it's quite likely to encourage them to be lonely and sad. And that seems like a problem. but in terms of who has actually changed politically over the last 10 years it's young women who are veering left and young men who've actually stayed relatively still at least the median young man has stayed relatively still yeah you can see that in in polls that there's

31:29Ross Douthat:i think you'll get a slight rightward tilt for young men and you do have you do have some polling that will say you know sort of ask sort of feminist coded questions about like what are your expectations for your wife and are working women good for society and so on. I think in some of those you do see also some rightward movement among Zoomer men. But if you're just asking about sort of general questions of political affiliation, it's a very stark divergence among young women relative to men. And this is very bad for relationships. It does seem as though men and women de-radicalize each other through exposure, through positive intimate exposure.

32:11And that's exactly what's not happening.

32:14Ross Douthat:What about though, so in addition to sort of misogyny on the right and anti-masculinity on the left, you also have a sort of cultural phenomenon in the last few years that is itself sort of reactionary, right? Which is the trad wife, right? Are the trad wives successful reactionary feminists? Are they Louise Perry readers who've taken the right point of Have you? Who've doubled down on the, who've, yes, who found their internet ideology and doubled down. I mean, yes, I mean, trad wives are an internet phenomenon, obviously. Yes. But what do you make of them? I have sympathy with, I think that trad wives are angry and sad for the same reasons that progressive feminists are angry and sad, but they have a different set of solutions, which they think will solve it.

33:07Ross Douthat:Churned butter. You churn the butter. Everybody notices that not only are relations between the sexes mutually embittered, but also there are certain ways in which women's lot is just quite tragic. There are ways in which, say, the nature of the female reproductive system is that it causes a lot of suffering often in a way that just isn't true for men because we have more complex reproductive systems. Pregnancy is difficult. Childbirth is painful. There's no way of opting out. I can tell from experience a plan C section still necessitates a lot of suffering. There's no way through this which doesn't necessitate suffering.

33:46And in very traditional cultures, that's understood as the counterpart to the male burden of waging war and suffering by defending the community. The male warrior and the female, the woman in childbirth are in some sense the counterparts to one another. These are your twin roles. But of course, men don't do that anymore in cultures like ours. Men have basically been excused the suffering traditionally that they were burdened with. And also men do less of the, it's a strange feature of the modern economy, is that the jobs that men used to do, including around the home, are quite easy to automate.

34:29So we don't really need men to chop firewood anymore, for instance. But we do need women to do a lot of care work because that hasn't so far proved to be something that one can automate. So women look around and they see there are burdens that I am presented with, which seem unfair to me. And rather than blame God, which would be one option, there's a desire to blame the people. Or Adam and Eve.

35:00Ross Douthat:Yes, right. Again, the trad option is to... But for many people, they think maybe this is a product of politics. Maybe this is patriarchy or whatever. And there's an attempt to try and solve the problem. And I think tradwise, in a sense, they're doing that, right? Like say the position on childbirth, a popular view among people in the kind of tradwife online space is... Which of course isn't very trad because it's deeply online. So there's an inherent connection there. We're performing everywhere. Right. is that the reason that childbirth is painful and dangerous and difficult is because of modernity has ruined it in some sense.

35:38The hospitals are the problem that the sort of male-dominated, I actually wrote my thesis on this, male-dominated obstetrics has wrested it from the traditional control of women and this is why it's bad. And so you have things like free birthing emerging as a very small subculture, but this is where you give birth not only at home but without any assistance. You give birth on your own in the hope that maybe this solves the problem. And of course it doesn't. So these are wicked problems. They are just wicked problems. And I feel very sympathetic to women and men of all of these different online generated subcultures who are sort of raging against the world and the unfairness of some of...

36:29There are problems that modernity can't completely solve. We live so much more comfortably and safely than any of our ancestors, but there is still pain, there is still

36:41Ross Douthat:social friction, there's everything that can't really be solved. No, but wait, I'm going to ask you to solve them. That's why you're here, right?

37:04Ross Douthat:Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. Eating meat is the key to good health. Nicotine can boost brain function. GLP-1s are a miracle drug. I'm Dani Blum. I'm a health reporter at The New York Times. We're bombarded pretty much constantly with claims about how to live better and feel better, and it's really hard to separate fact from fiction. That's what really differentiates my reporting and The Times, is that I am scouring the science. I am speaking with leading experts. I am making sure that everything I write is rigorously researched, reported, and that I can back it up. And when the science isn't clear, sometimes that is the story, that we don't know the answers yet.

37:45Ross Douthat:And that's a level of nuance and depth you're not going to get just floating around the Internet. That's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times. If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mytimes.com slash subscribe.

38:03Ross Douthat:So I'm really interested in what you think the models of improvement are. Is there a different culture that's imaginable in a world with the pill and the internet, right? And I'm going to ask you to imagine it. You're in charge tomorrow, right? And we can start this as just what advice would you give to a young person, let's say, going to college, going to university, right? We would say over here, going to university with minimal romantic experience who's not sort of profoundly religious in a way that sort of sets a script for their sexual life. How should this hypothetical young person approach dating?

38:46Ross Douthat:Like what is the system that should exist? I guess those are different questions. you can take it either way. Well, I'll start by offering one concrete view, which is on contraception. I am not completely opposed to contraception. I think though that women in particular should behave as if contraception doesn't exist. If you would not have sex with this man, if you weren't using contraception, then you should not have sex with him at all. I mean, in choosing the man rather than the moment, you know, if this man wouldn't make a potentially a good father to your children, then you shouldn't have a sexual relationship with him.

39:20I think I would absolutely say that to my sure to my sons as well right um but i'm not completely opposed to contraception and in fact when the pill was first came on the market it was available exclusively to married women as a means of spacing births and actually i think that that is the key miraculous thing that the hormonal contraception can do is allow women to safely space births for the sake of their own health um because having a baby every year is bad for your body maybe that's my concrete proposal that you should use contraception within marriage rather than as a means of seeming to have consequence-free sex.

39:58But the problem is it isn't actually consequence-free, either physically, but also socially or psychologically. In terms of the rest of it, I tend to think that this might be a problem that kind of solves itself. People are going to find in the the post-digital revolution, there will be people and there are subcultures that emerge who are able to solve these problems, who find solutions to not being completely so deranged by the internet that they can't form relationships with the opposite sex. Something that I'm noticing at least as time goes by is more and more people making efforts to log off and to reject being excessively online as a spontaneous recognition that it is deranging.

40:50So maybe more people will do that as time goes by. And those will be the people who find spouses and have children and pass on that culture.

40:58Ross Douthat:Right. Is that too optimistic? Well, I want to dig in a little bit though on what that culture actually looks like, right? So you're basically arguing that we should have a culture of greater sexual restraint in which people try to have sex primarily with people who they consider prospective mates. So in this world, just to imagine it, there is still premarital sex. Probably not. There's no premarital sex. I thought in this book about just saying... So now we're becoming very reactionary here. Well, is it reactionary? It is obviously completely intuitive to say, for a woman having sex in some sense is one of the most consequential things that she can do because if she gets pregnant by this man, that is, all the options are difficult.

41:52And particularly, I mean, something I think we forget about abortion, up until recently, up until the 60s and 70s, abortion was not just illegal, it was very dangerous. There wasn't really a safe way of having an abortion. So for all of our female ancestors, your options if you get pregnant and you don't want to be are all very difficult. Of course, given that, you should take very seriously indeed who you have sex with and when. And of course, it makes sense to say that you'll only cross this line once the man has been approved by your family and community in some sense. and also has made a costly and public declaration of commitment to you.

42:36And one way of doing costly and public declarations of commitment is through marriage.

42:42Ross Douthat:So you've read, but yeah, I have many questions. So first, in our world, this world, right, where there is contraception, there is the birth control pill, there will be, you know, unknowable technologies around, you know, in the future surrounding reproduction, right? There is the internet, there is sort of a degree of just sort of generally individualism and social liberalization that's connected with technological change and economic change and so on that isn't going away. In that world, is it imaginable to have that kind of stringent norm outside of, again, sort of an intense religious community?

43:32Yeah.

43:32Ross Douthat:Right. Well, I think the religious are going to inherit the earth for multiple reasons. But so then in the future, you're suggesting, right, that this kind of ethic returns via just the return of religiosity. Maybe. Because religiosity is what yields people having children, right? Yeah. But earlier you were saying that feminists, progressives, people who are, if they are religious or not, you know, religious traditionalists, should wish for a world where their own ideas sort of flourish and continue. So what are they, you know, someone who's listening to this conversation who considers themselves a liberal feminist, right, and wants to have an ethic around sex that leads to good relations.

44:16Ross Douthat:Are you just saying learn from the conservative Christians? I'm going to draw a distinction between feminist and progressive. That's fine. So I favor a very broad definition of feminism. Yes. Politics for women, queer women, okay. And specifically, I think politics that recognizes the inherent vulnerability of women and therefore the fact that there needs to be a sort of rebalancing in some sense to account for that vulnerability. That's not at odds with being religious. I don't think. But obviously, some religions are better or worse for women in that sense. And the thing that I am aware, the liberal feminists watching and I completely agree, is that I don't want Gilead.

44:59Or there are various real world examples of this. I don't want a world in which women are completely subservient to men and have no... It's not even just the ability to work, although that's important. It's the ability to do things like you know one thing that I really appreciate about living in the modern feminist society that I do is things as basic as the ability to um swim in public I'm also Australian and um Australia has a real swimming culture and it occurred to me recently that the beach culture that Australia has is so modern and so fragile because it specifically relies on um the ability to share common space without conflict, but also the right of women to go to wear scanty swimsuits, to go into the sea safely without being harassed.

45:49That's the sort of thing that is potentially imperiled by the failure of feminist societies to reproduce themselves. And I'm using feminist in the most expansive way possible.

46:01Ross Douthat:Yes, but that culture is itself connected to permissive norms around sexuality that allow people who are teens and early 20s to say nothing of, you know, older people, right? But they're not married. They want to have sex with someone. They have sex with them in, I think, the same spirit that you might wear a string bikini to an Australian beach, right? It seems to me very hard to say we're going to have a society where there's an ideal of sexual chastity that is at least somewhat equivalent to the ideals in the traditional past and also have Australian beaches. Yeah. I'm trying to be a centrist, Ross.

46:44No, I know. I know, but it's genuinely difficult.

46:46Ross Douthat:Well, or to take another example, right? I think that it is plausible to imagine a world that had an ethic of chastity around sex that was also comfortable with women succeeding in the workforce. I think you can separate those things. But I think it's understandable that historically, feminists look and say, we had the ethic of chastity in a society that used it to control women, tell them that they shouldn't go to college, or they should only go to college to meet a husband and so on. And the fact that two things came in together historically doesn't prove that they go together, but it's an indicator, right?

47:23Ross Douthat:Like, can you separate those things? I don't know. And I also, also another strong argument against the reaction feminist position is to say that, you know, we would, we might like it if everyone sort of spontaneously realized that, particularly in a world with the pill, that it is better for you if you basically adopt soft trad norms of your own volition. But realistically, if you look at every period of the past, really, the way that this actually gets enforced is through something like slut shaming and through sexual double standards. Yes. Is it possible to have, and I don't like those things, I would rather women not suffer like that.

48:04Is that possible? I don't really know. I'm not sure if I have, I can offer critique. I'm not sure if I can be the architect of an entirely new sexual culture.

48:17Ross Douthat:Okay. But in terms of evolutions, right? Like this is why you, I guess, you went straight to very strict norms when I asked you, right? I don't think that... And when you go straight to strict norms, it immediately raises all of the questions that I've just pushed at you, including questions about what happens to gay and lesbian people under these conditions where the sexual landscape and incentive structure is very different. And again, where an ethic of chastity was associated with profound hostility to homosexuality, right? All of these questions immediately come up. And if you don't have an answer for them, is there a gradualist position?

49:03Ross Douthat:where you would say, look, you could have a society where, you know, people were understood to have sex before marriage, but there was a kind of ethic around it that said casual sex is bad. I hope so. I mean, so the one thing I'd quibble with is strict norms. Like, I don't think that a social disapproval of premarital sex counts as strict. Historically, for instance, it was quite common for brides to be pregnant on their wedding day because often they would have sex when they got engaged. History is messy in this sense. The problem though, of course, with trying to, and this is the challenge always of the conservative, of trying to defend any kind of historical society is that people always point to the trade-offs of that model and the bad things about that society, which are absolutely true.

50:04But that's why I'm pushing you on to what extent can post 1950s norms be preserved

50:17Ross Douthat:around, you know, every, I mean, there's, the list is just extremely long, right, of things that you could, that you could throw in questions around consent in marriage and marital rape, right? How much of that is, in the end, compatible in some near future or far future with an ethic of sexual restraint? And to what extent is there just this fundamental tension that we're dealing with where you can have female emancipation or you can have sexual restraint, but you can't have both. Well, I hope that's not true. And I would say that female emancipation is on a spectrum. So one can imagine, because they have existed, societies where women have, say, the right to vote, but also there are clear default templates for having children and it's considered eccentric not to, for instance.

51:15That seems to be possible. Whether or not that's possible long term, I guess, is the bigger question. Because it does seem as if there's a tendency to have a ricocheting between more permissive and more restrictive sexual cultures. And maybe that's where we are right now. When I wrote the book in whatever, 20, 20, 21. I wrote at the end, you know, at the moment, you know, millennial liberal feminism is riding high, but I wonder if there might be a reaction and there might be, you know, you see, you hear these, these trad wives, et cetera, on the internet, you know, maybe this is going to be something more substantive.

51:52And I think that has happened. And there has been a significant rebellion against the liberal feminist assumptions of say the me too moment.

52:01Ross Douthat:But it seems to me that both in sort of the trad wife phenomenon and in the more male masculinist parts of that rebellion, there is just a kind of one, a fundamental unrealism about the kind of society that we live in and how it could plausibly evolve. You're not just going to say, now it's 1955 again, right? That's not going to happen. So what would be your argument from a feminist perspective to the people who are like, what's she doing calling herself a feminist, right? Feminism is terrible and responsible for every evil in society and we just need to bring back patriarchal authority. Why should they care to preserve things that feminism has won?

52:53I think it is good for women to be educated and to have minds of their own. One of the things that we have learned from the sex revolution is that women actually do have remarkable capacities to actually outshine men in some professional contexts. Women are actually just as capable as men are of using their intellectual capacities. it is a real shame for society aside from the interest of those women it's a real shame for society to lose that i would say that that's true it's also the case that professional life is is at odds at certain crucial moments with motherhood and that to for women to entirely imitate the male um life course will often be at odds with having children at all and so there has to be a point at which that kind of gives way and there has to be some site of compromise but

53:52Ross Douthat:but why is it good for the man to help figure out those balances because that's i mean that's what certainly like that's what i tried to do in my own marriage right it's like you are trying as a man in the 21st century a conservative man but not you know not a masculinist influencer right? You are trying to find a balance that enables my own wife to be professionally fulfilled while also having kids. And it is a balance. There's no simple solution, right? But why is that good? Happy wife, happy life. Is that an expression that Americans use? Sometimes. I've heard it. Yes. Yeah. That seems compelling to me.

54:32Do you want as a man to have to manage an unhappy subservient wife? I think probably not.

54:39Ross Douthat:And if you did, That would be itself bad, right? Betray your lack of virtue. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that is one reason too. It seems I am pro-marriage not only because it's a means for having children and so on, but also because I think one remedy potentially, or the remedy that I take in my own life at least to the battle of the sexes is to look at the differences that clearly exist between men and women. and rather than read them as antagonistic, read them as charming and interesting and funny. And there is no better arena in which to learn that than in marriage and to become genuinely fond of the opposite sex.

55:23That seems a very important step on the road towards men and women getting along. And again, that seems to be obviously in the interest of both men and women to have good marriages.

55:32Ross Douthat:And you probably can't achieve that to the necessary and proper degree if you start with an assumption of fundamental inequality. Right? Yeah, with the man as a tyrant. Right. That this is the key insight of feminism is to say that all good things flow from some assumption, not of interchangeability, but some assumption of male and female equality. I think that's true. That you are marrying an equal. Yeah. I guess the reason why reactionary feminism may never find a large popular audience is that I think I just have quite a tragic outlook on these questions. Maybe this is my instinctive conservatism, my temperamental conservatism.

56:21I don't think that there are at scale clear solutions. but I think at the individual level they can be. I think one good thing to say for our current era is that if you have sufficient agency and strength of will, you can almost have it all pretty much. We all have the capacity actually to resist all of the negative trends that we've spoken about today, which maybe wasn't so true for our ancestors. So in that sense, maybe the modern choice is available to us for a good thing.

56:56Ross Douthat:All right. On that note, Louise Perry, thank you for joining. Thank you.

57:27Thank you.