#698 - Mary Eberstadt - Did The Sexual Revolution Actually Benefit Women?

33:07Again, back to that distinction between pleasure and happiness. So the technological shock of reliable contraception for women made pleasure much easier to attain for both sexes, three in the morning and the club kind of pleasure as you put it. But simultaneously it made long -term fulfillment more difficult to secure. And that's the biggest paradox that we are living with. How do you change expectations when they've become so ingrained? You know, it won't be long before nobody alive remembers life before the sexual revolution. I don't. And I'm not, again, not saying let's go back to some golden age.

33:57There's no such thing as a golden age. But we need to recover the truth that radical autonomy is not in our best interests. Any more than it's in the best interests of, say, elephants or dolphins or other mammals, we are social creatures like they are. And the ironic thing, Chris, is that if we look at other species, we understand very well that they need each other. Those horrible experiments on the recess monkeys, separating the babies from the mothers, showing how dysfunctional the babies became when they were separated from their own kind. You know, this kind of thing makes sense to us, and we look back on that and think, oh, that was a horrible thing to do to the monkeys.

34:40Just as we think now, it was a horrible thing for circuses, say, to take individual elephants and separate them from their families, and so we don't do that anymore. The ironic thing is, we don't seem to be able to hold the mirror up to ourselves and to see that we are running that same kind of radical experiment on homo sapiens. Yeah, I mean, think about when you, the videos of zoos where the pen is way too small for the animal and it's not able to roam around and it's not got fresh air and it's in the corner doing a very sort of strange, compulsive behavior. Tell me how different that is to somebody living in a box apartment somewhere in some unforgiving cosmopolitan city swiping through TikTok.

35:30Like it is the same thing, right? It's not a screen addiction that people have. It's a screen compulsion that they have. One interesting point we were talking about romance and the socializing effect that helps people to become better communicators more generally when you're around family members. I just thought about something. This is me, bro, sighing in real time here. You might need to give me a little bit of rope. One of my friends who's very successful with women said that the best advice that he could give any young guy who wants to be successful with women is have lots of female friends when you're in your teenagers Because it's low stakes communication.

36:12It teaches you how to communicate with the other the other sex It you're not trying to do anything so there's no such thing really as failure other than the natural sort of highs and lows of friendship and coming and going and falls out and all the rest of it. I wonder if a extended family, pan generational homestead style situation that would have been at least post -agricultural revolution for a good chunk of time or pre -agricultural revolution in terms of tribes, you're not going to have sex with your sister. You're not probably going to have sex with your cousins. So what it creates there is almost this precise This scenario of training wheels for males and females as they grow up to learn how to communicate with the other sex, very low stakes, no expectation.

37:02It doesn't really matter if you get it wrong because they're family. They've kind of got to love you in any case. And then by the time that you get to the stage where you do actually need to communicate with somebody who is outside of your own gene pool, you've accumulated enough background and skills that you can actually maybe make it work. What do you think about my my bro signs theory? I think that's absolutely spot on nailed it. Yeah go Chris. Yes It's how we used to learn about each other. We have multiple examples of the other sex in our families and extended families and that would teach us something I think part of the the belligerent rhetoric of contemporary feminism is actually covering up a fear, a fear and an insecurity that is coming about because a lot of women don't know much about men anymore.

37:57They haven't had that experience in the home. And I'm not saying that's the only place fearfulness comes from. There are, of course, threats, real threats. But similarly, I think a lot of what we see, I think especially online, is animosity toward women, sometimes coming from the bros, you know, this sort of phenomenon of the holes and whatever they're called, this reflexive misogyny. Again, I think some of that is also coming from the same place, which is ignorance of the opposite sex, just not understanding the first thing about what it's like to deal with the opposite sex and trying to cover it up.

38:46In the case of men with this kind of cheap misogyny, this free -floating misogyny, and in the case of women with this kind of belligerent feminism that apes male tropes and insists on a kind of toughness to cover up the fact that people are insecure. This goes back to talking about the teenagers and the, you know, 20 -somethings out there who really seem clueless and it's not their fault. Part of what I'm trying to do here is give people permission to understand that their misery, their loneliness, is not of their making and it's not as if we can point backwards in time and finger the real culprits.

39:36There are some names that come to mind. Hugh Hathner would be one. For example, Helen Gurley Brown didn't help. There are more. But the point is this was not an intentional plot. We did something to ourselves not understanding how serious it would be. And that's what we have to face now. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I'm thinking an awful lot about reducing the adversarial nature between the sexes, right? that there is an anti -mating, mating culture at the moment, at men and women or enemies. They are resources to be extracted from. They are enemies to be avoided entirely or to be used and discarded.

40:23It's almost like a virtual reality game of trying to be a human. So you go through all of the motions. You're the philosophical zombie of the relationship world, where you try and do all of the actions and do all of the things that you kind of think you're supposed to do, but you don't feel any of the things that you're supposed to feel because you know that the risk is so high, because it's just transient and transactional and onto the next one. So, you know, the fear of being ghosted or left behind or hurt in some way, because that happens. And yeah, I think it's the natural human response is, okay, whose fault is it?

41:01Who's to blame? Who can we hang drawer and quarter so that we can say, ah, yeah, it was this particular person. You know, the scapegoating rally around whoever it is that got it wrong. But telling people that from first principles, think you are in the 1960s and you have this world changing, a technological innovation that was the contraceptive pill. But you have a time where women want to not be beholden financially to their husband anymore. They don't want to have to stay in abusive or terrible marriages simply because they're going to be out on the street with two and a half children and a dog if they don't stay with their partner that beats them or doesn't care about them or is awful or whatever it might be.

41:47And you're given this technology that on the face of it allows women to be liberated from situations in which they would have been bad. It would have been terrible for them. And this means that we can get into university. This means that we can have parity in terms of pay. This means that we can have parity in terms of socioeconomic status. All of those things, here is the freedom. Like, that's a really, really fantastic deal. And very, very few people, if anyone had been able to see the second and third order effects of this, there are genius. There are clairvoyant super genius, right? with astral realm abilities.

42:22And yet, you can look back on it and say, we couldn't predict this, downstream, it caused some effects that nobody expected to happen. And it's almost a little bit like the gambler chasing his losses. We thought that this was going to be good, and accepting that it's not potentially opens up a whole world of difficult conversations. And yeah, right now, the change in culture that I'm seeing is not this like card carrying, like you say, it's not coming from a religious standpoint. It's not tradcon, like hard, right conservatives trying to take women out of the boardroom and put them back in the kitchen.

43:13It's just saying, look at what's happened with overall happiness. Let's see if this is genuinely right for what people want in life, which is fulfillment, connection, health, longevity, family that cares about them. So an analogy that comes to mind based on what you were just saying is tobacco smoking. Because you could say the same thing about tobacco smoking that we've said about the sexual revolution. When that all started, nobody could have seen what was coming. In other words, tobacco smoking was ubiquitous across the Western world, and that was true for a long time, and I can actually remember as a kid seeing people smoke in hospitals.

43:59That's probably not something you remember, but it was that common. What was the thing, Dr. Smoke Camels? That sounds right. I mean, you shouldn't do it near an oxygen machine, but it was that common. So what happened here? We don't see that anymore. You can't smoke indoors, practically anywhere. There's been an enormous change in stigma. Stigma got attached to this substance somehow. How did that happen? And it happened because there was an accumulation over half a century of evidence that that this substance tobacco could cause harm. And there was a lot of resistance to that message. Nobody wanted to hear it, especially if you smoked.

44:46You certainly didn't want to hear that this was bad for you. But little by little, the accumulation of evidence and research made a dent. And again, not just in one country, but across the Western world and across the non -Western world. This substance has been made less ubiquitous and people smoke a lot less than they used to. So my point is we might be at the very beginning of the equivalent of the Surgeon General's report. We might be at the very beginning of people pushing back and saying, look, there's evidence that we are harming ourselves through no fault of our own, and we need to get a little more of a balance here.

45:34We need to get back to some kind of normal that isn't the normal that we have. And so maybe 50 years from now, all of this will look different. Talk to me about how in such a sex -positive world, so many people seem to be checking out of mating altogether. Right now, this is basically a widespread stigmatization of traditional sexual morality? Yes, and there's a widespread de -stigmatization of all forms of sexual behavior apart from marriage. It is kind of interesting. So what does sex positivity have to do with us? Again, I think if you have to resort to a term like sex positivity, you're protesting too much.

46:21Look, what are you not getting about this? Why do you need to make some public statement about something that up until, say, the 1960s people thought was ordinary, normal behavior? So that's what I'm hearing and what you're saying is that the fact that we have words, like that, sex positivity, to make us feel good about ourselves, tells me, again, that there's lot of disconnection out there at the most fundamental level. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. Whatever you, whatever Nomenclature you want to give to it, there is a sexist front and center of an awful lot. Even girl advice magazines, how to sleep with him and not catch feels.

47:07Some of the most popular female podcasts on the planet, in fact, one of the biggest ones was a multi -year diatribe about the perils of relationships and getting and too much commitment and you know the pedestalization of casual sex and sleeping with people who you didn't know their name and all this sort of stuff. And yet we have some of the highest rates of men especially but also women saying that they're not interested in short term or long term relationships at all. And this to me seems to be another paradox. Culture that says casual sex is great. and also that, you know, mating and dating is completely on your terms.

47:49So there's never been more different ways that you can do mating. And yet, there's never been so many people electing to check out of mating altogether. How does that, how do you square this circle? Yeah, when I hear what you're describing, women talking about how great it is to be as free for casual sucks as men. I find that very sad because what I'm hearing in that is Stockholm syndrome. If we can't get reliable men, we will secure them by male means. We will ape the opposite sex and try and be as tough and predatory as its worst members can be. It's Stockholm syndrome. It's not liberation. It's sad.

48:44Yeah, it's um, the modern women are being taught that true liberation is working like their father and having sex like their brother. And I mean, you know, I don't know how powerful the patriarchy is, but it may very well have managed to convince women that they can not only be the breadwinner for the relationship while the husband stays at home and plays Xbox, but that they can also give up no strings attached sex to men that either don't care about them or maybe even actively dislike them. So maybe the patriarchy is in charge all along, I don't know. Well, one of the worst things about our moment is that women have lost a sense of their own and grandeur, you know, both sexes have such a diminished understanding of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.

49:43There's glory in being a woman, and when it feels as if the culture is sending the message that the only way to succeed as a woman is to be more like a man, we are getting something really wrong here, and we are ironically disempowering people. There's glory and marriage, there's glory and motherhood. Those are not statements of nostalgia. There are statements about how much richer our lives become when we take radical leaps like marriage, like child bearing. And the excitement of that, the glamour of that, frankly, is lost on people. We need to bring it back. How is the sexual revolution related to identity politics?

50:33So here's an interesting fact, I think. The first use of that phrase identity politics comes about in 1977. It appears in a manifesto by radical African -American feminists called the Combahee River Collective. And in this document, which again is one of the documents that points to the sadness of the years after the 60s, these women declare that they are giving up on men. They are giving up on the men in their lives. The words fathers and brothers do not even appear in this statement. The statement is all about how we can only trust people who are just like us in our victimhood to understand ourselves.

51:21We can only trust those people to have our back. Now, why is that interesting? Well, first of all, because 1977 is just as the young adults born into the revolution are starting to come of age. And what do we see? We see a kind of shattering and we see what becomes the first episode in identity politics.

51:53So, let's is a victim, everybody joins a group, everybody involved in this kind of politics treats their group in the way that say the family is to be treated. This is my chosen family, whether it's LGBTQ or something based on race or ethnicity or whatever the grouping is. They all share this common denominator of of having their political identity become a substitute for what I think were the old ways of establishing identity. What would those be? Well, first of all, people lived in families. What was your identity? I'm a mother, I'm an aunt, I'm a cousin, I'm a sister, et cetera, et cetera. Again, thanks to the shrinkage of the family, that kind of answer is off the table for many people.

52:47They can't answer that question, who am I, by pointing to their relationships within a family. It's too complicated. What if I have step siblings and half siblings and my father's on his third divorce? It's complicated. What is not complicated is that this implosion of the family has left a lot of people disconnected and feeling in need of protection and wanting to attach to something. We're relational creatures. We have to attach to something. We can't actually live like autonomous electrons. And so the rise of identity politics, I think, directly parallels what we've been talking about, which is the implosion of the family, family networks, et cetera.

53:34Didn't you become a service to two families for people who don't have the real thing. Yeah, I mean the human draw toward tribalism is so great that you will just start constructing arbitrary tribes if you can't find one that seems to make sense. Yeah, and again loneliness is a driver here. It's about not wanting to be lonely. It's about wanting to go online and have your vindication and the number of likes you get from your group for performing some totemic act, if you will. It's about being rewarded and feeling loved and feeling all these things that we all want to feel in a time when many people don't seem to be feeling them in real life.

54:22And that's what's driving identity politics and the problem with it is that it is deforming the politics of the Western world to have groups that are absolutist about other groups that are absolutist in stating that no one else outside the group can understand them. It's a problem. Yeah, what about changes in sort of sexual behavior and confusion around whether it be identity or orientation? Have you drawn any lines between the sexual revolution and that? Yeah, I think it's interesting because so many people profess shock at the phenomenon of transgenreism, for example. Whereas from what I've read in research and written about, shock is the last thing I feel when you think about the confusion we have generated among ourselves, going back to the lack of social knowledge about the opposite sex, for example.

55:25When you think about the messages sent to boys and girls in homes without fathers, for example, boys absorb the message that men are bad, because very often, fatherless homes are fatherless because dad was bad, and girls absorb the message that men are not to be trusted. So where does that leave them? I think it leaves us with this weird incentive for the disconnected to gravitate toward an androgenous mean, to gravitate away from holes of, say, femininity and masculinity, and toward something that doesn't look as scary as those things because it's more anodine than those things. Just a theory.

56:16Look, I think everything's kind of on the table at the moment. There's definitely an awful lot going on and I had Melissa Karnie, who wrote the two parents' advantage on recently. And I think a book comes out today, actually, and it's causing all manner of a shitstorm on Twitter, which is just fantastic. So it doesn't surprise me, and I think this is probably worth driving home again, that people are confused and struggling, right? That life, it's easy to say the world has never been more convenient and comfortable, and this is all the pains and the complaints that you've got. But it's this bourgeois speaking down from on high, sort of like whine -key aristocrat complain to about a world that you really shouldn't.

57:09But it's, there's, from a felt sense that a lot of people have their lost, you know, they're struggling, they don't have the role models, they don't have the archetypes to follow anymore, especially if you're my generation, millennials are younger, the step change between your parents generation and ours was so great. You have parents born in the 60s and 70s that grew up without technology or without, certainly without sort of portable technology that was widespread. To now, okay, so Mum and Dad, what are you going to teach me about how to navigate TikTok and deep fakes and, and, and, and, and nudes and leaked screenshots and, and group chats and Instagram and all that's to online bullying.

57:53It is a time of massive turbulence and a lot of the things that people feel like, that the shame that people feel for almost, they castigate themselves and feel resentful that they're not able to take advantage of a world that they feel has been given to them. And I think that one of the front runner emotions that we should be feeling is like understanding and sympathy. Absolutely. I think also we're at the beginning of a renorming about social media and screens and the internet and all of that stuff generally. And again, it's not our faults. Exactly. We got flooded with this stuff and kids are flooded with this stuff.

58:38You know, like the Jin alleys of London in the Victorian era and before were flooded with Jin and babies drinking and pregnant women drinking gin wasn't thought to be a bad thing. It took an awakening and a lot of reform to ameliorate that problem. But I think the fact that the architects of Silicon Valley don't give these toys to their own kids and send their own kids to schools where these things are not in play tells us a lot. So one reason I'm hopeful is that I think in 10 years, 20 years, we'll have much better strategies for keeping kids from diving down that rabbit hole and not coming out.

59:25Yeah, yeah, it is a machine gun fire from all angles of new stimulus, right? A new stimuli that nobody actually has an understanding about how to get around. You looked at, didn't you look at some stuff to do with life expectancy as well? wasn't that related to it? Yeah, well, a couple of things about that. One, life expectancy has been dropping in the United States for the first time in recorded history. And some of that is due to the opioid epidemic, which became a heroin epidemic, which became a synthetic methamphetamine and heroin epidemic, that we are still living through. In the United States, drug deaths are at record highs.

1:00:07And there's a lot of theorizing about that. I would go back to the question, why are people so drawn to these things? And I don't mean that as a polyena kind of question. We all know there's nothing more powerful than the morphine molecules say. But clearly, the fact that millions of people are part of this tells us that there's a hole there. There is something there that is not being filled by, say, working with your hands, working in a field, coming home to a family, etc. So the drug problem, I think, is partly, again, pointing to what we've done to ourselves. Second thing about life expectancy.

1:00:58The hardest stuff that I've had to read for my research is actually not about kids, even know a lot of kids are imperiled today by the trends we're talking about. It's about old people because what has happened is that the implosion of the family has left many other vulnerable people at the other end of life unattached. So for example in sociology there's been an explosion of things called loneliness studies. It's a really hot stock. If you wanted to be a sociologist today, go into loneliness studies because I'm sure there's a lot of grant money there and rightly so. So why is this? You can just Google it.

1:01:46Google loneliness studies and any country in the Western world. What's happened is that the generations of people who have bought into the promises of this actual revolution who lived as autonomous people, maybe not having families, maybe having a child, etc. but living this radically unattached way, these people come to the end of life and there's nobody there. And that's what the loneliness studies are about. So again, clear evidence of harm is here. We didn't used to have studies like this. We didn't used to talk about the profound loneliness of people at the end of life. For example, in Germany, I seem to remember from some study, some incredible number of people over the age of 80 have not been called by their first name in the past month because there's no one around who knows them well enough to do that.

1:02:49But these facts tell us something that, again, ought to be addressed. So what I'm trying to do is summon evidence from all over, from the popular culture, from sociology, from reading about the misery that young men and women, especially seem to be experiencing these days, and just wrap it all up and say, here, this is what we have to deal with. the good news is we know what the problem is now. So let's start. What does starting mean to you? In part it means listening and what I mean by that is that it's very easy to dismiss, say young people, say the millennials and the zoomers as snowflakes, right?

1:03:44It's very easy to dismiss the sensitivities that come with identity politics. It's very easy to dismiss Phenomena like students with their mouths duct tape shut marching around on campus and retreating to safe spaces and otherwise behaving in these kind of retrograde ways It's easy to mock that we have a lot of people in public life who make a living off it and I understand why Because on the surface, it looks ridiculous. What I'm saying is underneath that is suffering. We need to understand where it's coming from. So the first thing to do to start fixing stuff is to exercise our empathy muscles, which I think are pretty underutilized these days.

1:04:37And to see the suffering people around us, whether we agree with them about other things or not, as victims in the proper sense. The problem, Chris, is that these people aren't victims of the things that they've been taught they are victims of. They're not victims of quote the patriarchy or had our own normativity or other abstractions. Those are very abstract labels for what ails us. So I don't respect them. They are victims of this phenomenon that started before most of us were born that has had the effect of producing a love deficit across the west, a people deficit. Yeah, it's hard to rally a angry mob holding placards against the love deficit, though.

1:05:31Do you know what I mean? Or a technological revolution that happened 70 years ago. It's hard to rally an angry mob period. Wow, it depends on evidence over the last three years or so.

1:05:48Again, if facts were all it took to convince people that you and I are right about this, because I think we're on the same page about this, then people would have been convinced long ago. Facts are not enough. We need to find a language that acknowledges that suffering but also encourages people to recognize it and move on because this is the problem. The problem is that there is no redemption in this grim new world of ours. The world of cancellation doesn't allow a second chance and the world of identity politics doesn't give you a second chance if you are exiled from the group you're dead or might as well be and perversely this makes me hopeful too because people don't really believe that there isn't redemption nobody wants to live in a world like that right we all make mistakes we all need to come back from things and so I think this that's severity of the cancel culture, the severity of identity politics is proving already to be too much to bear.

1:07:03And it makes me hopeful that in five years we'll be having a more reasonable conversation across the aisle about that stuff. That is a future that I would look forward to. Mary, Eberstadt, ladies and gentlemen, Mary, I really appreciate you. I think that you've got a fantastic perspective on all of this stuff. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing? Thank you, Chris. I have a website, MaryEverstap .com, and my books and articles and speeches are there, and the books are also on Amazon, of course. Mary, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.