The Broken Promises Of The Sexual Revolution - Mary Eberstadt

Who were the biggest winners and losers of the sexual revolution in your opinion? It's a long story, but I think the biggest winners have been men and in particular predatory men. And I think the biggest losers have been romance, men who are not predatory men, and women and children. How would it be the case that a movement that ostensibly gave women more freedom, it decoupled their having sex from always having to potentially carry babies, it liberated them to be a part of the workforce. How would it be that women ended up on the receiving end of something that had a lot of promises to make life better? Well, this is why I've spent two books trying to explain these paradoxes, books called Adam and Eve after the pill and Adam and Eve after the pill revisited because it is a lot of paradoxical fallout. So, let's go back to say the early 1960s before most people listening were born, for example. And back in those days, which I don't remember either, there was a lot of hope about the advent of the birth control pill, about reliable contraception that was almost foolproof. And you can see why people were hopeful. People said that it would strengthen marriage, for example, to empower couples to have control over their fertility. People said that the pill would reduce abortion. This, by the way, was Margaret Sanger's argument for contraception. She believed that it would reduce abortion. And so, despite all of these hopes, the opposite seemed to happen. So, within a few years of the adoption of widespread hormonal contraception, instead of strengthening marriage, what we saw was a sharp rise in divorce rates, later in cohabitation. Instead of the pill and company reducing abortion, abortion rates skyrocketed into the millions within a few years of this same cultural change. So, what I'm trying to do in my research is piece together why this happened. And I'm doing it with the help of perfectly secular sources. These are not books of theology. You don't have to believe anything about religion to understand the arguments of the books. And I think that's important to establish because this kind of talk about what happened after the birth control pill, what did the sexual revolution really do, tends to get confined to a religious ghetto. And I think it's important that people understand that the the reality is upon us, whatever you believe. You can be an atheist, you can be a devout Muslim. You can be anything you want, but you still have to understand that the effects of this revolution have been epic and in more areas than one. Okay, let's talk about abortion then. How does contraception reduce or increase abortions? What what are the outcomes of introducing it? It does not reduce abortion. Contraception increases abortion by changing intentionality. And this is something else that has been well studied and that I talk about in the footnotes to these books. But essentially, what contraception does is make pregnancy a woman's problem. And this is the big cultural change that we see. Back before there was reliable contraception, it was assumed that an unplanned pregnancy was a problem for two people and that they had to figure out what to do about it. The man was expected to bear some responsibility. But once women are contracepting en masse, clearly pregnancy is a a quote failure that is her fault, her responsibility. I'm not defending that outlook. I'm explaining that the change in thinking that resulted once contraception became unremarkable. And that's where abortion comes in. Or to put it another way, the the adoption of contraception effectively ended the so-called shotgun wedding. I assume that's an American phrase. I think people will people will know what that is, right? You It's It's intuitively obvious, right? The dad and the brothers show up at the boyfriend's house and say, "Marry the girl or else." And once again, after the 1960s, that phrase became antiquarian, which tells you something interesting, I think. It tells you that expectations were radically changed. Now, the effect this has had on men is something else that we ought to talk about. I rely here on the work of a sociologist named Lionel Tiger, who wrote a book in 1999 called The Decline of Males. And once again, Tiger is not a religious thinker. He even said that he regarded religion as toxic. But what he was trying to understand was what the sexual revolution did to men because, he argued, once women have sole control over reproduction, men are essentially sidelined and pretty useless, frankly. So, decades before everyone was talking about the crisis of men in our time, this sociologist, Tiger, was seeing it very clearly and prophetically, I think. How would it be the case or why would it be the case that women having control over reproduction decreases the necessity of men? Because it reduces their role as protectors, as fathers. It says to the world what the message that the sexual revolution has sent to the world, which is autonomy is all that counts. And so, suddenly, you have this radical cultural message, which I believe most people in our time have adopted, that sidelines the traditional family, that takes away from men what some of us believe is the grandeur of being a a provider and a protector. And this is why we have seen single-parent homes, that is to say, fatherless homes proliferate because the social approbation for the traditional male role is missing and has gone missing because of the sexual revolution. Okay, so you get an increase in abortions. You get an increase in out-of-wedlock births. You get an increase in single-parent households, which are almost exclusively mother single-mother households, fatherless homes. Men don't have the same protector-provider uh glory, perhaps, that would have previously been bestowed on them. Is there cuz obviously we're talking about sexual revolution and contraception here. What happens Is there such a thing as a sexual revolution without the introduction of the contraception pill? Could you you could you imagine what that would look like? People argue over definitions of the sexual revolution, but I think this one is pretty uncontroversial. The sexual revolution begins in the 1960s with the approval of the birth control pill, which is then quickly adopted across the Western world. We're not just talking about the United States. And the effect of that is to destigmatize non-marital sex because the pill becomes like something that everybody wants to have. Contraception and the adoption thereof becomes a like a big wild party that everybody wants to go to for understandable reasons. I mean, we're human beings, and if you were to ask most people what they would enjoy most in life, sex without consequences is pretty high up on that list, I think. So, you know, it's important to understand this, Chris, because so often people who take a critical look at these phenomena, the sexual revolution, contraception, broken homes, et cetera, are accused of wanting to go back to the 1950s. You know, they're accused of being retrograde somehow. And I don't think those charges are fair. I think we can have a lot of empathy for why the sexual revolution took hold and a lot of understanding of the human human motivations at work back then that are still at work now, but also we can use our reason to see what the fallout of this thing has been because, in my estimation, it has been more bad than good. You think it's a net negative overall? I do. And I think there are different kinds of proof for that. So, for example, there's proof from the popular culture. In one chapter of one of my books, I go through the music of the 1990s, for example, when Eminem is the big bad boy rap superstar. And I dig into not only his lyrics, but the lyrics of most of the bands that were prominent at the time because I think they give us clear evidence from the popular culture that the post-revolutionary age is not a good age for kids. Why do I say that? Well, what are the themes that Eminem and many other rappers and rockers are talking about during those years? They're talking about how angry they are at their absent fathers. They're talking about how dysfunctional the adults in their lives are. They're talking about, and this is particularly true of Eminem, the need to protect younger sibling from the adults in life who can't be trusted. These are deep themes and they speak to a hurt out there that I don't think has been correctly understood and it's why I try to do justice to it in my work. So, there, from just one aperture onto the popular culture, I think we see clear evidence that the post-revolutionary world is not okay by the kids. I think that's a really interesting insight because if you were to begin a conversation, sexual revolution, contraception, and rap, where most people would think that you were going to go would be the objectification of women. Right? That you can, now that you've got consequences free sex, this means that the rappers can talk about my my hoes and my and stuff like that. But it's not, it's about what has been the lived experience and the felt experience of those rappers when they were growing up. And especially if you're some guy from the hood somewhere in America, why were you growing up in a fatherless home? Well, it was largely facilitated in some situations by the sexual revolution and the contraceptive pill. Yeah, I mean, the misogyny is there. There's no sugarcoating that, but I'm trying to look deeper into this genre of music. So, for example, let's look at a song by Tupac Shakur called Papa's Song. It was one of his most popular. And it is one of the saddest set of lyrics I've ever seen. It's about a boy trying to play catch by himself. That's what the song is about and it's addressed to his father by apotheosis. Um, and he's talking about what that's like to try to play catch by yourself. So, there we have again evidence that this music is speaking to millions of kids. It was kids who put all of these guys on the top of the charts. Millions and millions of kids, boys mostly, turning out for the likes of Eminem and others rapping about how sad their childhoods were and how angry they were at the adults. And this continues beyond the 1990s, but it's there I think that we really see this pivot that's so important. There was a big debate in LA a few days ago about the sexual revolution. One of my friends, Louise Perry, who you might be familiar with her work, was was one of the participants and Grimes, who's a music artist, she was on the the opposite side a few other people as well. One of my friends, Rob Henderson, tweeted saying, "There's lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men or failed women or helped men more than women or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know it's too depressing a topic." That's absolutely spot on. And I'm aware of the conference you're describing and I have to say it's really encouraging. It's one of the grounds for hope that, say, 10 years ago when I published my first book, Adam and Eve after the pill, on this subject, there was very little discussion outside religious circles of these issues. There was a kind of omerta reigning libertarianism about the subjects in my book, like pornography, like what has this done to kids, like what is this doing to romance. And it's really heartening to see that now this is this debate is taking place not only in the United States, but in various countries of the West by people with no interest in religion in many cases. And it's a clear example of how ideas do percolate if you keep hammering at them long enough. And I think it's a very healthy sign that um ordinary Westerners are starting to ask these questions and that intellectuals and journalists are starting to think that this is important to cover. What about divorce rates? What did the sexual revolution do to them? They also skyrocketed in the 1970s and into the 1980s. And they seem to have stabilized since then, but for the reason that so many people have dispensed with marriage in the first place. So, in other words, cohabitation rates have risen sharply ever since the 1960s. And couple of notes to make about that. One is that research indicates that people who cohabitate are actually more likely to break up than people who marry. This was also the kind of thing that was once wildly controversial to put out there, but it is now very well established in social science. And the other problem, of course, is that the risks of abuse to children are highest in homes without a biological father. 40 a 40 times increase, I think. Yes. Yes. And that's a statistic that is an indictment of society, I think. And I don't say that to point fingers at any individual family situation, but the social science is unambiguous and it has been for decades. Okay, so we have this raw objective data coming out of demography, coming out of social sciences. Melissa Kearney's new book, The Two-Parent Advantage, you know, looks at this through a policy wonk DC lens, right? There's very little ideology coming into this. How is it the case that the debate and the discussion around this is so fraught a topic? Why is the truth, or why was the truth about the sexual revolution and the contraceptive pill being repressed? How does this sort of fold into culture and and and why this discussion has been so abhorred? Well, once again, getting back to that image of the wild party that was started by the sexual revolution, to continue the metaphor, I think we're at the point where it's 2:00 in the morning and the party is out of control and everybody knows it, but nobody wants to be the first one to snitch, right? Nobody wants to be the first one to call the police or the ambulance or whatever it is that the party needs at this point. Again, I think that former omerta has been broken and I'm very happy to see that that it is. That's a good thing. So, I understand that first-order happiness or satisfaction, like immediate gratification of our base desires, I want to have sex. I don't want anybody to tell me that it's immoral or unethical or whatever and I would like to not use a condom and I would like so on and so forth, right? But if the outcomes are genuinely negative for women, I would have presumed that this would have been, you know, the campaign for feminists to have been flying the flag for. Like this should have been ground zero for feminists that are looking at the data, who want the best for women in terms of outcomes. What Why is this not, you know, the Why is this not the front vanguard of fourth-wave feminism? I think feminism took a wrong turn a long time ago after the 1960s. And stopped putting women first in that sense. So, let me give you an example. Um Another thing I talk about in the books is pornography and the effects of pornography on human relationships and the relation of relationship between pornography and the sexual revolution. Now, back in the 1960s, even into the 1970s, there were feminists who said, "You know what? This stuff is is bad. This smut is bad for human relationships. Uh we should be against it. It objectifies women." Um and you could hear those voices, including some pretty radical feminists. It all seemed to go away. Feminism seemed to buy into a kind of libertarianism uh that benefited men. And so, by the 1980s and 1990s, instead you hear feminist voices that defending pornography as a woman's right and something that no one has a right to question. And this is a sea change that I think tells us a lot about what happened when feminism stopped putting women first. Now, I think we're seeing another course correction here and I think there are feminist voices asking about whether pornography is okay or giving women permission to be against this thing. But of course, it's not just that pornography is bad for women, it's bad for romance, which means it's bad for both sexes. What's the What is the legitimate feminist case against pornography or OnlyFans or something like that. Why shouldn't it be the case that a woman can be completely liberated with her sexuality as much as possible? Surely this was the the role of the sexual revolution was to remove the constraints to allow women to fully be whatever they wanted. Unlimited freedom is a good thing, no? There's pleasure and there's long-term happiness and I think that's the distinction we need to talk about at this point. So even now, Chris, if you were to ask most women, wherever they are in the political spectrum, what they want most in life, most will still say they want a husband and a family. And the problem is that the revolution made these things a lot harder to get because when the sexual marketplace is flooded with potentially available partners, um it makes it it reduces the incentives for men to settle down with any single partner. And that puts a major barrier into marriage and hence having children within marriage. And again, um you don't have to take my word for it. There are some great economists who have studied this question and then they're in the footnotes of these books as well. Have you considered the reduction in the standards that men will meet in order to get sex if sex is more easily available to them? So if if a man, in order to be able to get access to sex, needs to be an upstanding member of society with a good job and he needs to be well known in the local community, needs to attend church, he needs to, you know, ask the father of the daughter before he can get down on one knee. Like the the most the the hardest gatekeeper in her entire life, he needs to somehow get past him. Then he needs to get down on one knee. Perhaps there's a dowry, perhaps you know, all the right then there's a ceremony and all of the people come and then finally finally he gets to have sex, right? That required men to meet a pretty thorough set of criteria, right? There's a lot of hoops that you need to jump through. This isn't to say that all men that got married before 1950 were like upstanding citizens, but there's a lot more to happen. If the alternative is you need to be in the right place at the right time at 3:00 a.m. in a nightclub, men will meet those standards appropriately. And the listlessness of men and the dearth of eligible male partners that women complain, you know, where are all of the good men are is a a huge meta meme that that women talk about. Uh you know, if men can get sex without investing in themselves to get themselves to the standard that previously would have been held for them in order to have got sex, which would have included the father's hand in marriage, the marriage, the ceremony, the house, the all the rest of the stuff. I think that it seems to me the reduction in men's standards that the standard that they take themselves to can be laid at at least partly at the feet of the reduction in what women ask in order for men to be able to get access to sex. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. I think there's been a lowering of the standards for both sexes, but I think the biggest problem here is that um men are not being given their due, frankly. They're not being given things to live up to and strive for, including the privilege of protecting a woman and children. The idea that that's even a privilege is dangerously close to being lost in our culture. And instead what we have are millions of young men who are in so involved in pornography that it's kind of game over for romance. If that weren't true, we wouldn't have therapists who treat men and boys for this. And the fact that we do tells us something. It tells us that there's harm here. This is evidence of harm that people show up to therapists saying, "I've got a problem with this substance." Um so again, part of what I'm trying to do here is just change the terms of debate so that it's not about exhorting people, it's not about beating people up for being bad. It's about trying to honor the the misery and the suffering that underlies statistics like that about pornography use or about of the rise in female unhappiness over the past couple of decades. Yeah, we're hearing an awful lot about the psychological fragility of young people, especially young girls. Where do you think that's coming from? I think social media, as many have pointed out, is throwing gasoline on a fire that's already raging. And I think the fire that's already raging is about what I call human subtraction. So let me walk through this. What really did the sexual revolution do? It subtracted people out of other people's lives, whether by abortion, by family breakup, fatherlessness, family shrinkage. All of these are acts of subtraction and what they mean is that, for example, a 20-year-old today has many fewer people, on average, to whom he is related, whether in nuclear family or extended family. Many kids are growing up as only children. Many kids don't have a sibling of the opposite sex or a father in the home. Now, why does this matter? It matters because we are social creatures. We are like other animals. We learn by observing others of our kind. And I think what we've done is radically reduced the number of people from whom we can learn elementary lessons like what is the opposite sex like uh without going to the internet to find out. Um we have reduced the number of people in our lives who can be trusted to love and protect us. And this has been a profound change, I think. And I believe it is reflected in the rising rates of psychiatric trouble with kids, which actually predates the internet. This is something I've been writing about for 20 years now because it's at least 20 years since the rise in anxiety and depression and other problems among adolescents was well established. And everyone agrees now that that was not something that rose because we were more aware of it, that the rates of these problems are actually rising and continue to rise. I think part of the reason in one word is loneliness because the sexual revolution took away people. Yeah, there's this strange like mass solipsism thing going on at the moment, right? Like the the the this atomized, individualized, all that matters is me, my pleasure in the immediate, like a convenience and comfort at at the expense of everything else. And um it's not a single unidimensional problem, right? It's it's led into by helicopter parenting. It's contributed to by moving from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy where you don't actually need to be in connection with your work quite so physically anymore. You know, the all the way down. Yeah, uh there's a lot going on, but I do think the reduction in social knowledge is at the root of a lot of it. Let me give you a homely example. Uh I was talking with a radio host once off the air about this same notion that we just lack people. There's a people deficit and a love deficit out there. And he told me a story about one of his kids who had gotten involved in the diaper business. She had gotten involved in uh making cloth diapers, which you know, are enjoying a rebound um uh for ecological reasons. So she started selling these things and very often the new mothers would get in touch with her and say, "Well, but wait a minute, how do you put this on?" And she realized that women were coming to motherhood with no experience of babies. And so it was good for her because she expanded her business, but the point is, think about it. Before the sexual revolution, how likely would it have been that a woman would get to the age of 18, say, without knowing how to take care of a baby or a toddler? I think the likelihood would have been very low. And yet now, because of the people deficit I'm describing, because of the diminishment of social knowledge about basic things like how to take care of other people, it's entirely possible for a woman or a man to reach middle age without ever having held a baby. We have inflicted a wound on ourselves that we're only beginning to understand. And I think for the sake of human happiness and for the sake of the people who are wounded in this way, we need to understand it to to get to a less divisive place. What would you say to the people that respond, "Marry, looking after a child below the age of 18 or even below the age of 25, that doesn't sound like fun. I've got a career to go after. I've got an academic pursuit that I'm doing, and then once I finish that, I'm the job market and financial independence and exploring the world and myself and learning about myself and growing. What you're suggesting here sounds ancestral and patriarchal and and restrictive." So, I would say to that person that nurture is like a muscle, and if we don't use it, it atrophies. And it is not the fault of people today that most of us don't grow up, say, with an aging relative in the home, as also used to be common. And fewer and fewer of us grow up in families of size where there are babies and toddlers around reliably. But the point is that taking care of other people is part of what humanizes us. And the fact that we are not called upon to do that very much anymore or that we choose not to call upon ourselves to do that isn't good for us. That's the point that I'm trying to drive home. To get back to the social science, again, since the Moynihan report, since the 1960s, all of these issues have been studied. Everybody knows the sexual revolution has had some very bad effects. And if social science convinced people, then we would be living in a different world by now. And I'm not saying that to knock the social science. It's important. It's important to know where the truth is. But we need something else to get through to people so that they understand what has changed about the world, what's bad for them about this change, um and how to get to a better place. And that again is what I'm trying to describe in my work. I saw some stats, social science stuff, saying that previously women used to be happier than men on average. And now women are less happy than men on average. Now, both men and women's happiness over the last 50 years has decreased, but women have gone from being above to being below, and men have just dropped down a little bit. Uh I mean if the story that we were told about increased freedom and liberation was true, we shouldn't have seen this effect. And I would be interested in asking a, you know, card-carrying sex-positive feminist person, "How do you explain this decrease in happiness among women if ostensibly over the last 50 years all of the things, if you'd asked a woman 50 years ago, maybe 60 years ago, if you'd asked them, 'What is it that you would like for your life or for your daughters' lives?' you know, all of those things have been handed to them. And as your work identifies, what on the surface sounds like a fantastic uh wonderful liberation often has second and third and fourth-order consequences that are wildly unseen and may end up not only negating the advantage, but actually setting people back more than they were originally." Again, 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. Um 3:00 in the morning in the club kind of pleasure, as you put it. Uh 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. Um and I'm not, again, not saying, "Let's go back to some golden age." There'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. Um 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 rhesus 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." Just 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. Like tell me how different that is to somebody living in a box apartment somewhere in some unforgiving cosmopolitan city swiping through TikTok. Like it is the same thing. Right? It's not a screen addiction that people have. It's a screen compulsion that they have. And one uh interesting point, we were talking about sort of 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-sciencing in real time here, so you might need to give me a little bit of 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 teenage years, because it's low-stakes communication. It 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 and coming and going and falls out and all the rest of it. I wonder if a uh 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 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 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. 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 and skills that you can actually maybe make it work. What do you think about my my bro-science 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'd have multiple examples of the other sex in our families and extended families, and that would teach us something. I think part of 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. They haven't had that experience in the home. And I'm not saying that's the only place fearfulness comes from. There of course threats, uh 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 uh um phenomenon of the hoes 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. In the case of men, with this kind of um 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 the teenagers and the, you know, 20-somethings out there who really seem clueless. Um 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. There are some names that come to mind. Um Hugh Hefner would be one, for example. Helen Gurley Brown didn't help. Um 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. Uh men and women are enemies. They are resources to be extracted from. They're enemies to be avoided entirely or to be used and discarded. Um you know, it's it's it's almost like a virtual reality game of trying to be a human. It's like you go through all of the motions. You're the the 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 I think it's the the natural human response is, "Okay, whose fault is it? Who's to blame? Who can we hang, draw, and quarter so that we can say, "Ah, yeah, it was this 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 uh technological innovation that was the contraceptive pill. 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 if they don't stay with their partner that beats them or doesn't care about them or is, you know, is awful or whatever it might be. And you're given this technology that on the face of it allows women to be liberated from situations in which they would have had you would have been you 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, they're a genius. They're a clairvoyant super genius, right? With with astral realm abilities. And yet you can look back on it and say, "We couldn't predict this. Downstream, it's caused some effects that nobody expected to happen. And it's almost it's almost a little bit like the uh gambler chasing his losses. The we we thought that this was going to be good. And accepting that it's not potentially opens up a whole world of of difficult conversations and uh 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 uh standpoint. It's not trad con like hard-right conservatives trying to take women out of the boardroom and put them back in the kitchen. It'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. That's probably not something you remember, but it was that common. What was the thing doctors smoked Camels? That sounds right. I mean, you shouldn't do it near an oxygen machine, but it was that common. Yeah. 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 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. You 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 uh 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. We 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, there's basically a widespread stigmatization of traditional sexual morality. Yes, and there's a widespread destigmatization of all forms of sexual behavior uh 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. Like 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 in 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 a lot of disconnection out there of them at the most fundamental level. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. Whatever you Whatever nomenclature you want to give to it, there is a sex is front and center of an awful lot. You know, even girl advice magazines, how to sleep with him and not catch feels, you know, some of the most popular female podcast on the planet. In fact, one of the biggest ones was a many a multi-year diatribe about the perils of relationships and getting and and too much commitment and 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. So, 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 sex 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 um as its worst members can be. It's Stockholm syndrome. It's not liberation. It's sad. Yeah, it's um the modern women are being taught that true liberation is working like their father and having sex like their brother. Mhm. 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 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 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. There'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 in marriage, there's glory in motherhood. Those are not statements of nostalgia, they're statements about how much richer our lives become when we take radical leaps like marriage, like childbearing. And the excitement of that, the the glamour of that, frankly, is lost on people. We need to bring it back. How is the sexual revolution related to identity politics? So, 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're giving up on the men in their lives. The 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. We 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. So, let's fast forward a few decades. Now, we're surrounded by identity politics. Um everybody is a victim, everybody joins a group, everybody, um involved in this kind of politics, treats their group in the way that, say, the family used to be treated. This is my chosen family. Um whether it's LGBTQ or something based on race or ethnicity or whatever the grouping is, they all share this common denominator 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. They can't answer that question, who am I, by pointing to their relationships within a family. It's It's too complicated. What if I have step-siblings and half-siblings, and my father's on his third divorce? It's complicated. Um 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. They become substitute 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 in the number of likes you get from your group for performing some uh 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. And 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, um 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 um changes in sort of sexual behavior and and confusion around whether it be identity or orientation? Is 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 transgenderism, for example. Whereas, from what I've read and researched 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. When 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. Um 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, um for the disconnected to gravitate toward an androgenous mean, to gravitate away from poles of, say, femininity and masculinity, and toward something that doesn't look as scary as those things, because I it's uh more anodyne than those things. Just a theory. Look, I I I think everything's kind of on the table at the moment. There's definitely an awful lot going on, and I had Melissa Carone uh who wrote the Two-Parent Advantage on recently, uh and I think her book comes comes out today, actually, and it's causing all manner of a shitstorm on Twitter, which is just fantastic. Uh um 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 and this is all the the the pains and the complaints that you've got, it's this bourgeois speaking down from on high sort of like whiny aristocrat complaint about a world that you really shouldn't. But it's there's from a felt sense that a lot of people have, they're lost, you know? They're 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 or 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, Mom and Dad, what are you going to teach me about how to navigate TikTok and and deep fakes and and and nudes and leaked screenshots and and group chats and Instagram and, you know, all that stuff, online bullying. It you know, it 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 and feel resentful that they're not able to take advantages of a world that they feel has been given to them. And I think that, yeah, the the one of the like frontrunner emotions that we should be feeling is like understanding and sympathy. Absolutely. I think also we're at the beginning of a re-norming about social media and screens and the internet and all of that stuff generally. And again, it's not our fault, exactly. We got flooded with this stuff, and kids are flooded with this stuff. You know, like the gin alleys of London in the Victorian era and before were flooded with gin, and babies drinking gin, and pregnant women drinking gin wasn't thought to be a bad thing. It took It took a an awakening and a lot of reform to ameliorate that problem. Um 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. Yeah. Yeah, it is uh a a machine gun fire from all angles of of new stimulus, Right? New stimuli that nobody actually has an understanding about how to 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, 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, and there's a lot of theorizing about that. I I would go back to the question why are people so drawn to these things? And I don't mean that as a Pollyanna kind of question. We all know there's nothing more powerful than the morphine molecule, say. But clearly, the fact that millions of people are part of this tells us that there is there's a hole there. There is something there that is not being filled by uh say working with your hands, working in a field, coming home to a family, etc. So, the drug problem, I think, is is partly again pointing to what we've done to ourselves. Second thing about life expectancy, the hardest stuff that I've had to read for my research is actually not about kids, even though a lot of kids are in peril 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 um unattached. So, for example, in sociology, there's been an explosion of things called loneliness studies. It's 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. Google 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 the sexual revolution, who lived as autonomous people, maybe not having families, maybe having a child, uh etc., but living in 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, uh in Germany, I seem to remember from some study, uh 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. These facts tell us something that again ought to be addressed. So, what I'm trying to do is summon evidence from 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? It'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 taped shut marching around on campus and uh 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 um make a living off it, and I understand why um because on the surface on the surface, it looks ridiculous. What I'm saying is underneath that is suffering, and we need to understand where it's coming from. So, the first thing to do to start fixing stuff uh is to exercise our empathy muscles, which I think are pretty underutilized these days. Yeah. And to see the suffering people around us, whether we agree with them about other things or or not, um as victims in the proper sense. You know, 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 heteronormativity or other abstractions. Those are very abstract labels for what ails us, and so I don't respect them. Uh they are victims of this phenomenon that started before most of us were born, uh 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. Do you know what I mean? Or a technological revolution that happened 70 years ago. It's hard to rally an angry mob, period. Well, I didn't Depends on evidence over the last 3 years or so. Again, 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 the severity of the cancel culture, the severity of identity politics, is proving already to be too much to bear, and it makes me hopeful that in 5 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, maryeberstadt.com, and my books and articles and speeches are there, and uh the books are also on Amazon, of course. Mary, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. 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