Marriage and the Sexual Revolution (Part 1)

Before the advent of the sexual revolution, there were two presumptions that were somewhat at odds with each other. The first was that a man should “sow his wild oats,” that he should come to the marriage bed with some experience. The second was that a woman should marry as a virgin.

A major contributor to the double standard of sexual expression between men and women was the fact that the possibility of pregnancy made the cost of extra-marital sexual expression riskier and potentially more expensive (and not just financially) for women. Men could engage in extra-marital sex without nearly as much thought of the consequences. Social opprobrium was the main deterrent to male extra-marital sex, but even here it was far worse for women.

Of course the main risk for men was “knocking up” one’s partner — something that had both social, legal and perhaps even personal dangers. Often a man who got his partner pregnant outside of marriage would urge her to get an abortion — this during a time when abortion was an illegal and somewhat risky process. The irony of the “pro-abortion” movement was that it normalized the common recourse men had in avoiding the responsibility involved in getting a woman pregnant.

The advent of reliable birth control, followed by the legalization of abortion (both of which were imposed on society undemocratically, and, as it has been acknowledged, unconstitutionally) made the cost of extra-marital sex more or less the same for both men and women. In fact, the de-stigmatization of single motherhood along with government support for single-parent (mostly single-mother) families actually gave women certain incentives for sex outside marriage. In his book The Visible Man, George Gilder documents the reality that in many ghetto communities becoming a single mother is a rite of passage, giving her access to government programs and thereby allowing her to move out on her own. The social cost of this is glaringly obvious but politically inconvenient to address.

It is a historical fact that feminism had its roots in sexual equality — the desire to eliminate the sexual double standard. Removing the risk and cost of pregnancy for women normalized extra-marital sex for women. It also gave rise to the notion that there is no fundamental difference between men and women.

Making pregnancy optional and controllable meant that women could enter the workplace and compete with men on more or less equal terms, especially in occupations that did not emphasize physical differences between the sexes. Since work has tended toward more “knowledge work” and industrialization and automation have replaced manual labor in many areas, women are able to perform at a level roughly equal to that of men in an increasing number of occupations. Areas requiring male-level physical strength, such as firefighters and the military, have been opened to women by simply lowering the physical requirements for entry and ignoring other factors such as differing styles of leadership and the fact of pregnancy.

The sexual revolution has transformed society so as to make it unrecognizable to someone who grew up fifty years ago. Ways society has changed include the following:

1. Wage competition has made single-earner households less and less viable. In other words, virtually doubling the workforce, thereby increasing the supply of labor, has had the economic effect of depressing the cost of labor (wages). This, in turn, means that in most (i.e. ~60%) families, both husband and wife enter the workforce so that the family can maintain a standard of living more-or-less equal to that of their parents.
2. Families have gotten smaller. The inconvenience and cost of trying to care for children with both parents working has tended to limit the number of children a family has. The acronym “DINK” — double-income, no kids — has gained currency to describe couples who choose not to have kids at all.
3. People are getting married less. For many years people noted that the rate of divorce was increasing, to the point that more than half of all marriages ended in divorce. That trend has leveled off, but observers attribute that to the fact that a smaller percentage of people are getting married in the first place. If you don’t intend to have kids, marriage is an expensive luxury. Even if you do have kids, it is often financially expedient not to marry in cases where marriage would affect government support (I have personally known a couple with kids who did not get married for this reason).
4. More and more kids are born out of wedlock, to the point where over 40% of births are to unmarried women. This has a major effect on the children so born; every indication is that they do far worse in areas such as education, mental health, and poverty.

The second-order effects of the above trends (and others not mentioned) are beyond my ability to enumerate. Government economic policy, for example, faces the necessity of maintaining “social programs” in the face of a demographic implosion. This encourages the use of immigration (both legal and illegal) to import cheap labor and support the economy as the population ages. This in turn has effects on social cohesion (diversity is not our strength), while making the social welfare system more expensive. But if the current population is unwilling to reproduce at replacement level, there seems to be no alternative to immigration if people desire to preserve the current mixed (i.e. free market with major elements of socialism) economic system.

(To be Continued in Part 2)