The sexual revolution had no unambiguous “Thermidor” moment like the fall of Robespierre to bring its most radical phase to an end, but by the beginning of the new millennium it was clear feminism was no longer carrying all before it as it had just a few years earlier. Its institutional legacy, of course, is with us still, and the work of clearing it away has scarcely begun.

In the late 1990s I read and was influenced by Maggie Gallagher’s book The Abolition of Marriage (1996). She pointed out that much of the debate surrounding sex at that time pitted angry lesbian radicals against “sex-positive” liberationists left over from the 1970s. She wished to defend an older way of thinking: marriage creates a permanent bond. It means giving up the right not to care about someone. And she pointed out that marriage in this original sense was not “under threat,” but already a thing of the past. Misnamed no-fault divorce, which really refers to divorce without grounds at the demand of either spouse, had effectively abolished marriage as a legal institution, which presumes that traditional wedding vows mean exactly what they say.

She also noted that one reason for lifelong monogamy was the weakness of the man’s position. She did not explain in detail what she meant by this, but it was easy enough for me to recall my old high school biology textbooks with their pictures of millions of tiny sperm competing to fertilize a single enormous egg. In other words, if Gallagher was right, marriage existed not to limit the amount of sex available to men—as male sexual utopians of the 1960s thought—but to get sex (and families) for as many men as possible. This came as a revelation to me. Feminists were not defending the oppressed, but trying to increase the strength of the naturally stronger sex over the weaker all the way to infinity.

Also in the late 1990s I became aware of a group of men who were responding to the sexual revolution in a way that struck me as profoundly uninformed, misguided, and counterproductive. These men were known as paleoconservatives, many connected with the Rockford Institute and its monthly publication Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. It was my interest in politics rather than the sexual revolution that led me to Chronicles and the paleocons, and I found much of their political thought enlightening, especially that of Sam Francis.

But the editors of Chronicles were also quick to speak out in the most authoritative tones against the sexual revolution, and this material seemed to me clearly the worst that appeared in their magazine. There was nothing on the date rape and harassment hysterias with whose fallout millions of men were struggling. By contrast, their neoconservative rivals at publications like Commentary produced thoughtful critiques of such utopian excesses.

For the editors of Chronicles, the year was still 1969, and the Woodstock Festival had never ended. They knew less about recent feminist-inspired sexual hysterias than if they had been farmers with the old order Amish. In their minds, all sexual dysfunction was men’s fault. Scarcely a single comment of theirs on sexual matters failed to describe contemporary young men as “predators.” The difference between this view and Andrea Dworkin’s thesis that men are rapists was not entirely obvious. Women were virtuous creatures longing for holy matrimony, but men simply used and discarded them like trash. Such men ought to be punished, then punished again, before being punished some more. It was rescue fantasy masquerading as social commentary, with the paleocons casting themselves as the men on white horses in some old nickelodeon feature, riding up at the last minute to free the damsels in distress whom mustache-twirling villains had tied to the railroad tracks.

The reader will note that this paleocon narrative of the sexual revolution does not correspond to what I observed at college in the 1980s, as recounted at the beginning of my last essay.

A favorite paleocon trope was the need to bring back the death penalty for rape. That young man whose trial for “acquaintance rape” I had read about just a couple years before was fortunate not to get a Chronicles editor for a judge. Harsh penalties for rape may make sense in a strictly monogamous society, but not in one where rape has been redefined as a mere violation of a woman’s momentary, or even retrospective, wishes. Today it would result in killing off a lot of men whose only crime was not being voluntary celibates. And advising such men to seek security in marriage won’t cut it either, for there is no longer any security in marriage, as Maggie Gallagher correctly noted.

Gradually, the reason for the paleocons’ misunderstanding of the sexual revolution began to dawn on me: they were all older men who had dated in their youth according to the sort of rules outlined in my first essay in this series, “Dating, Marriage, and Sex in the 1950s.” They remembered their own powerful and unruly sexual urges but were clueless concerning female sexuality, which one did not need to understand in order to find a girlfriend or wife in those days. They never said anything about female attraction to status, wealth, power, or even good looks. They were like men of the 1950s who had never noticed that their dates were excited over Elvis Presley. Their complete understanding of the opposite sex was “women want marriage.” They may even have imagined young women anxiously seeking out men of the most sterling moral character for this purpose, i.e., men such as all of them used to be when they were young.

They also appeared to be unaware of something Maggie Gallagher remarked upon as obvious: the weakness of the man’s natural position. Most of them probably thought they had chosen their wives, when in reality it was their wives who had chosen them. And if you do not know that women constitute the supply side of sex, and are therefore the primary choosers in the mating dance, nothing much you might have to say about sex is going to be of any value. It would be like sounding off on complex economic issues without ever having heard of supply and demand.

In the minds of these older male traditionalists, the sexual revolution must have liberated male sexuality, the only kind with which they were familiar. Those degenerate hippies of the late 1960s must have forced themselves on poor, misguided hippie girls. And their successors must be continuing to do so right down to the present. Date rape was no hoax, but the inevitable result of liberating male desire. Harassment law was no more than a reasonable response to men whose urges were spinning out of control. This whole narrative was a chivalrous male version of Andrea Dworkin’s nightmare vision of women getting raped and violated everywhere all the time. And it was no closer to the truth, which can be summarized as follows: When monogamy breaks down, the result is intensive polygyny driven by female desire. If sexual behavior were driven by male urges instead, the result of liberating those urges would be all the men gang-banging the most attractive young women—something never observed outside a pornographic movie.

Speaking of pornography, traditionalists are still up in arms over it, just as they were in the 1950s, and just as they probably always will be. And pornography has undoubtedly gotten both worse and far more abundant. “Streaming” internet porn has proven addictive to many young men in a way the girly magazines I remember from the 1970s never were, and it has measurable effects on the male brain and sexual functioning. The reader may consult Gary Wilson’s enlightening book Your Brain on Porn for details. The most important point to grasp is that the people most harmed by pornography are not the sluts who make the stuff for easy money, but the male end-users. Porn whores are exploiting these men, not vice-versa.

But another pattern has persisted as well. Only male sexual substitutes carry moral and social opprobrium. Betty Page is still considered worse than Elvis Presley. Romance fiction and celebrity gossip publications (like People magazine with its annual feature on the “sexiest man alive”) go their merry way without a peep of opposition. They may be laughed at as frivolous, which they certainly are, but not denounced as immoral. But I suspect that if women were to start purchasing pictures of naked men to gawk at, there would be no lack of men defending them. In fact, I would bet the house on it. Pornography is condemned with such fervor not because it is objectively more harmful than female sex substitutes, but because it is designed to appeal to men.

Even women’s advice books have gotten worse, and now include detailed, do-it-yourself guides to divorcing your husband, bankrupting him in divorce court, and destroying your own family by separating your children from their father. To my knowledge, no one is calling for outlawing such publications or punishing those who profit from them; only pornography and pornographers call forth such a response. Yet women control the supply of sex, and so bad influences on their behavior are likely to be far more consequential than the influence of pornography on men. In my view, if better and more reliable women were available to men, fewer of them would be turning to a substitute like pornography in the first place. What does it say about today’s women that so many men clearly prefer porn?

The young men of the 1990s who bore the full brunt of the hate campaigns against date rape and harassment remained strangely silent during those years. As I have repeatedly noted, men do not like to complain, but there are limits to how far even the toughest and most stoical of men can be driven. Early in the new millennium, I began picking up on men’s reactions to the sexual anarcho-tyranny and female utopianism of the 1990s on that brand-new technical marvel known as “the internet.” Anonymous discussion forums emerged where men could share their experiences and reflections without fear of ridicule. One comment that has always stuck in my mind was, “If women had a lick of damned sense they would be in the streets demanding the return of their traditional meal ticket”—marriage to a man obliged to support them—“but of course, they don’t.”

One experience reported by many of these men might be labelled “women arriving ten (or fifteen, or twenty) years late to the party.” It happens like this: a lonely young bachelor toils at his job day-in, day-out, watching his words carefully to avoid harassment accusations while he wonders where his wife is hiding. Then, well into his thirties, he finds himself being approached by pre-menopausal women his own age offering him transparently insincere compliments. He understands, of course, that these are the same female contemporaries who have been ignoring him ever since high school. It is finally dawning on such spinsters that reading Cosmo all these years has been a colossal waste of time. No movie star would be showing up to make all their dreams come true, so they were reluctantly resigning themselves to socializing with mortal men whom in their heart of hearts they still considered not good enough for them. Naturally, no man is going to feel flattered by such belated attentions, nor attracted to the women offering them. I once heard a man say of these women, “If the kitten didn’t want me, I don’t want the cat.” So the men tell them, in effect, “thanks, but no thanks.” To the women, this is obvious confirmation that men are bastards after all.

And there are some women to whom such a realization never comes. They persist right on up to menopause and beyond dreaming about getting swept off their feet by an “alpha male,” rendered chaste through lust. I remember hearing of one woman who openly stated that she could never compromise at all regarding men, no imperfection was tolerable. Of course, she might as well have taken a vow of celibacy. Christianity actually developed a teaching that nuns are “brides of Christ.” How different is that, really, from the attitude of the above-mentioned woman that no one short of a god is good enough for her?

I have a favorite anecdote about women showing up too late. It concerns a man who exactly fit the description of someone a mother of the 1950s would have wanted to see her daughter dating and marrying. He was ambitious, hard-working, clean-living, and dreamed of becoming a husband and father. But no woman was interested in him. So he did what good men do in such a situation. He went right on plugging away at his job and his life without complaint. The money he had hoped would pay for his children’s upbringing accumulated uselessly in a savings account year after year. Being a man of modest habits, he did not touch it.

Eventually he found himself well into his thirties with no marriage prospects at all, but with his wealth multiplying through compound interest and prudent investment. At last, our temperamentally modest and abstemious hero, seeing no possibility of starting a family, decided for the first time in his life to do something nice for himself. He took some money out of his savings account and bought himself a really first-rate sports car, which by this time he could easily afford. Within days, he found himself besieged by women with compliments on his wonderful personality.

Also early in the new millennium I became aware of another male response to the challenge of feminism and women’s sexual liberation: the pickup artist scene. These were younger guys who studied evolutionary theory and field-tested it in bars and other social spots to get women into bed. They obviously appreciated that this was no easy task for most men. They were too young to remember the “more sex” hoax of the early 1970s, and many clearly suspected they were having a more difficult time with women than previous generations. But they were determined to succeed, and some did. Yet a few more young men learning how to lure sluts into bed was not going to lead to a general revival of family life or raise Western birthrates back up to replacement level.

Some of the material put out by these pickup artists was genuinely enlightening, confirming and illustrating the evolutionary theory of sexual behavior. But I could not suppress the thought that no previous generation of men had found it necessary to master evolutionary psychology in order to get a woman. The paleocons were living proof. Most of them were married, and they understood absolutely nothing about women. Maggie Gallagher was obviously correct. Lifelong monogamous marriage had existed to make things easier for men, to provide a bit of institutional support for the man’s naturally weak sexual position. But no man seemed to have grasped this.

In another interesting development, rumors began to swirl that men were starting to avoid marriage altogether due to fear of divorce. A newspaper column published in 2002 introduced the concept of a male “marriage strike.” Is there a single young woman in America today unaware that she can cash out of her marriage the moment she becomes bored or dissatisfied with it? Plenty of forces within our society encourage her to do just that. Consider the recent Hollywood genre of “divorce porn,” typified by Eat, Pray, Love (2010), in which ditching a boring husband magically transforms a woman’s life into an exciting adventure—with a far more attractive man as her big reward at the end!

Is it reasonable to expect American men to reman unaware of the dangers of divorce, or to go on behaving as if they were? How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away before Charlie Brown begins to wise up?

So yes, men are beginning to avoid marriage. I split my sides laughing at a website called “nomarriage.com” apparently created by one of the strikers (NB: not to be confused with the current nomarriage.com site, which only dates from 2011; the one I found so entertaining can still be perused here.)

Of course, denunciations of such men have followed in abundance. They are “cowards” and “losers” who do not want to grow up and accept life’s responsibilities, etc. For most social commentators, especially men, nothing can ever be women’s fault. “Conservative” Senator Josh Hawley has recently joined the chorus of public figures scolding bachelors for attempting to avoid being plundered by ex-wives and the Office of Child Support Enforcement; as Stephen Baskerville points out, Hawley’s own career began as one of the plunderers.

Some men have another reason for shunning marriage: distaste at the idea of marrying a slut. For despite all the new punishments aimed at men as harassers and rapists, many women have gone right on indulging themselves sexually with men they find attractive, just as Cosmo encourages. Sometimes these women find themselves in their thirties with a history of several abortions and perhaps one or two surviving bastard children tagging along behind them—but still no husband. Contemporary men will be happy to tell you about the efforts being made to manipulate and shame them into marrying such women. “Man up and marry those sluts” is how they summarize the message being directed at them. But what is unmanly about not wanting to devote one’s life to paying the bills for another man’s discarded girlfriend and the bastards he sired upon her? As evolutionist Roderick Kaine has written: “Disgust toward the idea of commitment to whores is the correct attitude for men to have, and it should be encouraged” (Smart and SeXy, 217). Besides, if women wanted “equality in the workplace” so damned much, what is wrong with letting them pay their own way in life?

Some men have even begun to realize that a mere marriage strike is not enough. Given the dangers posed by sexual harassment and date rape laws, the only real way for a man to guarantee his own safety is to avoid women altogether. Nearly twenty years ago I discovered websites recommending the complete shunning of the female sex, sites obviously created by men with very traditional views on marriage and sex roles. These men traded horror stories about the female behavior they had observed on dates and elsewhere. With few exceptions, the women they had met were clearly unfit for marriage or motherhood, simultaneously unchaste and certain they deserved a handsome prince charming able to transform their lives into a romance novel fantasy.

In short, the women these men had attempted to date in the hope of finding a life-partner and helpmeet were the same monsters of feminine egoism described at the end of my last essay, the natural product of an education combining the sexual utopianism of Cosmopolitan magazine with the misandry of radical feminism. All such women were perfectly aware how easy and lucrative it could be to bail out of any marriage they became bored with; many consciously planned their divorces before the wedding.

Observing all this, certain men decided they had finally had enough. There was nothing left for it but to force such women to confront the folly of their ways by refusing them access to traditionally-minded men like themselves. Celibacy was better than divorce court and possible arrest as a “deadbeat dad.” Some of the men were considering expatriating to try to start families. (I am thinking here principally of the americanwomensuck.com website most active between 2003 and 2009, and still viewable at https://web.archive.org/web/20090215000000*/americanwomensuck.com. It had competitors, however.)

I soon discovered there was another group of men caught between the pincers of female insistence on exceptional sexual attractiveness and the feminist hate campaigns against “harassers,” and these men were not ready to resign themselves to chastity. Braving ridicule and contempt, they began openly complaining of their inability to find a mate, labelling themselves “involuntary celibates” or “incels,” and sometimes lashing out violently. Those voluntarily shunning women turned out to be the more self-controlled among contemporary men. Sexual dysfunction is clearly leading our society into new and dangerous territory.

At the very same time incels and woman-shunners were lamenting the impossibility of finding a good wife, the paleocons were ridiculing men who used pornography instead of “asking a real woman out”—as if there were simply loads of virtuous women out there just waiting for the opportunity to make good men happy, and all a fellow had to do was ask one of them out! I couldn’t help but think that the younger men frustrated with the spoiled feminist Cosmo-girls they had come to know so well had a better understanding of contemporary realities than men who had last dated before the sexual revolution even got into high gear.

The long and short of it was that the sexual revolution was finally succeeding in killing off sex itself, perhaps its inevitable end-point all along.

Once I had arrived at this point in my reflections, everything I had ever heard and observed about sex over the course of my life—as recounted in my previous four essays—started falling into place. The true nature of the sexual revolution became clear to me: it had been driven almost in its entirety by the female sex drive, not the male. That women were miserable as a result of this revolution was obvious, but their misery was not primarily due to male villainy—however desperately both feminists and paleocons wished to believe this. It was due to the intrinsic impossibility of punishing one’s way to utopia; it was the unhappiness of spoiled children impatient of restraint yet unable to see that merely obeying their blind and changeable desires is no guarantee of success in life.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/05/clearing-the-wreckage-of-the-sexual-revolution