Plato sowed the wind of sexual egalitarianism a long time ago. So did Karl Marx, his sugar-daddy Friedrich Engels, and Leo Tolstoy.
Then came the kibbutz system of Israel. Then, the radically anti-male, anti-marriage, and anti-family feminists of the West, who jumped on that bandwagon in the mid-20th century.
Now, we’re reaping the whirlwind.
George Gilder sounded the alarm in his prescient 1992 book “Men and Marriage,” with a warning that is quite telling, given today’s bitter war between the sexes. To wit, the prevalent sexual instinct of males the world over—to the great detriment of social stability—is to focus on their immediate gratification. Single, young men, undisciplined and unconstrained by traditional sexual mores and manners, are a distinct hazard to society and its procreative health, for many reasons.
Losing Out
The whole business of sexual liberation has backfired. Men have benefited sexually in the short term, but not necessarily in the long haul. Women have lost in both because they have surrendered the one sure means—the postponement of immediate male gratification—that enabled them to have children, provide for them, protect them, and nurture them personally at the same time.In essence, the traditional balancing equation that drew men into the powerfully attractive fertility world of the female has been surrendered and, instead, we have encouraged females to enter the frenetically sexual world of men.
A direct result has been the weakening of marriage and family bonds; men abandoning women and children; and many—mostly poor women and their children—abandoning marriage altogether and cleaving unto the patriarchal state.
Even worse, as Gilder explains, feminism, by default, has allowed males to create an informal system of serial (or even simultaneous) polygamy—one in which the stronger (wealthier, more successful) men can enjoy many, usually younger, partners. But a woman loses out, in that, for the purposes of child-bearing, her chances of locating a strong husband and father for her children are biologically confined to a few fleeting years of her life. If she waits too long to marry, the strong males her own age get taken in a rapidly peaking, concave-sided pyramid of diminishing choices.
Furthermore, in societies that choose to deny these natural sex differences and to permit “liberated” sex, the homosexual sub-culture vies for normalcy with the core culture, attacks traditional values, and recruits otherwise procreative (and usually younger) males. And because liberation so obviously multiplies the sexual choices for strong males, it overturns the equal apportionment of possible mates, and, in its feminist guise, sets the female ethos against the male ethos, thereby encouraging sexual resentment between men and women.
Death of Marriage
All of this leads to fewer marriages, something we saw first in Sweden halfway through the last century, when it enthusiastically embraced sexual liberation: Its marriage rate did a freefall to around 50 percent of its former level.And then, more people began living alone. Today, almost 60 percent of the residents of Stockholm live alone—a growing pattern seen everywhere in the West. For downtown Seattle, that number is now over 70 percent.
Meanwhile, easy divorce—or “couple dissolution” as the Swedes so coyly call it—has risen drastically everywhere. Multiple mates? Easy sex? Homosexuality? Easy cohabitation and divorce? All these inevitably undermine heterosexual monogamy, which is most unfortunate, precisely because “monogamy is designed to minimize the effect of sexual inequalities—to prevent the powerful of either sex from disrupting the familial order,” Gilder says.
And so, as Gilder warns, because the most crucial process of civilization is “the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality,” society must be set up to tame men and their barbaric proclivities. For without the long-range reproductive goals of women, men would be content to fight, enjoy their lust, wander, make war, compete, and strive for power, glory, and dominance.
The conclusion is that, in terms of the larger purposes, and indeed the very survival of human civilization—which depends utterly on sufficient procreation, successful child-nurturing, and strong families—males, in general, are inferior sexually to women, who, because of their biology, control the entirety of the sexual and procreative order (or disorder) of human life.
In this sense only, males are neither sexually nor morally equal to females, and therefore—and this is surely Gilder’s most important point—“men must be made equal by society.” Which is to say that men rely for personal meaning and success on the socially purposive roles created for them by their culture.
In short, women channel and confine the generalized male sexual desire in such a way as to protect themselves and their children, and in so doing, they teach men to subordinate their impulses to the long-term cycles of female sexuality and biology on which civilization, and its survival, has always depended.
When you stop to deeply consider the complex physical, emotional, and financial requirements of the average family, the seriousness of this undertaking sinks in. It requires what the anthropologist Margaret Mead called a “commitment of permanence” from each sex, and a “deal” struck between the parties, the terms of which are supplied by the culture. We have been breaking the deal at our own—and especially at our children’s—peril.
