Admitting the Failure of the Sexual Revolution Without Admitting It

Timothy Fountain’s piece That Golden Age of Porn is an honest piece on the era of 1969-1984 when porn was distributed freely (thanks in part to SCOTUS) in print and in theatres. Porn was a major disseminator of the sexual revolution.

Tim’s major contribution in this piece, however, was to remind everyone of the routine trashing of people who objected to the sexual revolution in general and porn in particular:

First of all, objections to the Golden Age of Porn were “cancelled” in the same way objections to “Pride” are censored today. To challenge the public proliferation of porn was to be:

• called a religious zealot or nut;
• labelled a Philistine opposed to artistic expression;
• tagged as a Nazi opposed to free speech;
• pop-psychoanalyzed as a sexually repressed neurotic;
• lumped in with the old, ignorant and generally uncool.

But there were consequences, not the least to feminism:

Self-described feminists sometimes attacked porn as “objectifying women,” then pivoted to extol it as “women finding empowerment through their sexuality.” Very much like arguing for elevation of women’s sports while simultaneously bringing biological males into women’s events and locker rooms.

The sexual revolution in general put feminism in a tight place. Were women supposed to spurn sex in order to minimise contact with men? Or was it their most powerful weapon? Feminism has had a schizoid cast to it ever since, something that becomes evident when women like Paula Jones and Tara Reade come forward.

Tim brings us to the present: the transgender movement. It’s worth noting that the sexual revolution used to be called the “free love” movement. We were promised that, when our inhibitions were cast aside and we ripped off our bourgeois phoniness to be our true selves, that we would all be happy. But that’s how it started: how is it going? What we have really done to ourselves is turn sexual activity into a performance-based arena, where there are some winners and many losers. Porn made it look easy. It’s not, especially when it intersects with real relationships.

The trans movement is a way of removing the performance-based sexual activity by pivoting away from sex to gender, and from there to tie gender to personal identity, which in turn ties is to the issue we can never seem to get away from, authenticity. Now we focus on identity, with expensive medical procedures (there’s the cash flow, as was and is the case with the porn industry.) It’s a tacit admission that the sexual revolution has failed, and its attractiveness to young people (along with declining sexual activity) is an indication that they realise the jig is up for “free love.” It’s admitting the sexual revolution has failed without admitting it.

The first victim of this is, ironically, the LGB community. They’ve been telling us that they’re “born this way,” but the trans people tell us that no one is born any way, that we’re “assigned” a gender at birth subject to subsequent alteration. They’ve put themselves into the same kind of tight place as the feminists did. But things can play out differently. In the U.S., a relatively large community of religious conservatives have forced the LGB and T (along with the other alphabet letters) into an unnatural alliance, at least for the moment. In the UK, where religious conservatives are nearly invisible, things are different, especially with the lesbians and their “TERF wars.”

Until we find a way to cast aside our sexo-centricity and attain a more balanced view of things, which includes productive output for our mental health, prosperity and protection from foreign invaders, we will stumble from one disaster to another until we succumb to the last one.