Sexual Revolution by Design

Matthew Crawford has penned a brief history of the rise of the techno-therapeutic state for UnHerd (“Was the sexual revolution a government ­psy-op?”). Postwar programs and initiatives, ­many ­funded by the U.S. government and establishment foundations, facilitated its emergence. Driven by what I call the “Never Again” imperative, progressive social ­scientists purported to explain fascism by tracing it back to the “authoritarian personality.” Traditional views of sexual morality and of roles for men and women, or the strict disciplining of children, were deemed clear signs of a proto-fascist mentality.

Earlier progressives had described conservative reservations about their political programs as stemming from ignorance, superstition, and intolerance. In the postwar years, liberals were unified in their conviction that anyone who disagreed with them suffered from one or another pathology associated with fascism. After World War II, psychotherapy enjoyed great prestige, and many believed that traditional forms of repression, especially those rooted in paternal authority, were not merely sources of personal unhappiness. They also fed the authoritarian impulse in politics.

These convictions motivated an all-out effort to change the “personality structure” of the average American. Parents should refrain from imposing strict rules backed by corporal punishment and adopt more easy-­going methods of child rearing. This would spare their children the trauma of an overbearing super-ego and its attendant personality disorders. Society as a whole would improve as it became less repressive and more accepting. A similar, more relaxed attitude was encouraged for sex roles and sexual morality. Experts promised that a more fluid and inclusive outlook would prevent the development of the “authoritarian personality” and forestall the emergence of a right-wing tyranny in the United States.

In the popular imagination, the sexual revolution was a spontaneous outburst. The “kids” weren’t going to take their repressive medicine any longer, and they hitchhiked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. But, as Crawford documents, the sexual revolution was always intertwined with the anti-fascist political agenda, which predates the 1960s. Beginning almost immediately after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and ­Nagasaki, our cultural elites used the power of government, educational institutions, and mass media to promote various forms of “liberation,” and they did so in the conviction that we must provide more amplitude for the expression of our instincts if we wished to save civilization.

Crawford cites the publication of the first Kinsey ­Report on American sexual practices in 1948. Its author, Alfred Kinsey, was an entomologist who, like the social scientists who framed the notion of the “authoritarian personality,” was practiced in the rhetoric of ­disinterested science. But that rhetoric was ­disingenuous. Kinsey saw himself as a social reformer, someone whose “­science” would deliver a repressed country from the dangers of sexual moralism.

As I argue in Return of the Strong Gods, the student radicals of the 1960s were always self-deceived about their imagined rebellions. No doubt many came from backgrounds in which new permissions were ­blended with older prohibitions, but Crawford illuminates the extent to which their cultural program—“Let it all hang out”—was a script written by progressive elites of an older generation, a script funded by governmental agencies and establishment foundations and backed up by pseudo-scientific studies produced at elite universities. A young Baby Boomer at Berkeley could take LSD and sleep with his girlfriend while convincing himself that his actions advanced the great cause of freedom—a self-image similar to the one cherished by Alfred Kinsey, who was born in the nineteenth century.

Following Christopher Lasch, Crawford identifies a link between the anti-fascist agenda and the rise of consumer capitalism. Sophisticated advertising techniques evolved alongside equally sophisticated methods of political propaganda. The effectiveness of both bolstered the confidence of elites that they could outsource governance to “experts” while guiding mass opinion and thus maintaining democratic legitimacy. This ambition created incentives for cultural policies that made ordinary citizens more vulnerable to their appetites, leaving them with fewer resources for self-command, thus rendering them more available for manipulation.

In the postwar era, the political utility of a sybaritic populace amenable to the ministrations of the “helping professions” dovetailed with economic incentives to promote a post-traditional society. The sexual revolution dissolved old restrictions, including those that steered men and women into marriage and family responsibilities. The removal of traditional constraints made men, and especially women, far more available as workers. It also cleared the way for “consumer” to become a person’s primary identity. The fact that corporations have departments of human resources is telling. A post-traditional world unties the cords of moral duty and social convention that bind us to particular roles and identities, making us more “universal.” ­Unburdened, we are like minerals, timber, and capital, resources to be deployed in the productive process.

Crawford begins his essay by noting a peculiar internet phenomenon: men pledging to abstain from masturbation. The reasons for this pledge bruited online are wide-ranging, but none are moral in the traditional sense. Yet many on the left have reacted with concern. Is this call for self-imposed discipline a sign of resurgent political conservatism, or even—dare we say the word—fascism?

We’ve seen this reaction before. In the 1990s, the Promise Keepers movement, founded by University of Colorado Boulder football coach Bill McCartney, sought to encourage men to be faithful husbands. At the movement’s peak, tens of thousands of men filled stadiums to hear inspirational speakers and recite ­pledges. A half-­million men gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a Promise Keepers rally. At every stage, progressives expressed dismay, convinced that the movement represented a backsliding into the old, ­patriarchal mores that fuel authoritarianism. The National Organization for Women warned that the Promise Keeper posed a threat to women’s rights. Feminist authors denounced the movement’s “muscular ­Christianity” as an effort to reassert male power and privilege.

Crawford predicts more of the same. “The politics of anti-fascism have proven highly elastic, adaptable to the needs of an expanding, therapeutic para-state that has not hesitated to substitute morally cognate terms such as racism and sexism for the original. These too are expressions of dark irrationality, and cunningly increase in society precisely by appearing to decrease.” Anyone who dissents from the sexual revolution will be denounced as Hitler’s accomplice. Forewarned forearmed.