TRIGGERnometry - ＂The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics＂

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:09.380 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.700 I'm delighted to say we have yet another brilliant guest for you. She is an American author.

00:00:19.800 Mary Eberstadt, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:21.900 Thank you, Constantine and Francis. Thanks for having me.

00:00:24.260 It's a great pleasure to have you. We wanted really to focus on your latest book, which is

00:00:29.580 Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. And that is just a fascinating

00:00:36.800 look into some of the many things that we talk about on the show. Before we do that, just tell

00:00:41.980 everybody, who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey that leads you through

00:00:46.520 life to be sitting here talking to us? Well, thank you. I'm an American writer. I've been

00:00:52.680 writing since I could hold a pencil. I've written in various genres over the years. I wrote a novel

00:00:59.440 at one point in response to The New Atheism, which was produced on stage some years later.

00:01:05.180 Very exciting stuff. And I've written in pretty much every genre, I'd say, apart from poetry and

00:01:12.840 reportage. I'm not a reporter. And over the years, increasingly, my focus became the sexual

00:01:20.780 revolution and its fallout because evidence seemed to be accumulating that this revolution

00:01:29.000 which is part of the wallpaper of all of our lives now has changed a lot about humanity and

00:01:35.880 I think has changed a lot for the worse and we can talk about that. So you're saying that a lot

00:01:41.240 has changed but look let's see some of the narratives that I've certainly been fed you know

00:01:47.080 it was a time where women had control over their bodies all of a sudden it gave them greater agency

00:01:52.500 over their lives that you know they they could pursue careers because of the pill etc etc surely

00:01:58.420 isn't that a universal positive mary i'm just thinking before you answer the question shall

00:02:03.160 we maybe define the sexual revolution for people who weren't around at the time and maybe aren't

00:02:08.180 familiar with it maybe constantine's never had a sexual revolution i have not me i've exactly i've

00:02:12.760 never been overthrown? Well, I think the most uncontroversial definition would be the

00:02:19.060 widespread adoption and destigmatization of contraception that begins with the introduction

00:02:26.540 of the birth control pill. So we're going back to the early 1960s here, which is when that all

00:02:33.520 started. And in answer to your question, Francis, when it all started, I think there was a lot of

00:02:40.020 optimism. I mean, I don't remember it either, but you could see why people would make the case that

00:02:45.980 this would be a good thing for humanity, that it would free women, as you say, that it would allow

00:02:52.080 them to have robust careers, etc. But what wasn't clearly seen at the time was the negative fallout

00:03:01.000 in the forms of rising fatherlessness, out-of-wedlock births,

00:03:08.300 truly shocking numbers of abortions.

00:03:12.600 All of these things went up in tandem with the use of contraception.

00:03:18.180 And you don't have to be a card-carrying theologian or a religious fanatic

00:03:22.700 to question some of this stuff.

00:03:25.160 In some of my writing, I cite perfectly secular economists,

00:03:29.640 including Nobel Prize winning economists, who look at these numbers and try to figure out

00:03:34.680 why did it happen that instead of strengthening marriages, strengthening relationships and

00:03:41.080 improving romance, the widespread adoption of the birth control pills seem to have the opposite

00:03:47.120 effect. And it's a paradox, but it disentangles if we realize that we should look at this the

00:03:55.460 way economists do. What contraception did was flood the marketplace with available sexual

00:04:01.180 partners. And that diminished the incentives for everyone, but especially for men, to settle down

00:04:09.560 with any one of them. And so here we see the negative fallout of contraception at its most

00:04:18.040 crystalline, I think, because what we see is that something that was meant to enhance relations,

00:04:24.680 especially relations between the sexes, instead ended up being an obstacle to human happiness

00:04:31.440 in many cases. And that's why we see when sociologists study happiness, especially among

00:04:38.220 women over the last couple of decades and in numerous countries, not only in the United States,

00:04:46.060 what they see is a diminution of happiness over time, which makes no sense if we're supposed to

00:04:52.940 be all liberated now. But it does make sense if you realize that what women always say they want

00:05:00.340 in survey data are families and husbands most of the time. And so the fact that these things are

00:05:10.480 now harder to obtain means that we've introduced a serious new form of acrimony and unhappiness

00:05:19.960 into society. And there's a lot more that we could say about that. But the sexual revolution

00:05:26.540 has a lot of other effects that I think are now showing up, not just between individuals,

00:05:31.880 not just as private contractual matters, but across society. And that's what the last book

00:05:37.900 of Primal Screams is about. And so you were saying about the effects it has on society.

00:05:44.980 I read the book Mary in fact I read it yesterday I found it very very powerful and dare I say

00:05:51.200 harrowing because of the effects that you explained quite brilliantly about the breakdown

00:05:58.080 of the family and how that has affected society now in particular as well by the way that we've

00:06:04.780 embraced identity politics could you go into that a little bit for us and tease it apart

00:06:10.680 Yes, sure.

00:06:11.380 And Frances, I'm glad to hear that I wrote something short enough to be read in a day.

00:06:16.680 My publisher will be happy about that.

00:06:20.560 So the sexual revolution and identity politics.

00:06:26.320 I would like to start with what happened in the United States last summer, because the

00:06:32.340 book came out a year before the riots and protests in the U.S.

00:06:36.180 And I could not help but feel as if they vindicated the thesis of the book, because the book argues that in the absence of religion, in the absence of family, in the absence of what throughout human history have been very primal attachments for all human beings.

00:06:58.180 beings. In the absence of those things, as those things weaken across the Western world,

00:07:04.340 we see an increasingly impassioned flight to identity politics, to collective identities.

00:07:12.400 And the reason for that flight is that, you know, fundamental to all of us is the question,

00:07:18.240 who am I? And if you were to ask me, who am I? I would probably say something like,

00:07:25.520 I'm a mother, I'm a Catholic, I'm an aunt, I'm a wife, etc. In other words, my intuitive response

00:07:34.080 would be to define myself by my primal attachments. What we have to understand is that in this day and

00:07:41.400 age, a lot of people do not have strong attachments of that nature. We live in societies that are

00:07:48.940 secularizing rapidly. So that takes one answer off the table. Who am I? I'm a child of God.

00:07:55.680 A lot of people wouldn't say that, wouldn't think to say that, don't believe that.

00:08:00.460 But then we get into the more complicated tangle of defining oneself by relations to one's family.

00:08:08.620 And let me say at the outset, there is not a family in the world that is not affected by

00:08:14.220 the trends that we are describing. We're all in this together. So when I talk about something like,

00:08:21.060 say, divorce and remarriage, and what that does to the sibling relationships of people with half

00:08:30.400 brothers, stepbrothers, etc. I'm coming from a place where I know as much about this as you do,

00:08:38.640 which is that it's ubiquitous. But what these more attenuated relationships have done over time

00:08:45.740 is weaken the emotional attachments of people. They've weakened the gravitational pull that

00:08:54.300 people feel toward their families. And we're not talking about Ozzie and Harriet, you know,

00:08:59.240 perfect nuclear family. We're talking about the extended family, which for most of us

00:09:04.740 has shrunk by quite a lot. So I get into this in Primal Screams for a couple of reasons. One is that

00:09:13.220 I really do believe that in the rise in mental health problems, in the increasing acting out

00:09:20.560 that we see on campuses, people duct taping their mouths shut, people having nervous breakdowns

00:09:27.460 about pronouns. You know, I think what we're seeing is a deep unraveling that's coming about

00:09:33.560 because so many people, especially young people, can't answer that question, who am I,

00:09:40.280 by resort to their native families, if you will. And this leaves a big lacuna that has to be filled

00:09:49.080 by something. And I think increasingly it's being filled by identity politics. Getting back to what

00:09:56.220 happened in the streets of the United States. There were in 2020 over 10,000 incidents of

00:10:04.580 what's politely called unrest in city after city. And over 500 of these devolved into what is

00:10:14.160 impolitely called riots. This is unprecedented in American history. Nothing like this has happened.

00:10:21.480 So where is this coming from? Well, of course, the conventional answer is police brutality and racism. And it's true that police brutality energized a lot of people, especially young people who were already living under the restrictions of the pandemic, etc.

00:10:40.200 this is what started it but this is not what kept the momentum going night after night in cities

00:10:47.840 like portland where you would see the same young people out there throwing things attacking the

00:10:54.500 police this does not explain the level of sheer emotiveness that we saw in these riots these did

00:11:03.900 not look like civil rights protests. They didn't even look like anti-Vietnam protests from what

00:11:10.640 I've seen of that footage. This was very raw, primordial stuff that was in the streets of

00:11:18.040 America. And we can see that very clearly in the sort of street theater that this devolved into,

00:11:26.400 where people, protesters and rioters were going around into residential neighborhoods,

00:11:32.580 shining lights into people's homes as they were sleeping, or disrupting people who were out

00:11:39.340 trying to dine outdoors. In the rage that we see in those acts, I believe we can see through it

00:11:48.720 to a place where people are so unhinged and so devoid of attachment, of primal attachments of

00:11:59.320 their own, that they're now taking it out on people who they perceive to have those things.

00:12:06.500 That is the deeper meaning of all that anger spilling into residential neighborhoods and

00:12:12.680 attacking innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with police brutality or racism,

00:12:18.980 But we're representative of a kind of world, a kind of order that many young people are now having serious trouble finding.

00:12:31.560 And that, to me, is the deeper meaning of what we saw in the streets.

00:12:35.420 We saw identity politics as an unstable substitute for more stable connections to family and community.

00:12:45.460 And Mary, what I like about your analysis as well,

00:12:48.680 I heard your brilliant conversation with Christina Hoff Summers,

00:12:51.300 who I have a lot of respect for as well.

00:12:53.540 And in that you talk about how identity politics,

00:12:57.720 you know, it's very fashionable for people on the right

00:13:00.360 to attack people on the left with it.

00:13:02.220 But actually, you talk also about the rise of the incel community.

00:13:07.600 You talk about the rise of white nationalism, such as it is.

00:13:11.160 I'm not saying it's widespread, but it certainly exists, right?

00:13:13.780 So the idea of identifying with a group seems to appeal across the political spectrum to people.

00:13:21.660 And it certainly makes sense that, you know, I can feel it.

00:13:24.680 You know, you talk about being religious, Francis and I are both non-believers.

00:13:28.060 But the awareness of the fact that people crave community and also the emergence of the sort of woke thing that feels very religious in nature.

00:13:37.480 It's got its inquisitions. It's got its cancel culture. It's got all of that.

00:13:41.140 we i mean it does seem like what you're saying is true so i guess the question is

00:13:47.420 all that being accepted i mean it's not like i don't imagine you're suggesting reversing the

00:13:53.900 sexual revolution and disappearing the pill and contraceptives are you no i'm talking about

00:14:00.580 re-norming society in a more uh reasonable direction which we do all the time i mean

00:14:08.200 human beings do learn from mistakes. And one of the prime examples of this is what's happened

00:14:15.320 with tobacco smoking over the last 60 years. And I say this not to knock smokers, but everybody

00:14:22.420 knows there's been a sea change. Everybody knows that decades of evidence about the negative effects

00:14:28.840 of this substance made it easier for people to quit and made it more stigmatized than it had

00:14:38.700 been. Tobacco use indoors is very stigmatized, at least in the United States. And all of this was

00:14:44.620 the result of empirical evidence eventually filtering down to individual decisions. And that,

00:14:51.180 I think, is what needs to happen with the sexual revolution, because the costs of it are not only,

00:14:57.840 you know, on the individual level of romance and not only in our increasingly untethered

00:15:04.340 woke politics, but also the shrinkage of the family and the fracturing of the family

00:15:12.060 has raised the costs of the welfare state across the Western world. The state has had to come in

00:15:19.060 and be that substitute daddy. The state simultaneously bankrolls the broken family

00:15:25.920 and has to. So these are pretty major consequences that affect the most advanced economies of the

00:15:35.520 world in every single country. We're not talking about private consensual transactions here. And

00:15:44.480 that's what's really ironic to me in the long run is that everybody says this is only about

00:15:52.020 private decisions right sexual matters are completely off the table we can't talk about

00:15:56.360 this stuff it's all private and it's all about consent and yet nothing has done as much to

00:16:03.420 transform our world as this revolution has socially politically uh as and as i mentioned

00:16:10.520 in primal screams you know psychologically and otherwise so it's something we probably

00:16:16.580 ought to look at it seems to me you know and again going back to it so i i was a teacher for

00:16:24.780 many many years and the children who struggled the most at school whether it was academically

00:16:31.940 whether it was with the discipline whether it was the structure were always children who came

00:16:37.600 from broken homes who didn't have a father around but it was always a great debut you can never say

00:16:43.720 it because then you're demonizing single mothers and you're punching down on single mothers etc etc

00:16:49.160 and one of the things i found really powerful about your book is is the way that you approach

00:16:54.300 this issue in particular the long-term implications for children not having a man around the house

00:17:01.020 would you be able to explain that a little bit more mary this is the best known fact in sociology

00:17:06.540 and it has been for decades it's just that nobody wants to emphasize it for obvious reasons

00:17:13.300 not having a biological father in the house raises risks to children period it raises

00:17:20.360 risks of physical and sexual abuse by mom's boyfriends and it also seems to make it harder

00:17:28.660 for male children to become men that is functioning reasonable men again for obvious reasons so

00:17:37.280 in Primal Screams, as you know, I'm trying to do something new with this debate because it is so

00:17:44.420 ossified. It's not really even a debate. This stuff is so taboo. And that's why I get into

00:17:51.100 the research on animals, especially mammals, because I think that gives us a safer way of

00:17:57.800 talking about some of these things. During the past couple of decades, scientists have learned

00:18:04.620 a lot that they did not expect about animal behavior. Number one, animals are intensely

00:18:11.380 familial. The myth of the lone wolf, which I opened the book with, is just that. It's a myth.

00:18:19.240 Wolves don't run around alone. Wolves run around in packs. We would call nuclear families,

00:18:25.720 actually typically mom dad um pups and it's not only wolves look at just about any mammal um and

00:18:35.640 you find the same pattern so this is important because first of all it goes to show that at

00:18:42.500 least in nature as far as nature is concerned animals aren't a bunch of atomized beings who

00:18:48.220 are out there you know finding their glitter families and their substitute families no animals

00:18:53.200 exist and flourish in a biologically related family. The other thing is social learning.

00:19:01.720 This is terribly important, I think. Scientists now know that animals learn by watching other

00:19:07.940 animals. In particular, they learn by watching their mothers and their siblings and their

00:19:13.900 fathers. Why does this matter? Well, I give the example of the cat that can go up a tree but can't

00:19:21.640 get down the tree, which is something scientists have studied. Because some cats can get out of

00:19:26.640 trees and some cats can't. The working theory is that the cats that know how to climb down out of

00:19:32.000 the trees are those who learned by watching their siblings or their mothers or their fathers. And

00:19:38.100 cats who can't get out of trees didn't learn that because they were isolated from their families,

00:19:43.640 typically house cats. So that's really interesting. Does it apply to us? I think it very much applies

00:19:50.280 to us. Consider the family is smaller. Fathers are absent. Many people don't have siblings or

00:20:01.000 a sibling of the same sex or a sibling of the opposite sex or cousins of the opposite sex or

00:20:07.320 cousins of the same sex. What I'm saying is for all that we think we're so sophisticated and

00:20:13.860 advanced, we actually have shrunk the number of people we can learn from effectively.

00:20:22.140 And I think, again, we're seeing this on a social scale.

00:20:28.800 People often remark, say, about transgenderism, homosexuality, that it seems these things

00:20:37.800 seem to have exploded in recent times and that it's not just that these things have

00:20:43.160 been de-stigmatized, it's also that they're growing in real numbers. My response to that is

00:20:49.280 we have taken out of our lives, I mean, inadvertently, but really, the kinds of ways

00:20:56.940 in which people used to learn about the opposite sex from a young age, for example. How could there

00:21:03.040 not be confusion given what we've done to ourselves, given all of those acts of subtraction

00:21:11.060 from our lives. So the idea that people are now struggling extra hard to find their identities

00:21:19.000 is not an idea that comes as a surprise if you read what happens with animals when animals are

00:21:25.540 separated from their families and communities and the dysfunctional behavior they exhibit

00:21:30.860 when they are living in that unnatural way. So we can see this very clearly if we're talking

00:21:39.520 about other species but we're not very good at seeing it in ourselves and that's why i emphasize

00:21:46.920 that research in primal screams because i hope it gives us an end run around this static discussion

00:21:55.940 about fatherlessness and etc that so many people find hard to engage in

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00:23:08.660 Why do they find it so hard to engage in? Because, you know, you talk about having other people in your family to teach you stuff.

00:23:17.480 That certainly resonates with my experience. You know, I learn more about being a man from my grandfather than I did from my father, I would say.

00:23:25.080 And me.

00:23:25.460 from you. Yeah. Yeah. Learn a lot. Anyway. So I totally get that. And it's not a political

00:23:33.180 statement to me to say that children need parents and they need grandparents and they need family

00:23:38.860 members to be around. And you learn different things from different people. And, you know,

00:23:43.420 grandparents are important not only because they're just another person, but they're from

00:23:47.520 a different generation. They've had their children. Maybe the aspirations for their

00:23:52.420 children have relaxed a little bit now they can just be playful with the grandchildren like all

00:23:57.060 of that is important and none of that seems in any way controversial to me and i'm a sort of like

00:24:02.620 non-religious uh you know sort of liberal guy living in a big city in western in western europe

00:24:09.520 why can't we why why you say that we can't talk about this for obvious reasons why has the debate

00:24:16.360 become exossified, as you say? Well, sometimes I think it's because

00:24:21.420 we are in the position of, say, white people in the American South pre-Civil War. That is to say,

00:24:33.520 everybody is affected by this institution of slavery in that time. Or nowadays, I would say

00:24:40.560 everybody's affected by the sexual revolution. Everybody's implicated, and people know that

00:24:47.440 there's something wrong. On the other hand, they don't want to go around hurting everybody's

00:24:52.740 feelings, and that's what this reluctance is about. It's about not wanting to hurt, as you said,

00:24:58.420 Francis, the single mom, right? Single moms are doing heroic stuff. They're doing the work of

00:25:03.800 two people, so nobody wants to hurt their feelings. But at some point, someone has to ask

00:25:09.420 what the cumulative effect of this is on kids. So in the United States, for example,

00:25:18.240 I've just read the umpteenth story about the fentanyl explosion. And before that,

00:25:23.620 there was, of course, the heroin explosion. And before that, the opioid explosion.

00:25:28.940 Simultaneously, psychiatric diagnoses of depression and anxiety have been rising.

00:25:33.900 I've been chronicling this for 20 years. This was happening long before COVID.

00:25:37.540 The picture I'm painting here is one of widespread, pretty serious psychological dissolution.

00:25:46.840 And I don't think that's a picture that professionals would quibble over because they know that it's true.

00:25:53.400 Again, we have to push through some of that resistance in the interest of the people who are most affected by this, which I think amounts to younger people.

00:26:04.540 When we saw those protesters in the streets, you know, wrecking things and being supremely emotional, I was seeing something on their faces, which was real misery and real suffering.

00:26:21.360 I think conservatives, and I include myself in this, make a mistake when we dismiss these bizarre actings out as snowflake-ism or something that is the product of an overly privileged childhood.

00:26:37.560 That's not what I see in this.

00:26:39.240 I see real suffering.

00:26:41.500 And the problem is they've come up with the wrong names for this thing.

00:26:46.260 the problem out there is not some abstraction like heteronormativity right i think that's

00:26:54.000 right anyway um the problem is not uh feminism even the problem is much more primal than that

00:27:03.920 it's that a lot of people um are psychologically um unhinged by the fact that they have not been

00:27:12.500 able to attach to family community i would argue religion is part of that although i agree that

00:27:19.280 um there are substitute forms of what joseph bottom called bastard christianity is floating

00:27:26.180 around i mean we see this in climate change we see this in other things too um generally the

00:27:31.440 woke religion uh so there we have it and you know it's it's a very very depressing but in my opinion

00:27:41.320 an accurate analysis of what is happening i guess you know the question that i really want to ask

00:27:48.320 mary is how you know how do we row back from this now because we've got to this point it feels to

00:27:54.280 me like a crisis point what can we actually do as a society to row back from it is it you know

00:27:59.660 good old-fashioned take responsibility and in in this era that we live in now is that realistic

00:28:06.100 it's always realistic i am hopeful for a couple of reasons one is that revivals religious and

00:28:17.500 otherwise i have a way of you know popping up just when you least expect to see them

00:28:22.440 and i agree with you francis that we have hit a kind of rock bottom especially with the problems

00:28:30.320 among the young and the suffering among the young. And I think out of that will come new

00:28:37.720 leaders and new conversations, because human beings are not meant to live as miserably as

00:28:44.680 many of us do. So there's that. There's always hope because of that kind of, again, religious or

00:28:54.180 other evangelization. I would point out something interesting about religion here, which is

00:29:01.180 being in Washington, D.C., which is, you know, has a vibrant Catholic community. I'm very aware of

00:29:07.920 sort of what goes on in it. Most of the young people, people in their 20s and 30s who are

00:29:13.120 entering the Catholic Church, are entering it because they have been victims of this stuff

00:29:20.320 one way or another. And they enter the church and embrace its theology because they hope to find

00:29:26.520 something more congruent with the complicated human beings that they are. You know, they're

00:29:33.020 looking for something that isn't some two-dimensional woke religion. They're looking

00:29:37.600 for something that corresponds to the depth that they feel in themselves. So that's kind of

00:29:44.520 interesting. In other words, it's not the old, the fuddy duddies who have been, you know, raised

00:29:50.280 homeschooled, etc., who are becoming the new backbone of Christianity in America. It's the

00:29:56.940 people who are the walking wounded. And I think that's going to be an influential fact for a long

00:30:02.580 time to come. And Mary, moving on now, so towards, because when you were talking in the book,

00:30:08.820 you address the Me Too movement, and you also discuss pornography. And you were saying that

00:30:14.320 we don't have good examples of what is a positive romantic relationship anymore,

00:30:19.780 which in your view is what led us to this mess where men and women, we can't seem to get along

00:30:26.080 anymore. And again, I think part of that is because of the collapse of fundamental social

00:30:34.280 learning. At one point, I sat down and read hundreds of the Me Too accounts. And the thing

00:30:41.460 that was so striking was this was this was all roshamon right this was all the man had one

00:30:47.720 experience of an encounter the woman had a completely different experience and over and

00:30:53.680 over and over nobody seemed to realize that it's because men and women are different maybe um you

00:31:00.760 know just basic stuff like that that that shouldn't be political and is um or basic stuff like obviously

00:31:10.600 pornography is completely toxic for human relationships everybody knows that you know

00:31:18.360 an 11 year old who dumps her boyfriend's phone knows that what's irritating is that feminism

00:31:24.840 used to know that and that here is a place where feminists once took a strong stand saying look

00:31:32.820 this is this is bad for romance this is bad for women this is bad for men too and what we have

00:31:40.260 instead now is a feminism that's just seems to completely have Stockholm syndrome about

00:31:47.200 everything and whatever the most libertarian guy wants is what feminists today go along with. And

00:31:55.700 I think that's been a real dissent from the feminism of yesteryear, the feminism of Andrea

00:32:01.800 Dworkin, which, by the way, I don't happen to share, but I can have a lot more respect for

00:32:06.720 something that at least stood up to some obvious detrimental things in society like pornography.

00:32:18.440 Hey Francis, do you like to keep your online activity private?

00:32:23.140 Yes, I mean sure.

00:32:24.900 Think about everything you've ever browsed, searched for, watched or tweeted.

00:32:28.720 Now imagine all of that data is being crawled through, collected and aggregated by third

00:32:33.260 parties into a permanent public record.

00:32:36.120 You are. Trigonometry is now going to be a solo project.

00:32:41.440 There are hundreds of data brokers out there whose sole business is to buy and sell your data.

00:32:46.980 That's why I use ExpressVPN.

00:32:49.580 With ExpressVPN, my connection gets routed through an encrypted server and my IP address is masked.

00:32:55.680 My career is over.

00:32:57.220 Enough about the good news.

00:32:58.620 Every time I turn ExpressVPN on, I'm given a random IP address shared by other ExpressVPN customers.

00:33:05.140 that makes it more difficult for third parties to identify me or harvest my data i'm finished i'm

00:33:11.620 absolutely done for and the best part is how easy it is to use no matter what device you're on phone

00:33:17.740 laptop or smart tv all you have to do is tap one button to get protected come on francis you can

00:33:24.100 do the last bit come on let's do this if you don't want to end up like me go to expressvpn.com

00:33:31.040 slash trigger and get three extra months for free. That's expressvpn.com slash trigger.

00:33:39.100 Go to expressvpn.com slash trigger to learn more.

00:33:50.000 And do you think you've touched on it several times in different ways, but

00:33:54.500 I'm kind of hearing out of what you're saying, and please correct me if I'm not hearing you

00:33:59.780 correctly, but what this sexual revolution really did, rather than freeing women, what it really

00:34:07.540 did, it freed men. And what men want isn't necessarily, you know, biologically, we're

00:34:13.520 programmed to pursue very different things. If you ask a guy what he'd really want when it comes

00:34:19.100 to sexual relationships, it'd probably look very different to what a woman would want. And I say

00:34:23.960 this as someone who's happily monogamous and married, but I'm not sure that's what I was

00:34:28.240 biologically programmed to be. Do you know what I'm saying? Oh, I think so. I think so.

00:34:35.280 Sure. So the sexual revolution empowered the already powerful. That is the meaning of the

00:34:43.440 Me Too movement. It empowered the already powerful and it weakened those who were already in a

00:34:51.000 subordinate situation. And this is a theme that I come back to often because I think it matters

00:34:57.780 as a humanitarian fact. The sexual revolution falls heaviest on the weakest shoulders,

00:35:05.180 and that is to say children. Adults can engage in all of these social experiments, right? And now

00:35:14.680 we have the idea of chosen families or glitter families. I don't know if you're familiar with

00:35:20.460 these terms, but the idea is families that you like better than the ones you were stuck with

00:35:26.560 in the first place and that you can have these substitute families of those whom you choose

00:35:33.620 and this is a fashionable thing over here um david brooks and others have written about it favorably

00:35:41.000 oh what's interesting about that is if if you ask a six-year-old

00:35:46.200 what his family is he wouldn't say that he wants to choose it he would just want the one that was

00:35:54.100 handed to him. And that's what I mean. You know, these are the ways in which the way we've come to

00:36:00.340 live make it harder for the smallest and weakest, who also can't be expected to understand all of

00:36:08.820 this. Again, this is where we're seeing this increasing immiseration of the young coming from.

00:36:15.820 And it's also as well, I mean, we keep circling around it as well. Isn't the fact, you know,

00:36:21.300 we're more deeply selfish than ever before you know it's about me it's about my my gratifications

00:36:27.580 and that has an impact on society even though we don't like to admit it

00:36:31.940 so getting back to the differences between men and women i had this formulation at one point that

00:36:40.140 the sexual revolution in men is more like a slow acting virus that you

00:36:45.140 don't realize how deadly it can be until some decades in. And this comes to mind because

00:36:54.280 if we look at life from the other end of the telescope, from old age, we can see what we've

00:37:04.400 done to ourselves. So for example, in places like Japan, where a lot of people didn't have families,

00:37:10.660 didn't stop to have families, and came from small families in the first place.

00:37:16.760 There's an entire industry surrounding what are called lonely deaths. I don't know if you're

00:37:22.780 aware of this, but it's because there's so much solitary living and people die in apartments as

00:37:29.120 singletons. And insurance companies have been transformed to deal with this. And there are

00:37:36.000 companies that go in and clean out apartments of people who have no living relatives, etc.

00:37:41.760 That's just to say I'm not bringing that up to be a Debbie Downer. I'm saying that when you read a

00:37:47.860 story about how thousands of people die alone in a place like Japan every week, you can't help but

00:37:54.160 think this is temporary. I mean, we're going to devise some way around this. We're going to adapt

00:38:01.140 so that there's less of this in the future.

00:38:04.840 And again, that's a ground for hope, I would think.

00:38:07.560 We have to be, we can't beat ourselves up.

00:38:10.820 The way we are living now is really new

00:38:14.340 compared to everything that came before us.

00:38:18.000 If you were an illiterate peasant

00:38:19.840 in the south of France in the year 1200,

00:38:25.140 you would still be more literate about family

00:38:28.920 than a lot of people are today.

00:38:33.080 You would just have those ties.

00:38:35.300 They would be a given.

00:38:36.740 They're just an unbidden thing that you were born into.

00:38:40.480 And you wouldn't question them.

00:38:41.660 I mean, it's not until you get to our level of prosperity

00:38:45.000 and the innovation of the birth control pill

00:38:48.500 that suddenly a lot of people are questioning this stuff

00:38:51.420 and trying to devise new forms of connection.

00:38:55.460 This is all very recent.

00:38:56.800 So it's no wonder that it's not well understood and it's no wonder that there's such resistance to talking about it.

00:39:03.600 Mary, there will be a lot of people watching this because we have people from all over the different sides of all these different conversations watching the show.

00:39:10.320 And if they haven't switched off yet, they may be planning to very shortly.

00:39:14.100 So before they do, let me ask you this.

00:39:16.120 I mean, people would say, I mean, not entirely unreasonably, that there have been some great breakthroughs as a result of the sexual revolution.

00:39:23.060 And, you know, they've they have freed women to to do what they want to do or at least what they think they want to do.

00:39:30.760 You know, there's you might have an argument about that.

00:39:33.820 But surely, you know, the traditional maxim of our time is, you know, freedom is great and we've just we've got more of it.

00:39:41.180 Isn't that brilliant?

00:39:43.940 Right. So that's a very consumerist attitude.

00:39:47.220 And I think we live in a time when people are rethinking consumerism at all costs.

00:39:53.620 People are rethinking globalism, for example.

00:39:57.300 And this is not to diss freedom as such, but we all know that unlimited consumerism in any area is bad for us, right?

00:40:08.940 We're moralistic about obesity.

00:40:11.080 We're moralistic about tobacco smoking.

00:40:13.940 um well why can't we apply the same lens to some of what's happened on account of the sexual

00:40:21.560 revolution and what you might call you know sexual consumerism uh consumerism in the sexual

00:40:27.640 marketplace i think that if anything um younger people who are especially aware of uh the need

00:40:37.100 to put limits on some of our behavior whether it's because of climate change or for other reasons

00:40:42.780 those people of all people would be open to arguments about hey maybe we are hurting ourselves

00:40:49.980 by having unlimited freedom in other areas and mary i'm going to bring it back to being depressing

00:40:55.300 again because that is uh my modus operandi that's his brand that's my brand that's what i bring to

00:41:00.300 the party so after i start it's no longer a party and i'm very proud about it um but one of the

00:41:05.100 things that you talked about that i found particularly powerful is you compared the family

00:41:10.800 to one of the pillars of our society and effectively what we're doing by turning our

00:41:19.540 back on the family is destabilizing the pillar of our society well sure um and again this is all

00:41:30.300 social science that people don't want to talk about but uh people kids who have the best

00:41:36.500 outcomes in school, et cetera, the least truancy, the least criminal behavior are basically coming

00:41:42.780 out of intact homes. And that holds across the socioeconomic spectrum. Again, it is hard to talk

00:41:51.600 about this at a time when so many people don't have access to that very model. But that doesn't

00:42:00.680 make it any less true yeah well that's a difficulty and I'm still you know when I asked you about

00:42:07.540 why people don't have this conversation or are scared to I'm somewhat dissatisfied with with

00:42:13.300 your answer and it's nothing personal to you I just I'm not I just don't understand why we can't

00:42:20.040 say well if you do this it's less good than doing something else without you know still respecting

00:42:27.300 people because they are in the position that they are so if you're a single mother we can say well

00:42:32.840 it's not ideal for your child but you're doing your best and we we still respect you for that

00:42:37.900 it's just maybe you know you you might be worth you teaching your child that actually it would

00:42:43.960 be great for them to to stay together with their partner and have children like that like i don't

00:42:49.480 see how those two things are mutually exclusive why is this even a political issue i just i really

00:42:55.280 don't understand? Well, we live in a politicized time. That's one reason it's a political issue.

00:43:04.120 But I would like to make it a political issue in a positive sense and say, maybe we can experiment

00:43:10.700 politically. I'm not a policy wonk, but it does seem to make sense that there might be policies

00:43:16.180 that would make it easier for parents to stay together, that would make it easier for parents

00:43:21.380 to have another child. There could be tax breaks that way. There could be certain

00:43:28.860 things about family formation that you could tether to forgiving student loans. I mean,

00:43:35.060 there's a lot of room for creativity in this. And I think that seeing the government do some of that

00:43:43.000 might help us down the road, might make it easier to start and keep a family in the first place.

00:43:49.780 So we should look at that.

00:43:51.880 I agree.

00:43:52.740 I think it is something that we need to look at.

00:43:56.000 When are you proposing, mate?

00:44:00.260 We're skipping over that one, are we?

00:44:01.740 Yeah, we're skipping over that.

00:44:03.080 There we go.

00:44:05.580 I guess what I'm worried about, Mary, is that I think as a society,

00:44:11.700 I think we're so wrapped up in consumerism.

00:44:14.600 I think we're so wrapped up in the glorification of the self.

00:44:18.600 and tied up with identity politics that the idea of you know putting others needs first before your

00:44:27.640 own i think is seen as a bit old hat and old-fashioned is it not

00:44:32.300 well it is but that doesn't make it any less heroic i mean there are things about people

00:44:41.440 that don't change. If we look at the serious concern over climate change, for example,

00:44:50.140 and the way in which people make sacrifices in the name of that, right? Turning off their

00:44:58.080 air conditioning, not going on airplanes, et cetera. In extreme cases, there are people who

00:45:04.240 argue one shouldn't even have children because of climate change. But what that example goes to show

00:45:10.060 is that we have a sacrificial side to ourselves and it's just been displaced onto these more

00:45:18.380 abstract ventures. It's not impossible to think that we can turn that back to its natural position,

00:45:28.720 which is sacrificing in marriage, sacrificing by having family, etc.

00:45:34.340 we should make it cool to post pictures of yourself being married on instagram i think that

00:45:40.660 that's that's that's the way you solve it uh well it's interesting because you know francis

00:45:45.400 obviously brings in the voice of pessimism but i get the sense from you that you are

00:45:48.880 uh well the way i would interpret it is you think things have got so bad that we can only

00:45:54.240 go up from here yeah there was a novel in the 70s with that very title been down so long it

00:46:01.360 looks like up to me i don't know whether you've heard of it but that's uh yeah that's the idea i

00:46:07.640 mean the bottom line is that we are living in ways unnatural to the kind of creatures that we are

00:46:14.280 and we need to recognize that just as we can recognize in other creatures in fellow creatures

00:46:22.700 when they are living in ways out of keeping with their natures that's what i'm trying to do in my

00:46:30.180 work is shine a light on that. I'm a conservative precisely because I don't think we've been very

00:46:39.820 good at coming up with new answers to ancient questions like, who am I? My hope is that we can

00:46:48.280 also dig into the past and recover some of that wisdom and bring it to bear on these very new

00:46:54.700 problems that we have like psychiatric dissolution among the young and and you talk about you know

00:47:01.360 ancient you know ancient questions isn't the problem as well for men is they're not it's

00:47:07.920 not that they're obsolete it's just that their their position in society isn't as clear-cut as

00:47:14.600 it used to be and as a result has not that has that not created a kind of crisis within men as

00:47:21.000 whoa. Yes, very much so, I think. And deriding the masculine principle, as happens in everyday

00:47:31.900 discourse in all of the mainstream media, is not going to help that. Again, if you think of the

00:47:39.280 plight of a young boy growing up today, about half of them in the United States are being raised in

00:47:45.980 families without the father present, typically after some cataclysmic happening like divorce,

00:47:52.740 meaning that the message a lot of them are getting are men are bad, right? And that can't help but

00:48:00.560 confuse a boy and be a toxic factor in his life. So if we can't have real fathers, we can have

00:48:10.260 substitute fathers, I wouldn't be surprised to see religion re-emerging in a surprising way

00:48:16.260 in this kind of wreckage. Now, as far as the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church has

00:48:21.180 like impressive history of own goals. Put very mildly there, Mary, well done.

00:48:28.380 but uh you know it offers at its best uh a paternal principle that people can understand

00:48:41.080 and it offers for example the figure of saint joseph as a substitute father so there's still

00:48:47.460 a language there that broken people of our time can work with and i wouldn't be surprised to see

00:48:53.060 again unexpected but real religious revival coming out of this because that's at least more

00:49:00.420 tangible that gives you more to hold on to than a glitter family or a chosen family or in the long

00:49:08.280 run identity politics and do you think that that would be a force for good this reinvention you

00:49:16.320 know and you know the reawakening of religion i think anything that gives atomized purposeless

00:49:25.340 people a source of positive meaning is good right now we need that we could use a lot more of that

00:49:34.600 you know it's interesting when i talk about how this the identity politics are related to the

00:49:42.280 sexual revolution, there is a particular document that I would like to point to here, which is the

00:49:48.240 first document in which the phrase identity politics was used. It was done in 1977 by a group

00:49:55.840 of radical African-American feminists. It's called the Kambahi River Collective. And in this statement,

00:50:04.060 which is a very sad statement, these women say, we are giving up on the people around us,

00:50:11.600 especially the men around us. We don't think they have our backs. We don't think we can work

00:50:16.400 with them anymore. We can only work with people exactly like we are. That's the founding statement

00:50:23.860 of identity politics. It appears in 1977, just as the sexual revolution is taking hold. And I think

00:50:32.200 it's incredibly evocative because it shows that identity politics is born not out of liberation,

00:50:41.600 but out of desperation to find people and create a community in a world where communities were

00:50:49.340 already weakening. So that is something that we should all think about. When we think about

00:50:54.980 identity politics, think about that document and think of it as a statement of resignation,

00:51:01.120 a statement about giving up on most of the rest of the human race. That's where identity politics

00:51:07.120 is coming from. Our former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, said there's no such thing

00:51:12.320 as society. There's only men, women, children and families. And it goes back to what you're saying,

00:51:18.340 which is, you know, without families, we don't have a functioning society.

00:51:23.360 Pretty much that. And we're finding it out. The empirical evidence is all around us.

00:51:31.520 We just need to acknowledge it and move on somehow,

00:51:36.500 whether it's through politics or through personal behavior.

00:51:41.220 Mary, it's been great talking to you.

00:51:43.620 It's a perspective that we don't often hear,

00:51:46.340 certainly in the mainstream,

00:51:47.540 which is why we wanted to speak with you about it.

00:51:50.720 Thank you for talking to us.

00:51:52.340 And as you know, we have one more question for you,

00:51:55.940 which is, of course, what is the one thing

00:51:57.960 that we're still not talking about as a society

00:52:00.400 that we really should be?

00:52:03.120 Well, so since I'm talking to a couple of agnostics or atheists.

00:52:08.400 Agnostics.

00:52:09.080 Don't lump us in with the hardcore.

00:52:11.960 Okay.

00:52:13.620 I would like to put one thought out there

00:52:16.140 at a time when organized religion seems to be in free fall,

00:52:21.300 which is that really our theotropic nature

00:52:26.080 as human beings is ineradicable.

00:52:29.080 If we don't have organized religion, we will make up other religions. And I really believe that out of the sexual revolution has been created a substitute religion that has its own secular saints like Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Mead.

00:52:47.880 It has its own rituals, and it is reminiscent of Christianity in many ways, which is to say, when people think that religion is something we've put behind us because we're somehow smarter and better than anyone who came before us, I would like people to stop and reflect on the religiosity of our time, the secular religiosity of our time.

00:53:13.180 hmm well listen uh we we mentioned that we're non-believers but that is an issue we've been

00:53:19.840 thinking quite a lot about in recent years uh because it's becoming in unavoidable and

00:53:25.520 inescapable and certainly the fact that people seem to be waking up to a different religion now

00:53:31.740 uh you know it's it's everywhere and the similarities are so blindingly obvious that

00:53:37.600 even people like us who i think otherwise would quite like to pretend that it's not there

00:53:41.260 are starting to go, yeah, I think there might be something to this. So, yeah, it's a good point

00:53:48.940 and well made. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book is called Primal Screams,

00:53:55.740 How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Thoroughly recommend for people to

00:54:00.620 get that. Is there anywhere else you'd like people to go and find you online?

00:54:05.240 I have a website, maryeberstadt.com,

00:54:08.320 where they can read about whatever I've been spouting off about lately

00:54:12.400 and the books and et cetera.

00:54:14.240 And thank you, Constantine and Francis.

00:54:16.960 Well, thank you very much, Mary.

00:54:18.400 You've indeed been an absolutely wonderful guest.

00:54:20.900 Go make sure to go and check out Mary online.

00:54:24.000 If you have enjoyed this episode,

00:54:26.520 they come out on Wednesdays and Sundays.

00:54:29.080 They come out on Wednesdays and Sundays,

00:54:31.040 even if you haven't enjoyed them, by the way.

00:54:32.560 Yeah, absolutely.

00:54:33.340 Works both ways.

00:54:34.260 Yeah, and we have Trigonometry Raw

00:54:36.200 which comes out on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday

00:54:39.740 and they always go out 7pm UK time.

00:54:42.500 Take care and see you soon, guys.

TRIGGERnometry - May 02, 2021

＂The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics＂ - Mary Eberstadt

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