American Sexuality and Its Discontents: A Primer for Middle Easterners

Americans of a certain age and educational level, assuming an interest, can know at least a little about how Middle Easterners think about sexuality, but the reverse is generally not true. We know about you because, several non-trivial cultural nuances notwithstanding, your ways of thinking are not wildly different from how we thought about the subject, say, sixty years ago and before (meaning for at least several centuries before).

The evidence for similarity resides in our collective memories as preserved in literature, which provides a means to establish perspective between now and then. We have an operational rear-view mirror, so to speak, it being understood that objects seen in the mirror are not the same size as the actual objects. In other words, memory, including collective social memory, is not completely accurate. But it’s good enough for most purposes, and anyway it’s all we have.

Of course, thinking about sexuality and gender roles in the Arab countries has not remained entirely static over the past half century. The region is not shut off from Europe and America, after all; people partake of cultural products from both. And certainly Middle Eastern societies differ from each other in this respect: Tunis is not Riyadh and Beirut is not Benghazi. But traditional thinking and behavior remain generally more socially influential for you than for us. That is why your perspective on us is generally sparse: Our cultures differed before the Sixties; now they differ even more because we have moved away, faster and further, from our traditional ways of understanding and behavior than you have.

So you’re entitled to be perplexed when looking at us, with our suddenly sprung #MeToo movement, our affirmative consent codes on college campuses, and more besides. It would be shocking if you weren’t perplexed. The purpose of this essay is to guide your perplexity at least some distance toward understanding.

Confusion All Around

But let me now reveal a little secret: Most of us are confused about these changes, too.

Americans usually tell themselves a happy story about the transformation of attitudes toward sexuality and gender roles over the past sixty years, but the happy story increasingly fails to align with reality. The extent and rapidity of the changes in America, and in most of the Western world (including secular culture in Israel and, still to some extent, in Turkey), have been so dizzying that those caught up in them have typically devoted little effort to trying to understand it all. Most took the advice to “go with the flow,” and at the start that meant seeing what was happening as simply good in contrast to the “up-tight,” repressed, “Victorian,” neurotic attitudes being at last, thankfully, tossed into the proverbial dustbin of social history.

Now that roughly three generations have turned since the sexual revolution’s temporal ground zero—the 1967 Haight-Ashbury “summer of love”—things seem to many a lot less simple and a lot more puzzling than they did 52 years ago. Only blinkered ideologues persist in this original optimism, which tacitly assumes that what has been the most significant social upheaval since the Industrial Revolution has brought with it not a single tradeoff or downside. The only irritant, according to the ideology, is the continuing presence of some reactionary vestiges of the bygone age.

Unfortunately, there are many blinkered ideologues in the West, and they dominate many a secular altar with various forms of political correctness—basically a secular catechism. There are also plenty of people who simply don’t think about such things, such that PC ideas have them rather than the other way around. For thoughtful people, however, it is increasingly clear that things have not turned out to be all peace and light as promised and widely expected. There have been tradeoffs, and now many once-youthful enthusiasts of the sexual revolution want to identify and understand them.

History helps in two ways to provide some answers. First, it eases the problem of presentism, the conceit that what any given generation is doing is really revolutionary, sui generis, entirely de novo. The fact is that traditional British and European conceptions of sexuality and gender roles had begun to defrost in America long before the fabled Sixties, and for many reasons: the looser social definitions of pioneer and especially frontier life as it developed here; the 19th century rise of urbanization and literacy, especially female literacy; the tides of change set off by World War I and the ensuing Progressive era, and the growing entry of women into the work force during the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Beat Generation. That said, it wasn’t until the Sixties that the combination of cumulative precedent, unprecedented affluence, the demographic weight of the Baby Boomers, the advent of the “Pill,” and, possibly, the psychological spillover of early nuclear age “Rocket Rattle,” produced the countercultural pulse at whose core was the sexual revolution.

Second, it is worth remembering that not only did the sexual revolution not come from nowhere, but that it did not stand alone either. It was at its inception part of a wider cultural critique and movement that included several shards of high ambition. One concerned “authenticity” and another the ideal of an unfettered individualism, which at times verged on a collective generational narcissism.^[1] People needed to shed pretenses and “get real”; they needed to hear their own distant or inner drummer and spurn all forms of artificial conformity. The distancing masks imposed by “the system” of gray-suited bureaucrats and corporate automatons had to go so that genuine intimacy and human fulfillment could prevail, not just physical intimacy but a vaguely spiritual intimacy as well. Bigness was bad; “human scale,” Kirkpatrick Sale famously wrote, was good. If certain drugs could aid this process of psychic transformation, fine.

As a general corrective to the enormous pressures for social solidarity and conformity that had been imposed by the Great Depression, the exigencies of World War II, and the circle-the-wagons anxieties of the early Cold War, none of this is surprising in retrospect. It is however ironic that Sixties youth, in promoting a radical form of individualism, thought that they were doing unprecedented and noble things when in fact they were just reprising the oldest of American memes; but that’s a story for another time and place.

So the scope of change was far wider than sexuality and gender-related social conventions, but those conventions naturally became part of changing social mazeways and norms. So if idealizing sex within monogamous marriage had to be dethroned to achieve authenticity and empower expressive individualism, fine. “Love the one you’re with,” famously sang Steven Stills.

If certain moral strictures and taboos associated with inherited gender roles had to be challenged, not only those about a supposed “women’s place” but also including those concerning easy divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, fine. (The first no-fault divorce law passed in 1969, right on schedule; in California of course, and it was signed into law by none other than that flaming liberal, then-Governor Ronald Reagan.)

If Anglo-Protestant Christian beliefs foundational to American political culture had to be relegated to museum status because of their association with discredited attitudes, also fine. And so, over roughly two to three decades, out went the long-dominant Abrahamic moral code and in came the supposedly scientific therapeutic mode of understanding right and wrong, good and bad, behavior. No one was evil anymore, merely ill—and we could fix ill.

Whatever set off the sexual revolution and its appurtenances, nothing has been the same since—since in fact to one extent or another all the aforementioned attitudinal switch-outs, and others besides, occurred. Since all these social transformations were “made in the USA,” the rest of the world perceived the consequences in a set of concentric circles. Culturally close Canada and Western Europe (and appendages like Australia) formed the closest circle, able to grasp the essence of changing American currents, which washed over these places in fairly short order and to which they contributed their own stamp. Circles furthest away mainly got wind of the changes mostly via American exports of mass-entertainment products from movies, television, popular music, and fashion—all of these at best two-dimensional, distortive, and distanced means of communicating complex changes in social values.

So Middle Eastern societies have never “owned” the Western sexual revolution and made it part of their everyday experience; they have at best been voyeurs from a distance. That itself has roiled the region, as Western ways have sideswiped more traditional cultures. But that is well short of immersion; so how could normal, typical people in the Middle East hope to understand it all when even we who do own it still manifest much confusion? In other words, we’re all confused, just confused differently. We’re confused from being too close and too emotionally invested, and you’re confused from being too far and too emotionally detached.

Our confusion has given rise to a profusion—of babbling. But the babbling is usually narrow in focus: It hones in on the sexual/gender parts and leaves out the context of the sexual revolution, without which it cannot make much sense. The gist is that we Americans do have sex, sometimes, but we talk about it publicly all the time, and “it” includes homosexuality, trans-sexuality, and every other form of sexuality anyone can think of.

That by itself perplexes many Middle Easterners, most of whom still believe that it is unseemly to discuss sexual matters in public. I happen to agree; but most Americans today have a very different sense of the boundary between what is properly private and what is public. Many of us today are nearly hysterical over supposed threats to our privacy, whether at the hands of Lord Google or the National Security Agency (the choice being a matter of political taste), but we are rarely inhibited from airing intimacies of our (and especially others’) sex lives. We wallow in it, supposedly for the sake of authenticity, honesty, and candor. (It couldn’t have anything to do with salacity, could it?) Indeed, several observers have pointed out that we Americans have transferred our moral taboos away from sex to food—as in homosexuality is fine, but transfats are sinful.

In any event, we babble because, as suggested already, we’re trying to figure out what has gone wrong with the sexual revolution. Having finally acknowledged that tradeoffs may have occurred, we disagree over what they have been and whether the downsides exceed the upsides, or not. And so we argue, but we don’t get far toward a true understanding mainly for two reasons: the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” strictures of politically correct ideology make it hard to ask pertinent questions; and the tendency to wrangle with the sexuality/gender portfolio in isolation from the larger context makes other pertinent questions about possible tradeoffs hard to articulate. So it’s like trying to describe how plants grow without reference to soil or weather.

Beyond Babbling

So what might some of the tradeoffs be? Many are hiding in plain sight; a person has only to look.

To start with the relatively trivial, few youthful enthusiasts of the sexual revolution anticipated the rash (word carefully chosen) of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that resulted from more people having more sex with greater numbers of partners. This was despite the fact that syphilis and gonorrhea had been around for a very long time. But those things happened to other people—until they didn’t. It is hard to communicate to those not here and young at the time how entitled and invulnerable the Sixties generation imagined itself to be—all flowing from a heretofore unthinkable affluence and an almost completely unglued sense of unearned entitlement. And no one anticipated AIDS as a downside of the “gay liberation” that followed on the heels of women’s liberation.

STD epidemics may not seem a trivial downside to some, but it is compared to other likely effects. It would take several entire books to do justice to them, but let some brief comments suffice for now.  

The sexual revolution/women’s liberation phenomenon undermined the stabilities of the nuclear family even as it opened up opportunities for women in the workplace and in society at large. Results have included smaller families and families begun later in life; the advent of regularized commercial daycare for children as young as six weeks; a much greater frequency of divorce and hence of mixed- and single-parent families; less consequent contact generally between children and their biological grandparents; and hence also more older-but-not-elderly people living alone, with attendant increases in loneliness, depression, and consequent ill-health. These are not speculations; these are facts. The sexual revolution alone does not explain all of these phenomena but it is absent as part of the explanation from none of them.

The effects of all this, taken together, on the socialization of children and their sense of emotional security are the most broadly significant in social terms. We still do not fully understand the details of how the bonding process between parents and young children works. We do not understand how mere parental eye contact and tone of voice manage to communicate whole worlds of meaning to young children, including the instilling of a sense of moral reasoning. We seem to be genetically wired for that, but no one has figured out exactly how parents activate it. We just know by intuition and experience that somehow they do.  

We do know that stories are a powerful part of the activation process. So to let strangers and television (and now internet) advertisers play a major role in formative communications processes with children under the age of three years actually means taking a leap into the unknown, into an age of what one social scientist called “industrial folklore.”^[2] We know, too, that a child rendered emotionally vulnerable by a broken family life finds it harder to establish bonds of trust with teachers, and that makes it harder to learn in school settings. Despite what we know, or strongly suspect based on evidence, it is not generally permissible to raise such questions in the United States if they are in any way tied to the rinse cycle of the sexual revolution, or of “women’s liberation” as it used to be and sometimes still is called.

Now let’s look briefly at an effect of intermediate importance. After use of the birth-control pill became widespread in the United States, by around 1965, large cohorts of mostly younger women—large percentages of them highly educated for the first time in history—entered the labor force. This coincided with two other phenomena: the first major pulse of outsourcing industrial jobs to lower-wage production platforms overseas, and with it the first glimmerings of large-scale industrial automation; and the rapid growth of Great Society-infused administrative/bureaucratic government at both the state and Federal levels.

Setting aside for a moment the direction of the causal arrows here, this massive coincidence bore three consequences. First, it shifted the economy’s labor profile away from manufacturing and toward clerical jobs, women being far more attracted to the latter than the former.

Second, it depressed wages generally and eventually hurt manufacturing and trade unions. Companies seeing a burgeoning labor supply soon figured out how to get two employees for not much more than the price of one. That in turn led to many more two-parent working families, nearly all of them mesmerized by the subtle transformation of “want” into “need” in the evolving consumerist paradise of the postwar era.

And third, least important but still noteworthy, the movement of so many women into the workforce in such a short span of time made a shambles of the Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Women now earning a salary figured into the statistics, so the economy seemed to boom (say, between 1965 and 1973, and again after about 1980). But all that had happened was that the non-monetized labor women were doing as homemakers and full-time parents now got counted just because it got monetized. Anyone who thinks that women qua homemakers had just been sitting around the house all day watching soap operas and eating bonbons needs urgent re-educating. The substitutes for their formerly non-monetized but essential work—daycare and elder care givers, restaurateurs, security system makers and installers, lawn care providers, and plenty more—now also got paid, so the boost to national income accounts was doubled. But actual productivity changed vastly less than the BLS numbers suggested.

Someone, maybe some economics or economic history doctoral student, ought to go back and adjust the database to reflect reality. But this is unlikely to happen because it is not permissible even to raise the point. We babble about sex. We do not readily discuss the broader implications of changes in sexual attitudes and behavior.

Given these tradeoffs, and others left unmentioned, would I turn the clock back if I could? Certainly not. But it’s one thing to embrace the essence of and the need for women’s liberation from the yoke of constraining tradition, and another to take a mindlessly cavalier attitude toward its broad effects. Good intentions never foreordain good outcomes in any simple way. I wouldn’t turn the clock back to before the Industrial Revolution either, but who can look at the human wreckage the species endured to achieve its escape from the Malthusian trap and not weep? If this is the best of all possible worlds, we should shutter to contemplate any other.

#MeToo

Even people living in the middle of this or that Middle Eastern desert have by now heard of the #MeToo phenomenon. So what’s that about?

Back in the old days, by which I mean the mid-1960s and 1970s, women’s liberation often meant in practice that women became self-avowed sexual beings. They admitted to experiencing sexual longings, and were not embarrassed or ashamed by it.

Now, this may seem a pointless thing to say, seeing how as a matter of plain fact it is so obvious. But you must realize that in this and other Western societies such thinking had been confused if not repressed for centuries by a tangled mass of custom and religious stricture. So it was something new for American women at least in certain socio-economic strata, now in possession of more or less foolproof pregnancy protection, to express their sexuality more openly, and to act more frequently on their longings. A fair number in my general age cohort embraced “hippie” fashions, discarded their bras, and did from time to time indeed love the one they were with. Fifty-some years ago this went by the generic phrase “free love,” and the attendant adjuration to “let it all hang out” was not without multiple meanings.

I have never figured out to my satisfaction what was going on inside young women’s heads at the time, those who heard the call of the sexual sirens and those who did not. But I remember how young men saw all this, since, born in June 1951, I was one of them: We liked it. Let me avoid graphic detail, but merely say that the opportunity to have sex with many different women, without experiencing serial panic over getting anyone pregnant and often without subsequent emotional or other obligation, appealed to many young men. The women were the ones proclaiming their liberation, but we men were showered with a kind of freedom, too—or license.

For a while it seemed too good to be true. That’s because it was too good to be true. What if a man developed deep feelings for a woman, and began to contemplate marriage and children, but she was soon off enjoying intimacies with other men—the love-struck man’s roommates, for example? That hurt, and the more “free love” proliferated the more hurt there was. That was fair; now men got to suffer feelings of rejection, betrayal, and humiliation just as women had since time immemorial. But it wasn’t fun.

Far more important, men who came of age then during the sexual revolution, and in the several generations since, have come to expect women to be sexually available before and even outside of marriage. Which ones? Well, a man has to make an effort to find out, but that no longer involves making small talk with her father and sitting on the porch swing as the courting-candle burns down the allotted time.

                                                                       Antique Courting-Candle

What is now permissible, and indeed expected, in terms of dress, speech, and behavior (dancing techniques and alcohol consumption, to take but two examples) in pursuit of womanly favors is a very far cry from what it used to be. Behavior once universally considered gentlemanly and ladylike is now considered quaint to the point of risible.

In short, men have been incentivized since the mid-1960s to change their approach to courtship. How could it possibly be otherwise? Is it not a form of madness to assert that the sexual revolution has transformed the attitudes and consequent behavior of most women, but has had no effect whatsoever on men? It is, yes, and that madness defines a new problem for which #MeToo thinks it has a solution.

Rape is rare, but it happens—and it fully deserves its categorization as a capital crime. Acquaintance and date rape are also rare, but they too happen. The most common form of rape by a significant margin, according to the data, is separated spousal/ex-spousal rape. But even that is rare. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the adjusted per-capita victimization rate of rape—using a consistent definition of the crime—has declined from about 2.4 per 1000 in the 1990s to about 1.4 per 1000 now. That’s less than two-tenths of 1 percent, and the likelihood of an American women being raped by a stranger or casual acquaintance is probably closer to two-hundredths of 1 percent. American women are less likely to be raped than any other women in any time or place in history, but thanks to the panic-driven exaggerations of the #MeToo movement you wouldn’t know it.

Far short of rape is the amorphous category of “sexual harrassment.” The numbers being flung around these days in the #MeToo era are meaningless because no definition of the term exists. If a man’s patting a woman on the shoulder in an office setting for a job well done is an example of sexual harrassment, then claims that one in five or one in three women have been sexually harrassed might be true, but only on the condition of the numbers’ absurdity, because a simple shoulder pat is only an example of sexual harrassment to those avidly in seach of it.

But absurdity cannot be ruled out at a time of moral panic, which is what the #MeToo phenomenon mostly is: a warlock hunt.^[3] It resembles similar moral panics in American history: burning supposed witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-93; the McCarthyite anti-communist hysteria of 1954-55; the “satanist” daycare pedophilia scare of the 1980s; and a number of lesser-known others.

This is not to say that boorish and stupid male behavior short of rape does not exist. It is not to say that we should overlook powerful men who intimidate subordinate female employees into granting sexual favors. We would all be better off if such things did not happen, or happened less frequently than they do. Some men should be fired, humiliated, and even jailed for crimes less than rape. It is right to press hard against unwonted permissiveness and a sense of entitlement, and against “guys” networks that protect creeps and jerks who have gone too far. If #MeToo succeeds at that I’m all for it. But it is crazy to ruin people’s lives in the absence of due process, to assume that women must always be believed no matter what they say, and even crazier to conflate all forms of undesirable behavior into one great gaseous ball of outrage and name it rape.

Here is the true essence of the derangement: With the sexual revolution women began to think and act differently, and they came to believe that their being free to act more naturally, more like men, would equalize their freedoms with men and banish all the neuroses and oppressiveness that their mothers and grandmothers had suffered. They could have careers and families and love and freedom and everything good altogether. But detours appeared on the road to the feminist paradise. What many got instead was hard work that was not necessarily fulfilling. Many got marriages that could not withstand the array of new pressures put upon them. And many got forms of motherhood that lacked the support of close neighborhood friends and extended family, forms that became more onerous than many could bear without becoming desperately unhappy and guilt-laden to boot.

Many young women also unknowingly forfeited the protection of middle age against the ease of divorce. Before the sexual revolution and the advent of no-fault divorce it was difficult and risky for a professional-status male in the United States to dump his wife for a younger woman. That middle-aged woman had power—power in the extended family and power over her children, and often too the power to organize other wives in such a way as to ruin a man’s social standing and even his career should he ask for a divorce. But once narcissism posing as “expressive individualism” displaced communal and familial responsibility as the highest obligation of men as well as women, and the social norms pressing against divorce eroded, the power of the middle-aged matron melted away. It is far easier in contemporary America for successful men to dump their aging wives than it used to be, a change of circumstance that has given the power of the reviled patriarchy a real boost. Will ironies never cease?  

In short, some things, at least, about the sexual revolution have gone badly and even shockingly wrong. Who to blame? American women could not and cannot blame themselves, cannot disavow the personality-shaping choices they made as young feminist pioneers, cannot own the unanticipated downsides of so noble a cause. Who, then, is left to blame? Who is left for the purpose of venting ambient—but sometimes very specific—disappointment and anger? That disappointment and anger constitute the invisible fuel that powers #MeToo beyond its unexceptionably justified core aims and toward the abyss of hysteria.

Some women can avoid serious reflection on what has gone wrong because they are seized with certain mind-shackling feminist theories. One of the most extreme holds that all heterosexual relationships, including marriage, are modeled on rape.^[4] Marriage is just an institutional lock-in for rape, founded on the unequal physical power relationship between men and women. A woman would be raped by many men, and no one man would take an interest in protecting and succoring her (and his children with her) were it not for marriage. So women give in to marriage to protect themselves from a completely Hobbesian fate.

This theory of the origins of marriage is an off-take of a pseudo-Marxian view that sees all human relationships as based on conflictual materialist (and physical) power struggles. It completely ignores the reality that human relationships are inherently cooperative as well as competitive by nature. When it comes to relations between men and women, it completely discounts natural human emotions such as love and natural human partnerships that characterize families.

If that were not enough, another popular theory, this one postmodern as opposed to Marxian, holds that all gender roles are socially constructed. There is nothing about human biology in any of it. It is of course true that peer pressure generalized into a whole culture affects how people think of themselves and consequently how they’re liable to behave. It is part of the socialization process. But that’s a long way from claiming that there are no inherent differences between men and women, or that socialization processes across nearly all human cultures are at the same time completely arbitrary but have just happened over several millennia to align on similar gender roles—apparently for no reasons whatsoever if you believe this theory.

Nonsense on stilts is a kind way to describe such ideas, but when people are desperate to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they have unwittingly done to themselves, and others, no form of nonsense appears to be off-limits.

Affirmative Consent

It would be unkind to end on such a depressing note. So let us end instead with a pinch of humor, if that is at all possible in discussing such a subject.

About four and a half years ago the California legislature passed a law on affirmative consent in sexual relations on campus. As with other pioneering ventures like the aforementioned no-fault divorce law of 1969, some other states soon followed California with campus codes of their own.

So it happened that colleges in California must require “affirmative conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” Moreover, the law mandates such consent for each phase of a sexual encounter, without explicitly defining what those phases are: “Consent to one kind of contact cannot be taken to mean consent to another. So an encounter that progresses from kissing to intercourse would require not one go-ahead but several.” The California law stipulates, again without defining it, that consent can be communicated verbally (they didn’t dare say orally) or through actions. But some such codes in other states require written consent, which can range from a short statement to up to two pages.

There is no excuse for sexual abuse or violence, up to and certainly including rape. But that’s not at issue in these codes, which are not needed for clear-cut cases of violent abuse. They rather seek to regulate and so routinize inherently ambiguous human behavior so that no misunderstandings can possibly occur. But routinization of that sort is utterly foreign to and destructive of such activities. Sexual encounters between young and relatively inexperienced individuals—and I mean emotionally inexperienced more than I mean inexperienced in technique—are frequently less than clearly staged. Part of the mystique—and part of the enjoyment—is the sweet uncertainty with which such encounters begin. If both participants knew ahead of time where the first sexual opportunity with a given person would lead, it would rob the experience of much of its allure. It would cease being an adventure, which, by its very nature, poses the possibility of risk and regret as well as of satisfaction and serenity.

I don’t make light of the dilemma that college leaders face, especially given the fact that American undergraduates today tend to be less emotionally mature than were earlier generations due to the effects of their immersion in IT technology. College presidents and deans don’t want to be sued out of their endowments and they earnestly want to do what is best for students. But when I try to picture the actual implementation of a multi-stage written sexual consent code, I double over in paroxysms of laughter.

Try to picture Pat and Jess, their clothing loosened and cast hither and yon, their breathing quickening and audible, their body parts vibrating to music on the stereo (could it still possibly be Pachelbel’s “Canon”?), and their tongues launched on journeys toward salty destinations when, suddenly, Jess interrupts their romantic embrace and flatly states: “Pat, you’ve got to sign this paper before I can lick your [fill in the blank……].” Use your imagination.

Do campus sex code writers really expect an already consummated couple, so to speak, who met a month before in English lit class, to calmly discuss beforehand the nuances of whether they are going to make love, have sex, or rut like beasts of the field? The PC crowd that thinks up this stuff doesn’t find anything about it the least bit funny, or even weird—and that itself is scary. They thus manage the improbable feat of being unseemly, inane, and tedious all at the same time.

So now, dear reader, perhaps you understand better what is going on over here under the broad rubric of American sexuality. You may still think we have lost our minds, and you may be correct. But hopefully your reasons, now at essay’s end, are more precise. Perhaps you understand us better than most of us understand ourselves. It could be.

Adam Garfinkle is Founding Editor of The American Interest and a regular contributor to Al-Mesbar.

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