The Smallest Minority by Kevin D. Williamson

Author:Kevin D. Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

CHAPTER S IX

The Lonely Mob

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951

Social media is the birth-control pill of political discourse: It has fundamentally changed the nature of an entire broad category of human relationships by rendering those relationships sterile.

The birth-control pill enabled a new kind of sexuality—serial polygamy—in which the absence of the procreative element proved simultaneously liberating and degrading: Sex liberated from the consequence of pregnancy was liberated from many other consequences as well—for a time, that liberation continued under the delusion that contraception together with penicillin had liberated sex from all serious consequences. The shock troops of the so-called Sexual Revolution in the 1960s subsequently encountered horrifying new consequences such as AIDS and fatherless young psychopaths in subsequent decades, and wistfully described their youths as the “PPPP” years: post-pill, pre-plague.

But the biological consequences of sex never stood alone; instead, they were enmeshed in a complex set of social, legal, political, and economic relations founded on that underlying biological reality. Without the mitigating influences of marriage and parenthood—and the social institutions built around them—it was easy, and probably inevitable, that sex would degenerate into a mechanical exercise in self-gratification and exploitation that is mutual but rarely mutual in exactly the same way: Men and women want different things out of their sex lives and out of the relationships built around them. What was once called “women’s liberation” has mainly liberated heterosexual men at the expense of their female partners, who have been reduced to something not entirely distinguishable from equipment for an advanced kind of masturbation. The consequences of that are everywhere obvious: the undeniable social defects of single motherhood, the unhappiness that women experience from delaying marriage and motherhood until too late in life, the impossible socio-economic expectations laid upon many women, etc.

The current moral panic involving the “epidemic” of sexual assault on college campuses—an epidemic whose existence is to be found nowhere in the actual sexual-assault data—is the revenge young women are exacting for their exploitation and the social blessing that accompanies that exploitation. As Meghan McArdle has eloquently argued, the libertarian approach to sex, which insists that consent is the only moral issue of any consequences, leaves women without a moral language to describe their unhappiness with the state of their intimate relationships, and so they attempt to link their regrets to consent even in situations in which there was no violation of that consent.

Perhaps it did not occur to the feminists of the 1960s that women themselves, their interests and their happiness, were the principal burdens from which sex was to be liberated, or that the result of this would be more sex with more partners but also more loneliness—a kind of loneliness that did not exist before the twentieth century, one for which we still do not have a precise name.

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