Other factors that seem relevant but weren't included here:
> the constant decrease in age at which career pressures start may be helping drive less risky behavior in teens
> teen culture moved online
> porn singularity
> online sex education
> Millennials saw the breakdown of forever marriage and learned not to repeat their parents mistakes with spouse choice
> decentralized and democratized social scenes (e.g., video games, fandoms) where you don't just default to drinking a bunch or doing coke
> better consent practices as a form of realized egalitarianism, not "neo-Puritanism". Would neo-Puritans have onlyfans?
> decentralization of culture against the individual atomization of hustle culture: why bother with a traditional marriage when chasing your career + side hustles takes you to new cities that you can't afford to start a family in anyway?
> commodification of public spaces and erosion of the dole
Hey Noah, one way you can very easily test your hypotheses is by comparing the US with other rich countries. My guess is many of these effects are true across the EU, and since there’s no Christian movement there, you could control for your driver.
Not sure how much weight I would give the social conservative echo theory on this. It's not like liberals were ever cheering on teen pregnancies.
A big part of the joke in Austin Powers was his naive late sixties belief that he could all that stuff in a consequence free environment. People began seeing that, yes there were consequences, so they reevaluated. Add in HIV, which was a big psychological event, and the current wave of feminism and I don't know how much you need to credit social conservatives.
I think this leaves out the substantial degree to which social conservatism is about gender norms. I'd point to three key hypocrisies/inconsistencies: opposing greater access to contraception even as it would reduce the number of abortions; urging "modesty" on women and girls while holding men and boys to nowhere near the same standard; and claiming that they were in favor of sexual pleasure provided it was within a heterosexual marriage and then Mike Huckabee denouncing Beyoncé for singing about enjoying sex with her lawfully wedded husband. All point to a revulsion at the idea of specifically women experiencing sexual pleasure.
It seems to me that in the socially conservative worldview, it's partly that sex is dangerous even when consensual but it's also partly this idea that men and women want incompatible things, have different roles to play, cannot fully understand one another, and must be understood primarily as men and women respectively, without tolerance for individuals who defy the trend. From that angle, the idea that men face overpowering sexual urges that women cannot possibly understand and must restructure their lives to manage is a fundamental social conservative idea; it's also a mainstay of the comedy of Bill Cosby and Louis C.K. As far as I can tell, that kind of benevolent sexism – at least coming from men – is (mercifully) less acceptable post-MeToo; the presumption of MeToo is that communication is possible between sexes and indeed can be required, that sex that a woman enjoys is not an incoherent or utopian concept.
On the other hand, FOSTA-SESTA exists and the neo-Puritan streak in progressive sexuality discourse was really brought home to me by the attempt to make a scandal of Alex Morse benignly flirting with college students, so yeah, the social conservatives still seem to be in charge, from where I stand. And to my point about gender norms being central to the social conservative project – one of their big victories was thwarting the ERA!
This is a crazy assed column. Yes, the social conservatives’ goals fighting against abortion rights have been terribly and oppressively effective, but it’s pretty clear the forces driving lower divorce rates, lower birth rates and lower sexual promiscuity have very little to do with Pat Robertson’s preaching.
For one thing, people could afford to get divorced in the seventies, they could divide their income and still lead middle class lives. Today it would ruin them.
Also too back then one had a possibility of privacy that made extramarital behavior possible while iPhones and social media have tethered us to one another in a way that forces us to be more accountable.
My guess/hope is that one change that the Christian Right has never embraced - the rise of women in our culture (we only now have our first female Vice President) - has driven more of the social revolutions you mention than The PTL Club ever did.
But mostly, like everything else in the anthropocene, it’s a combination of economics and technology that’s impacted the landscape. The fact that a handful of those changes reflect the stated goals of the radically sexist, hypocritical and barbaric Christian Right is only coincidental and not worthy of mention.
think you're missing a key element in your rush to give social conservatism too much credit for the drop in teen pregnancy and sex. Consider the fact that in the late 80s and 90s teens and college students saw a rise in sex education regarding safe(r) sex using contraceptives and prevention of unwanted pregnancy & STDs. Social conservatives pushing "abstinence only" education failed in this regard. Where such "abstinence only" education dominated in conservative states teen pregnancy and STD transmission rose among abstinence teens.
The other aspect was living under the constant shadow of AIDS & STDs in the 90s and early 00s. While social conservatives fought against expansion of abortion access, progressives pushed for access to birth control. Specifically the pill and the morning after pill to reduce / eliminate unwanted pregnancies. Something social conservatives are also against.
So while credit is warranted to social conservatives packing the courts and passing abortion restrictive laws, they managed to not keep the contraceptive genie in the bottle either.
Whether or not young people taking a healthy approach to sex (which would be literally position that is not the drug and disco fueled sex orgies of the 70s) would or could be attributable to socially conservatives is specious at best.
Likewise a huge victory you don't mention is the massive reduction in sexual and violent content in movies. The ratings system that social conservatives demanded really did a great job neutering Hollywood
I think I'd draw a bit of a distinction between "social conservatism" and "religious conservatism." The latter tends to focus more narrowly on various issues related to sexuality. The former encompasses things like immigration restrictionism, capital punishment, climate change denialism (and skepticism of science in general) and opposition to things like globalization, firearms regulation and woke education reforms. In other words, social conservatism is now the broader church of "owning the libs."
Now, I realize there's a lot of overlap between these groups. And indeed that's my main point: from what I understand white evangelical Protestants have been an overwhelmingly loyal part of the MAGA coalition over the last few cycles. So, yes, to support Noah's thesis here: social conservatives have indeed left their mark (despite some defeats*) in more ways than one, and one of the most prominent ways is that they've solidified their control of the Republican Party, and pushed that party to the right to more closely hew to their worldview on myriad issues.
*Cannabis acceptance has been another rather striking defeat for these folks, too.
I mean you could take this further and point out that the wider embrace of gay equality was based on a rejection of "Queen Liberation" as the harbinger of a wider sexual revolution in favour of "Marriage Equality" as a sign LGB people just wanted to live similar lives to straight people. Less a surrender by social conservatives, and more a detente with them. I imagine the embrace Trans Equality will follow a similar path, with the some of the wilder ideas of gender theroists abandoned to reassure cisgender people that the aim is to have Trans People live in society, rather than change it
So, tech is a driver of the absolute decline in rates of sex. There's at least one study that gets taught to anthro undergrads about birthrates dropping in one Indian state after TV became widespread there. Other stuff to watch/do. This seems clearly distinct from any role of social conservatism unless "social liberalism" is being defined as far more fragile than even I would do, such that it's anything more than not having North Korea-like control of communication/media.
The widespread availability of birth control is another factor in the drop in birth rates in the US. Social conservatives do have a relationship to that, in that they want birth control to be illegal and will move to start restricting it once Roe is gone.
The role of economics could well be summed up as Millennials/Zoomers know precarity, and their reaction to it has been to do the sexual equivalent of stashing their earnings under a mattress. Social conservatives have an oft-stated expectation that middle age will naturally move these generations to the right, but the economic security that existed when previous generations did that has, ah, not been granted to our generations by the Tooth Fairy in a way that lets the Kochs keep all their money.
That said, my own default assumption is that the US is an intensely conservative Calvinist country and has only become marginally, tentatively more socially liberal in fits and starts, and that the only reason the right in the US can get away with the insistent claim that it's actually liberals who are dominant is because Americans are so insular/parochial (because conservative) that they can't even imagine what actual social liberal egalitarianism would even be like.
Kind of surprised you didn’t mention the alliance between Dworkin/McKinnon and the Religious Right with respect to anti-porn legislation in the ‘80s/‘90s (this was used as a plot point by Margaret Atwood in *The Handmaid’s Tale*, as one reason for the rise of Gilead). And the Michelle Goldberg piece linked elsewhere in this thread also points to a resurgence in Dworkin/McKinnon-type thinking within left circles, most notably MeToo.
With that being said, it seems clear that this was a political alliance, with hardly any ideological similarities between the two, save a deep need to restrict other people’s behavior for the sake of their vision of a just or holy society.
So is it possible, Noah, that you're mistaking correlation for causation? I think other commenters have pointed this out, but haven't studies shown that a large reason for declining sex rates amongst Millenial and Gen Z folks is the increased amount of time people spend online? To me, it seems like there are large cohorts of young men nowadays who spend a lot of their time online, where, obviously, it is more difficult to find a sexual partner. Relatedly, is it possible declining employment rates factor into this phenomenon? If people are working less/ have less disposable income, they are less likely to spend money going out and meeting potential partners? Not to mention, being out of work certainly isn't good for one's confidence, which, you would think, would hurt these peoples' abilities to court sexual partners. Just some food for thought, let me know what you think.
Hmm, I think this post is broadly true, but I dont think not cheating on your spouse was a conservative issue! Everyone agrees on that one! Open marriages also allow for none cheating, yet the increase prevelence is not really a conservatie win, either.
Similerly, I got the feeling conservatives were literally saying restrict sex outside of marriage because the bible says so, and because people who did had better outcomes, they rarely cited consent. Unless IM totally wrong, I guess I haven't exactly read a history of conservative arguments against sex.
Very useful and thoughtful column. I would add that another way to frame this is that the sexual liberation or what some might call sex-positive form of feminism has been losing out in the broader culture to the Andrea Dworkin heterosexual-skeptical form of feminism.
I wonder if some of these statistics hide a form of growing sexual inequality. I recently saw numbers (that I think were in a paywalled Washington Post article I can't find again) showing that over the past few decades, the percentage of Americans that haven't had sex even once in the past 12 months has been gradually increasing from the low teens to the low 20%s. But at the same time, dating and hookup apps seem likely to mean that the few percent of people having the most sex are probably having quite a bit more sex than was the case a decade or two ago (though it would be nice to have actual data on this - it's obviously hard to measure in a meaningful and representative way).
This essay by Amia Srinivasan raises some of these issues, along with many other fascinating ones, in ways that at least to me suggest a parallel between the increasing economic inequality of economic liberalism, and a potential increasing sexual inequality of sexual liberalism.
Other factors that seem relevant but weren't included here:
> the constant decrease in age at which career pressures start may be helping drive less risky behavior in teens
> teen culture moved online
> porn singularity
> online sex education
> Millennials saw the breakdown of forever marriage and learned not to repeat their parents mistakes with spouse choice
> decentralized and democratized social scenes (e.g., video games, fandoms) where you don't just default to drinking a bunch or doing coke
> better consent practices as a form of realized egalitarianism, not "neo-Puritanism". Would neo-Puritans have onlyfans?
> decentralization of culture against the individual atomization of hustle culture: why bother with a traditional marriage when chasing your career + side hustles takes you to new cities that you can't afford to start a family in anyway?
> commodification of public spaces and erosion of the dole
Hey Noah, one way you can very easily test your hypotheses is by comparing the US with other rich countries. My guess is many of these effects are true across the EU, and since there’s no Christian movement there, you could control for your driver.
Not sure how much weight I would give the social conservative echo theory on this. It's not like liberals were ever cheering on teen pregnancies.
A big part of the joke in Austin Powers was his naive late sixties belief that he could all that stuff in a consequence free environment. People began seeing that, yes there were consequences, so they reevaluated. Add in HIV, which was a big psychological event, and the current wave of feminism and I don't know how much you need to credit social conservatives.
I think this leaves out the substantial degree to which social conservatism is about gender norms. I'd point to three key hypocrisies/inconsistencies: opposing greater access to contraception even as it would reduce the number of abortions; urging "modesty" on women and girls while holding men and boys to nowhere near the same standard; and claiming that they were in favor of sexual pleasure provided it was within a heterosexual marriage and then Mike Huckabee denouncing Beyoncé for singing about enjoying sex with her lawfully wedded husband. All point to a revulsion at the idea of specifically women experiencing sexual pleasure.
It seems to me that in the socially conservative worldview, it's partly that sex is dangerous even when consensual but it's also partly this idea that men and women want incompatible things, have different roles to play, cannot fully understand one another, and must be understood primarily as men and women respectively, without tolerance for individuals who defy the trend. From that angle, the idea that men face overpowering sexual urges that women cannot possibly understand and must restructure their lives to manage is a fundamental social conservative idea; it's also a mainstay of the comedy of Bill Cosby and Louis C.K. As far as I can tell, that kind of benevolent sexism – at least coming from men – is (mercifully) less acceptable post-MeToo; the presumption of MeToo is that communication is possible between sexes and indeed can be required, that sex that a woman enjoys is not an incoherent or utopian concept.
On the other hand, FOSTA-SESTA exists and the neo-Puritan streak in progressive sexuality discourse was really brought home to me by the attempt to make a scandal of Alex Morse benignly flirting with college students, so yeah, the social conservatives still seem to be in charge, from where I stand. And to my point about gender norms being central to the social conservative project – one of their big victories was thwarting the ERA!
This is a crazy assed column. Yes, the social conservatives’ goals fighting against abortion rights have been terribly and oppressively effective, but it’s pretty clear the forces driving lower divorce rates, lower birth rates and lower sexual promiscuity have very little to do with Pat Robertson’s preaching.
For one thing, people could afford to get divorced in the seventies, they could divide their income and still lead middle class lives. Today it would ruin them.
Also too back then one had a possibility of privacy that made extramarital behavior possible while iPhones and social media have tethered us to one another in a way that forces us to be more accountable.
My guess/hope is that one change that the Christian Right has never embraced - the rise of women in our culture (we only now have our first female Vice President) - has driven more of the social revolutions you mention than The PTL Club ever did.
But mostly, like everything else in the anthropocene, it’s a combination of economics and technology that’s impacted the landscape. The fact that a handful of those changes reflect the stated goals of the radically sexist, hypocritical and barbaric Christian Right is only coincidental and not worthy of mention.
think you're missing a key element in your rush to give social conservatism too much credit for the drop in teen pregnancy and sex. Consider the fact that in the late 80s and 90s teens and college students saw a rise in sex education regarding safe(r) sex using contraceptives and prevention of unwanted pregnancy & STDs. Social conservatives pushing "abstinence only" education failed in this regard. Where such "abstinence only" education dominated in conservative states teen pregnancy and STD transmission rose among abstinence teens.
The other aspect was living under the constant shadow of AIDS & STDs in the 90s and early 00s. While social conservatives fought against expansion of abortion access, progressives pushed for access to birth control. Specifically the pill and the morning after pill to reduce / eliminate unwanted pregnancies. Something social conservatives are also against.
So while credit is warranted to social conservatives packing the courts and passing abortion restrictive laws, they managed to not keep the contraceptive genie in the bottle either.
Whether or not young people taking a healthy approach to sex (which would be literally position that is not the drug and disco fueled sex orgies of the 70s) would or could be attributable to socially conservatives is specious at best.
Likewise a huge victory you don't mention is the massive reduction in sexual and violent content in movies. The ratings system that social conservatives demanded really did a great job neutering Hollywood
I think I'd draw a bit of a distinction between "social conservatism" and "religious conservatism." The latter tends to focus more narrowly on various issues related to sexuality. The former encompasses things like immigration restrictionism, capital punishment, climate change denialism (and skepticism of science in general) and opposition to things like globalization, firearms regulation and woke education reforms. In other words, social conservatism is now the broader church of "owning the libs."
Now, I realize there's a lot of overlap between these groups. And indeed that's my main point: from what I understand white evangelical Protestants have been an overwhelmingly loyal part of the MAGA coalition over the last few cycles. So, yes, to support Noah's thesis here: social conservatives have indeed left their mark (despite some defeats*) in more ways than one, and one of the most prominent ways is that they've solidified their control of the Republican Party, and pushed that party to the right to more closely hew to their worldview on myriad issues.
*Cannabis acceptance has been another rather striking defeat for these folks, too.
I mean you could take this further and point out that the wider embrace of gay equality was based on a rejection of "Queen Liberation" as the harbinger of a wider sexual revolution in favour of "Marriage Equality" as a sign LGB people just wanted to live similar lives to straight people. Less a surrender by social conservatives, and more a detente with them. I imagine the embrace Trans Equality will follow a similar path, with the some of the wilder ideas of gender theroists abandoned to reassure cisgender people that the aim is to have Trans People live in society, rather than change it
How can a falling marriage rate partially explain a low divorce rate, given the divorce rate is defined as divorces:marriages
So, tech is a driver of the absolute decline in rates of sex. There's at least one study that gets taught to anthro undergrads about birthrates dropping in one Indian state after TV became widespread there. Other stuff to watch/do. This seems clearly distinct from any role of social conservatism unless "social liberalism" is being defined as far more fragile than even I would do, such that it's anything more than not having North Korea-like control of communication/media.
The widespread availability of birth control is another factor in the drop in birth rates in the US. Social conservatives do have a relationship to that, in that they want birth control to be illegal and will move to start restricting it once Roe is gone.
The role of economics could well be summed up as Millennials/Zoomers know precarity, and their reaction to it has been to do the sexual equivalent of stashing their earnings under a mattress. Social conservatives have an oft-stated expectation that middle age will naturally move these generations to the right, but the economic security that existed when previous generations did that has, ah, not been granted to our generations by the Tooth Fairy in a way that lets the Kochs keep all their money.
That said, my own default assumption is that the US is an intensely conservative Calvinist country and has only become marginally, tentatively more socially liberal in fits and starts, and that the only reason the right in the US can get away with the insistent claim that it's actually liberals who are dominant is because Americans are so insular/parochial (because conservative) that they can't even imagine what actual social liberal egalitarianism would even be like.
Kind of surprised you didn’t mention the alliance between Dworkin/McKinnon and the Religious Right with respect to anti-porn legislation in the ‘80s/‘90s (this was used as a plot point by Margaret Atwood in *The Handmaid’s Tale*, as one reason for the rise of Gilead). And the Michelle Goldberg piece linked elsewhere in this thread also points to a resurgence in Dworkin/McKinnon-type thinking within left circles, most notably MeToo.
With that being said, it seems clear that this was a political alliance, with hardly any ideological similarities between the two, save a deep need to restrict other people’s behavior for the sake of their vision of a just or holy society.
So is it possible, Noah, that you're mistaking correlation for causation? I think other commenters have pointed this out, but haven't studies shown that a large reason for declining sex rates amongst Millenial and Gen Z folks is the increased amount of time people spend online? To me, it seems like there are large cohorts of young men nowadays who spend a lot of their time online, where, obviously, it is more difficult to find a sexual partner. Relatedly, is it possible declining employment rates factor into this phenomenon? If people are working less/ have less disposable income, they are less likely to spend money going out and meeting potential partners? Not to mention, being out of work certainly isn't good for one's confidence, which, you would think, would hurt these peoples' abilities to court sexual partners. Just some food for thought, let me know what you think.
Hmm, I think this post is broadly true, but I dont think not cheating on your spouse was a conservative issue! Everyone agrees on that one! Open marriages also allow for none cheating, yet the increase prevelence is not really a conservatie win, either.
Similerly, I got the feeling conservatives were literally saying restrict sex outside of marriage because the bible says so, and because people who did had better outcomes, they rarely cited consent. Unless IM totally wrong, I guess I haven't exactly read a history of conservative arguments against sex.
Very useful and thoughtful column. I would add that another way to frame this is that the sexual liberation or what some might call sex-positive form of feminism has been losing out in the broader culture to the Andrea Dworkin heterosexual-skeptical form of feminism.
I wonder if some of these statistics hide a form of growing sexual inequality. I recently saw numbers (that I think were in a paywalled Washington Post article I can't find again) showing that over the past few decades, the percentage of Americans that haven't had sex even once in the past 12 months has been gradually increasing from the low teens to the low 20%s. But at the same time, dating and hookup apps seem likely to mean that the few percent of people having the most sex are probably having quite a bit more sex than was the case a decade or two ago (though it would be nice to have actual data on this - it's obviously hard to measure in a meaningful and representative way).
This essay by Amia Srinivasan raises some of these issues, along with many other fascinating ones, in ways that at least to me suggest a parallel between the increasing economic inequality of economic liberalism, and a potential increasing sexual inequality of sexual liberalism.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex