Enemies of Eros

by Maggie Gallagher

How the sexual revolution is killing family, marriage, and sex and what we can do about it

Her book spreads itself to touch many different topics and examples, and does not follow a path sharp enough to summarize easily. I'll try anyway. [Go read the book yourself! Also see The Abolition of Marriage] She observes that:

• Sex in our culture has been abstracted, dehumanized, and dis-integrated. "Sex is about physical pleasure" is the Big Lie. If sex were only about physical pleasure, who would bother with the complexities of dealing with another purpose, when masturbation is so easy? Sex is about the union with another person: not just a body, not just a set of physical stimuli.
• Sex without responsibility is an illusion. Sex makes babies, who require years of care--unless you kill them.
• Contract law doesn't even begin to reflect the complexities and sacrifices that marriage and parenting entail. Contract law focuses on choices rather than status, but in a family responsibilities are based on status--husband, wife, father, mother, child. To be a member of a family is the exact opposite of being an economic cog in the machine; and interchangeable part.
• You can't pay people enough to raise a child properly--unless they fall in love with the child.
• Children need stable families.(*)
• Gender differences are real. Their expression varies slightly with the culture, but every other culture tries to distinguish masculine and feminine. Sex roles create a climate of stability.
• Easy divorce creates a climate of instability that effects everybody.
• It is no longer possible to make a commitment to marry for life and have this honored by law. Marriage in the customary sense no longer exists in law.
• Popular feminist theory demonizes stay-at-home mothers. This is perverse enough already, but an unintended side effect of encouraging women to work and be independent is that men take this at face value, and frequently decline to support the woman and his/her children.
• Some women are meant for careers outside the home, but the majority fall in love with their children.
• Men need to be civilized. Without social pressure they often duck their responsibilities, and thus never fall in love with their children, and thus do not care for them effectively.
• The sexual revolution is designed for the convenience of unmarried men. Women are expected to put out without the promise of commitment.
• Simple-minded welfare programs have, by making men less necessary, made them less involved with their families (often never bothering to marry), and thus perpetuating the poverty the programs were meant to relieve.

To give a flavor of her insights...

If sex roles are too stifling, the obvious answer is to widen the range of opportunity contained in the role, not to extirpate gender altogether. What is the result of attempting to abolish sex roles by proclamation? Men, abandoning a civilized male role, increasing turn to promiscuous sex and violence as their primary route to male identity. Women remain in our traditional role as caretakers of the children--poorer, overworked, more vulnerable to male abandonment and abuse. And children, both male and female, become the most vulnerable of all.

Men are, apparently, rather bad at determining when a woman is actually attracted to them.

I don't know how they can have failed to notice that, as a matter of hard empirical fact, not every woman who smiles at a man is signaling an uncontrollable desire to become his own sweet patootie. But from their point of view, it seems, men are constantly surrounded by lustful women who perversely refuse to sleep with them. ... What men are apparently doing is projecting their own sexual responses onto women. It's only natural, women do the same thing in the opposite direction.

One consequence is that women vastly underestimate the effect their sexuality has on men in relationships which they have defined as nonromantic. This emerged clearly in Richardson's landmark study of mistresses. "One of the primary reasons these relationships escalate is because the men and women have different assessments of the situation. 'His' reality and 'Her' reality are not the same." If forewarned is forearmed, women who believe in androgyny are ripe for the plucking.

And get plucked they do.

Nothing is more astonishing than the naivete of the sophisticated woman. "We talked about it for several months," reports one woman, "and I only saw him after work. I told him I wouldn't mind just being friends, purely platonic, but if he wanted a flesh relationship, forget it. Because he kept seeing me, I knew he wanted to be friends too."

By all means go read her book(s).

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(*)The crime rates prove this. Note people frequently lie with statistics, by saying that the average child without a stable family is not much more violent than one from a stable family. This is misleading because the criminal activity comes from the tail of the distribution (the number violent beyond a certain threshold), and a small change in the mean produces a huge change in the number whose violence becomes disruptive.

She points out that black families in the USA have been hugely disrupted, and the social effects are horrible.