It’s been a while since I updated here - I’ve been buried in the final stages of writing Feminism Against Progress, which I’m pleased and proud to say is now finished and in the brilliant and expert hands of my editors at Swift.
So much so, in fact, that it even has cover art and a pre-order listing - get it here from Swift, or here from Amazon.
Meanwhile, I was invited to address the older years at a well-known boys’ public school, on the subject of the sexual revolution, which left me wondering: would it even be possible to address, this while thinking think my way across the gap not just of sexed experience but also the immense gulf that divides those growing up in the cyborg era from those whose teens (like mine) occurred just before that era began?
I decided to offer a digested version of part of the argument I make in Feminism Against Progress, which concerns the damaging effects it has on our capacity for human intimacy, when you apply the market mindset to sex. I’m sharing it here (perhaps ironically given I’ve also included a marketing link for my own book…). The response was challenging and rewarding; I’d love to hear from readers about the teenage boys and girls of you acquaintance, and your sense of how these issues are perceived. My impression is that Gen Z is far from being as monolithically woke as the pessimists would have us think.
Sexual Thatcherism
I originally thought of calling this talk ‘Against Sexual Thatcherism’. I decided not to, in the end. But I want to start with Thatcher, as because her ghost has been haunting us recently, with all the goings-on in the Conservative Party.
In the most recent of their endless leadership elections, the Tories have been back and forth yet again about which of them is the truest heir to the Cult of Maggie. But it’s probably more accurate to say that’s actually all of us.
We all live in Maggie’s world now.
I was born the year Thatcher came to power. She spent my childhood forcing “market reforms” on a host of public services. Tony Blair continued her work. I’m not going to drone on about privatised utilities this evening, but I will talk about “markets” as a metaphor for how we organise human social life at scale.
Because in Maggie’s world, where we all now live, it’s more or less taken for granted that the default way of organising everything is via markets.
If you think something should be exempted from the market, it’s on you to explain why. I want to talk about what happens when you extend that mindset to sex.
What does that look like? Well, it’s everywhere. Thatcher famously said “There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women”. And it’s taken for granted that this is 100% true where sexuality is concerned.
Sexuality is a matter for individual conscience, isn’t it? Why should society have any say in what I do in private, with consenting adults? What possible reason could there be for imposing constraints on anything, as long as everyone is a willing participant? Right?
I’m going to call this “sexual Thatcherism”. Individual freedom, individual responsibility, caveat emptor and a healthy dose of competition. You’ll hear something along these lines referred to routinely nowadays as “the sexual marketplace”.
Over the next half an hour or so, I want to offer a critique of sexual Thatcherism, or the “sexual marketplace” if you prefer. I’ll look a bit at the history of sex and the market: that is, how men and women have historically negotiated the eternal overlap between sex, power and money.
I’ll suggest that the sexual norms that usually get treated as questions of personal morality are just as easily understood in broad material and practical terms.
I’ll show that dissolving social and sexual norms, which is usually called “progress”, is downstream of material changes – and where sex is concerned, of one technology in particular. This is now generally framed as ‘liberation’, not least by most feminists, but in practice has many downsides. And its ultimate beneficiary is not men or women but big business.
And I’ll talk a bit about where we might go next if we’re to have any chance at all of men and women being able to live together.
There’ll be time for questions or brickbats at the end, so if you can please hold fire while I make my case.
Sex, Babies, and Society
If you look back through history, the link between sex, power, and money is always there. These are powerful forces in culture, and their interests don’t always line up.
[Abelard and Heloise]
And for most of Western history, at least since Roman times, the mediating institution for these interests has been marriage. This is for the simple reason that until very recently, for women having sex meant getting pregnant.
Then what do you do with the baby? Imagine trying to answer that question in a world with no welfare state.
At the bottom of the social hierarchy, a single mum who can’t work because she’s caring for a baby is a serious economic and social challenge. At the top of the social scale, sex and money also collide – just differently. If you’re a rich aristo with a big estate, you want to pass your titles and assets on to your own genetic descendants, and major political alliances can turn on unions between families. That’s all much more complicated to navigate if you’re not sure whose baby your daughter just had, and no one has invented DNA tests yet.
As a result, unfair though it may seem today, for most of human history there’s been much heavier social pressure on women than men to avoid extramarital sex. When there’s no way of reliably preventing sex from resulting in babies, society does in fact have skin in the game as regards what you do in your private life.
This is one origin of what feminists today call “the sexual double standard”. As we’ll see, this material pressure no longer applies. But that doesn’t mean radical egalitarianism now rules.
Market Society
So aristocrats have always contracted marriages at least partly for pragmatic reasons: creating or preserving alliances, consolidating power or money, brokering peace and so on.
But where that was largely confined to the upper classes in medieval times, from roughly the 18th century on colonial expansion and the industrial revolution created a new mercantile elite. This group began to eclipse the old aristocracy, and began adopting the same aspirational approach to marriage as had previously been confined to the nobility.
And as “getting ahead” grew more competitive, in industrial “market society”, so snagging a good husband also grew more competitive. There’s no shortage of Georgian and Victorian art and literature that shows how close this often came to straight up prostitution – for example Hogarth’s satirical engravings, or the cynical social climbers depicted in Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair.
This is the world Jane Austen describes, where women cultivate themselves to be as charming as possible in order to snag a wealthy “catch”. The meeting-grounds where such young people were thrown together were, in the language of the age, often called ‘marriage marts’.
So sex and the market had to be held forcibly apart sometimes. The chief means of doing this was via the social ideal of romantic love, which emerged at the same time as the marketisation of marriage.
Think again of Jane Austen’s heroines, who usually manage to snag a guy who’s rich and handsome and also respects them for their brains and integrity. Austen is saying: look, you don’t just have to sell yourself to the highest bidder, you should hold out for someone who has a good character and loves you (and ideally is very rich too).
The new idealisation of romantic love also helped to protect women’s interests, as for many the shift to the industrial era represented a loss of agency compared to their agrarian foremothers. [explain about productive households and the Cult of Domesticity]
So to sum up: as we shifted from the medieval world to industrial market society, marriage became a kind of competitive market for ambitious women. At the same time, women justified their transformation from economic participants in a productive household to “chief consumer” in a private one by framing family life as a respite from the competitive market.
That uneasy balance held more or less from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth. It was ended by another material change every bit as far-reaching as the effect of industrialisation on women’s lives: contraception.
PILL
The first sexual revolution happened long before the 1960s. There was an attempt in the early 19th century, and another in the 1920s. But these never gained traction because for most women the risks were just too great.
The Pill changed everything.
Suddenly the material incentive for women to refuse casual sex more or less disappeared. When that happened, the so-called ‘sexual double standard’ abruptly stopped making intuitive sense. All of a sudden, it stopped looking like a way of protecting women from asymmetrically disastrous consequences of a casual sexual encounter. Now, it was just an arbitrary constraint on women, imposed for no reason at all. Or perhaps just because patriarchy.
It wasn’t just the feminists who sat up. There were no social costs to casual sex, so people could now claim it was just a private matter.
And that was good news not just for feminists, but also for the sex industry. Each of us owns our own body, right? Why shouldn’t people make money out of their own property? The first Playboy Club opened within a year of the Pill being legalised in the United States, and rapidly spread internationally. So the carefully maintained boundary between sex and the market started to collapse.
By the end of the 1960s, radical feminists were protesting the booming porn industry – even though you’d have prised the contraceptive pill that made that industry possible from their cold dead hands.
Fast-forward a few decades, to my teens in the 90s, and every garage sold porn mags. Sexualised marketing imagery was everywhere. And meanwhile all the social codes that had governed my mum’s mid-century dating life had more or less disappeared. Her dating advice to me was useless, because by the 1990s teenagers didn’t really go on ‘dates’. We hooked up informally at social gatherings, while teenage magazines alternately sold girls romantic visions of true love or “empowering” ones of trading on your youth and hotness for attention or power.
No one talked overtly then about just monetising yourself. That happened between my teens in the 90s and yours today, thanks to another revolution that kicked off just two years after the Pill arrived in Britain: the internet. Invented by the US military in 1969, it became a mass phenomenon in the early 00s (before most of you were born, which is frankly terrifying) with the arrival of social media platforms that didn’t require coding skills to enjoy.
“Online marketplaces” were the hot new thing: I even had a hand in founding one. Why wouldn’t we do for dating what Amazon did for books, or eBay for second hand stuff? To see how this whittled away still further at our remaining defences against collapsing sex into trade, think about what you’re doing when you create a digital profile. Doing so for yourself is only slightly different to creating a listing on eBay. And when you do so because you’re searching for a romantic or sexual partner, it arguably takes more effort to not add a checkout stage.
Men and women package themselves for consumption, like product listings on Amazon; everyone scroll the product listings. You can order a casual encounter like getting food on Deliveroo. The step from there to OnlyFans, which commodifies the “girlfriend experience” on a subscription basis, is minuscule. So too is the step from there to “sugar baby” websites that essentially pimp out young women to older men for money.
So what, you might say – let people do that if they want to. But that would be to overlook the knock-on effects the pervasive marketisation of sexuality has even on people who aren’t willing to commodify themselves directly. If the romantic and sexual norm looks like scrolling products on your phone, there might always be a better offer. So even if you don’t want to sell yourself, or you are looking for a relationship, this is now the exception rather than the accepted norm. I gather from younger friends that no one now assumes just because you’ve seen someone a few times that they’ve stopped dating other people, and it’s not really the done thing to ask.
New asymmetries
In turn this radical fluidity has introduced new asymmetries. This is because, while the Pill seemed to make men and women equal, it didn’t really.
Differences in mate choice
- Women: seek status, resources and intimacy
- Men: youth and fertility; ‘cad’ or ‘dad’
All these things make sense from an evolutionary perspective, in the context of reproductive asymmetries [explain]
When you eliminate the material consequences of sex, and with it all social pressures toward long-term relationships, those features of our nature don’t go away. Instead, they’re wildly exaggerated. High-status men are swamped with attention, as are hot women; everyone else copes in various ways.
This is the central incel talking point. These guys view this as women’s fault and is strangely reluctant to critique the technologies that enable this liquid market in sexual access.
Obviously I don’t know what it’s like being a guy. But it’s clear to me from men of my acquaintance that while there are ‘cads’, more men than not ultimately want love and companionship, and usually kids too. A cultural and technological juggernaut that militates actively against those goods, while incentivising impermanent, transactional relationships where each treats the other as a ‘thing’, is not in men’s interests.
Nor is it in women’s interests. Women have evolved to prefer sex in the context of emotional closeness, for solid adaptive reasons. For all these women, a generalised culture of casual sex and emotional impermanence is an ongoing disaster. No amount of self-commodification, even if it’s framed as “empowerment”, will stop us longing for love.
The educational impact of pornography, and the assumptions it bakes in about what women are, and enjoy, is having catastrophic effects on young women [anal prolapses at 15]
Despite this, feminism itself is busy dismantling arguments that once gave women grounds to hold out for intimacy, against violent sexual degradation and self-commodification. “Sex work is work” is now a feminist mantra. Universities offer freshers’ courses to undergraduates considering work as an escort or cam girl, in how to sell yourself safely.
What’s wrong with any of this, though, as long as everyone consents?
Litany of testimony about abuse in the sex industry
MeToo scandals: “consent” is a rogues’ charter where money and power is asymmetrical
But also, at scale, the “sexual marketplace” doesn’t leave everyone free. It’s not just a matter of everyone doing their thing.
For it turns out that “money can’t buy me love” really is true. Commerce implies a foundation of suspicion and self-interest. Solidarity implies a foundation of mutual trust. You can’t base a long-term partnership just on suspicion and self-interest.
If your thing is commodifying all of human sexuality, you’re in the way of me doing my thing, which is long-term relationships based on mutual solidarity and love.
And if you want long-term solidarity, you’re swimming against a commercial and technological behemoth that tells you no, this isn’t want you want. What you want is novelty, pleasure, and perfect freedom to end any liaison at any time for any reason.
Because there’s always another contractor out there. Isn’t there? Better cough up for another month of swiping on the dating apps, or perhaps just cut out the middleman and buy your girlfriend experience on OnlyFans.
I was a radical leftist in my teens. Apart from the fact that I no longer believe in progress, my values haven’t changed since then. I still oppose the dismantling of natural or human ecologies in the name of freedom but to the benefit of big business.
And today I see an immense commercial, technological, cultural and political industry dedicated to convincing every young person that it’s good and right to be a lonely atom, without commitments or obligations, because freedom and progress. And then cashing in, via the false promises of the sexual revolution, via dating apps, porn and other sedatives, on the longings – for sex, for love, for companionship – that haven’t gone away just because you sold people a vision of life without them.
People tend to read me as a conservative these days, because I say progress is an illusion created by tech. I say marriage is good, and porn is a social cancer. But my arguments are less conservative than anti-capitalist. Marriage, if you’re doing it right, is human-scale communism: the possible unit of social solidarity outside the market.
And porn is not self-expression or empowerment, it’s a ruthless commercial machine that hacks human pleasure centres for profit. In the process it rewires your brain till you lose the ability to enjoy normal sex.
In my view the NoFap guys, who gather on Reddit to support one another with kicking porn addiction, are more genuinely anti-capitalist than any of the self-described “communists” who post about neoliberalism from their iPhones while demanding “solidarity” for the sex industry.
I’ve probably talked for long enough, but in summary: sex and economics have always overlapped, and this intensified with the industrial revolution. But that society managed to hold sex and money in balance via marriage - until the Pill came along. Since then, the incentives of commerce have spread to colonise nearly all of human sexuality, to the detriment of both sexes. And this encourages radical atomisation, impermanence and mutual objectification that’s sold as “freedom” even as it exaggerates normative differences between men and women in ways that deepen hostility between the sexes.
What do we do about any of this? To my eye, the sexual counterrevolution is already happening. If any of you end up part of it, I’m probably too old to advise you on strategy. I reached escape velocity just in time, and have been married for a decade.
As a few starting-points though, I’d suggest hanging on to the heretical but true fact that men and women really are different, even if only slightly, and this matters. Most people still want love and permanence. There have always been gay and lesbian people, but the default is still heterosexuality. Marriage is good. Family is good. It’s wrong to treat someone else as an object for your use, especially in the context of sex, even if they say they’ve consented to it. And rejecting pornography is an act of anticapitalist resistance.
Thank you.
Sexual Thatcherism
As an older gen z, this was a dope read. I was raised in conservative small town, then went to college in nearby big liberal city and had all my values scrambled during the rise of tinder. Now, in the aftermath, I am taking a step back and try to figure out what I actually believe again. Reading analyses like this is incredibly helpful to articulate *why* I intuitively feel like some things are wrong in the face of popular opinion. In other words, thanks for sharing!
And porn is not self-expression or empowerment, it’s a ruthless commercial machine that hacks human pleasure centres for profit
This is so succinct. The next time the topic comes up in conversation I will try and steal this phrase. It is hard sometimes to communicate how terrible porn is to folks. I am a happily married (18years) male with 5 kids, and it seems obvious that sex belongs in the context of a stable/ intimate relationship. Like adding salt to a meal, it must be balanced. It would be ridiculous to just eat salt. Yet society, or rather the machine, wants to isolate sex like a commodity. Once out of context or isolated it is a different thing entirely.
I am no expert on the subject but I suspect men and women are much more similar than we are lead to believe when it comes to a real sense of fulfillment and happiness.
Cheers, and thanks for your work Mary.