Winners and Losers of the Sexual Revolution
The Sexual Revolution coincided with the Technological Revolution in the 1970s; the period known as the Sexual Revolution was from the 1950s until the 1970s, the reason why the Technical Revolution or the Silicone Revolution is so important and interconnected at the same time.
These revolutions transformed how we work and the kind of work that people do in Western and post-industrial societies, and they fundamentally changed sexual relations between men and women.
A massive plus of the sexual revolution is that it freed men and women from the burden of having sex, which historically led to the production of the child, which meant for the first time in human history, people women had more options when it came to making mate selection.
From these revolutions, there have been winners and losers.
According to the Economist and African-American or American Thomas Sowell, any policy has negative and positive outcomes. Policymakers and society get to choose to live with and accept that there are trade-offs.
Still, we get to decide whether or not the trade-offs were ultimately more beneficial for society.
The contraceptive pill it sells was first invented in May 1950 and was made available in the United States when The Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960.
Within two years of its initial distribution, 1.2 million American women were using the birth control pill, or the “pill,” as it is popularly known.
The United Kingdom was a bit later made available in the UK on the NHS in 1961 for married women only — until 1967 — and is now taken by 3.5 million women in Britain between the ages of 16 and 49.
For people reading this article, I intend to outline the losers and winners of the Sexual Revolution, and ultimately, I’m not trying to convince anybody reading this that the Sexual Revolution and the Technological Revolution that went along with the Sexual Revolution were ultimately positive or negative for men and women.
What I will do is give you, the reader, the information and let you make up your mind.
My take on this topic is its nuance and that, finally, there are winners and losers from the outcomes of the sexual revolution.
For people reading this from different generations they being the Silent Generation born between 1928 and 1945 and the Boomer Generation born between 1946 and 1964 that lived through and were born after World War II, they have very different interpretations, and I’ll be interested in hearing your viewpoints.
As for myself, the writer, I was born in 1997 and grew up primarily with the outcomes of the Sexual Revolution, so from my point of view, I’ve never known a world that is different for women who did not have access to the workplace or the contraceptive pill.
I was also born in a Western liberal society and educated in a liberal Western University surrounded by other liberated people’s different cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations.
This means I was born and raised in the impact of the post-World War Two world order and the Sexual and Silicone Revolution, so it is much easier for me to point out the negative, having not known a world any different than the one of the last 40 years.
Agricultural to Industrial Economy
Humanity has experienced a massive significant change in how we live our lives since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago.
Only a few centuries ago, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which started in 1769 in the islands of Great Britain, humanity experienced another significant change.
What industrialisation meant was that humanity now started creating wealth and other goods and services previously; the economy functioned with a rent space system where there were landlords, and they would receive profits from their tenants and farmers.
This is a primitive economy with limited merchant and middle classes, predominantly in cities and operating trading links.
One of the fantastic outcomes of the Industrial Revolution was that it provided new opportunities, and typically, around 80% of people primarily survived by being farmers in the agricultural economy.
Industrialisation freed people’s farming and made it so people could survive and develop new skills without the need to be farm labourers.
From 1800, 80% of people worked on farms.
Now, only around 2.9% of the population works in the agricultural sector in the United Kingdom, and these figures vary depending on the nation’s economy and sophistication.
As people in the late 18th and 19th centuries moved from the agricultural economy into industrialised manual labour professions in cities, families became much smaller. Traditionally, a family will consist of a pan-generational household with grandparents, parents and their children’s children.
Furthermore, families will be connected through the husbands and wives of the brothers and sisters living together in a communal space with different cousins and other relatives that would share in the burden and support one another in the endeavour of child raising.
Also, women tended to work in traditional industries, such as spinning wheels and turning wool into cloth; with those traditional home jobs being taken over by industrial machines, it made the women working at home redundant in the 19th century.
This incentivised more men and women to move to cities to secure work and live in smaller apartment buildings, which incentivised people to have fewer children, and children moved from being a valuable resource to an expensive luxury.
In manual labour and agricultural economies, more people are a benefit because they are a cheap source of work. As professions become more highly specialised, it takes longer and longer to have a trained workforce.
That is why when nations industrialise, their birth rates start to plummet; this is why India’s birth rate is hovering just around replacement levels of 2.1 and why China’s birth rate is plummeted since industrialisation and urbanisation in China’s coastal regions.
Having a family without the support of other relatives is much harder, and people not surrounded by other young couples are not holding the baby the very first time into their 30s and disincentivising having babies.
The pros and cons of the Industrial Revolution are that it freed people from living according to the seasons and facing the risk of famine. Still, the negative outcome is that it destroyed the family and the disincentivised connections of different generations of families and made the family unit smaller and smaller. Were now people lucky if they have two parents and a golden retriever as a family unit.
The Wealth of Nations
The Industrial Revolution brought fantastic opportunities for developing specialisation, best described in the philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776.
In Mr Smith’s book, he argued for specialisation that will lead to cheaper goods and services that will enable people to have more items and better living standards, which will also lead to technological improvements.
The hyper-specialisation made possible by the Industrial Revolution did more to liberate women from the household than feminism ever has because it freed women from domestic chores and responsibilities.
It is highly naïve and disrespectful to believe that women in nothing throughout human history provided meals and clothes as well as working in agriculture to keep their homes fed and the household running.
In the past, running a household was a full-time job just as valuable as a man working in a factory because it did not generate wealth; it was perceived as lesser.
It is economic activity that doesn’t go to the national GDP that is disrespected by contemporary societies, the work of a wife or homemaker.
The technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries have liberated women from the household and provided them with great opportunities for education and advancement in different career paths, starting with the invention of the lightbulb by Thomas Edison in 1879.
The lightbulb has liberated women because it enabled women to read and write during darker hours; when the children are asleep and the husband has been fed, she can now devote time to educational pursuits and not be limited by the rising and the setting of the sun.
James King, in 1851, created the first washing machine to use a drum. Hamilton Smith 1858 patented a rotary version, and in 1868, Thomas Bradford, a British inventor, created a commercially successful machine that resembles the modern device.
This is another technology that liberated women from household chores of washing, which gave them more time to have other pursuits and is a massive reason why women could enter the workforce because more and more domestic chores were now being taken over by new specialised machines made possible due to the Industrial Revolution which further liberated women from the household.
Women were also liberated from having to kill and cook food from scratch with the invention of the freezer was invented by James Harrison in 1857. It was used to store food, meat, and vegetables.
In 1859, engineers started using ammonia to freeze food. Until then, vapour was used to cool and eventually freeze the food.
Now, women will no longer have to take a chicken and turn it into a chicken nugget. Now, the chicken was already killed, and it could be cooked from frozen again three more times for women to join the workforce or pursue other avenues of meaning.
On a final note, what made it possible for women to function in the workplace to work in factories was the invention of the tampon [jr1] and public toilets, which meant that women could dispose of any blood during their periods as well as the female-only spaces for their safety and security.
The importance of female-only areas cannot be overlooked due to women facing the possibility of rape, murder as well as protecting their dignity when engaged in functions involving toilets and the disposal of their sanitary products.
George Jennings was an English sanitary engineer and plumber who invented the first public flush toilets.
(In 1851, the first public flushing toilet block opened in London and, due to its popularity, spread around the country. The cost of using these public toilets was 1 penny, hence the famous phrase ‘to spend a penny’.)
(In 1931, Earl Haas, a physician in Colorado, developed a cardboard applicator tampon meant to absorb menstrual blood. He made the tampon inside the applicator from a tightly bound strip of dense cotton attached to a string for easy removal.)
What has been concisely demonstrated was how industrialisation and the specialisation created through the process of industrialisation enabled the liberation of women from domestic chores and made it possible for women to enter the workplace.
For those reasons, I would have to say industrialisation was a positive because it gave women the choice of whether to work or to stay at home as a homemaker.
Unfortunately, women don’t have the options today due to the cost of living; staying at home with the children is not an option for most wives, women or others unless the husband/wife or Person is earning £52,000 in the United Kingdom or $100,000 in the United States of America due to the sheer cost of living.
Unwanted Pregnancies and Single Mothers
The sexual revolution from the 1950s and 1970s has changed social norms concerning sex. Now, it is socially seen as the woman’s fault if she gets pregnant due to the sheer availability of the contraceptive pill and its many forms available to women.
In previous generations, before the 1960s, it was the man’s responsibility to get a woman pregnant to get married and provide a hearth and home to his wife and children. However, social norms, either rightly or wrongly, have been destroyed.
Women, particularly young women, are not educated on how the contraceptive pill actually works, aware of its side effects and how effective it truly is at preventing pregnancy.
If you use it ideally, the pill is 99% effective. But people aren’t perfect, and it’s easy to forget or miss pills, so in reality, the pill is about 93% effective. That means about 7 out of 100 pill users get pregnant each year.
It’s also important to be aware that for the pill to be effective, it’s got to be taken every single day at the same time, and it can take one month to be effective.
Furthermore, if a woman increases size, this can be in terms of muscle or body fat; the dosage may not be effective. The pill makes the female mind believe that she is pregnant, which can cause an increase in breast size and anxiety due to the mind believing it is pregnant.
Also, the body believing it is pregnant decreases the natural female sex drive and can cause symptoms of depression. Also, the pill, in extreme cases, can affect a young woman’s natural development.
The social impact of the pill is the removal of responsibilities from fathers to take care of the unwanted children from the woman they slept with due to the pill removing social constraints surrounding fatherhood.
Also, the contraceptive pill contributed to the increase of unwanted children because women and men are sleeping with people not with whom they want to start a family but sex just for enjoyment.
There is a significant difference between the man or woman you sleep with and another one that you may marry, and I have found that this is what the sexual revolution did: it removes responsibility and social constraints from sexuality.
Added to this is the sexual mismatch between men and women, with a man having 16 to 20 times more testosterone than the average female, meaning that men, on average, are much more interested in casual sex and short-term relationships.
The average woman, in contrast, has a more interesting commitment to building a lasting relationship.
Globalisation and the Silicon Age
International trade and globalisation, as we understand it today, was born out of the aftermath of World War II, 1939 to 1945.
What created globalisation and the specialisation which enabled the technological marvels such as the iPhone invented in 2007 and man landing on the moon in 1969 was possible thanks to American security.
The USA protects the world’s global shipping lanes, ensuring that all nations have the capabilities to buy and sell goods across the globe.
This became the ultimate example of Adam Smith’s utopian version of specialisation, which you wrote about in his book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.
What this meant was that if a nation didn’t have access to coal and steel, it would not be able to industrialise; what globalisation did was turn the world into a giant marketplace where individual nations could specialise in certain goods and services.
For Germany and China, it was manufactured goods, and for the United Kingdom, for example, it specialised in financial services due to Britain being the nation that created global finance.
Britain was the world’s most potent superpower and the crated precursor to what we call globalisation during the Pax Britannicus from 1815 to 1914.
The reason why all this is related to the Sexual Revolution is that jobs became so specialised and moved away from manual labour, enabling women to be economically productive by working office jobs and laptop jobs that require brainpower over brawn power.
This was good for women as it freed them from domestic work, and it meant that women no longer had to rely on a man to be a provider for them.
Now, for the first time, women can earn their own money and make independent life choices.
The feminist and author Betty Friedan, who wrote and published the book The Feminine Mystique 50 years ago in 1963, would not have been able to pursue a writing career without the support and cooperation of her husband.
Most women during her time, having been educated in the late 1930s and early 1940s, would have been able to become writers and pursue independent career paths without the support of their spouses.
Women in today’s society have the encouragement and the necessary social norms to put off work and motherhood to pursue careers; however, this only truly applies to a particular class of woman who is part of the laptop classes and higher earners.
I cannot say to most women that having a job as a cleaner working in customer service will not be my idea of an ideal career path, but that’s up to you to decide.
Feminists were fighting not for women to be cleaners or to work in customer service. They were fighting for the right for women to go into higher education and have high-paying jobs.
This is the massive divide in feminism between working-class feminists and the upper middle- and higher-class feminists, but having different priorities and fighting for different outcomes for a working-class woman having the support of a loving husband and family makes much more sense here.
In contrast, a young woman working in the city doing a financial job will need independence from her family and the responsibilities that it entails to pursue her career ambitions.
There is a massive divide between what is a career and what is a job. In a career, fulfilment can be found in a job; you are just a servant to fulfil another person’s dreams and ambitions.
This is a big case of luxury elites; this is where an elite group of people put forward economic policies and social policies that suit their upper-class interests and negatively affect people in the working classes.
If you are a man or a woman living in an inner city, I invite you to go to a dating app as a man using the dating app.
You will find a massive growth of working-class women from 18 to 25 who are single mothers, but if you narrow the field down to women at university, then you will find most of them don’t have children but are from a different socioeconomic group.
In this little bit of information, you can see who is winning and who is suffering due to the impact of the sexual revolution and literal beliefs that can harm some people.
Men Left Behind
The Sexual Revolution and the Silicon Revolution have left men behind due to the old manufacturing jobs in middle America and old coal mining communities in the United Kingdom moving to foreign nations thanks to the hyper-specialisation and being cheaper to get the goods abroad.
This is a massive success story that people don’t talk about because it took over half a billion people in China out of extreme poverty, and the levels of absolute poverty have declined globally since the end of the Second World War.
However, this came at a price for the manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that men typically dominated.
Still, with those jobs having gone abroad, it left those kinds of men without work or purpose, which meant they were left behind by society.
It is not the duty of women to raise men merely that society has left these men behind and has not made a place for people who are not suited for office jobs that require a lot of mental work.
I remember speaking to a man working at Morrisons, who told me how he spent £1000 on new computer software for his PC. I was taken aback by how much passion and drive, as well as his finances, goes into gaming.
This event still makes me think that young men don’t have the motivation to succeed or to build a prosperous future, not just for themselves but for those around them, because they have given up due to society telling them they are not good enough.
For women, it may be frightening how much male motivation is driven by the desire for sexual intercourse and the desire to have female affection.
With the growing use of pornography, the male drive is not being used appropriately and healthily because men are not having sex and are instead using pornography to fill natural needs rather than becoming worthy of female attention. It’s not good for society as a whole.
There are growing numbers of young men becoming addicted to pornography or suffering the effects of erectile dysfunction.
This is because the male sex drive is triggered through the use of images.
If a man sees too many sexual images when he finally interacts with a woman, he will not be able to maintain an erection.
There are two reasons for this.
One is the sheer volume of pornographic images and staged sexual scenes that can’t live up to the real thing, and it makes the man become desensitised to a woman’s natural floors and beauty in real life.
The second reason is that to have self-pleasure for a man, he doesn’t need to have a full erection, and his body becomes used to ejaculating without being hard.
Also, this is very bad for women because when she has sex with a man, he will expect her to act like a porn star due to growing up and seeing images on pornography websites that do not reflect reality.
What needs to be made clear is that those kinds of websites and pornography are studio productions.
What people are seeing is not actual sex but camera angles; people in those productions move the way they do so they can get the best camera angles.
It’s not a good idea to spit or choke a woman; that’s the kind of image a man sees and learns online. Also, for women, because it’s pornography doesn’t make it right, nor is it normal for what you are both seeing is a fantasy and a production it’s not real.
Modern Dating
The Sexual Revolution has destroyed dating. There is no such thing as courtship, which has led to the death of romance due to people learning everything about one another online through dating and social media for you even meet the other person.
So, by the time you get to the dating stage, there is not really anything to communicate about having texted each other over weeks.
Also, sex is no longer sacred due to people’s having multiple sexual partners. A 2017 survey of 2,180 people from the U.S. and Europe from U.K. health service Superdrug Online Doctor found women had a lifetime average of 7 sexual partners. Men had an average of 8 sexual partners.
Sex is no longer sacred, and people are living together before getting married. This reduces the importance of the institution of marriage.
What we are saying to our boyfriend and girlfriend is that before we get together, I’m going to try you out and see if you out I want. This can lead to resentment because what you are communicating is that I’m not ready to commit to our relationship, and I’m keeping my options open.
Modern dating is also harmful because it turns people into a commodity. Dating apps like going on Amazon shopping basket and saying tonight I will have Kelly or I will have Kevin dehumanise men and women on those dating apps and turn them into products.
It’s got to be stated that it provides the illusion of choice and that we have infinite selections when it comes to sexual and relationship partners; this can lead to some women feeling like they are a piece of meat, feeling pressured to have sex with strangers until they find a man willing to stick around.
With the destruction of courtship and no longer being any established dating norms, there are no guidelines for men and women when they are dating, when they should have sex or how they should behave.
The Sexual Revolution has liberated people from commitments and old social norms, but no guidance on how we should behave and how we should act in the dating world is forthcoming and has become free for all, which has left both men and women feeling devastated and like they are just a piece of meat.
The only advice I could give on this matter is that on first dates, you be honest with yourselves about what you are looking for, have realistic expectations and be honest in saying that you’re looking for a long-term relationship and not for just sex.
If that person says they’re not interested in anything long-term, then see that as a positive, not a negative, outcome because that way, you won’t feel heartbroken.
Instead, you will feel emotionally ready to see a different person because you have neither gained nor lost anything from the encounter.
(Thank you for reading to the end of this article.
For people just scrolling down, I intend to break this article into smaller chunks for people who prefer reading articles in much smaller bite sizes of 500 to 1000. Also, the Silicon and Sexual Revolutions are highly complicated, and I could not fit everything into one article.)
