BLAME WOMEN

The Sexual Revolution debate failed to confront the real problems with the Sexual Revolution

This is a Carousel guest piece by an anonymous attendee of the Free Press debate in Los Angeles featuring Grimes and Anna Khachiyan

I went to the Free Press debate this week—and while entertained, I can’t say that the debates participants answered the core question: has the sexual revolution failed? Failed at what? And failed whom? These are the core questions a debate has to answer. At the start, we saw widespread agreement on what enabled the sexual revolution: namely, the pill and a change in public morals around sex. But here was where the debate started to go off track. 

No one engaged with what the pre-Sexual Revolution moral paradigm entailed—monogamy. Louis Perry, the strongest at the debate, did state that all non-monogamous societies are definitionally polygamous, but we did not get a coherent account of what the Sexual Revolution was fighting against. What was monogamy? And why has the West historically preferred it to polygamy?

I…