The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

freedom and sexual health are the same thing.”

do things to which they do not consent, from receiving immunizations and eating their vegetables to attending kindergarten and having to go to bed at a certain time. Why

Domination, by contrast, is the power exerted over others by a particular group within society in order to maintain its own privileged social

short, the rational exercise of authority has the goal of the common good.

short, the ruling, dominant class imposes repression well beyond that which is strictly necessary for the rational management of resources for all.

This is because the dominant class has a vested interest in maintaining its own special status and control over others. And true to his positive appreciation of Freud, Marcuse sees

Some level of sexual repression is necessary for the maintenance

of society.

The problem is that the sexual mores of late capitalism, focused as they are on the maintenance of monogamy and the patriarchal family, are actually ...

To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically, a point that places psychological categories at the heart of revolutionary political discourse.

How can the restoration of freedom of thought be advanced by “new and rigid restrictions” on what can and cannot be said and done in educational

institutions?

education and speech need to be carefully regulated in order to ensure

the correct outcome.

Thus, it becomes necessary to make sure that good words and ideas are not simply promoted but are, if possible, enforced and given a monopoly in public discourse.

Why, after all, would bad words and ideas be allowed

when their only purpose is to inflict psychological damage on and cause oppression of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and other victims of th...

free speech is itself not simply not a political virtue but is in fact positively harmful.

Left, and it alone, is competent to see through the false consciousness of Western consumerist culture and to perceive what the political realities truly are. And only the Left has a monopoly of knowledge as to what political strategies must be adopted to advance the cultural revolution necessary for freedom.

constant critiquing of dominant narratives that support the established order and through transgressive actions, such as the practical shattering of bourgeois sexual codes.

Ultimately, one assumes, this will all require coercion by government force.

Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s famous saying “Existence

precedes essence”

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some

Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.

By shifting attention away from empirical biological facts

the inner psychological life,

Beauvoir makes a clear separation between gender and sex. The latter is biological, while the former is psychological. Consonant

human nature is not something we are given but something we do or something we determine for ourselves via our

free decisions and actions, why should we tie gender identity to an objective physiological basis?

function between men and women that is rooted in biology. It also has obvious implications for personal behavior. To put

crudely, men have always been more sexually free than women because they are able to have sex with whomever they please and never run the risk of conception. Promiscuity

reproductive rights are rights precisely

because of the nature of the freedom that is presupposed.

biology

regarded as

form of tyranny, a potentially alienating form of ex...

The body is something to be overcome; its authority is to be rejected; biology is to be transcended by the use of technology; who or what woman really is is not her chromosomes or

This distinction

between gender and sex is now a basic element of contemporary

notions of id...

mismatch between what one is biologically and who one is psychologically must inevitably be regarded as a dysfunction of

the mind.

psychology rather than biology is seen as fundamentally determinative of identity—then the problem becomes one of the body, to be treated with medication and surgery.

Technology, one might even say, defines ontology.

orthodox distinction between “sex” which is “merely biological” and “gender” which is socially constructed, as well as the increasingly pervasive (and relentlessly promoted) idea that freedom means our self-creation of both.

commitment to denying the authority of the physical body and its significance for personal identity.

not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction

First, the distinction between genders based on the physical difference of genitalia will be eliminated. That