Lucía’s Reviews > The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century > Status Update

«There are ways out», as the poet Charles Bukowski puts it, «there is light somewhere, it may not be much light, but it beats the darkness».

The marriage system that prevailed in the West up until recently was not perfect, nor was it easy for most people to conform to, since it demanded high levels of tolerance and self-control. Where the critics go wrong is in arguing that there is any better system. There isn’t.

The critics of marriage are right to say that it has historically been used as a vehicle for the control of women by men, and they’re right to point out that most marriages do not live up to a romantic ideal. They’re right, too, that monogamous, lifelong marriage is in a sense ‘unnatural’ in that it is not the human norm.

This is the solution to what anthropologists have called ‘the puzzle of monogamous marriage’. How is it that a marriage system that does not suit the interests of the most powerful members of society –high-status men– has nevertheless come to be institutionalised across so much of the world? The answer is that, although monogamy is less satisfactory for these men, it produces wealthy, stable societies that survive.

Birth rates and crime rates both fall, which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives, instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and other productive endeavours.

But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively unusual, it is also spectacularly successful. When monogamy is imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives tends to generate both. (...)

two of the thirteen chapters in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman were devoted to bemoaning the lack of chastity in men – the sex with the higher sex drive – and thus – to Wollstonecraft’s mind – the greater responsibility for containing their passions. ‘Votes for women, chastity for men’ was a real suffragist slogan, now forgotten.

What might nowadays be interpreted as ‘slut shaming’, or a fear of female sexual agency, in fact had a very urgent purpose. That purpose is now somewhat anachronistic in an age of contraception, but only somewhat. Illicit affairs do still end in trauma and tragedy because sex is still just as consequential as it ever was.

single motherhood itself was disastrous enough to result, for some poor women, in a choice between prostitution and starvation, a dangerous attempt at abortion, abandonment of a child to an orphanage or infanticide. The stigma around single motherhood caused a great deal of misery for its many victims. It also existed for a reason: to deter women from making an irreparable mistake for the sake of a worthless man.

in an era without contraception, a prohibition on sex before marriage served female, not male interests, because it protected the group of people who bear (literally) the consequences of an extramarital pregnancy.