Sex and the Social Order
GILDER, GEORGE F.
POLITICS'HIDDEN DIMENSION Sex and the Social Order by george f- gilder Every politician knows that there are some issues on which private prejudices-ro matter how apparently irrational-Cannot be...
...The real reasons, though, may be significantly different...
...at the very core of these relationships and institutions, moreover, are differences-sexual, financial and motivational...
...When determining policy, it would be wise to consider not only the abstract principles being applied and the specific grievances alleviated, but also the impact on our most intimate institutions...
...It is difficult for the financially comfortable to appreciate the psychological impact of money on the poor...
...In other words, this is not an issue-like the antiballistic missile-that is too complex for most people to understand...
...Government should tread lightly indeed when entering the murky arena of sexuality, where we may find at once the most critical and least negotiable, the most sensitive and least understood of the terms of our social contract: the source of motivation, commitment, and solidarity...
...few recognize the extent to which it shifts the balance of sexual power in favor of women...
...Many individuals will make large contributions to the society in spite of, or perhaps in some cases because of, their failure or refusal to follow the usual cycles...
...a sound social policy will devote itself to promoting the creation and maintenance of family connections...
...Yet protection and socialization of children are perhaps the definitive functions of the family...
...The psychological consequences of this change are greater than they might at first appear...
...No one begrudges money for the blind and disabled, and the sight of a deserted mother and child strikes a deep emotional chord in everyone...
...Each adult can be seen as occupying a different position on the continuum that begins with psychological and economic preparation for marriage, is punctuated by marriage itself, and proceeds to parental and postparental stages...
...They cling to their weapons and persist in their hunts as totems of masculinity, as rites and symbols of their continuing role as protector and provider in the family...
...The values promoted by families will create a social order within which the unmarried will be most likely to contribute...
...The usual assumption is that opposition to abortion on demand stems from a puritanical aversion to premarital sex, combined with a religious superstition that feticide is murder...
...as with guns and abortion, it would be treating people not principally as members of families subject to familial disciplines, but as individuals primarily subject to the state and its social and legal priorities...
...This is not to say that gun control is unimportant, particularly in congested urban society...
...Now it may well be that in most of these programmatic instances the intelligentsia is right and the public wrong...
...But aFDC qualms and frightens every lower-class male...
...This masculine attribute is now almost completely lost...
...It is a reaction to what is felt as a further encroachment on the rights of the family, a further encroachment on the sexual constitution...
...If his wife is restive, he sees welfare as a positive invitation from the state for her to dissolve the marriage...
...They may reject marriage largely because the society did not provide them with a stable family example in the beginning and made marriage financially or sexually uninviting...
...Thus the feminist demand that women have control over their own bodies accentuated an unconscious recognition that males have almost completely lost control of procreative activity...
...This complex of problems, often termed "the social issue," is at once the chief vulnerability of american liberalism and the greatest opportunity for american conservatives...
...although the voters in California in 1972 turned down an antiobscenity proposition (it was so extreme that even John Wayne opposed it), the public in general supports antipornography laws...
...In designing a social policy, we should consider the society not as an aggregation of undifferentiated individuals but as an organism consisting of interdependent men and women, largely defined in terms of their particular relationships to families...
...and, perhaps most important of all, it must respond to the interlocking crises of masculinity and family breakdown...
...He cannot imagine how this amount of money appears to a man required to submit to 40 or even 50 or more hours of drudgery a week to earn only slightly more after taxes...
...again, the racial crisis is perhaps our most grievous social problem, testing the viability of our democracy and its ideals of equality and fraternity under the law...
...Public opposition to marijuana would not be so intense if it were not a symbol of social disintegration...
...Until the problem is addressed in these specific terms-how do you give men a sense of civilized participation in the community and restore the family to its appropriate role?-busing will just spread demoralization...
...Because their socialization, despite the stringent discipline required, is so little rewarded in material terms, it is not surprising that so many millions of Iower-middle-class americans, black and white, look with the greatest cynicism on welfare dispensations...
...If one understands the critical role of the family in the society, a role that no other institutions have shown any significant ability to perform, one understands the positive character of attempts to defend it from the state...
...The assumption is that the children will be taught more effectively than they could be at home...
...So the problems keep getting worse, and the people, demoralized and confused, show a rising and justifiable contempt for the world of politics...
...But the people perceive these proposals as a symbol of a more profound menace to our community...
...thus he loses the psychological affirmation for which, in many cases, he holds a job and supports his family...
...It has become an optional accessory of the woman's will and body, and an instrument of sexual pleasure somewhat inferior to the clitoris and a Coke bottle...
...One can admit that it is not logical or inspiring to think in terms of such morbid trade-offs...
...It also opposes liberalized divorce and granting birth control pills to teenaged girls...
...Busing violates the implicit contract by which parents give over their children to the state to be educated...
...So they advocate programs of adaptation, often individually desirable, which collectively intensify the crisis of the sexual constitution...
...a conspicuous instance of this mode of thought is, of course, the Equal Rights amendment, which declares it unconstitutional to differentiate between men and women in most public policy...
...Changes that affront the sexual prejudices of the people may cause a demoralization more serious than the nominal or real limits on freedom-and the protective surfaces of hypocrisy-entailed by the status quo...
...He remembers all the sexual opportunities forgone, all the payments dutifully made, all the disciplines arduously observed, and the image of the fugitive fathers tears at the very ligaments of his identity...
...In addition, their early work and education-their discipline and resolve-may have been motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by sexual ambition...
...another apparent mystery of public sentiment is gun control...
...The people resist it not out of some vulgar misanthropy or stinginess, but from an instinctive knowledge, probably more sound than most sophisticated analyses of the subject, that free money has a corrosive impact on the motivation of its recipients...
...But such "human beings" exist only in actuarial tables and in the minds of fastidious economists and sociologists...
...Only somewhat less threatening to the very core of male consciousness is the possibility of the violation of his home...
...Until a serious effort is made in this direction, one can plausibly maintain that the blighted lives of millions of our urban citizens constitute an injustice far more grave than the occasional incarceration of a user of marijuana...
...It is often maintained that nearly all welfare recipients have no other way of supporting themselves...
...Today men across the land continue to hunt compulsively, despite a possibly declining need or appetite for the available game...
...Before we can casually dismiss their prejudices, the progressive positions regarding abortion, gun control, marijuana, pornography, welfare, and busing should be examined for their impact on the sexual constitution...
...This, according to many anthropologists, was the primordial role of the evolving male homo sapiens...
...They thus consciously asserted the uncomfortable principle that at some point a woman should not have control over her own body...
...It has failed to maintain the civilization he arduously sustained...
...The response?not with my kid, you don't"-is not chiefly racist...
...The ultimate nightmare of almost every male is to witness helplessly the rape of his wife...
...In November 1972, for example, 62 per cent of the voters in Michigan and about 80 per cent of the voters in North Dakota-including heavy majorities of both sexes and all races-voted against liberalized abortion laws, making them an electoral proposition even less popular than George McGovern...
...But this crisis, too, is to a great extent a crisis of the sexual constitution-of a breakdown and incapacitation of the family, particularly in its role of socializing ghetto males...
...a man quite simply cannot now father a baby unless his wife is fully and deliberately agreeable...
...according to a survey by sociologist Jessie Bernard, single women seem to suffer fewer psychological strains than do wives...
...For it will be hard indeed to maintain a just or orderly or idealistic society without the crucial socializing work of families...
...and what is it about the other so-called social laws, embracing such varied matters as desegregation and guns, that makes them analogous to abortion on reasonable demand...
...We must assume that the large majority of the electorates in Michigan and North Dakota acted with relatively knowledgeable deliberation...
...a move by the state finally to incapacitate the man in this responsibility-and usurp him—undermines the validity of the family itself and the man's part in it...
...abortion after conception, on the other hand, or perhaps a "morning-after" pill, may not so directly intrude on the act of love itself...
...There are few social or cultural pressures on her to conceive...
...Women viewed male potency with some awe, and males were affirmed by this response...
...The Women's Movement would have us focus attention on the unmarried-particularly on talented unmarried females-and devote our social policy to removing any pressures that encumber their success or impel them toward marriage...
...It is the chief single source of funds in the community...
...For if the public is right, if these measures do gravely threaten the sexual infrastructure of our society, then the changes probably should not be enacted regardless of how practical and realistic they seem...
...This divergence is more significant than the immediate statistics indicate, because public opinion is largely shaped by the small minority that holds the sophisticated view: The articulate, knowledgeable elite has in?197J by George F. Gilder fluence far beyond its numbers...
...If they performed a normal amount of sexual activity?sowed their wild oats"-they could assume that they would cause a number of women to bear their children...
...True, the Women's Lib demand for "control over our own bodies" seems eminently justifiable: The tragedy of an unwanted baby and the dangers of abortion mills are well known...
...This change in the sexual balance between men and women is still being absorbed by the society...
...Lionel Tiger even contends that the male propensity to work in all-male groups originated in these early expeditions...
...But first we have to resist the alternative "family policy" of Women's Liberation-an antifamily program advocated even by the "moderates" in the movement...
...The obstinate refusal of many males to support gun control is not chiefly a product of conditioning by the weapons industry...
...although legalization would be universal, it is feared by the older generation as an assertion by the state that children under 18, who are among the principal users, should have the right to autonomy at a period in their lives when the family is still trying to instill values of industry, thrift and continence, values that pot tends to subvert...
...In any event, most of the unmarried, no matter how stalwartly self-reliant, were originally products of marriage and beneficiaries of the sexual constitution...
...all these responses will require sexual discrimination of various kinds...
...Unless this erosion of the sexual constitution is recognized as a major social problem-for which realistic solutions, not Utopian incantations, must be provided-Gun control will remain politically difficult and practically unenforceable outside a police state...
...The current busing effort does not reduce total educational costs in most instances or demonstrably improve the education of the participating students...
...They recognize that no government can prevail against the dissolution of the social connections and personal motivations that sustain a civilized polity...
...They acknowledge, with Carl Jung, that though the society can resist epidemics of physical disease, it is defenseless against diseases of the mind...
...This pressure, in effect, undermines the poor man's role as provider by depriving it of its moral quality as a deliberate act...
...For, in truth, few males have come to psychological terms with the existing birth-control technology...
...akey reason for our current failure is the tendency of bureaucrats and social theorists to look upon the society primarily as an aggregation of individual units, scarcely differentiated except in income and employment...
...But almost every woman wants to marry at some point in her life if the conditions are right...
...They are the natural reaction of honest americans who are trying to defend their families against the poisonous emissions of a decaying sexual constitution...
...They are relinquished for this educational purpose, not for the engineering of a more just and integrated society as debatably envisaged by judges...
...Recognizing this, Norman Mailer argues that abortion is actually preferable to prophylactic methods of birth control...
...The fact is, however, that most unmarried men and women either aspire to or once aspired to marry and would find life most rewarding if marriage were made less onerous...
...The liberals would make the problem a lot worse by enlarging welfare, day-care and other government programs that promote matriarchy...
...It is not simply a fear of disarmament at a time of rising crime...
...They early give their male children guns and ceremoniously teach them the rules of their use...
...It is the notion of the male deserter, lovin' and leavin'-in the glamorous pattern of every male fantasy hero-that makes the lifelong husband and worker, with wages little greater than welfare, feel oheated...
...Male potency was not only a matter of erectile reliability...
...The tenacity of public opposition on this group of issues therefore suggests a resistance sufficiently profound to demand explanation...
...Legal abortion on demand is resisted as a symbol of this radical change in the sexual constitution...
...In this sense, the guns have a virtually religious import, and gun restrictions pose a serious psychological threat...
...Our welfare program-particularly aid to Families with Dependent Children (aFDC)-is not a tragedy, therefore, because it gives inadequate aid...
...The opposition of the blacks and poor, the supposed beneficiaries, was greater than the opposition of the rest of the electorate...
...The sexual dimensions of the abortion issue may be more obvious, but they are little better understood...
...at some point, it may also have to face problems of motivation and identity leading to inadequate procreation...
...Women are only marginally dependent on men-women can conceive a baby artificially or in one passing encounter...
...Yet for most people, the pursuit of happiness is inextricably tied to sexual relationships...
...Unlike aFDC payments, moreover, his earnings must sustain not only his wife and children but also himself, and his few stinted indulgences...
...In addition, a gun is an emblem of the male as hunter...
...Unless some of our liberal programs start to work-and unless our conservatives start to provide plausible alternatives-the people are likely to seek immediate symptomatic relief: repression...
...The declaration that "all men [meaning men and women] are created equal . . . endowed . . . with certain unalienable Rights" has been interpreted to mean that the laws of the land must be sex-blind: that men and women are essentially the same and wherever possible should play similar roles in statistically similar patterns throughout the economy (and where impossible, we should feel guilty about it...
...He is not resentful toward the subsidized women and children themselves...
...He feels that the social contract by which he has ordered his life has been broken...
...When those thinkers address the problems of equal opportunity, too, they seem to think exclusively in terms of individual financial prospects...
...To overcome the revulsion-with all the injustices it entails?one must resolve the ulterior crisis of motivation, masculinity and the family...
...But the conservatives are little better...
...and we may not be able to preserve the family as an obstacle to the dehumanizing threat of the new technology of reproduction...
...against "psychic epidemics," our laws and medicines are virtually helpless...
...This bias is understandable...
...Male procreativity is now dependent, to a degree unprecedented in history, on the active pleasure of women...
...Even their unmarried identities may be defined in terms of a rebellion against marriage and thus in a negative way are dependent on the institution...
...Such a policy will have to acknowledge and accommodate sexual differences...
...It is, in fact, the dominant economic influence in the lives of the indigent, and it exerts a continuous and morally corrosive pressure on the lower-middle class...
...they are losing the sense of a defined male identity and role in the family...
...that the threat of easy abortions, say, is less grave than the threat of unwanted and unaccommodated children...
...In addition, he sees welfare as an imposition on his familial authority, forcing him to give his wife almost all his money...
...Everyone knows that an important cause of the american carnage by firearms is the proliferation of handguns...
...Rather, millions of men fear gun control because they are losing life control...
...It is objectively sound, therefore, to define the society as chiefly an assemblage of families, family aspirants and unmarried units within the familial order...
...Senate, a relatively liberal body dominated by Democrats and passionately exhorted by Edward Kennedy, has adamantly refused to enact so much as a meaningful registration requirement...
...Busing further symbolizes the diminishing control of a family over its own children, the raison d'etre of families...
...a policy that ignores or counteracts these differences in the name of statistical or numerical equality will tend to retard familial creation and male affirmation, and subvert the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness...
...The pursuit of happiness and the promotion of the general welfare are to be measured in the comparative income, housing and employment of independent citizens...
...The general welfare is best served when most men and women are socialized through love, marriage and family...
...If he is restive, he finds welfare-and the example of other unchastened deserters-an implicit moral exemption...
...When the women demanded "control over our own bodies," they believed they were couching the issue in the least objectionable way...
...The numerical symmetries will come at the expense of possibilities for real equality in human fulfillment...
...But as only Norman Mailer fully understood, they were actually invoking one of the most extreme claims of the movement and striking at one of the most profound male vulnerabilities...
...The state would be implicitly legalizing a lifestyle profoundly hostile to the values of the elders...
...Unless we take this reality into account, our politics will fail to achieve its goals-will fail to foster the happiness and fulfillment of our citizens...
...It is tragic because it promotes social disintegration...
...What is it about liberalized abortion, for instance, that leads a 62 per cent majority of Michigan's voters to violate the considered views of perhaps 90 per cent of the american intelligentsia...
...The answer is that all these rreasures directly impinge on that sensitive psychological terrain involving sexuality, children and the family, which comprise the sexual constitution of the society...
...The campaign for abortion on demand is not simply a drive for better government, with laws more congruent to genuine social need and practice...
...Nor is it a paranoid response to black revolutionary rhetoric and violence...
...Their artistic or professional creativity often comes in a drive to compensate for their failure to marry, whether deliberate or not...
...Not only do they lack the guts to rebuff the upper-class feminist ladies, but they lack a fundamental interest in the problems of the poor and the lower-middle class...
...If the state can take children and use them for dubious social experiments, actively opposed by the parents themselves, parental protection of, and authority over, offspring are gravely reduced...
...Yet the U.S...
...the chiselers and frauds are said to be a figment of demagogic speechwriters...
...But we should not be unduly concerned with the exceptional individuals or the geniuses who can find inspiration and commitment outside the usual pattern of biological fulfillment...
...The society that entwined his sexuality in social cords-reaching from the depths of his psyche into the womb of a woman, and thence into the future of mankind-has betrayed him...
...By insisting on a view of society as an aggregate of individual units-however well they may fit the computers in the labor department or the ideologies of liberation-we will prevent ourselves from responding to the real and different, though interrelated, problems of men and women...
...Many of the male's distinguishing physical characteristics-his greater throwing ability and running speed, his more volatile hormonal pattern, and his greater muscular energy and aggressiveness-were said to have begun in the anthropoid hunting party...
...The male penis is no longer a decisive organ in itself...
...The reluctance of the people to authorize abortion on demand stems from a profound sense of justifiable conservatism in interfering with our deepest human experiences...
...During this process, of course, people will often see themselves in independent ways, unrelated to family...
...The role of protector of wife and children is as old as the family nexus itself, as old and deeply ingrained as the role of provider...
...It does objectively increase the man's capacity to defend his household...
...In fact, it may exacerbate the syndrome of male insecurity, violence and frustration it is meant to restrict...
...as anyone who has undergone this paternal instruction knows and remembers, it is a portentous event, conducted in the atmosphere of an initiation rite...
...It will have to meet the increasingly dire threat of the new biochemical technology of artificial reproduction...
...The liberal looks at welfare payments and sees them as pitifully low...
...Doubly corrosive is money that goes to women under conditions that deter marriage...
...Views disdained as superstitions by most sophisticated americans, casually rejected by most young people, nonetheless sometimes hold firm as democratic verities...
...Welfare is one of the programs that not only does not work but also attacks the sexual constitution...
...Women may not face the same problem as men...
...The sexual constitution is to be ignored...
...But the issue is formidably complicated...
...Throughout the centuries, men could imagine their sexual organs as profoundly powerful instruments...
...But millions of americans are losing patience with the social engineers who demand ever greater payments for a used war on poverty that looms increasingly like a war on middle-class males...
...Liberals cannot seem to offer any effective programs of communal affirmation and male socialization that would actually reduce crime, violence and narcotic escapism, or divorce, abandonment and sexual disorder...
...If, on the other hand, a family policy is established and the sexual constitution is renewed, we can probably overcome most of our current domestic distresses, which feed on and derive from our sexual disorders...
...Contrary to a popular impression, the deep resentments aroused have little to do with bigotry or avarice...
...He believes that the sure knowledge of sterility, conferred by the pill, itself aborts the deepest resonances of every sexual experience...
...It has used his money to subsidize the primal mode of male behavior that he painfully abandoned...
...We can restore our confidence as a people and prevent the rise of demagogic movements exploiting the resentments of the social issue...
...The forcible creation of a broadly integrated urban school system, at a time of ghetto disorder, is an enterprise radically different from the consolidation of dual school systems in relatively small and tranquil communities...
...and virtually everyone in the society, male or female, would benefit from better socialization of disruptive or predatory single men...
...Unlike many intellectuals whose lives are devoted to legal and scientific abstraction, most of the people still instinctively recognize that preservation of the sexual constitution may be even more important to the social order than preservation of the legal constitution...
...One could extend the list to busing, welfare and marijuana-three other cases where respectable opinion radically differs from public opinion...
...they are not, as is sometimes said, "innocent victims of priestcraft...
...as government attempts to foster equal opportunity for liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is urged to apply the same standards to all citizens, as individuals, whether they are married or single, young or middle-aged, male or female...
...Most women are capable of quietly enduring civilized society without marriage...
...In choosing among the various birth-control possibilities, it may be that some advanced form of abortion is least disruptive of the sexual constitution-least damaging to the sources of male identity and least impoverishing of human sexuality...
...In this role, the gun is not a mere symbol...
...Marijuana is similarly perceived as a threat to familial authority...
...It is part of a movement that is changing the sexual dimensions of every human relationship and every exchange of love...
...POLITICS'HIDDEN DIMENSION Sex and the Social Order by george f- gilder Every politician knows that there are some issues on which private prejudices-ro matter how apparently irrational-Cannot be safely affronted...
...The public reacts with a general revulsion toward social liberalism...
...In a profound sense, the male has now lost control of his own principal masculine endowment...
...Guns are a good example...
...it is free and can be augmented by unreported part-time or criminal income, more difficult to come by if one is working full time...
...a man's penis becomes an empty plaything unless a woman consciously decides to admit a man's paternity...
...He may be right, and his position should not be considered a quirk...
...It is undertaken to promote broader and more abstract objectives-often at a cost in time and convenience, or even at the peril of the students involved...
...The United States is a nation of households, each containing a man who deeply feels his responsibility for defending his family-and who fears that his ability to do so is diminishing in modern society...
...Polls indicate, however, that on this issue people have relatively strong and considered beliefs...
...Beyond the import of the Michigan vote as a repudiation of the Women's Movement-and of sexual liberation in general-it may be seen as a symbol of resistance to the erosion of male sexuality...
...But a man cannot validate his procreative powers, his role in the chain of nature, without the active, deliberate and now revocable cooperation of a woman...
...They fail to show the resolution and decisiveness needed to develop a complex of new and expensive social policies designed to strengthen families and socialize males...
...He has little choice...
...it was a fell weapon of procreation...
...The relationship of each of these issues to the sexual constitution, though perhaps not immediately clear, is psychologically profound...
...To displace them is to subvert filial ties and undermine this crucial institution of civilized society...
...Similarly, when the feminists speak of the need to consider us all "human beings" and "people," what they mean is autonomous rational individuals: men and women without powerful sexual drives reaching into all their relationships and without kinship ties binding them to their very identities...
...Neither the liberals nor the conservatives have any answer...
...The leading recipients-the blind, the disabled and the deserted mothers with small children-are pointed to as being unimpeachably qualified for public assistance...
...But the crisis of crime and violence itself is to a great extent a product of familial disintegration and male incapacity...
...Under the pressures of population and the need for increasingly inventive and sophisticated manpower, sound social policy will have to encourage an emphasis on the quality rather than quantity of child-rearing...
...although the best process of socialization seems to be love and family, even men who never marry will be favorably influenced by an environment that commits most men to the long-term patterns of family life...
...It will have to come to terms with the special frustrations of older women during the increasingly extended period after their children grow up, and with the loneliness of women isolated with their children...
...One might even argue that a widely held belief that certain measures jeopardize our sexual fabric is in itself a sufficient case against them...
...There are other issues on which relevant public sentiment is directly hostile to the consensus of informed americans...
...It derives from a seductive misconception of democracy and of the great moral mandates of our founding fathers...
...an ultimate failure to overcome racial conflict would represent something of a final moral tragedy for our nation...
...If intercourse indeed can fathom the reaches of our unconscious and shape the innermost flows of personality-if it is our paramount ritual of biological community-then we must be extraordinarily careful how we choose to reform it...
...Significantly, the welfare payment, from the point of view of the poor, is anything but negligibly small...
Vol. 56 • September 1973 • No. 17
