My late friend Noel used to say that the real division in society was between those who thought “we should pay and pay and pay for sex” — by which he meant sexual intercourse — and those who thought that “sex should be ‘free.’”

The first time I heard him say this, I minimized its profundity. I immediately translated this maxim as being about sexual responsibility, and I did not see why one couldn’t be free and responsible.

Of course, I was thinking as an individualist, and most people are not individualists. The “right,” by and large, thinks responsibility can only be inculcated in society by limiting sexual freedom, while the “left” seeks to reduce the burden of sexual responsibility in the pursuit of freedom. Individualists, on the other hand, tend to find both attitudes a bit hard to take.

The sexual revolution was launched as a liberatory enterprise, but chiefly succeeded in reducing the bite of responsibility with a handful of innovations:

1. improved contraception and prophylactics, decreasing the pinch of natural consequences for multiple-partner sexual activity;
2. increased frequency of abortions, through legalization, which made it easier for sexually active members of both sexes to avoid the burden of taking care of the natural by product of heterosexual unions; and
3. extensive “welfare” benefits given to women without spouses but with children.

These three things allowed the sexual revolution to really take off. But the political elements of these three developments — and the second and third are largely political in nature — were not demanded by the masses. They were pushed by the elites, who themselves, historically, tend to lean left on cultural and sexual matters. 

But driving this idea was not merely that perennial and quite ancient temptation, freedom-without-responsibility. Deep in the heart of modern life another idea lurked, hidden just barely: over-population worries. 

The sexual revolution has been pushed by elites as part of an anti-natalist agenda, a frank and sometimes cruel demand for general population reduction. Pushing the ideology of hedonism and the legal policies that helped help thrive served to curb population growth. Especially among whites, which allowed post WWII eugenicists to feel less Nazilike and more racially altruistic. Many elite thinkers and politicians frankly pushed an anti-Caucasian agenda as part of their neo-eugenics.

The arc of the implementation of this agenda has been breathtaking to watch, but I do have two predictions.

1. I think that now, with trans, we’ve arrived at the penultimate absurdity — the ultimate having been described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, but which I don’t think we can advance towards at present, because of limitations of current biotech. And trans will seal the end of the sexual revolution. It is too ridiculously absurd as well as manipulative of decadence: it too frankly defies the basic habits that maintain the civilization that encourages it. In ten years it’ll be worse than a deep embarrassment. There will be a crisis of consequences, yes (I predict suicides and mass revenge murders), which will lead to no longer being promoted. And the politico-cultural left will have suffered its second major comeuppance, after the fall of the Soviet Union (which itself echoed the post-socialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — see David Ramsay Steele’s book on Orwell).

2. But the elites will not give up. Their commitment to population reduction is classist and a matter of “identity.” So they will continue to support their agenda in the revolution that is now following the sexual revolution: the death revolution. Canada has already taken it up in a big way: the promotion of medically assisted suicide in a big, bureaucratized way.

We’ll see a lot more on encouraging suicide. Time to read Gore Vidal’s Messiah again, or watch, for the umpteenth time, Soylent Green.

Decadence is not just a matter of sex. It is food and death, too. Cannibalism and entomopophagy, and a whole lot more, too, will likely feature large in the near future. Our civilization seems to sport a death wish. And it is going to get ugly before it turns around.

twv