TRIGGERnometry - "The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics" - Mary Eberstadt

Episode Date: May 2, 2021

Mary Eberstadt is an American essayist, novelist, and author of several works of nonfiction, including Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. I'm delighted to say we have yet another brilliant guest for you. She is an American author. Mary Eberstadt, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you, Constantine and Francis.

Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to have you. We wanted really to focus on your latest book, which is Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. And that is just a fascinating look into some of the many things that we talk about on the show. Before we do that, just tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey that leads you through life to be sitting here talking to us. Well, thank you.

I'm an American writer. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. I've written in various genres over the years. I wrote a novel at one point in response to the new atheism, which was produced on stage some years later, very exciting stuff. And I've written in pretty much every genre, I'd say, apart from poetry and reportage. I'm not a reporter.

And over the years, increasingly, my focus became the sexual revolution and its fallout, because evidence seemed to be accumulating that this revolution, which is part of the wallpaper of all of our lives now, has changed a lot about humanity, and I think has changed a lot for the worse, and we can talk about that. So you're saying that a lot has changed, but look, let's see some of the narratives that I've certainly been fed. You know, it was a time where women had control over their bodies.

All of a sudden, it gave them greater agency over their lives, that, you know, they could pursue careers because of the pill, et cetera, et cetera. Surely, isn't that a universal positive, Mary? Mayor, I'm just thinking, before you answer the question, shall we maybe defyue that? find a sexual revolution for people who weren't around at the time and maybe they aren't familiar with it. Constantine's never had a sexual revolution. I have not, may. Exactly. I've never been overthrown. Well, I think the most uncontroversial definition would be the widespread adoption and destigmatization of contraception that begins with the introduction of the birth control pill. So we're going back to the early 1960s here, which is when that all's,

And in answer to your question, Frances, when it all started, I think there was a lot of optimism. I mean, I don't remember it either, but you could see why people would make the case that this would be a good thing for humanity, that it would free women, as you say, that it would allow them to have robust careers, et cetera. But what wasn't clearly seen at the time was the negative fallout in the forms of rising, fatherlessness, out of wedlock births, truly shocking numbers of abortions. All of these things went up in tandem with the use of contraception. And you don't have to be a card-carrying theologian or a religious fanatic to question some of this stuff. In some of my writing, I cite perfectly secular economists, including Nobel Prize-winning economists who look at these numbers and

to figure out why did it happen that instead of strengthening marriages, strengthening relationships, and improving romance, the widespread adoption of the birth control pills seem to have the opposite effect. And it's a paradox, but it disentangles if we realize that we should look at this the way economists do. What contraception did was flood the marketplace with available sexual partners. And that diminished the incentives for everyone, but especially for men, to settle down with any one of them. And so here we see the negative fallout of contraception at its most crystalline, I think, because what we see is that something that was meant to enhance relations, especially relations between the sexes, instead ended up being an obstacle to human happy.

in many cases. And that's why we see when sociologists study happiness, especially among women over the last couple of decades and in numerous countries, not only in the United States, what they see is a diminution of happiness over time, which makes no sense if we're supposed to be all liberated now. But it does make sense if you realize that what women always say they want in survey data are families and husbands most of the time. And so the fact that these things are now harder to obtain means that we've introduced a serious new form of acrimony and unhappiness into society. And there's a lot more that we could say about that,

but the sexual revolution has a lot of other effects that I think are now showing up not just between individuals, not just as private contractual matters, but across society. And that's what the last book of Primal Screams is about. And so you were saying about the effects it has on society. I read the book, Mary. In fact, I read it yesterday. I found it very, very powerful and dare I say harrowing because of the effects that you explained quite brilliantly about the breakdown of the family and how that has affected. society now, in particular as well, by the way that we've embraced identity politics.

Could you go into that a little bit for us and tease it apart? Yes, sure. And Francis, I'm glad to hear that I wrote something short enough to be read in a day. My publisher will be happy about that. So the sexual revolution and identity politics. I would like to start with what happened in the United States last summer. because the book came out a year before the riots and protests in the U.S. And I could not help but feel as if they vindicated the thesis of the book.

Because the book argues that in the absence of religion, in the absence of family, in the absence of what throughout human history have been very primal attachments for all human beings, in the absence of those things, as those things weaken across the Western world, we see an increasingly impassioned flight to identity politics, to collective identities. And the reason for that flight is that, you know, fundamental to all of us is the question, who am I? And if you were to ask me, who am I, I would probably say something like, I'm a mother, I'm a Catholic, I'm an aunt, I'm a wife, et cetera. In other words, my intuitive response would be to define myself by my primal attachments. What we have to understand is that in this day and age, a lot of people do not have strong attachments of that nature. We live in societies that are secularizing rapidly,

so that takes one answer off the table, who am I, I'm a child of God. A lot of people wouldn't say that, wouldn't think to say that, don't believe that. But then we get into the more complicated tangle of defining oneself by relations to one's family. And let me say at the outset, there is not a family in the world that is not affected by the trends that we are describing. We're all in this together. So when I talk about something like, say, divorce and remarriage and what that does to the sibling relationships of people with half-brothers, stepbrothers, et cetera. I'm coming from a place where I know as much about this as you do, which is that it's ubiquitous. But what these more attenuated relationships have done over time is weaken the emotional attachments of people.

they've weakened the gravitational pull that people feel toward their families. And we're not talking about Ozzie and Harriet, you know, perfect nuclear family. We're talking about the extended family, which for most of us has shrunk by quite a lot. So I get into this in primal screams for a couple of reasons. One is that I really do believe that in the rise in mental health problems, in the increasing acting out that We see on campuses, people duct taping their mouths shut, people having nervous breakdowns about pronouns. You know, I think what we're seeing is a deep unraveling that's coming about because so many people, especially young people, can't answer that question, who am I, by resort to their native families, if you will.

And this leaves a big lacuna that has to be filled by something. and I think increasingly it's being filled by identity politics. Getting back to what happened in the streets of the United States, there were in 2020 over 10,000 incidents of what's politely called unrest in city after city. And over 500 of these devolved into what is impolitely called riots. This is unprecedented in American history. Nothing like this has happened. So where is this coming from?

Well, of course, the conventional answer is police brutality and racism. And it's true that police brutality energized a lot of people, especially young people, who were already living under the restrictions of the pandemic, etc. This is what started it, but this is not what kept the momentum going night after night in cities like Portland, where you would see the same young people out there throwing things, attacking the police. This does not explain the level of sheer emotiveness that we saw in these riots. These did not look like civil rights protests. They didn't even look like anti-Vietnam protests from what I've seen of that footage.

This was very raw, primordial stuff that was in the streets of America. and we can see that very clearly in the sort of street theater that this devolved into where people, protesters and rioters were going around into residential neighborhoods shining lights into people's homes as they were sleeping or disrupting people who were out trying to dine outdoors. In the rage that we see in those acts, I believe we can see through it, to a place where people are so unhinged and so devoid of attachment, of primal attachments of their own, that they're now taking it out on people who they perceive to have those things.

That is the deeper meaning of all that anger spilling into residential neighborhoods and attacking innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with police brutality or but were representative of a kind of world, a kind of order that many young people are now having serious trouble finding. And that to me is the deeper meaning of what we saw in the streets. We saw identity politics as an unstable substitute for more stable connections to family and community. And Mary, what I like about your analysis as well, I heard your brilliant conversation with Christina Hoff-Somers, who I have a lot of respect for as well. And in the you talk about how identity politics, you know, it's very fashionable for people on the right to attack people on the left with it.

But actually, you talk also about the rise of the in-cell community. You talk about the rise of white nationalism, such as it is. I'm not saying it's widespread, but it certainly exists, right? So the idea of identifying with a group seems to appeal across the political spectrum to people. And it certainly makes sense that, you know, I can feel it. You know, you talk about being religious, Francis and I are both non-believers. But the awareness of the fact that people crave community and also the emergence of the sort of woke thing that feels very religious in nature.

It's got its inquisitions. It's got its cancel culture. It's got all of that. I mean, it does seem like what you're saying is true. So I guess the question is all that being accepted, I mean, it's not like, I don't imagine you're suggesting reversing the sexual revolution and disappearing the pale and contraceptives, are you? No, I'm talking about renorming society in a more reasonable direction,

which we do all the time. I mean, human beings do learn from mistakes. And one of the prime examples of this is what's happened with tobacco smoking over the last 60 years. And I say this not to knock smokers. But everybody knows there's been a sea change. Everybody knows that decades of evidence about the negative effects of this substance made it easier for people to quit and made it more stigmatized than it had been. Tobacco use indoors is very stigmatized, at least in the United States. And all of this was the result of empirical evidence eventually filtering down to individual

decisions. And that, I think, is what needs to happen with the sexual revolution, because the costs of it are not only, you know, on the individual level of romance and not only in our increasingly untethered, woke politics, but also, the shrinkage of the family and the fracturing of the family has raised the costs of the welfare state across the Western world. The state has had to come in and be that substitute daddy. The state simultaneously bankrolls the broken family and has to. So these are pretty major consequences that affect the most advanced economies of the world in every single country. We're not talking about private consensual transactions here.

And that's what's really ironic to me in the long run is that everybody says this is only about private decisions, right? Sexual matters are completely off the table. We can't talk about this stuff. It's all private and it's all about consent. And yet nothing has done as much to transform our world as this revolution has, socially, politically, and as I mentioned in primal screams, you know, psychologically and otherwise. So it's something we probably ought to look at, it seems to me. You know, and again, going back to it, so I was a teacher for many, many years.

And the children who struggled the most at school, whether it was academically, whether it was with the discipline, whether it was the structure, were always children. who came from broken homes who didn't have a father around. But it was always a great deput. You can never say it because then you're demonizing single mothers, then you're punching down on single mothers, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things I found really powerful about your book is a way that you approach this issue, in particular the long-term implications for children

not having a man around the house. Would you be able to explain that a little bit more, Mary? This is the best known fact in sociology, and it has been for decades. It's just that nobody wants to emphasize it for obvious reasons. Not having a biological father in the house raises risks to children, period. It raises risks of physical and sexual abuse by mom's boyfriends. And it also seems to make it harder for male children to become men.

That is, functioning reasonable men. again for obvious reasons so in primal screams as you know i'm trying to do something new with this debate because it is so ossified um it's not really even a debate this stuff is so taboo and that's why i get into the research on animals especially mammals because i think that gives us a safer way of talking about some of these things during the past couple of decades scientists have learned a lot that they did not expect about animal behavior. Number one, animals are intensely familial. The myth of the lone wolf, which I open the book with, is just that.

It's a myth. Wolves don't run around alone. Wolves run around in packs. We would call nuclear families, actually, typically mom, dad, pups. And it's not only wolves. look at just about any mammal, and you find the same pattern. So this is important because, first of all, it goes to show that at least in nature, as far as nature is concerned, animals aren't a bunch of atomized beings who are out there,

you know, finding their glitter families and their substitute families. No, animals exist and flourish in a biologically related family. The other thing is social learning. This is terribly important, I think. Scientists now know that animals learn by watching other animals, in particular they learn by watching their mothers and their siblings and their fathers. Why does this matter? Well, I give the example of the cat that can go up a tree but can't get down the tree, which is something scientists have studied, because some cats can get out of trees and some cats can't. The working theory is that the cats that know how to climb.

down out of the trees are those who learned by watching their siblings or their mothers or their fathers. And cats who can't get out of trees didn't learn that because they were isolated from their families, typically house cats. So that's really interesting. Does it apply to us? I think it very much applies to us. Consider, the family is smaller, fathers are absent. Many people don't have siblings or a sibling of the same sex or a sibling of the opposite sex or cousins of the opposite sex or cousins of the same sex. What I'm saying is for all that we think we're so sophisticated and advanced, we actually have shrunk the number of people we can learn from effectively. And I think, again, we're seeing this on a social scale.

People often remark, say, about transgenderism, homosexuality, that these things seem to have exploded in recent times and that it's not just that these things have been destigmatized. It's also that they're growing in real numbers. my response to that is we have taken out of our lives. I mean, inadvertently, but really, the kinds of ways in which people used to learn about the opposite sex from a young age, for example. How could there not be confusion given what we've done to ourselves, given all of those acts of subtraction from our lives? So the idea that people are now struggling extra hard to find their identities is not an idea that comes as a surprise if you read what happens with animals when animals are separated from their families and communities and the dysfunctional behavior they exhibit when they are living in that unnatural way. So we can see this very clearly if we're talking about other species. but we're not very good at seeing it in ourselves.

And that's why I emphasize that research in primal screams because I hope it gives us an end run around this static discussion about fatherlessness and et cetera that so many people find hard to engage in. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then easy DNS are the company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be council culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies.

Enoes a bit about that. So will you in a second. Easy DNS have rock solid network infrastructure and incredible customer support. They're in your corner no matter what the world throws at you, unless it's your ex-girlfriend, in which case you're on your own. You'd know about that. Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDNS.com forward slash triggered

and use our promo code, which is of course triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, access of Easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Why do they find it so hard to engage in? because, you know, you talk about having other people in your family, teach you stuff. That certainly resonates with my experience.

You know, I learn more about being a man from my grandfather than I did from my father, I would say. And me. From you. Yeah, I learned a lot. Anyway, so I totally get that. And it's not a political statement to me to say that children need parents and they need grandparents and they need family members to be around.

and you learn different things from different people. And, you know, grandparents are important not only because they're just another person, but they're from a different generation. They've had their children, maybe the aspirations for their children, have relaxed a little bit, now they can just be playful with the grandchildren. Like, all of that is important. And none of that seems in any way controversial to me. And I'm a sort of like non-religious, you know, sort of liberal guy living in a big city

in Western Europe. Why can't we, why, you say we can't talk about this for obvious reasons? Why has the debate become as ossified, as you say? Well, sometimes I think it's because we are in the position of, say, white people in the American South pre-Civil War. That is to say, everybody is affected by this institution of slavery in that time. or nowadays, I would say, everybody's affected by the sexual revolution. Everybody's implicated and people know that there's something wrong. On the other hand, they don't want to go around hurting everybody's feelings.

And that's what this reluctance is about. It's about not wanting to hurt, as you said, Francis, the single mom, right? Single moms are doing heroic stuff. They're doing the work of two people. So nobody wants to hurt their feelings. But at some point, someone has to ask what the cumulative effect of this is on kids. So in the United States, for example, I've just read the umpteenth story about the fentanyl explosion. And before that, there was, of course, the heroin explosion and before that, the opioid explosion.

Simultaneously, psychiatric diagnoses of depression and anxiety have been rising. I've been chronicling this for 20 years. This was happening long before COVID. The picture I'm painting here is one of widespread, pretty serious psychological dissolution. And I don't think that's a picture that professionals would quibble over because they know that it's true. Again, we have to push through some of that resistance in the interest of the people who are most affected by this, which I think amounts to younger people. When we saw those protesters in the streets, you know, wrecking things and being supremely emotional, I was seeing something on their faces, which was real misery and real suffering.

I think conservatives, and I include myself in this, make a mistake when we dismiss these bizarre actings out as snowflakeism or something that is the product of an old. really privileged childhood. That's not what I see in this. I see real suffering. And the problem is they've come up with the wrong names for this thing. The problem out there is not some abstraction like heteronormativity, right? I think that's right anyway. The problem is not feminism even.

The problem is much more primal than that. it's that a lot of people are psychologically unhinged by the fact that they have not been able to attach to family, community. I would argue religion is part of that, although I agree that there are substitute forms of what Joseph Bottom called bastard Christianity is floating around. I mean, we see this in climate change. We see this in other things too, generally the woke religion. So there we have it. And, you know, it's a very, very depressing, but in my opinion, accurate analysis of what is happening.

I guess, you know, the question that I really want to ask, Mary, is, you know, how do we row back from this now? Because we've got to this point, it feels to me like a crisis point. What can we actually do as a society to row back from it? Is it, you know, good old-fashioned take responsibility? and in this era that we live in now, is that realistic? It's always realistic. I am hopeful for a couple of reasons.

One is that revivals, religious and otherwise, have a way of popping up just when you least expect to see them. And I agree with you, Francis, that we have hit a kind of rock bottom, especially with the problems among the young, suffering among the young. And I think out of that will come new leaders and new conversations because human beings are not meant to live as miserably as many of us do. So there's that.

There's always hope because of that kind of, again, religious or other evangelization. I would point out something interesting about religion here, which is, being in Washington, D.C., which has a vibrant Catholic community, I'm very aware of sort of what goes on in it. Most of the young people, people in their 20s and 30s who are entering the Catholic Church are entering it because they have been victims of this stuff one way or another. And they enter the church and embrace its theology because they hope to find something more congruent with the complicated human beings. that they are. You know, they're looking for something that isn't some two-dimensional woke religion. They're looking for something that corresponds to the depth that they feel in themselves. So that's kind of interesting. In other words, it's not the old, the fuddy

dotties who have been, you know, raised, homeschooled, et cetera, who are becoming the new backbone of Christianity in America. It's the people who are the walking wounded. And I think that's going to be an influential fact for a long time to come. And Mary, moving on now, so towards, because when you were talking in the book, you addressed the Me Too movement and you also discussed pornography. And you were saying that we don't have good examples of what is a positive romantic relationship anymore, which in your view is what led us to this mess where men and women, we can't seem to get along anymore. And again, I think part of that is because of the collapse of fundamental social learning. At one point, I sat down and read hundreds of the Me Too accounts. And the thing that was so

striking was this was, this was all Rochaman, right? This was all, the man had one experience of an encounter. The woman had a completely different experience. And over and over and over, nobody seemed to realize that it's because men and women are different maybe. You know, just basic stuff like that that shouldn't be political and is. Or basic stuff like, obviously, pornography is completely toxic for human relationships. Everybody knows that. You know, an 11-year-old who dumps her boyfriend's phone knows that. what's irritating is that feminism used to know that and that here is a place where feminists

once took a strong stand saying look this is this is bad for romance this is bad for women this is bad for men too and what we have instead now is a feminism that's just seems to completely have Stockholm syndrome about everything and whatever the most libertarian And Guy wants is what feminists today go along with. And I think that's been a real dissent from the feminism of yesteryear, the feminism of Andrea Dworkin, which, by the way, I don't happen to share, but I can have a lot more respect for something that at least stood up to some obvious, detrimental things in society like pornography.

Hey, Francis, do you like to keep your online activity private? Yes, I mean, sure. Think about everything you've ever browsed, search for, watched or tweeted. Now imagine all of that data is being crawled through, collected and aggregated by third parties into a permanent public record. I'm f***. You are. Trigonometry is now going to be a solo project. There are hundreds of data brokers out there whose sole business is to buy and sell your data. That's why I use ExpressVPN.

With ExpressVPN, my connection gets routed through an internet. encrypted server and my IP address is masked. My career's over. Enough about the good news. Every time I turn ExpressVPN on, I'm given a random IP address shared by other ExpressVPN customers. That makes it more difficult for third parties to identify me or harvest my data. I'm finished.

I'm absolutely dumb for. And the best part is how easy it is to use. No matter what device you're on, phone, laptop or smart TV, all you have to do is tap one button to get protected. Come on, Francis, you can do the last bit. Come on, let's do this. If you don't want to end up like me, go to expressvpn.com slash trigger and get three extra mumps for free. That's expressvpn.com slash trigger. Go to EXPR, E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash trigger to learn more. And do you think you've touched on it several times in different ways. But I'm kind of hearing out of what you're saying, and please correct me if I'm

not hearing you correctly, but what this sexual revolution really did, rather than freeing women, what it really did, it freed men. And what men won isn't necessarily, you know, biologically, we're programmed to pursue very different things. If you ask a guy what he'd really want when it comes to sexual relationships, it probably look very different to what a woman would want. And I say this as someone who's happily monogamous and married, but I'm not sure that's what I was biologically programmed to be. Do you know what I'm saying? Oh, I think so. I think so. Sure. So the sexual revolution empowered the already powerful. That is the meaning of the Me Too movement. It empowered the already powerful and it weakened those who were already in a

subordinate situation. And this is a theme that I come back to often because I think it matters as a humanitarian fact. The sexual revolution falls heaviest on the weakest shoulders, and that is to say children. Adults can engage in all of these social experiments, right? And now we have the idea of chosen families or glitter families. I don't know if you're familiar with these terms. but the idea is families that you like better than the ones you were stuck with in the first place and that you can have these substitute families of those whom you choose.

And this is a fashionable thing over here. David Brooks and others have written about it favorably. What's interesting about that is if you ask a six-year-old what his family is, he wouldn't say that he wants to choose it. He would just want the one that was handed to him. And that's what I mean. You know, these are the ways in which the way we've come to live

make it harder for the smallest and weakest who also can't be expected to understand all of this. Again, this is where we're seeing this increasing immiseration of the young coming from. And it's also as well, I mean, we keep circling it around it well, isn't the fact, you know, we're more deeply selfish than ever before. You know, it's about me. It's about my gratifications. And that has an impact on society, even though we don't like to admit it. So getting back to the differences between men and

women, I had this formulation at one point that the sexual revolution in men is more like a slow-acting virus that you don't realize how deadly it can be. until some decades in. And this comes to mind because if we look at life from the other end of the telescope, from old age, we can see what we've done to ourselves. So, for example, in places like Japan, where a lot of people didn't have families, didn't stop to have families, and came from small families in the first place, there's an entire industry surrounding what are called lonely deaths.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but it's because there's so much solitary living and people die in apartments as singletons. And insurance companies have been transformed to deal with this. And there are companies that go in and clean out apartments of people who have no living relatives, et cetera. That's just to say, I'm not bringing that up to be a Debbie Downer. I'm saying that when you read a story about how thousands of people die alone in a place like Japan every week, you can't help but think this is temporary.

I mean, we're going to devise some way around this. We're going to adapt so that there's less of this in the future. And again, that's a ground for hope, I would think. We have to be, we can't beat ourselves up. The way we are living now is really new compared to every, everything that came before us. If you were an illiterate peasant in the south of France and the year 1,200, you would still be more literate about family than a lot of people are today.

You would just have those ties. They would be a given. They're just an unbidden thing that you were born into. And you wouldn't question them. I mean, it's not until you get to our level of prosperity. the innovation of the birth control pill that suddenly a lot of people are questioning this stuff and trying to devise new forms of connection. This is all very recent. So it's no wonder that it's not well understood and it's no wonder that there's such resistance to talking about it.

Mary, there will be a lot of people watching this because we have people from all over the different sides of all these different conversations watching the show. And if they haven't switched off yet, they may be planning to very shortly. So before they do, let me ask you, this. I mean, people would say, I mean, not entirely unreasonably, that there have been some great breakthroughs as a result of the sexual revolution. And, you know, they've, they have freed women to do what they want to do, or at least what they think they want to do. You know, there's a, you might have an argument about that. But surely, you know, the traditional maximum of our time is, you know, freedom is great and we've just, we've got more of it. Isn't that brilliant?

Right. So that's a very consumerist. And I think we live in a time when people are rethinking consumerism at all costs. People are rethinking globalism, for example. And this is not to dis freedom as such, but we all know that unlimited consumerism in any area is bad for us, right? We're moralistic about obesity. We're moralistic about tobacco smoking. Well, why can't we apply the same lens to some of what's happened on account of the sexual revolution and what you might call, you know, sexual consumerism, consumerism in the sexual marketplace?

I think that, if anything, younger people who are especially aware of the need to put limits on some of our behavior, whether it's because of climate change or for other reasons, those people, of all people would be open to arguments about, hey, maybe we are hurting ourselves by having unlimited freedom in other areas. And Mary, I'm going to bring it back to being depressing again, because that is my modus operandi. That's his brand. That's my brand. That's what I bring to the party. It's after I start, it's no longer a party, and I'm very proud about it.

But one of the things that you've talked about that I found particularly powerful is you compared the family to one of the pillars of our society. And effectively, what we're doing by turning our back on the family is destabilizing the pillar of our society. Well, sure. And again, this is all social science that people don't want to talk about. But kids who have the best outcomes in school, et cetera, the least truancy, the least criminal behavior are basically coming out of intact homes. and that holds across the socioeconomic spectrum. Again, it is hard to talk about this

at a time when so many people don't have access to that very model, but that doesn't make it any less true. Yeah, well, that's a difficulty. And I'm still, you know, when I asked you about why people don't have this conversation or are scared to, I'm somewhat dissatisfied with your answer, nothing personal to you. I just don't understand why we can't say, well, if you do this,

it's less good than doing something else without, you know, still respecting people because they are in the position that they are. So if you're a single mother, we can say, well, it's not ideal for your child, but you are doing your best. And we still respect you for that. It's just maybe, you know, you might be worth you teaching your child that actually it would be great for them to stay together with their partner and have children like that. Like, I don't see how those two things are mutually exclusive. Why is this even a political issue? I just, I really don't understand.

Well, we live in a politicized time. That's one reason it's a political issue. But I would like to make it a political issue in a positive sense and say, maybe we can experiment politically. I'm not a policy wonk, but it does seem to make sense that there might be, policies that would make it easier for parents to stay together, that would make it easier for parents to have another child. There could be tax breaks that way. There could be certain things about family formation that you could tether to forgiving student loans. I mean,

there's a lot of room for creativity in this. And I think that seeing the government do some of that might help us down the road, might make it easier to start and keep a family in the first place. So we should look at that. I agree. I think it is something that we need to look at. When are you proposing, me? My, we're skipping over that one, are we? We're skipping over that. There we go. I guess what I'm worried about, Mary, is that I think as a society, I think we're so wrapped up in consumerism. I think we're so wrapped up in the glorification of the self. I'm tied up with identity politics. That the idea of, you know, putting others' needs first before your own,

I think is seen as a bit old-hat and old-fashioned, is it not? Well, it is, but that doesn't make it any less heroic. I mean, there are things about people that don't change. If we look at the serious concern over climate change, for example, and the way in which people make sacrifices in the name of that, right, turning off their air conditioning, not going on airplanes, et cetera. In extreme cases, there are people who argue one shouldn't even have children because of climate change. But what that example goes to show is that we have a sacrificial side to ourselves. And it's just been displaced onto these more abstract ventures. It's not impossible to think that we can turn that back to its natural position, which is sacrificing in

marriage, sacrificing by having a family, et cetera. We should make it cool to post pictures of yourself being married on Instagram. I think that's the way you solve it. Well, it's interesting because, you know, Francis obviously brings in the voice of pessimism, but I get the sense from you that you are, well, the way I would interpret it is you think things have got so bad that we can only go up from here. Yeah, there was a novel in the 70s with that very title, been down so long it looks like up to me. I don't know whether you've heard of it, but that's, yeah, that's the idea.

I mean, the bottom line is that we are living in ways unnatural to the kind of that we are. And we need to recognize that, just as we can recognize in other creatures, in fellow creatures, when they are living in ways out of keeping with their natures. That's what I'm trying to do in my work, is to shine a light on that. I'm a conservative precisely because I don't think we've been very good at coming up with new answers to ancient questions like who am I? My hope is that we can also dig into the past and recover some of that wisdom

and bring it to bear on these very new problems that we have like psychiatric dissolution among the young. And you talk about, you know, ancient questions. Isn't the problem as well for men is they're not, it's not that they're obsolete. It's just that they're, they, they, they, they. their position in society isn't as clear-cut as it used to be. And as a result, has that not created a kind of crisis within men as well? Yes, very much so, I think.

And deriding the masculine principle, as happens in everyday discourse in all of the mainstream media, is not going to help that. Again, if you think of the plight of a young boy growing up, up today, about half of them in the United States are being raised in families without the father present, typically after some cataclysmic happening like divorce, meaning that the message a lot of them are getting are men are bad, right? And that can't help but confuse a boy and be a toxic factor in his life. So if we can't have real fathers, we can have substitute fathers. I wouldn't be surprised to see religion re-emerging in a surprising way in this kind of wreckage.

Now, as far as the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church has an impressive history of own goals. Put very mildly there, Mary, well done. But, you know, it offers at its best a paternal principle that people can understand and it offers, for example, the figure of St. Joseph as a substitute father. So there's still a language there that broken people of our time can work with. And I wouldn't be surprised to see, again, unexpected but real religious revival coming out of this. Because that's at least more tangible. That gives you more to hold on to than a glitter family or a chosen family

or in the long run identity politics. And do you think that that would be a force for good, this reinvention, you know, and, you know, the reawaking of religion? I think anything that gives atomized purposeless people a source of positive meaning is good right now. We need that. We could use a lot more of that. You know, it's interesting. when I talk about how the identity politics are related to the sexual revolution, there is a particular document that I would like to point to here, which is the first document in which the phrase identity politics was used. It was done in 1977 by a group of radical African-American

feminists. It's called the Cambahi River Collective. And in this statement, which is a very sad statement. These women say, we are giving up on the people around us, especially the men around us. We don't think they have our backs. We don't think we can work with them anymore. We can only work with people exactly like we are. That's the founding statement of identity politics. It appears in 1977, just as the sexual revolution is taking hold. And I think it's incredibly evocative. because it shows that identity politics is born not out of liberation, but out of desperation, to find people and create a community in a world where communities were already weakening. So that is something that we should all think about.

When we think about identity politics, think about that document and think of it as a statement of resignation, a statement about giving up on most of the rest of the human race. That's where identity politics is coming from. Our former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said there's no such thing as society. There's only men, women, children, and families. And it goes back to what you're saying, which is, you know, without families, we don't have a functioning society. Pretty much that. And we're finding it out.

The empirical evidence is all around us. We just need to acknowledge it. and move on somehow, whether it's through politics or through personal behavior. Mary, it's been great talking to you. It's a perspective that we've done often here, certainly in the mainstream, which is why we wanted to speak with you about it. Thank you for talking to us. And as you know, we have one more question for you, which is, of course, what is the

one thing that we're still not talking about as a society that we really should be? Well, so since I'm talking to a couple of agnostics or atheists. Agnostics. Don't lump us in with the hardcore. Okay. I would like to put one thought out there at a time when organized religion seems to be in free fall, which is that really our theotropic nature as human beings is ineradicable. If we don't have organized religion, we will make up other. religions. And I really believe that out of the sexual revolution has been created a substitute religion that has its own secular saints like Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey and Margaret

Mead. It has its own rituals. And it is reminiscent of Christianity in many ways, which is to say when people think that religion is something we've put behind us because we're somehow smart, and better than anyone who came before us, I would like people to stop and reflect on the religiosity of our time, the secular religiosity of our time. Well, listen, we mentioned that we're non-believers, but that is an issue we've been thinking quite a lot about in recent years because it's becoming unavoidable and inescapable. And certainly the fact that people seem to be waking up to a different religion now, you know, it's everywhere.

And the similarities are so blindingly obvious that even people like us who I think otherwise would quite like to pretend that it's not there are starting to go, yeah, I think there might be something to this. So, yeah, it's a good point and well made. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book is called Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics,

thoroughly recommend for people to get that. Is there anywhere else you'd like people to go and find you online? I have a website, Mary Eberstadt.com, where they can read about whatever I've been spouting off about lately and the books and etc. And thank you, Constantine and Francis. Well, thank you very much, Mary. You've indeed been an absolutely wonderful guest. Make sure to go and check out Mary online. If you have enjoyed this episode, they come out on Wednesdays and Sundays.

and we also... They come out on Wednesdays and Sundays even if you haven't enjoyed them, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. Works both ways. Yeah, and we have Trigonometry Raw which comes out on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and they always go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.