“Gay people have less satisfying sexual and romantic lives than they did before the sexual revolution” is certainly an interesting take. 
This idea that feminism, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution have made it harder for people to get laid is a big old [citation needed], @DouthatNYT.
So @q_philosopher wants me to engage with Douthat’s argument more fairly and less snarkily. Here goes...
Douthat says there’s a large number of people caught in a “psychic vi[s]e” between what society tells them about what a fulfilling, satisfying sex life looks like and their own experiences and desires. That’s surely true. But here’s what else is true...
The “psychic vi[s]e” between what society tells “female, older, gay, etc” people about what a fulfilling, satisfying sex life looks like and their own experiences and desires WAS INCALCULABLY MORE OPPRESSIVE WITHIN LIVING MEMORY.
And here’s a secret: The “psychic vi[s]e” between what society told young straight men about what a fulfilling, satisfying sex life looks like and their own experiences and desires WAS WAY WORSE IN THE BEFORETIMES AS WELL.
Let’s add in the experiences of people oppressed along axes of race, class, disability, and gender identity, too. Better, better, better, better.
And all this improvement in people’s lived experience is explicitly the result of liberatory political and cultural movements against oppression operating alongside, and often in tension with, changing straight male attitudes around sexuality.
Feminism works, as I’ve noted before. Feminism makes sex better. Feminism makes people happier. Feminism makes people feel less shitty. And the same is true of other anti-oppression movements.
Ross is like an antivaxxer who rails against immunization because he literally can’t imagine the lived experience of a parent watching their kid die of polio.
Yes, some people are lonely. Yes, some people can’t get laid. But to yell “think of the gays!” while you’re bemoaning the changes in society’s sexual mores over the last six decades is frankly obscene.
And that is as fair and as kind to Ross Douthat as I care to be today.
Oh, one last thing. A big way in which life is better than it was six decades ago? Far less rape. You want to talk about how society’s sexual mores shape real people’s lives? Talk about that.
I try to keep my tone light when talking about this crap, but honestly it just makes me so angry.
