Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today in the public sphere there are a number of socially conservative men - @DouthatNYT, Jordan Peterson, etc. - whose ideas about sex, marriage, and relationships have caused quite an outcry.

Why have they caused such an outcry? Let me see if I can articulate why.

2/In a recent article (nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opi…), Douthat suggested a return to the traditional values of monogamy and chastity.

In another article (nytimes.com/2018/05/18/sty…), Peterson suggested "enforced monogamy".

3/What does "enforced monogamy" mean? Does it just mean that society should value marriage?

If so, that's hardly a radical position. There have always been people saying marriage is good, and there probably always will be.

BUT, it seems to mean more than that.

4/Americans already have a strong norm of monogamous marriage. huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/gal…

91 percent disapprove of infidelity. 83 percent disapprove of polygamy.

5/Though a majority of Americans are accepting of divorce, the divorce rate in America has fallen to a 40-year low.

time.com/4575495/divorc…

6/Millennials have fewer sex partners than Baby Boomers did at the same ages.

washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…

7/The modal American aged 35-39 has had sex with precisely ONE other person in their life. This is true for both men and women.

Monogamy, in other words, is still extremely common.

8/And @RichardvReeves has done excellent work documenting how a norm of monogamous, childcare-focused parenting has taken hold among America's educated class (who are probably Douthat and Peterson's main readership, as well as most of their critics).

brookings.edu/blog/social-mo…

9/In other words, despite "The 60s" and "hookup culture" and whatever, monogamous marriage is still the norm in America, in terms of both what is preached AND what is practiced.

So what the heck are Douthat, Peterson, and the other socially conservative men talking about???

10/One possibility is that social conservatives don't *realize* how prevalent and popular monogamous marriage still is. Maybe they've been tricked by pop culture into thinking that most Americans are living in a Katy Perry song.

11/BUT - and here is the scary possibility - maybe the social conservative men want MORE than a norm of monogamous marriage.

Maybe "enforced monogamy" means something more extreme that what we already have. Something much darker.

12/What kind of "enforced monogamy" could social conservatives want? The question, to borrow a phrase from Lovecraft, is stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.

It summons all sorts of dark visions of totalitarian methods being used to control women's lives and behavior.

13/To name just a few, social conservatives might want:

* Weakened divorced laws

* Revoking of abortion rights to discourage women from having casual sex

* Decriminalization of male violence against women who cheat (or who they think cheat)

* Decriminalization of marital rape

14/None of those policies would be new or unprecedented. All of them are relatively common around the world, and existed in America up until relatively recently. Including in the much-lauded 1950s.

15/Those policies are all scary. But the very vagueness of the calls for "enforced monogamy", etc. suggests that social conservative men might be contemplating new, innovative, and unprecedented methods for controlling women's sexuality. Scary dystopian futuristic stuff.

16/In sum, because social conservative men seem to want much MORE than the monogamous marriage norm that already prevails, and because they are VAGUE about what more they want, it's easy to imagine that they want very very bad things.

17/Women are not a resource to be parceled out to men.

Women's sexuality is not a commodity to be regulated by the government for men's benefit.

Any seeming suggestion to the contrary rightfully causes an outcry.

18/So if social conservative men want to stop freaking people out, they should:

A) be more concrete about the changes they'd like to see, and

B) be more explicit that they DON'T view women and women's sexuality as commodities to be allocated to men.

(end)

P.S. - This Jordan Peterson post doesn't offer much clarity: jordanbpeterson.com/uncategorized/…

It praises monogamy at length, but doesn't discuss what additional policy levers might be employed to "enforce" it.