Dr. Lena Sun examines how sexual revolution messaging disproportionately harms working-class women, citing Tom Wolfe’s Hooking Up and a 2007 Philadelphia study linking single motherhood to reduced drug use. She argues upper-class women thrive despite social constraints, while lower-income women face violence or unintended parenthood without them, though some adapt effectively. Contrasting Gen Z’s reported abstinence with premarital sex trends, she suggests casual sex is often overblown as reckless, occurring more in committed relationships, questioning whether class-based outcomes reveal deeper systemic failures than moral decay. [Automatically generated summary]
That the solution to every broken sexual norm was to break more of them.
That's always been my MO.
A lot of women listened and a lot of women got hurt.
They ended up more medicated and more lonely than any generation before them, having less sex than almost anyone before them, too.
These things are also, these things are true to an extent.
I agree that there is a sex in the city era that occurred, and you could find lifestyle columnists that were these single sluts who would talk about their various conquests or being conquested.
Don't you think this is a little bit of a straw man?
I mean, liberal, wealthy liberal women have more success in marriage than middle class or in especially working class women.
Yes, marriage is collapsing amongst like the lower, the bottom 50.
It's not collapsing amongst upper middle class liberal white women.
It's become item, which is in a way very sad.
But I'm not, at the very least, you could say is that even if some people were telling women this, educated upper class women weren't listening.
No.
It reminds me of this.
I remember there's this book.
It wasn't called, it might have even been called Hooking Up.
I know that's a book by Tom Wolf, but I never read it.
I just read some reviews and heard some people interviewed about it.
And I agreed with the thesis basically, which was that the sexual revolution has hit college campus.
But the problem is, is that a lot of well-to-do women are smart enough to manage it.
And so, yeah, they might go and give a frat guy a blowjob and they might sleep around a little bit, but they're ultimately going to be fine.
And they're going to have this, these moments of degeneracy or whatever, but they're ultimately much more likely to have a successful marriage and children, et cetera.
And it's sort of like the lower class women are the ones that really need social morality.
You know, like they benefit from it more because they're the ones that like hook up with a guy at a truck stop and get beaten up.
Or they're the ones who have a one-night stand and then end up raising that man's children who they never hear from again.
And it's like, that's the argument, which I agree with, which is that upper class women are basically fine, but for the sake of the working class, you should maybe promote morality.
Also, from the point of view of, I guess, yeah, they're promoting, they're saying, you know, marital sex is the way to go rather than premarital sex.
The picture of premarital sex that's being drawn here is of this like wild bacchanea from coast to coast.
And obviously that's not really the situation for the most part.
Most of the premarital sex is happening is in the context of relationships.
So on the level as well, it's a strong man.
Yes.
That often lead to a marriage as well.
Yes.
And is it all a bacchanal or are we not having sex at all?
Because as I've also stressed at other points, like the fact that Gen Z aren't having sex at all, I think is a really big problem, sort of on a different level.
But another aspect of this, there's this book that I, when I was working in the American Conservative many years ago in 2007, that I remember editing this review of the book, and I also agreed with the thesis.
And I also am not going to bother actually reading the boring social science book, but I agreed with the thesis.
And it was basically about working class women in Philadelphia.
Working Class Women's Lives00:00:46
And this woman, the sociologist, did a lot of different interviews.
And she found out this kind of dysfunctional thing going on with them where they were okay as a single mother.
And in fact, being a single mother was a way of organizing their life.
You know, they would take their, I got to take my kid to daycare.
Oh, I got to get him to school by 8.30.
And then like, I do my job.
And then like, oh, I got to get out of there quick to pick him up and take him, you know, in a way, they're busy, but it also kind of helps you organize your life in a way.
You don't have time to like do drugs or run around because your child manages things for you by necessity, if you understand what I'm saying.