A Very Private Public Affair
By Karl Zinsmeister
Sex is an instinct that produces an institution. That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects.... Sex is the gateway of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway. But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about in the gate and never get any further. -G.K. Chesterton
There may be some readers who will think that a long examination of good sex, and bad sex, and how to tell the difference, is an odd subject for a magazine devoted to public affairs. Sex. Isn’t that private?
Well, yes, of course it is. But it is also one of the most important influences on the day-to-day shape of our society and the fabric of our collective life. As Chesterton points out above, sex is the element out of which we synthesize the family, and much of our sense of obligation to one another, as well as literally the next generation.
Chesterton also notes that there are some people who have an impaired appreciation of sexuality. They may grasp the mechanics, and get the part about what it can do for them. But they ignore all the rest of the elaborate architecture of lovemaking.
It’s a little hard to understand where the modern concept of “casual” sex came from. When and where has sex ever been casual? Most people through time have realized that sexuality is quite the opposite of casual-it is frantic, it is overwhelming, it can inspire sublime acts, it is able to cause insanity. I’ve always assumed that a significant portion of the polemicists promoting the idea that a person’s sexual behavior is “no big deal” must be persons who have never experienced real sexual love. Sex is fire: it can warm, it can thrill, it can have utility, it can burn horribly-and mankind’s control over it is always tenuous. Only a eunuch or a fool could imagine that sex is casual.
Yet that has been the reigning pretense for about 40 years now. In the detailed article at the heart of this installment of The American Enterprise, Jenny Morse describes in measuredly rational, sometimes moving, occasionally very personal ways, how harsh the effects of that mistake have been during her lifetime. Jenny is an economist and a powerful empirical thinker, not a raver. But she is also a sensitive soul, a mother, and someone who has reflected hard on real-life experiences and consequences. She makes it clear why even a libertarian-minded person like herself must accept that sexual behaviors are never wholly private decisions, but actions that ripple long and far into other citizens’ lives.
Perfect illustrations of the way private sexual choices overflow into public problems can be found in another pair of articles in this issue. Our frank interview with Shelby Steele (starting on page 12) and then John McWhorter’s powerful feature story (on page 30) turn a searchlight on some of the heartbreaking damage done to black America over the last generation. McWhorter observes that a toxic combination of bad public policies and poor choices centered on sexuality and family life sent a significant portion of black families “to hell” starting around the mid 1960s. Steele concludes that these same factors actually braked black progress to the point where blacks have advanced less since the Sexual Revolution and Great Society than in the segregated era that came before.
It’s said that ideas have consequences. Well, bad ideas have bad consequences. And this is as true when the bad ideas pertain to “personal choices” and “private behavior” as anywhere else.
When America catches a cold, goes the old saw, black America gets pneumonia. That certainly applies to the virus of the Sexual Revolution. As the numbers on page 24 indicate, blacks bought into the casual sex crusade with even fewer reservations than whites. From adultery, to teenage experience, to premarital sexuality, to homosexual relations, to the number of lifetime partners, black Americans are roughly twice as likely as whites to wander from traditional sexual norms. And this has hurt them badly.
Today, only 39 percent of black children are growing up in two-parent families. One hundred years ago, despite economic and political privation, twice as many black families were intact. Those are the wages of sexual liberation. The secondary effects include a welfare explosion, crime, wrecked cities and public schools, violence and abuse, and endless human misery. Most of the victims are innocent third parties who don’t see the fun in a casual approach to sexuality.
Remember this the next time you hear arguments about the privacy of sexual choices.
