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Well then I ask again: what are its own terms? What looks like a success and does the current situation look like it?
I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.
I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.
Look, you have to choose:
Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).
Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.
You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).
The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.
You'll note that I never claimed either that correlations means causation.
Social projects do not get to have control groups. All claims of success or failure, or indeed all plans for society, have to be judged on their actual outcomes instead of their theoretical consequences.
Unless you want to dispute the observations I'm stating, the sexual revolution is a failure. On its own terms. Which is the proposition I'm originally commenting on.
Whether it could have been successful were it not for other factors and whether the failure is inherent to its recommendations is frankly irrelevant, since we don't live in hypotheticals and all political recommendations have to be about the present set of humans in the present set of conditions.
These are not incompatible observations at all. People are having less sex. Most of the sex that's being had is casual and outside of formal bonds.
That is what you're responding to -- a causal claim.
Yes, you avoided ever stating any of your observations were causal, but you're responding to a question about causation by citing correlations. Your comment is either implying your correlational claims are evidence of the causal claim or it is a non sequitur.
I don't read it as ostensibly and specifically about causation. In part because of the aforementioned fact that social movements are essentially impossible to assess on a causal basis. And in part because "the sexual revolution" is an historical event and period as much as if not more than it is a set of policy prescriptions.
I will once again point out that refusing to engage with the only instance of consequences from a social policy on the grounds that they are not necessary consequences of that policy is the same insane rethorical gambit deployed to defend totalitarian socialism and that it is not coherent to employ lest we refrain from having any opinion on social policy since none of it can be ascertained in necessary terms.
I'm happy to concede to that idea, but most don't share my skepticism.
I'll therefore ask the same question I ask socialists: how many failures are necessary to prove that the idea doesn't work? If that number is not practically finite, the ideas' soundness is unfalsifiable and all debate of its merits is pointless.
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I know too little about the topic at hand to have a meaningful opinion on it, but the discussion here reminded me of something like this, as well. Part of the responsibility of any social or political project is being robust against malicious and/or unexpected forces that come about to throw a wrench in the system. If some unexpected technological advancement or sabotaging entity successfully throws the movement off course, then the failure rests entirely on the people pushing the movement, in not taking the correct precautions or not making the correct adaptations.
I'd also say that the whole time span excuse seems either misguided or, I suspect, just motivated reasoning. If we posit that the sexual revolution started around the 60s, it would follow that the first generation of people who grew up in that environment had kids in the 80s-90s, which means that the first generation of people who grew up raised by people who grew up in that environment were entering their young adulthood in the 00s-10s. It would make perfect sense for such a society-wide transformation to have different effects on people who saw the transformation as adults, on people who saw the transformation as kids but were raised by adults who were accustomed to pre-transformation, and on people who only knew life post-transformation, raised by people who mostly knew life post-transformation. This can't be extended indefinitely, of course; at some point, the multiple generations of people living better lives makes it clear that whatever issues that came after must have been extrinsic (which then gets to the previous paragraph, that failing to account for extrinsic, unpredictable factors is just as much a failure as any other), but given what we know about the human lifecycle and societies, 2 generations seems well short enough a timeframe to draw a direct line.
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