A new era dawns?
There’s an old New England ballad called “The New Bundling Song,” about the custom of “bundling” a young couple side-by-side in bed before marriage. The aim was to afford potential spouses a night together that would test their compatibility, but not their chastity. By the seventeenth century, however, bundling regulations among the Puritans of America had evidently grown lax enough to offend the sensibilities of rigorous moralists. The balladeer notes with stern displeasure that lovers may be wrapped up to the navel in bedclothes and separated by a wooden board, but they still enjoy plenty of leeway for heavy petting: “she is modest, also chaste / While only bare from neck to waist, / And he of boasted freedom sings, / Of all above her apron strings.”
The wonderful thing about bundling is that it reveals, contrary to subsequent caricature, just how much store New Englanders of the Puritan era set by physical attraction and romantic compatibility. If they hadn’t cared so deeply about conjugal delight—if their only objective had been to keep the bloodlines pumping—they would never have exposed their sons and daughters to the peril of ruination that came with so much premarital intimacy. They would have just arranged dynastic unions sight unseen and been done with it.
Another recorded custom, possibly apocryphal but certainly plausible and in keeping with the spirit of true Puritanism, was to manage flirtation with the aid of a long, hollow wooden stick. Lads and maidens would have been able to murmur sweet nothings to each other through the “whispering tube,” all while remaining fully clothed. Parents could supervise their charges physically without listening in on the private conversation, over which a tender veil was drawn. The result would have been intimacy in full view, which would perfectly serve the tricky double purpose of Puritan courtship rituals: to keep the raging currents of youthful libido under control while also channeling them into lives of fruitfulness and joy.
This is also, not incidentally, the objective of absolutely every healthy society in matters of the heart. Puritans had their follies and their superstitions, as we all do, but they were hardly sterile martinets. If anything they were, for their time, unusually concerned to afford a place of high respect to young love in the settlement they brokered between order and desire. The complexity of their attempts to do so, under the harsh conditions of the new world, only serves to emphasize what a delicate business it is to calibrate a functional sexual ethics—especially under radically unfamiliar material conditions. Technology and theology, ancestral wisdom and judicious innovation must all be pressed into service. And of course, you have to take the business seriously. That the Puritans’ feat of civilization building in this domain was laughed to scorn for its supposedly pointless acts of repression, and made a byword for humorless frigidity, is a measure of how unserious the American approach to sex became in subsequent generations. At just the moment when chemical contraception opened up another new world, ethical trendsetters developed a notable habit of acting as if the perennial challenges of matchmaking had simply ceased to exist. The birth control pill may not have summoned a new continent into being but, as Mary Harrington has argued extensively, it blew open a perilous and totally uncharted territory of relational possibilities. And whereas earlier feminists had labored painstakingly to balance technologically enabled freedoms against the enduring realities of physical nature, feminism in the age of the Pill “focused almost entirely on individual freedom, imagined as the property of functionally interchangeable ‘humans.’”
It must have seemed reasonable, when one invention had dislodged a set of constraints so foundational as those embodied in the reproductive system, to infer that moral and scientific progress consisted in successively removing all constraints, rather than renegotiating them. The new vision expressed in burning bras and nudist communes was given formal articulation by Susan Miller Okin in 1989: “A just future would be one without gender.” The rush to eliminate sexual boundaries, some of which really did now look outmoded and ill-suited to a reconfigured world, produced the torrent of iconoclasm and libidinal energy known as the sexual revolution.
The trouble has been figuring out what to put in the old world’s place. If dowry agreements and premarital chaperoning no longer seem workable or desirable, neither does the condition defined by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as “gender parity.” This would involve rendering women identical to men, at least as measured by their participation in the labor force and especially in STEM fields—i.e., the production and programming of machinery. Citing the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, WEF notes that a key step to advancing this dream is to provide women with birth control: “The private sector supplies modern contraception and contraceptive innovation as part of its commercial mission.”
The path to and perhaps the definition of “gender parity” seems therefore to be creating and distributing technology that empowers women, like men, to create and distribute technology. The ecstasies and enthusiasms of free love having spent themselves, true liberation now means a sexless year zero made possible by machines, for machines. It’s a receding goal: as of 2023, the Global Gender Gap Report predicted exhaustingly that “it will take another 131 years to reach gender parity,” at which point other lingering sex differences will doubtless have been identified for elimination. The major problem with stamping out all distinctions between male and female is that it’s impossible. The other big problem is that it’s no fun. Although the parameters of the encounter between men and women periodically shift, the polarities remain constant. The steps of the dance are always new, but it’s always the same two dance partners, meeting shyly across a crowded room and trying to work out something moderately graceful without stepping on each other’s toes. Bundling and whisper tubes would be absurd in the age of the smartphone, but the problem the Puritans were trying to solve remains: romantic love is at once the most powerfully creative and catastrophically destructive social force known to man. How are we to support and honor it without allowing it to wash civilization away in a bacchic flood?
The answer does not seem to be to tear the levees down. All this does is produce tidal waves of ruination, confusion, and sexual misery more acute than the manifold discomforts of tradition. As far as women are concerned, sweeping away the sex-differentiated rules of chivalry seems to have produced a wilderness of ambiguity where every traveler is freshly vulnerable to grotesquely predatory behavior.
This was recently re-emphasized when yet another self-proclaimed male feminist—this time the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman—turned out to have a fetish for subjugating and humiliating young women in unmentionable ways. The ensuing #MeToo hangover touched off a fresh debate over whether consent is a legitimate baseline—or even a viable concept—for thinking about acceptable sexual conduct. Contrasting entries into the discussion from Kat Rosenfeld and Louise Perry, despite their differences, both illustrated the devastating failure of what Rosenfeld calls “vapid, anything-goes sex positivity with a monomaniacal focus on consent.” The wages of that failure are documented by journalist Christine Emba in Rethinking Sex, a book about hookup culture whose real-life protagonists resemble nothing so much as frightened, lonely ghosts floating timidly through the bombed-out ruins of what was once a society.
As far as men are concerned, the temptation is very strong either to retire from this bleak landscape and burrow into a fetal cavern stocked with porn, or simply to become the toxic brute that the term “rape culture” presupposes you to be. Men who see no viable route to a manly twenty-first-century life have sometimes embraced what in China is called tang ping (“lying flat”), typically referred to in English as “nope-ing out.” Those who reject that option sometimes conclude that the only alternative is to “yup in” so hard that you shuck off not only the conceit of “gender parity” but also the basic standards of virtue and masculine decency. This is the approach represented by the muscled mega-influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who filmed himself this Christmas doing lateral dumbbell raises in his tricked-out man cave. He was shirtless, ripped, and surrounded by expensive gadgetry. He was also alone. The cultural horizon is now increasingly dotted with people who find these various lifestyle archetypes—the Tate-inspired cave-dwellers, the airbrushed tradwives, the male feminists and their dubiously empowered victims—hopelessly unsatisfying.
There is an intellectual and social vanguard casting about for a way of building relationships that consists neither in wholesale embrace of the sexual revolution, nor in reactionary fury against it, but in getting out from under its shadow altogether. The leading participants in this effort are coming at it from a wide variety of prior ideological commitments and political associations. Many of them write for this journal. They include some of the authors mentioned already, as well as others like Lane Scott, Alex Kaschuta, Rob Henderson, Anna Khachiyan, Erika Bachiochi, Louise Perry, and Ross Douthat. One conspicuous thing these Catholics, social scientists, TERFs, and dissident post-Marxists have in common is their interest in hammering out something like a stable, fruitful arrangement between the sexes that does not require wallowing in either shame or debauchery.
The yearning for an arrangement like that was intriguingly palpable in a much-discussed New York Magazine feature about the young celebrants at this year’s inauguration parties. Reading between the lines of what was ultimately supposed to be a hit job, it was possible to discern among the attendees a mood of tentative optimism that the youth movement of the future might be about making sex wholesome again. “‘Conservatives used to be uptight, but the left has become the funless, sexless party. Not that the right is the party of sex, necessarily. We have fun,’ says a 31-year-old influencer, Arynne Wexler. ‘What does a conservative even look like anymore?’” The answer may prove to be that the social conservatives of the moment are also the social innovators, hoping to marshal these kinds of sentiments into a transformative ethical and aesthetic movement.
Given time and favorable circumstances, current trends could ultimately coalesce into a new mainstream culture. Even now, it’s not too hard to describe in outline what such a thing might look like. It would probably make use of digital connectivity but aim at in-person connection. It might be loose about premarital sex but take lifelong monogamy as the default ideal for its participants. It would likely tolerate a small homosexual minority but not obsess over it or celebrate it. It could involve the return of matchmaking and benevolent grown-up meddling. It would certainly involve the resurgence of sexual continence as a standard. Joy and normalcy, two much-abused words in last year’s presidential contest, nevertheless describe real aspirations that motivate a lot of what’s taking shape. If that energy lives mainly on the Right these days, it’s not inherently political in the narrow sense of party allegiance, except incidentally. Instead, it is political in the sense of being pre-electoral—that is, civilizational. Technological and economic upheavals have shunted the West into a new era, and the ultimate verdict on last century’s sexual revolution may be this: reeling from the shock, we wandered down several blind alleys. What we’re trying to do now is get our bearings again.
If this effort succeeds, it will amount to nothing less than a new sexual revolution, or perhaps a sexual renaissance. It will not consist in reproducing point for point the conditions and conventions of Puritan America, or Edwardian England, or 1950s suburbia. But it might involve reconstituting, out of the elements currently at our disposal, a new version of the balance that obtained in some of the Anglosphere’s most successful eras. If nostalgia has dogged some of the more cartoonish attempts to reinstate traditional order, that doesn’t mean the past is a useless guide to the present—just that the spirit, and not the letter of history is what we’re after. Wherever children can be born and raised without too much existential angst, there lives the future. It’s been done before. It can be done again.
