What Is the Invisible Hand Doing to That Poor Woman?

Everybody talks about the sexual revolution, but no one does anything about it.

In a post published on April 16 (but with such verve that it propagated backward through time), Margaret Talbot looks at the sexual revolution through the lens of "Girls," a new show on HBO. After discussing the possibility that pornography has made women's lives worse (the cited example is that it has taught boys bad kissing technique), Talbot has this to say about capitalism and the sexual revolution:

When people talk about the sexual “revolution,” they can make the changes in sexual mores seem more intentional than they were, more like a strategically planned uprising with a neat manifesto. In some ways, it was: the feminist movement did call for, and then achieve, greater sexual freedom for women, and access to birth control and abortion as rights. But unintended consequences, and particularly economic forces, have played perhaps an even bigger role in arranging the new sexual landscape: certain moral barriers drop, and then capitalism rushes in with, say, Internet porn, stoking old desires and creating new ones. Like the young women on “Girls,” most young women in the real world are surely grateful for their sexual freedom, but they didn’t necessarily want it shaped by sleazy entrepreneurs. To paraphrase Marx, women make their own circumstances, but not under circumstances of their own making.

So my only real point here is that this is what capitalists do. Pornographers are sleazy, perhaps more sleazy than other capitalists, but fundamentally when you cede territory to the market this is precisely what you are inviting. The question is never whether a social institution is good but whether it is better than the alternative. To the extent that the sexual revolution consisted in curbing the influence of traditional social institutions, it is the natural and inevitable consequence that capitalism, with all of its assorted sleazebags, would rush in. After the king has been deposed, as the Vikings are rampaging through the streets, the citizens might say, "It turns out there were some downsides to the revolution." The king, if he is still alive, might respond, "This is the fucking revolution."