Unthinkable Thoughts--How feminism deforms intellectual culture.

By JAMES TARANTO

Over the past few weeks, this column has on more than one occasion expressed agreement with Rick Santorum's view that advances in birth control have had deleterious social consequences, most notably in contributing to the breakdown of the family. To our surprise, a not-insignificant number of our readers have pushed back against this idea, which some find counterintuitive and others downright unthinkable. So we'd like to go through the argument step by step.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use in 1960. Over the next half-century, the marriage rate declined and the illegitimacy rate skyrocketed, Charles Murray notes in a recent Wall Street Journal essay adapted from his new book:

In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont [Murray's metaphor for the upper middle class] and Fishtown [the working class] were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10. . . .

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education--were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

The same trends have been noted among blacks, although they started earlier and are more severe. Of course it would be a fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc, for those keeping score at home) to declare Santorum's argument proven on the basis of these facts. But they do demonstrate that the argument is not inconsistent with the facts.

The usual criticism we've heard is that it is absurd to suggest a causal link between birth-control advances and illegitimacy because, after all, birth control prevents pregnancy, and giving birth out of wedlock entails pregnancy. By that logic, though, illegitimacy rates should have remained low, or even declined further, after the inception of the pill. The Santorum argument may be counterintuitive, but the counterargument flies in the face of the facts.

But Santorum's argument is not really all that counterintuitive. It posits that the availability of birth control changed the culture in ways that encouraged illegitimacy. There is scholarly support for this hypothesis, in the form of a 1996 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which served as the basis for a brief written by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen and published by the centrist-liberal Brookings Institution:

Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. Even women who would be willing to bear children out-of-wedlock could demand a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.

The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations without being able to exact a promise of marriage in case of pregnancy. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.

Advances in reproductive technology eroded the custom of shotgun marriage in another way. Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. "If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception," the man can reason, "why should I sacrifice myself to get married?" By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

Santorum has come under particular attack for saying that contraception is "harmful to women." It may reasonably be said that this is an overgeneralization: There are many women for whom birth control has not been harmful--those who don't want children, who prioritize career over family, or who have been able to find husbands in the post-sexual-revolution mate market. Still, Akerlof and Yellen make a compelling case that birth control has been harmful to many other women, and it is not implausible to think, as Santorum does, that it has been harmful to women on balance.
By and large, it is the women of Murray's "Belmont" who have been the beneficiaries of feminism and the sexual revolution, and those of "Fishtown" who have suffered the ill effects. The former (along with men who are inclined to be deferential when it comes to "women's issues") are predominant in the elite media. But they are unrepresentative of the general population, which may explain why, as the Washington Post reported last week, Santorum seems to be doing fine with female voters notwithstanding the fierce opposition of the female elite.

Whether he wins or loses the nomination and the presidency, Santorum is doing a service to American intellectual culture by giving voice to ideas the feminist elite would like to decree unthinkable. For another example of such an idea, get a load of this, from Emily Yoffe's "Dear Prudence" advice column in Slate:

Q: I attend a small university studying engineering. I hold traditional values and I would like to get married to a woman willing to stay home and raise our children. I am lucky enough to not have any student loans and will be able to support a wife and children on my salary. Preferably, I would like to marry a woman who has a college degree and is smart because we would match intellectually and she would provide the best environment for my children.

Women I meet on campus frequently call me sexist. I never thought of myself as sexist because I have no problem whatsoever with women who work in general and I respect my fellow female students and professors.

Just because I don't want my wife to work does not mean I think women in general shouldn't work. Am I sexist? Is there any way I can meet a woman who shares my values, or was I born 40 years too late?

A: You sound like the male equivalent of the bride in the letter above who much preferred planning her wedding without the bother of a real person to marry. Of course we all have ideas of what our ideal life would be, then life happens and we have to--even want to--adjust to reality. Yes, there are women, even well-educated ones, who would prefer to stay home with their children. But dictating these terms before you've even gotten far enough to go steady makes you sound rigid, dictatorial, and yes, sexist. Instead of announcing your life plan for the so-far nonexistent woman you plan to marry, you should just date interesting, intelligent women and find out what they want out of life. But if you're determined to only spend time with women who meet your qualifications, go to a rally for Rick Santorum. He shares your views of women's roles, and during his Q&A ask if he can fix you up.

Yoffe is not usually that snide and judgmental. In an earlier column, she responded in blasé fashion to a (fictional, we hope to God) letter from a man who claimed to be carrying on a homosexual affair with his own fraternal twin brother: "When people ask when you're each going to go out there and find a nice young man, tell them that while it may seem unorthodox, you both have realized that living together is what works for you," she advised.

Don't even think of living like this.

But when a decent young man professes a desire to marry an old-fashioned girl and take financial responsibility for his family, Yoffe treats him as a deviant. She denounces him as "sexist" even though he is careful to affirm that women have every right to work outside the home if they choose to do so. He mentions nothing about politics, yet she feels compelled to bring Santorum, the feminists' Emmanuel Goldstein, into the mix.

Yoffe's hostility to this young man tells us more about elite culture than it does about her personally. (We've met her, and she's perfectly pleasant.) By his account, his female classmates have been indoctrinated with the same rigid ideas about "sexism" that Yoffe expresses in her response.

But we wonder if female opinion on campus is really quite as uniform as his experience would suggest. Our guess is that there are young women who don't believe the feminist dogma but expect that if they gave voice to their doubts, they'd receive a hostile response, and thus lack the confidence to speak out.

Rick Santorum doesn't have that problem, and that is why he is driving elite feminists crazy.
Don't Know Much About History
Robert Reich, the lefty academic who served as Bill Clinton's labor secretary, has an anti-Republican screed at the Puffington Host. Yeah, we know, and the sun rose today. But this one caught our attention for one comment in particular.

Reich denounces the GOP for being crazy and right-wing: "a party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers." Then he offers this history:

The GOP's drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years--and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples' lives.

This was enough to stir right-wing evangelicals in the South, social conservatives in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and stop-at-nothing extremists in Washington and the media who hounded Bill Clinton for eight years, then stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.

They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as "tea partiers" and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years. Even formerly sensible senators like Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar are moving to the extreme right in order to keep their seats.

At this rate the GOP will end up on the dust heap of history.

It's not clear how "at this rate" the Republicans, who during the period in question have had both ups (1994, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2010) and downs (1998, 2006, 2008), "will end up on the dust heap of history."

But what's really stunning is Reich's assertion that "the GOP's drift toward loopyness started in 1993." What about the presidential candidacies of Barry Goldwater (1964), Pat Robertson (1988) and Pat Buchanan (1992)? What about the influence of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the late 1970s and early '80s? To go back even further, what about Joe McCarthy, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1947 through 1957, or Robert "Colonel" McCormick, owner of the then-right-wing Chicago Tribune, who was a fierce opponent of both the New Deal and U.S. entry into World War II?
We don't think all these men are "loopy," but surely Reich would if he had heard of them. Apparently he thinks history began with his confirmation to the cabinet.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, a domesticated conservative, also decries what he sees as the Republicans' recent move to the right. He complains that Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana have tacked rightward in the face of potential primary challenges: "It's not honorable to adjust your true nature in order to win re-election." Then he complains that conservatives are too honorable: "Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles."

The closing paragraph, however, is a classic. Invoking Martin Niemöller, Brooks likens himself to the victims of the Holocaust:

First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.

"No one left to speak for me," whines David Brooks, who speaks for himself twice a week in a column on the pages of America's second most influential newspaper.

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