"Be Good" - Waxahatchee
Really like this song and sound. A woman named Katie Crutchfield recorded in her bedroom.
- And you know who's telling us to be good -- that font of life wisdom Megan McArdle. Actually, McMegan is confidently predicting that we will be good -- because the gays are getting married and that means no one will be having sex ever again. Except for the kind of boring married sex of which Megan approves. Now, it's true that Roy dispatched of this glib fatuous fuck in the kind of throw away manner that she deserves. But a perverse part of me -- or maybe that is one of the many perverse parts of me -- wants to delve a little deeper, hold this gem up to the light, and join in the raucous laughter that it merits.
It's an incredibly incoherent mess. For example:
I know, it feels like we're riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future. But moral history is not a long road down which we're all marching; it's more like a track. Maybe you change lanes a bit, but you generally end up back where you started. Sometimes you're on the licentious, "anything goes" portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you're on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box. Most of the time you're in between. But you're still going in circles.
So what is the evidence that we are rounding the track and heading back to olden days when a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking? Beats the fuck out of me. Well, I guess Newt Gingrich and John McCain, exemplars par excellence of Seventies decadence -- oh the days we danced at Studio 54 together, coke spoon a-dangling between Newt's man-boobs -- got divorced, while Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio are all still on wife number one. And?
McArdle then goes on to bemoan that the lesser sort of folk aren't getting married, are having children willy-nilly with every underemployed Tom, Dick, and Harry that they meet, and that people like her are getting married late in life -- although the latter trend will likely stop because she has now tied the knot at a still youthful -- measured in wisdom -- 37. But all of this is going to change, because, well because she thinks it should:
If I had to guess, I'd also put late marriage on the endangered list. I married at 37 myself, so I'm not judging, here. But if we want childbearing to take place inside marriage (and I think we do), then the average age of first marriage can't get higher; it probably shouldn't even stay so high. As that average age rises, you get two unwanted phenomenon on the tails of the distribution: babies born to unmarried parents at the low end, and couples who want children but can't have them on the high side. So the current upper-middle-class tendency to push marriage later and later while people finish their educations and get settled doesn't seem very stable to me--even before we consider the difficulty of finding a mate to match your settled life, which Keith Humphreys has dubbed The Problem of Grandma's Lamp.
Of course, predictions are hard, especially about the future. Nonetheless, here is mine: whatever the Supreme Court decides, gay marriage will soon be legal throughout the land. But this will not mean that we drive ever onwards towards greater sexual freedom--rather, it will mean quite the reverse. The sexual revolution is over. And the revolutionaries lost.
Does Megan really think that people will return to a (largely exaggerated) practice of having sex [and children] only within marriage or that people will return to marrying in their late teens or early twenties (an aberration of the 1950s)? Does the fact that well-educated, urban blue staters are staying married -- after spending their twenties getting educated and enjoying sexual freedom -- really mean that the "sexual revolutionaries" lost and we are heading toward neo-Victorianism?
Needless to say there is no evidence presented for these assertions. Indeed, Megan spends most of the piece decryng this and that and then suggesting things must change because she thinks they should. It is funny that right wingers like McArdle have an abiding faith in market decisions that people make, but have a difficult time accepting people voting with their feet -- well not really their feet for most people -- for their most personal preferences. Since bold prediction seems to be the name of the game here, my bet is that most young people will continue to find ludicrous the notion that sex should only take place within marriage and will scoff at those who try to scare them into marrying young.
