Scott Yenor: "The Long March From Marriage To Autonomy"

This is really, really interesting.

It's right in there with a bunch of conservative ideas I've been taking a lot more seriously now. I certainly had the radically autonomous ideal most of my life. Now I think that the conservatives were a lot righter than I used to think: institutions like the family are not infinitely malleable. Unfettered sexual autonomy is not an unmitigated good. There are reasons to keep the traditional ("traditional"?) nuclear family as a kind of ideal or paradigm. That doesn't mean: suppressing alternatives. But it may well mean: not "celebrating" them in the way certain sectors of the left want us to. Traditional nuclear families may well have such great benefits for society that those of us who don't have them or don't want them may have to accept that we fall short of something akin to an ideal. It may be that couples like JQ and I--who don't have kids--are akin to someone missing an arm. It doesn't make us bad--but it is non-ideal. And society can't be remade in such a way as to pretend the two states are equally good and equally normal.

   Of course I'm talking out my ass on this, because I don't study this in a serious way, and have read very, very little about it.

   But Yenor's essay reminds me of seeing....believe it or not...the t.v. show "Jersey Shore" for the first--and just about only, thank God, time. At the time, I still had the full-blown sexual autonomy uber alles view. But--in case you're not familiar with that show--it's largely about a bunch of sluts. (I use the term in the non-sex-specific sense that applies to both males and females.) I mean those people are really disgusting. Didn't take long for me to think Man...I maybe should rethink this a bit... Some of my friends were pretty libertine...but damn...they generally didn't revel in grossness...

   Anyway. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just kinda thinking out loud.