Pity the sexually frustrated left
If we conservatives have the wit to exploit it, a new study offers ammunition to attack a critical process by which the left has recruited an ever larger share of adolescents as they grow into adults and voters. The ruthless propagandists of the left, as shrewdly as any Madison Avenue advertising strategy, have linked their product to sex. That is shrewd, because a major portion of adolescent energies are devoted to sex, real, planned, or imagined, and those who offer a vision of free and easy sex with no consequences have an effective path into the emerging life preferences of these adults-in-development.
For roughly the last century, the cultural left has asserted that conservatives are uptight, unhappy prudes anxious to impose their antediluvian views on their betters. Harold Ross, the legendary founding editor of The New Yorker (which virtually defined the cultural attitudes conservatives now denounce as “elitist”), alluded to this when he famously declared that the magazine was not intended for the “little old lady in Dubuque.”
Margaret Mead’s anthropological research in Samoa, which has subsequently been highly contested, came as a godsend in 1928, with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. She argued that Samoans lacked the inhibitions we in the West observed back then and were all the healthier for it.
The most spectacularly obvious example of this propaganda strategy came in the early stages of the Vietnam War, promising sex to young males who resisted the draft.
Of course, Judeo-Christian religious teaching informs us that free and easy sex is no path to salvation or happiness, but as the decades passed, a variety of forces, many of them related to the same wave of cultural leftists grabbing control of the commanding heights of the academy and culture, weakened the power of religious constraints. Simultaneously, the availability of sex to youngsters skyrocketed with the invention and legalization (via the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision) of the birth control pill. It takes a lot of maturity to resist the gratification of urges at their most powerful in adolescence and post-adolescence.
But at last we have some evidence to prove that the progressive bargain with youth is a fraud. Via Buzzfeed with a hat tip to John Hinderaker:
People who describe themselves as “very right wing” are the most likely to be satisfied with their sex lives, according to a survey carried out across five European countries by the polling company YouGov.
The survey of more than 19,000 people in the UK, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, shared exclusively with BuzzFeed News, found in most countries sexual satisfaction increased the further right you went along the political spectrum.
In the UK, people with left wing politics were least likely to describe their sex lives as satisfying (with 66% of people saying they were), versus 73% for those saying they were “very right wing”.
American Thinker is not edited for the “sexually frustrated progressive in Berkeley.” We pity them. Pass the word.