IN TWELVE MILLENNIA, MAYBE WE GOT A FEW THINGS RIGHT.

Cultural norms are emergent, and it is not wrong to call them "social constructions," although it is an error to deconstruct them willy-nilly.  That's long been a theme at Cold Spring Shops, and maybe, just maybe, it's dawning on people that you deconstruct them at your peril.

Start with Christopher Rufo in City Journal, who has had enough of drag queen story hour.  Perhaps it's more accurate to say he has had enough of culture-studies types who think theorization is the same as implementation.

The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.

I recall enough of Cabaret-era camp to agree that its recent politicization has its roots in the academy.

“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” [Gayle S. Rubin] wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. . . . Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”

Rubin’s project—and, by extension, that of queer theory—was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction. “The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to” the view that sex is a natural and pre-political phenomenon, Rubin wrote. “Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.” In other words, traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political.” Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image.

Human interactions might not be "comprehensible" in "purely biological" (or economic, or any other organizing paradigm's) terms, and yet, the "traditional conceptions" that emerge will be those that confer evolutionary advantage on their adopters.

There was some reason to believe that Rubin might be right. The sexual revolution had been conquering territory for two decades: the birth-control pill, the liberalization of laws surrounding marriage and abortion, the intellectual movements of feminism and sex liberation, the culture that had emerged around Playboy magazine. By 1984, as Rubin acknowledged, stable homosexual couples had achieved a certain amount of respectability in society. But Rubin, the queer theorists, and the fetishists of the BDSM subculture wanted more. They believed that they were on the cusp of fundamentally transforming sexual norms. “There [are] historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized,” Rubin wrote. “In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” And, following the practice of any good negotiator, they laid out their theory of the case and their maximum demands. As Rubin explained: “A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.” Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy—“transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers.”

Up to a point: the heterosexual hook-up culture of Playboy and fraternity row didn't turn out so well for the plainer people, and the aesthetically blessed players might have ended up with multiple divorce settlements and a lot of psychotherapy. The culture studies types went from treating the pedophiles as people whose presence at Pride you don't honor to treating those stable homosexual couples as manifestations of "cis" privilege.  Apparently they got high on their own supply: go from the positive statement, "institutions are social constructions" to the empirical (and generally poorly tested) question, "constructions benefit people in power" to the normative stance, "we now have the power to impose our own constructions." How many times must I remind you that when you deny coherent beliefs and deconstruct useful institutions, you get into trouble?

Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum—pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex,” Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria,” rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains.

In the common room, though, the idea is to be able to play around with ideas, no matter how strange they might be.

[Judith Butler] argues that even the word “woman,” though it relates to a biological reality, is a social construction and cannot be defined with any stable meaning or categorization. There is nothing essential about “man,” “woman,” or “sex”: they are all created and re-created through historically contingent human culture; or, as Butler puts it, they are all defined through their performance, which can change, shift, and adapt across time and space.

Thirty years on, that idea becomes part of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Butler’s theory of social change is that once the premise is established that gender is malleable and used as an instrument of power, currently in favor of “heterosexual normativity,” then the work of social reconstruction can begin. And the drag queen embodies Butler’s theory of gender deconstruction. “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance,” Butler writes. “When such categories come into question, the reality of gender is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal. And this is the occasion in which we come to understand that what we take to be ‘real,’ what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality. Call it subversive or call it something else. Although this insight does not in itself constitute a political revolution, no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.”

That might be, but reality does have a say. You may carry on about social construction and power systems, but, ultimately, the adopters of the new dispensation must derive some benefit from so doing. "The purpose, then, is to subvert the system of heteronormativity, which includes childhood innocence, and reengineer childhood sexuality from the ground up."

Richard Reeves notes that the earlier feminist project, which in some ways prepared the battle-space for the later nihilists of many words, has brought unintended negative consequences with it.  "The movement to liberate women has unleashed the power and talent of half of the global population—to the benefit of us all. But like all revolutions, it has generated real challenges, too." Scientific medicine and mechanized agriculture and manufacturing played a role, and much of what Mr Reeves interprets as "liberation" might have happened without any shepherding from the chattering classes.  That "liberation," he argues, is not without consequences.

If men struggle to find work or decent wages, that puts more pressure on women as breadwinners. Except in the richest U.S. families (i.e., the top fifth), all of the growth in household income since 1979 has resulted from the increased working hours and earnings of women. Since women also continue to take most responsibility for childcare, they often also end up working what the sociologist Arlie Hochshild labeled a “second shift” of domestic labor on top of their job. The double shift is most acute, of course, for those who are raising children alone. All those disconnected fathers mean that one in four children under 18 are being raised by a single adult—82 percent of whom are mothers.

There's that Say Aggregation Principle, and when "the village" has the social norms of the hippie commune or the projects, it's the women and children who are hardest hit.  So much for the malleability of institutions.

The traditional institution of fatherhood, based on a provider and protector role, has been almost completely deconstructed. Millions of men are being benched as a result.

A new model of mature masculinity and fatherhood is desperately needed. Marriage provides structure, and legal protection, for the partners, but the reality is that large numbers of Americans are having children outside of marriage. We need decent fathers, no matter their marital status, to be deeply involved in their children’s lives.

We will be judged by the monuments we've destroyed.