Last month, November 2023, saw the 50th anniversary of perhaps the most prophetic book of the past century: Sexual Suicide by George F. Gilder. Haven’t heard of it, have you? But you might have heard of George Gilder, who went on to write bestsellers on economics and technology, starting with the supply-side manifesto Wealth and Poverty (1981).
In the 1960’s, Gilder was a speechwriter for leading Republicans, including Richard Nixon. He first made his mark publicly as co-author of a broadside against the GOP’s right wing, entitled The Party That Lost Its Head (1966), which he later recanted, writing in National Review, “the ‘right-wing extremists,’ as I confidently called them, were right on almost every major policy issue from welfare to Vietnam to Keynesian economics and defense—while I, in my Neo-Conservative sophistication, was nearly always wrong.”
Gilder then took to writing about social policy, building upon the early work of fellow Neo-Conservative (and later Democratic Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His next three books showed how miserable the welfare and civil rights policies of the 1950’s and 1960’s had made people, especially black men. The first book in this series was Sexual Suicide about the destructiveness of feminism; the second was Naked Nomads about the plight of single men; the third was Visible Man about the plight of black men (its title playing ironically on Ralph Ellison’s 1952 bestseller Invisible Man).
Gilder pulled no punches in Sexual Suicide. The chapter entitled “The Moderate Extremists” pointed the finger of blame at those who decry “radical feminism” yet defend its pernicious principles, believing that men have oppressed women for centuries and that the force of law should now be used to enable women to live however they please (still a lot of them running around today, unfortunately). In the book’s preface, Gilder wrote, “The feminists refer often in their books to ‘human beings,’ but I do not care to meet one. I am only interested in men and women.”
None of the three books were bestsellers, and all are now forgotten. Gilder was simply giving people too much truth, a problem he corrected by setting race and gender aside when making the same economic arguments in his first best-seller, Wealth and Poverty.
I may be the only person in the world who marked the 50th anniversary of Sexual Suicide. I doubt that even Gilder did. I am almost certainly the man most affected by Sexual Suicide, even more affected by it than Gilder.
I stumbled upon the book in 1977 while browsing through a mall bookstore the first day of spring break my freshman year of college. All I did that spring break was read the book. I had not thought much about feminism until then, but as a very young man, just setting out in life in the 1970’s, I did find feminism rather sickening. In Sexual Suicide, I found it all explained. My eyes were opened. I was shocked, I was alarmed, but I was also encouraged and emboldened. Here was a truth to be shouted from the rooftops! And how right things would be when it was!
Such is youth. I soon learned that people hate having truth shouted at them. The first work published under my name was a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer against women in combat, which brought a viciously obscene phone call from a deranged feminist, which my mother was the only one to hear, as I was then on campus. (Believe it or not, in those days newspapers printed your home address with your letter to the editor, and everybody’s telephone number was in the phone book.)
Sexual Suicide didn’t make me want to be a writer—I had wanted to be a soldier and a writer since fifth grade—but it did give me something to write about. Five of my books are on “gender issues”—two on women in the military and three on Christian teaching about sex and gender. Gilder’s own social and economic vision has always been consciously Christian, and my latest book, Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female (Pickwick, 2021), outlines a theological basis for male and female consistent not only with Christian scripture and tradition, but also with both Sexual Suicide and Wealth and Poverty. The book is dedicated to Gilder, who “opened my eyes to a great mystery half a century ago.” (Here and here are two wonderfully thoughtful and erudite reviews of Origen’s Revenge.)
Half a century ago, in 1973, feminism was still building momentum. Congress had passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and would order the federal service academies (West Point, Annapolis, etc.) to admit women in 1975. (They did so the next year.) The tide turned against the ERA in 1978, thanks to the indomitable Phyllis Schlafly (dear departed friend), and also to George Gilder, but feminists continued to rack up victories on all other fronts.
In the early 1980’s, the Army, under Reagan, attempted a correction of the Carter administration’s rush to put women in uniform, but the political backlash effectively castrated all of the military services. The policy issue was settled once and for all. By 1987, when I left the Army to begin my writing career, the thinking among professional “conservatives” in Washington, D.C., was, “This is life. This is the way we live now. No sense fighting it.”
But the revolution didn’t end. Our national denial of the difference of male and female, begun by feminists, moved immediately from women in combat to gays in the military, and then immediately from gay marriage to transgender rights. After all, if gender doesn’t matter, then gender doesn’t matter: The terms male and female no longer mean anything.
But, but, as Lenin is said to have said, “The worse, the better,” or “The worse things get, the better things are”—which is true for anarchists still struggling to overthrow the existing order. In our case, it is at least true that the worse things get, the clearer things are. The consequences of denying the difference of male and female are more and more obvious and pressing. Feminism has turned women away from men, marriage, and motherhood, and the result is that the world’s most feminist societies are shrinking fast and being taken over by less feminist foreigners, which is just what any honest man would have expected. The future always favors the family-friendly.
What’s more, the misery now endured by today’s young adults, raised amid the ruins of gender norms, has opened their eyes to taboo truths. Many more young men and women now see what Gilder saw fifty years ago and what I saw after reading Gilder, and they are speaking out about it, boldly and unabashedly, as he did and as I have. Whatever difference their witness makes, it is for me a reason to rejoice. The men of my own generation were rarely so bold. Most left fighting feminism to women like Phyllis Schlafly and Elaine Donnelly, fearing to be thought “insecure” as men for caring about the issue.
I can’t claim credit for having inspired any of these Young Turks through my writing about male and female. I doubt that many if any have ever heard of me. I do, though, wish to credit George Gilder, who turned 84 last week, with having inspired me by his works. Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year, George. May God grant you many more.
