The year was 1926 when a “woman resident in Russia” (anonymous for fear of the enlightened Soviet regime) published an article in the American magazine The Atlantic.
As she wrote, the Soviet government was considering a bill “eliminating distinctions between registered and unregistered marriages.” In other words, marriage would have no legal status. Couples (or throuples or polycules of any size) could join and separate with total freedom and zero red tape.
Suddenly, she reported, “[m]en took to changing wives with the same zest which they displayed in the consumption of … forty-per-cent vodka.” (RELATED: Bill De Blasio Reveals His Wife Will Sleep With Other Men While They Still Live Together)
At this time, the true extent of Bolshevik brutality was still largely unknown in the West. Many Americans viewed Russian Communism as an exhilarating social experiment. That it ended in tyranny and disaster seems not to worry 21st-century American progressives one bit. These modern descendants of the Soviets seem eager to impose sexual anarchy, consequences be damned.
One of the best pieces every published in The Atlantic is this 97-year-old piece by “A Woman Resident in Russia”.
In it, she described the chaos that resulted when Communists destroyed the institution of marriage.
Let’s read about what happened when Soviets ruined marriage🧵 pic.twitter.com/lRRY6u7a57
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) August 23, 2023
What were those consequences? The first and most obvious objection is that broken families are bad for children. In theory, this question had already been answered. The 18th-century English free-love advocate William Godwin argued children could be raised communally. Paternity, he claimed, was only considered important because of toxic social constructs, what the Soviets would call “bourgeois morality.”
In practice, things worked differently. The anonymous Russian writer noted that the easy availability of divorce had already produced “three hundred thousand bezprizorni or shelterless children in Russia,” most of whom became “professional criminals,” “drug addicts” or “sex perverts.”
We see the same pattern in America today. In 1965, Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later a long-serving senator from New York) raised the alarm about the black community’s 25 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate. This crisis of fatherlessness, Moynihan found, increased crime and juvenile delinquency, widened disparities in educational attainment and made economic advancement virtually impossible.
Today, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for all Americans is nearly 40 percent. For black people, it’s almost 70. (RELATED: America Has A Major Fatherlessness Problem On Its Hands)
So what happens to all those feral, fatherless children? Don’t worry. Alexandra Kollontai, archetypal Bolshevik girlboss and ambassador to Norway, had a solution. To fix “the vexing problem of children she suggested,” as an alternative to alimony and child support, “a scheme of ‘marriage insurance,’ to be financed by an annual levy of one dollar on every adult citizen of the Soviet Union,” the anonymous writer reported.
That’s right: Those children become everyone’s problem. Let’s do some math. A 1928 dollar is worth about $17.88 today. Multiply that by 330 million American adults, and you get around $6 billion a year. Americans pay around $33 billion in child support per year, and that doesn’t count alimony. It also doesn’t count all the social costs of broken families: failing schools, welfare benefits, courts, prisons, losses from vandalism and shoplifting. Six billion dollars doesn’t come close to covering it. I’m not sure $6 trillion would.
Among British children born in 1958, 9% experienced family breakdown by the time they turned 16. Among children born in 1970, it was 21%. Among children born in 2001-02, it’s 43%https://t.co/4dXJmzaJyV
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) August 23, 2023
The Atlantic article also notes the effects of free love and easy divorce on the female psyche. The author describes one second wife who, when her husband’s jilted ex refused to move on, “poured benzine over her rival, set her on fire, and burned her to death.”
No matter how hard they try to deny it, women are not built for casual sex. “[H]ookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex,” writes author Louise Perry. (RELATED: The Sexual Revolution Hijacked The Women’s Movement, Former Activist Says)
In the Soviet Union, some eager young revolutionaries even organized “Down with Innocence” clubs to shame their prudish comrades, viewing “the refusal to enter into temporary sex relations as mere bourgeois prejudice, the deadliest sin in the eyes of a Communist.”
Perry also notes that “studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress.”
Louise Perry (@louise_m_perry) argues that feminism’s error was striving for sameness between men and women.
Join her, @grimezsz, @sarahthehaider, and @annakhachiyan for a live debate on whether and how the sexual revolution failed.
Get tickets here: https://t.co/8u1u7v9ycV pic.twitter.com/JvKIHoxKE1
— The Free Press (@TheFP) August 21, 2023
Married women, on the other hand, report higher rates of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, as well as better mental health.
All too often, men can walk away freely, leaving their women behind with broken hearts and hungry children. Even that minority of women who are wired to fully enjoy sexual liberation still had to worry about unplanned pregnancy. Again, though, the revolution provided its own horrific solution.
The Soviet Union was the first country in modern history to legalize abortion, and the Russian woman writing for The Atlantic notes it was common for a 20-year-old woman “to have had three or four.” Women shamelessly demanded the right to kill their offspring in the womb on the basis that sex was the cheapest way to have a good time.
They’d be right at home in America today, shouting about their abortions and complaining Dobbs infringed on their inalienable right to have consequence-free sex with strangers.
In his book of the same title, Catholic apologist Scott Hahn calls marriage “the first society,” the cornerstone upon which all other social order is founded. To truly carry out their program of remaking the world, the Soviets had to go beyond abolishing the monarchy and disestablishing the church. They’d have to carry the revolution into every marriage bed. The result was chaos, and in the end, the communists backed down. In this, perhaps, they were wiser than us.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.