Wedding season is approaching, and so the New York Times ran a special wedding planning feature, which included a quiz.
Question 10 on the quiz might have sounded a bit racy to some ears: “How do you want to end the night?”
If you, reader, are a normal person, you can almost hear the winks and the chuckles, and brace for the borderline-inappropriate joke. But then you read the New York Times’s five possibilities:
One involved cheeseburgers and phone calls, another was calling in friends for an after-party, and the third involved Jell-O-shots at the local bar. The final two options were “Jump in the ocean fully clothed” and “Stay up till dawn dancing the night away.”
This “seems to omit one notable, traditional option,” conservative commentator Leah Libresco Sargeant noted.
Two million people viewed Sargeant’s droll post on Twitter. It was a perfect example of elite media bubble-think. It’s not that the New York Times offered all sorts of examples of alternative wedding-night activities. No. The New York Times presented an exhaustive list of the various ways you could spend a wedding night, and it never mentioned anything even hinting at the marital act.
For generations, in Western culture, the phrase “wedding night” has at least hinted toward sex. This notion was rooted in Christian sexual ethics, which posits that love, marriage, sex, and baby-making are all naturally connected and thus sex belongs within marriage.
To be sure, not even the most Christian culture ever held steadfastly to this rule, but the wedding night is still, in our post-Christian culture, a time for the man and woman to become one in many senses. Even those couples who hadn’t waited nevertheless gave a wedding-night nod to sex’s place in marriage.
But if the norm is living together for a decade and getting married in your mid-30s, the meaning of your wedding night — and your endurance that night — is different.
This, it seems, is the norm in the elite bubble so much that the traditional idea doesn’t even cross anyone’s mind. A wedding, in our individualistic, transactional, secular elite culture, is really just a party. Marriage is no sacrament. It’s not even a covenant. Heck, in the eyes of the elite media, which is constantly peddling open marriages and “polyamory,” monogamy itself is old-fashioned.
So wedding-night sex has gone from standard to optional to unimaginable within elite circles.
EVEN MORE THAN CIVILITY, WE NEED HUMILITY
“Have y’all even *gotten* married?” one viral Twitter response asked, shocked that anyone would even suggest wedding-night coupling. “Everyone I know well enough to talk about this has said ‘I pulled out ten thousand bobby pins, took off my makeup, and passed out.’”
Who knew the Sexual Revolution would give us so little sex?