Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Gilder

Gilder’s line lands like a smirk dressed up as sociology: “sexual liberation” is framed not as a broad loosening of norms, but as a precision tool that conveniently “chiefly” empowers one suspect behavior. The rhetorical move is a bait-and-switch. He takes a term associated with autonomy and mutual freedom, then narrows it to an image that reliably triggers moral disgust: young women “pursu[ing] married men.” It’s not an argument so much as a reframing device, designed to make liberation sound like license and social change sound like social decay.

The subtext is older than the sexual revolution itself. Agency is selectively granted and then weaponized. Women are depicted as newly unshackled predators, while married men appear as passive territory to be “pursued,” not adults with obligations and choices. That asymmetry does quiet cultural work: it relocates blame for infidelity from male behavior or marital dissatisfaction onto the ethos of feminism and permissive culture. The villain isn’t adultery; it’s the ideology that allegedly enables it.

Context matters because Gilder built a career out of contrarian moral economics, arguing that traditional family structures discipline men into responsibility and stabilize society. This sentence is a pressure-point summary of that worldview, compressing a whole thesis into a tabloid-ready provocation. Its intent is not to describe what liberation “chiefly” did, but to seed suspicion about who freedom is for, and to imply that when women gain sexual latitude, the social order pays the bill.