When I was younger, I believed I was a boy inside a girl’s body. I loved many stereotypical masculine things like video games, action movies, rough-and-tumble play, and disliked girly things like wearing dresses, romantic movies, or make-up. I often daydreamed of undergoing surgery to become a man. But I lived in a place and time where such ideas were unpopular and ridiculed.
By the time I left home for college, I had mostly gotten over my gender dysphoria phase. But the world grew into it. What was once an embarrassing secret is now widely accepted and even celebrated.
How did it happen? How did the statement, “I am a man trapped in a girl’s body,” which would have been ludicrous not too long ago, became so acceptable and meaningful today? Carl Trueman explains this cultural revolution and more in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
Trueman posits that the sexual revolution from the last sixty years—which includes widespread acceptance and normalization of transgenders—is linked to man’s understanding of himself and his quest for identity. The sexual revolution is not, therefore, a cause for our self-obsessed culture; it is a symptom.
He says, “The sexual revolution is as much a symptom as it is a cause of the culture that now surrounds us everywhere we look, from sitcoms to Congress. In short, the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West. And it is only as we come to understand that wider context that we can truly understand the dynamics of the sexual politics that now dominate the culture.”
According to Trueman, the rise of the sexual revolution follows a three-step progression. First, the self is psychologized, then psychology is sexualized, and finally, sex is politicized. The book explains this progression in four primary sections.
In part one, Trueman explains a few concepts critical for understanding the rest of the book and leans heavily on the ideas of philosophers Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Part two explains how the self became a psychological issue during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, Trueman discusses the ideas and influence of men such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Max.
Part three explores the sexualization of psychology, politicization of sex and explains how Sigmund Freud’s ideas and theories helped mix sex and politics. And in part four, Trueman analyzes different areas of modern culture and how they have been affected by the concepts covered in the previous chapters.
Trueman wrote this book to help Christians understand the current times and so they can respond accurately.
He says, “My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future. Understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times. And understanding the times requires a knowledge of the history that has led up to the present.”
In my opinion, Trueman hit the bullseye with excellence! He does an outstanding job explaining the origins and evolution of the modern self and its relation to the sexual revolution. I learned a lot about the concept of self, sexual revolution, the relationship between sex and identity, and why our culture is so obsessed with it. It also opened my eyes to a few things I had never realized about sex and our culture.
The only thing I have against this book is that it’s hard to read. It is long (405 pages), heavily academic, and full of complex words. As someone who has never studied philosophy, it took a lot of effort and time to get through it. Especially the first few chapters, which I found rather tedious.
Although I am not head over heels for this book like everyone else, I still highly recommend it (It became much more interesting around part three!). It is a critical book for our day and it’s worth the effort to read.
FYI, Crossway will release a shorter and supposedly more readable version of this book next year.
Thank you for your review of the book. It is informative and enjoyable. I listened to the audiobook version recently and thought it was a great book. I’d like to listen to it again because I know for sure that I’ll gain more knowledge and information on the second read. I particularly appreciated Trueman’s detail in explaining the thoughts and philosophies of those that contributed to the modern psychologized self (e.g., Rosseau, Marcuse, Shelley, Reiff, and others). I also appreciated that he did not present a defense or argument in favor or against, but just presented the facts, ending with… Read more »
Hi Ambar, I am glad you found my review useful. I will also need to reread the book (probably the upcoming shorter version) to understand it better. About the things, I learned, well, first, the meaning of the sexual revolution. I have heard the term used many times, but I never understood what it meant. Trueman’s simple explanation shed a much-needed light. Second, his explanation of how sex is now presented as our identity helped me understand a little why LGBTQ+ are so insistent on wanting everyone to recognize them and why our culture is so obsessed with sex. It… Read more »