Abstract

The emergence of a consumer civilization is associated with the extension of the democratic model to embrace both men and women. But from the gendered viewpoint inherited from past epochs, this democratization may appear as a dissolution. In Gender, Illich criticizes this psychosexual democratization, thus establishing himself as one of the most elegant theoreticians of the sexual counterrevolution. Highly idiosyncratic, he differs from other cultural conservatives such as Lasch and Gilder, who criticize the consumerist values of the sexual revolution from a 19th-century, quasi-productivist perspective. Illich criticizes this very perspective for its modernity. Collapsing the consumerist into the productivist viewpoint, he presents them as different aspects of the same capitalist civilization.