Mad Men, Sad Women

The Sexual Revolution Has Been an Unmitigated Disaster

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid for use as an oral contraceptive in 1960, “the Pill” was celebrated as the ticket to liberation for women. In the opening episode of the TV series Mad Men, which was set in 1960, new-hire secretary Peggy Olson was introduced to working-girl life by having her office manager take her to a doctor on her first day on the job so she could go on the Pill. Several 1960s and 1970s shows included scenes of the liberated woman pulling out her little packet and popping the day’s tiny tablet into her mouth. The message was clear enough: the Pill was an integral component of modern female life. But has it made women’s lives better? Has it made anyone’s life better?

In her 2012 book Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, sociologist Mary Eberstadt marshalled rigorous data and logic to argue a resounding no. Her thesis was that the sexual revolution, and especially the invention and widespread adoption of artificial contraceptives, has not only not set women “free” but has effected demonstrable harm on all sectors of modern society. She cataloged the damages according to four categories of people: women, many of whom long for marriage and family but encounter a dearth of sexually continent, marriage-minded men; men, for whom the casual-sex marketplace has morphed into an anodyne carnival, the indulgence of which hinders their growth into mature providers and protectors; and children and emerging adults, all of whom have been subjected to an increasingly coarse, sexualized world, often without the protective mediation of married parents, communities of healthy families, and watchful siblings.

Casualties Find a Voice

Now, Eberstadt has followed up with Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, which is not a revised version of the original, but an expansion of the argument. She opens with a discussion of reactions to the original. When it came out in 2012, the prevailing secularist narrative held that the sexual revolution had been a boon for humanity and that to criticize it was to set yourself at odds with the march of progress. But as the book made the rounds, she began to see signs that it was resonating with people, both men and women: “Often, following a book talk, individuals in the audience would linger and confide hard personal stories of blight, of families and children lost to the revolution’s troika: divorce, pornography, abortion.”

While the book was largely ignored by mainstream thought leaders (no surprise there), these people’s unbidden, raw testimonials of how sexual permissiveness had nearly destroyed them, or of how they had suffered emotionally as the result of sexual misconduct, provided sad but mounting evidence that she was onto something: the sexual revolution has wrought unmitigated harm; the casualties coming out of the woodwork were confirming it.

Human Fallout Writ Large

Whereas the first book surveyed the walking wounded at what might be called the micro level, the follow-up examines effects from a more macroscopic perspective. Three sections address three broad questions: What is the sexual revolution doing to society? What is it doing to politics? And what is it doing to the church? Following is a look at the fallout in each area.

Society: Earlier this year, the governing board for a school district serving Phoenix, Arizona, voted unanimously to sever its relationship with Arizona Christian University (ACU), which had for eleven years supplied the district with student teachers at no charge. No incidents or complaints were cited, but rather school board members said ACU’s commitment to traditional sexual morality now creates an unsafe environment for the district’s LGBTQ+ students, staff, and community. Meanwhile, over in Europe, when “Rex,” an employee of a large multinational corporation, raised questions about a company email encouraging organizational “pride activities,” he was told by the company’s Diversity and Inclusion Manager that “diversity” and “inclusivity” did not include displaying symbols other than the rainbow or progress flag. He was instructed not to question these things at work on grounds that “people would feel unsafe to be whoever they wanted to be.” These are just two instantiations of what Eberstadt calls “the new intolerance.” I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of examples yourself.

These Orwellian exclusions of diverse ideas in the name of inclusion and diversity are nothing but politico-sexual expressions of the totalitarian impulse. The totalitarian impulse involves using intimidation, humiliation, censorship (including self-censorship), and coercion to punish wrongthink, and it’s tearing rifts through every corner of communal life like an F-5 tornado. And, as Rex’s you-have-one-choice “dilemma” illustrates, it’s not just a Christian problem, but an everybody problem. “Nobody’s free speech is safe when mini-Robespierres write the rules,” writes Eberstadt. “Practicing Christians who refuse to recant are on the front lines of the new intolerance today. But where they stand now, others will soon. Some already do.”

As in past revolutions, a uniform secular dogma is being imposed on all with ruthless zeal, its sights homing in on traditional Christianity as a rival faith to be vanquished, rather than an alternative set of beliefs to be tolerated in a free and open polity. When Jane Fonda was asked on The View what people should do to keep abortion legal, she answered bluntly, “murder.” When the host suggested Fonda was “just kidding,” the erstwhile Vietnam peacenik just responded with a death stare. Nothing about it said she was making a joke. “The new church of secularism serves a very jealous god,” writes Eberstadt. “‘Ecumenical’ is not in its vocabulary.”

Politics: From the beginning, it was the revolutionaries who made sex political. Eberstadt does not rehash how this came about or point to absurdities in today’s politico-sexual arena (most of us know crazy when we see it). Instead, she identifies how sexual politics have led to the real inequality now ravaging America—family inequality. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan hinted at it as far back as 1965 (and was excoriated for it even then), and political scholar James Q. Wilson elaborated on it in 1997.

The primary factor delineating the “haves” from the “have-nots” today is family structure, or lack thereof. Beneath visible crises like unemployment, addiction, and street violence, more than race, income, or anyone’s station at birth, family stability is the single best predictor of positive outcomes for children according to nearly every measure of wellbeing. So much research supported this conclusion, Wilson joked in 1997, that “even some sociologists believe it.”

So innate is kin-hunger that the family-impoverished end up sorting themselves into a panoply of family substitutes: street gangs, intersectional identitarian groups, and toxic pseudo-communities. An entire chapter, “The Fury of the Fatherless,” addresses the links between familial disarray and social disorder. None of this is to excuse radical violence but to demonstrate the cause-and-effect relationship between the sexual “liberation” of Boomers and the downstream rage of atomized Zoomers.

The Church: If the sexual revolution has induced society-wide divisions based on ideas that shall be affirmed versus ideas that must be suppressed, and has led to family inequalities dividing the family-haves from the have-nots, when it comes to the church, the revolution has brought about a separation between what Eberstadt calls “Christianity undiluted” and “Christianity Lite.” “At this particular moment in history,” she observes, “it is sex—not Mary, or the saints, or predestination, or Purgatory, or papal infallibility, or good works—that divides Christianity into two camps.” Of the two camps, Christianity Lite distinguishes itself almost exclusively by dissent from traditional teachings about sex.

Regardless of how you trace the stages of departure from scriptural principles (which came first, divorce or artificial contraception?), a pattern appears over and over. The exceptions are initially put forth in the interest of compassion for human frailty, with assurances that lines would be scrupulously drawn and exceptions kept within the limits. “First limited exceptions are made to a rule; next, those exceptions are no longer limited and become the unremarkable norm; finally, that new norm is itself sanctified as theologically approved.” The same pattern can be seen in the normalization of contraception, abortion, same-sex sexual practices, and now, transgenderism. Boundary lines once moved tend to keep moving.

While the architects of Christianity Lite may have honestly believed they could accommodate the revolution without inflicting injury to the essentials of the faith, at some point, Christianity Lite tends to walk off the Christianity reservation. Eberstadt cites the example of ordained Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher, who wrote a treatise on the “new” sexual morality in 1966 and by the end of his life in 1991 had dispensed with orthodox teachings on sex, abortion, infanticide, cloning, eugenics, euthanasia, and more, before finally openly identifying as an atheist.

The Disinherited Generation

“The sexual revolution did not stop at sex,” Eberstadt writes, summing up her thesis. “Presumptively private transactions between individuals have paradoxically gone on to reconfigure not only family life, but the wider economic, social, and political spheres inhabited by the revolution’s heirs.” Put differently, sex is about more than just sex. What has happened sexually in private for nigh on sixty years has in large part produced the individual and collective pathologies we are witnessing in public today.

Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up the twentieth century in four words: “Men have forgotten God.” Mary Eberstadt sums up the twenty-first thus far in six: “Men are at war with God.” Sex is arguably the most powerful force on earth. Bullets and bombs can destroy life, but only the sexual union of a man and a woman can create it. God took pains to tell us that the way to prosperity and blessing was through observing his statutes, but revolutionaries threw caution to the wind. Too few of us understood what was happening, let alone resisted, and now we are all reaping the whirlwind.

Much of the suffering, however, is not being connected to the cause. In many cases it isn’t even acknowledged, let alone validated or addressed, by a culture steeped in denial. These factors make Mary Eberstadt’s work all the more important.

Choosing Better for a Better Future

The fictional Peggy Olson would be around eighty today. If she could do it over again, would she choose to put in another forty-odd years of corporate service? Would she reflect fondly on office flings, abortion(s), serial cohabitations, or divorce(s)? Or would she pine for the family she never had? To be sure, both life courses involve hardship and a fair share of difficulty with no guarantees of happiness in the end. But like gardens and vineyards, family prosperity does tend more toward a perpetual renewal of life and hope than a single lifetime of sterile sex.

If the revolutionaries are about anything, they’re all about choice. It’s time we recognize the failures of the past and help the next generation make better choices for the sake of posterity.