Victims of the Revolution 

The sexual revolution has been a disaster. More than fifty years since the so-called Summer of Love, the victims are all around us: Unborn babies who never got to see the light of day. Kids who grew up without a father. Women who were used and abused by men for sexual gratification and then abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Men who are addicted to pornography and unable or at least unwilling to commit, thus missing out on one of life’s greatest joys: marriage and fatherhood. And now a cohort of kids who don’t feel comfortable as boys or girls, with irreversible damage being inflicted on their bodies and minds by adults who should know better. The sexual revolution is built on a series of lies about the human person. And there are human costs to getting human nature wrong. 

“Consent”—that was the guiding principle of the sexual revolution. And consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want sexually—free in the legal sense from any restrictions or penalties, but also free in the cultural sense from any social opprobrium, from any cultural norms that might suggest a more humane approach to our sexual lives. Of course, consent alone cannot make an ethic; at the very least one needs something deeper in order to know when and where and how and why to consent. This is what traditional marital vows and norms provided. And, of course, what started as “consenting adults” quickly became applied to minors. Consenting teens should be free to … And consenting preteens … And it didn’t just stay restricted to sexual acts; it eventually progressed to sexual identities as well. If I should be free to engage in sex however I want, why shouldn’t I be free to be whatever sex (gender identity) I want? There is a certain debased logic to it all. 

But where has this train of logic taken us? Now three generations into the sexual revolution, we see more and more Americans who have gone along with its consenting-adults mantra and the ensuing erosion of marital norms—the rise of cohabitation and the hookup culture, the normalization of premarital sex and nonmarital childbearing, the introduction of no-fault divorce laws and the more than doubling of divorce rates, and a marriage rate that has fallen by 65 percent since 1970. Compared to the pre-revolution ’60s, we’re left with fewer marriages, more divorce, fewer kids, and more atomized adults. The kids we do have are often growing up without dads, and many of our elderly are aging without spouses or adult children to care for them. Why now, when we have the best medical care in history, with the best pain management ever, do we think we need to kill our elderly with assisted suicide? The sexual revolution has not just attacked the transmission and beginnings of life but has also destroyed the matrix of love and care and support that the family provides throughout the life cycle, from birth to death. 

And this has brought profound unhappiness. The sexual revolution is fundamentally opposed to marriage and the virtue that makes marriage possible, chastity. The sexual revolution says there’s nothing unique or special about marriage—at best, it’s simply one of many acceptable ways to “consent” to sex, and at worst it’s an outdated, overly restrictive institution of repression. But marriage is meant to bring together a man and a woman as husband and wife, committed to each other permanently and exclusively, so that any children their union may produce will have the love and care of both their mother and father. By ensuring a man and a woman commit to each other before engaging in the act that could produce new life, marriage helps guarantee that a mother and father will be committed to that new life. In other words, the way that you get fathers to commit to their kids is by first getting them to commit to their (future) children’s mother. We now have decades of social science research that confirms what every one of our grandparents knew because of the law written on the heart: that marriage is the best institution for the bearing and rearing of children. It protects against child poverty and increases the odds for social mobility; it decreases the rates of delinquency and crime while increasing the rates of graduation and employment. These goods—social justice, limited government, care for the poor, and the protection of freedom—are all better served by a healthy marriage culture than by the government picking up the pieces of a broken marriage culture. 

But it’s not just these secular metrics of poverty and crime and employment that marriage affects. Marriage and family and children are the source of many of life’s deepest fulfillments and happiness. And yet millions of our neighbors now have missed out on these great goods. Perhaps that is the deepest form of victimization caused by the sexual revolution: the people who have gladly bought into its ideology and lived out its mantras, thinking they were being liberated from oppressive and outdated strictures, when in reality they were enslaving themselves to lives spent chasing fleeting dopamine and oxytocin hits. Consent plus condoms does not make people happy (or safe). No one on his deathbed looks back on his life and thinks of all his various and sundry orgasms. He does think of the love built up in a decades-long relationship with his spouse and in relationships with his children and grandchildren—something the sexual revolution simply can’t compete with. 

And yet we have to be formed (and informed) to pursue such long-term, true fulfillment, especially in the face of the sexual revolution’s seductions for immediate gratifications. To a certain extent the entire point of civilization is to help people navigate the temptations for immediate satisfaction that come at the expense of long-term happiness. Cultures cultivate. That’s true of horticulture and agriculture just as much as it is of human culture. Good cultures cultivate natural capacities to their proper ends—in this case, our sexual capacities toward chaste marriage. But we’ve been living in a bad sexual culture for generations, and there’s been little sustained focus on combatting its corrupting lies. 

The root cause of virtually all our social problems is the collapse of marriage and family following the sexual revolution. Yet so little sustained, organized, strategic effort has gone into responding to this collapse. We must think it through: How can we reach ordinary people who don’t know what the word “anthropology” means and help them reject the lies of the sexual revolution? How can we help people live the virtue of chastity? How can we help people get married and stay married? This is a daunting task. But if the real root causes of our suffering and loneliness and social malaise are the sexual practices that Americans have habituated for generations, then we need institutions that will combat the sexual revolution with the same sophistication with which conservatives have fought for judicial reform, regulatory reform, and economic reform. 

And this is particularly urgent in our post-Roe, post-Dobbs world. I’ve spent the past two years running myself ragged trying to persuade people of the need to engage in our immediate battles (winning ballot initiatives, passing legislation, electing pro-life officials) without ignoring what should be our long-term priority. I use two statistics to illustrate that long-term goal, statistics about who gets an abortion and who gets aborted: 4 percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside marriage; and 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, while 87 percent are unmarried. Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. As long as nonmarital sex is expected, large numbers of Americans will view abortion as necessary when contraception fails. As long as marriage rates are declining and the average age of marriage is delayed—though the human sex drive persists—abortion rates will remain high. Our primary task is not to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn—anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows all about that—but to change how people conduct their sexual lives. We have a pro-life movement, but could anyone seriously suggest that we have a pro-marriage or pro-chastity movement? New institutions and new initiatives must turn their attention to the real battlefield. But few people want to. Who wants to be viewed as a professional prude? 

Nathanael Blake has written a radical book: Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Has Hurt Us All. His work is incisive and worth parsing. It tells the entire truth about the sexual revolution, including certain politically incorrect and momentarily unpopular truths that many “influencers” shy away from. Indeed, we live in an age when many sexual revolutionaries themselves are trying to contain the effects of the revolution they helped set in motion. The very people who pushed for the legal redefinition of marriage now object to the legal redefinition of sex as gender identity; the very people who deny biological reality in the womb rush to defend the biological reality of sex. But should we be surprised that the logic of “my body, my choice” is now being applied to gender identity? The conclusion follows naturally from the premise. Can we insist on the biological reality of sex while denying the biological reality of the unborn child? “This far and no further” has its limits. We should make tactical partnerships in the battles that can be won today. But we shouldn’t allow tactical alliances to cloud our vision of the truth. Blake’s book is one that will guide us toward truth and inspire us to become counterrevolutionaries in our own spheres of influence.  

Ryan T. Anderson is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This essay is adapted from the foreword he wrote to Nathanael Blake’s just-released book Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.