Mary Eberstadt on the Social Injustice of the Sexual Revolution

One of my favorite writers, Mary Eberstadt, has a must-read essay in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard that you should not miss.

Titled “Second Thoughts about the Sexual Revolution,” Eberstadt looks at the rise of the #MeToo movement and sees it as a product of sexual mores written into American society over the last five to six decades. The results of these norms are not producing social health, especially least of which for women.

In her view, the Sexual Revolution is responsible for:

• Contraception has re-written our social norms around sex, such that sex “on demand” produces a crassness in men toward women.

• The Sexual Revolution has produced mass social atomization and loneliness through the rise of broken families born of reckless and too-casual attitudes toward sex.

• Pornography has desensitized any notion of sexual purity, resulting in addiction with no small amount of impact on the family.

• The Sexual Revolution has propped up a social Darwinism that allows the powerful to prey on the weak and using financial incentives as a vehicle of such exploitation.

• It demonstrates a fundamental hypocrisy about our culture in that being both “pro-woman” and lax on sexual morality is doing the very opposite of protecting women.

To onlookers and observers, the social conservatism often touted by evangelicals is portrayed as political piety and moral do-goodism. If social conservatism is about maintaining appearances through a legalistic honor and shame culture, let it die. But if social conservatism is about acknowledging and fostering the conditions that allow every single person the opportunity to prosper, then it is time to see social conservatism less as a means of fostering the right public morality for appearance’s sake (as good as that may be), and more as the crux of what our society needs to repair the ruins born of the Sexual Revolution.