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Modern WisdomThe Broken Promises Of The Sexual Revolution - Mary Eberstadt
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Sexual Revolution’s Hidden Casualties: Romance, Family, and Lonely Children
- Mary Eberstadt argues that the sexual revolution, driven largely by the birth-control pill, has delivered far more harm than good, particularly to women, children, and non-predatory men.
- She claims contraception shifted responsibility for pregnancy onto women, undermined marriage, encouraged fatherlessness, and fueled abortion, divorce, cohabitation, and pornography use.
- Eberstadt links these changes to rising loneliness, mental health problems, identity politics, and an adversarial, distrustful culture between the sexes, in which many young people now opt out of relationships altogether.
- Rather than moralizing, she frames this as a large, unintended social experiment whose consequences we are only beginning to see, calling for empathy, honest acknowledgment of harm, and a cultural “re-norming” around sex, family, and commitment.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasContraception changed responsibility and expectations around sex and pregnancy.
Eberstadt argues that widespread birth control made pregnancy seem like an individual female “failure,” ending norms like shotgun weddings and enabling men to abdicate responsibility, which in turn increased abortions and eroded commitment.
The sexual revolution weakened marriage and fatherhood, harming children most.
She cites rising divorce, cohabitation, single-mother households, and data showing far higher risks of abuse and worse outcomes for children in homes without biological fathers, framing kids as the revolution’s main, often ignored, victims.
Pornography and casual sex culture undermine romance and women’s long-term goals.
While offering short-term pleasure and apparent liberation, easy sex and ubiquitous porn reduce men’s incentives to commit, make it harder for women to secure marriage and family, and correlate with rising female unhappiness and relationship breakdown.
Shrinking families create a “social knowledge” and love deficit.
Fewer siblings, absent fathers, and smaller extended families mean young people grow up with fewer trusted role models of the opposite sex and little hands-on experience of caregiving, feeding loneliness, anxiety, and confusion about men, women, and intimacy.
Identity politics fills the vacuum left by fractured families.
As traditional family-based identities weaken, people seek belonging and protection in political or victimhood-based groups, which function as substitute families but often foster absolutism, division, and a lack of forgiveness or redemption.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesContraception increases abortion by changing intentionality; it makes pregnancy a woman’s problem.
— Mary Eberstadt
We have a people deficit and a love deficit across the West.
— Mary Eberstadt
There’s glory in being a woman. There’s glory in marriage. There’s glory in motherhood.
— Mary Eberstadt
Modern women are being taught that true liberation is working like their father and having sex like their brother.
— Chris Williamson
We are running the same kind of radical experiment on homo sapiens that we now recognize was cruel when done to monkeys and elephants.
— Mary Eberstadt
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
