The Broken Promises Of The Sexual Revolution - Mary Eberstadt
Chris Williamson (host), Mary Eberstadt (guest), Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Mary Eberstadt, The Broken Promises Of The Sexual Revolution - Mary Eberstadt explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Contraception 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Many young people now ‘check out’ of mating despite a sex-saturated culture.
Eberstadt sees sex-positive messaging and hookup glorification coexisting with record numbers of men and women uninterested in relationships, interpreting women’s embrace of male-style promiscuity as a kind of “Stockholm syndrome” rather than real freedom.
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We need empathy and new norms, not nostalgia, to respond to this experiment.
Comparing our current moment to the long fight over tobacco, she suggests we’re only at the beginning of acknowledging the harms of the sexual revolution and digital life, and calls for listening to underlying suffering instead of mocking “snowflakes” or moralizing.
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Notable Quotes
“Contraception 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
If the harms Eberstadt describes are real, what concrete cultural or policy changes could realistically reverse trends like fatherlessness and declining marriage without coercion?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How do we balance individual sexual freedom with the collective, long-term interests of children and society that Eberstadt highlights?
She claims contraception shifted responsibility for pregnancy onto women, undermined marriage, encouraged fatherlessness, and fueled abortion, divorce, cohabitation, and pornography use.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
To what extent can digital communities and friendships meaningfully substitute for the extended families and in-person social knowledge that have been lost?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Is it possible to build a genuinely pro-woman feminism that rejects some aspects of the sexual revolution (e.g., porn, hookup culture) without sliding into reactionary nostalgia?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should parents and educators talk to young people about sex, commitment, and technology in a way that acknowledges these unintended consequences without shaming them?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Who were the biggest winners and losers of the sexual revolution, in your opinion?
It's a long story, but I think the biggest winners have been men and, in particular, predatory men. And I think the biggest losers have been romance, men who are not predatory men, and women and children.
How would it be the case that a movement that ostensibly gave women more freedom, uh, it decoupled their having sex from always having to potentially carry babies, it liberated them to be a part of the workforce. How would it be that women ended up on the receiving end of something that had a lot of promises to make life better?
Well, this is why I've spent two books trying to explain these paradoxes. Books called Adam and Eve After the Pill and Adam and Eve After the Pill Revisited. Because it is a lot of paradoxical fallout. So let's go back to, say, the early 1960s before most people listening were born, for example. And back in those days, which I don't remember either, there was a lot of hope about the advent of the birth control pill, about reliable contraception, uh, that was almost foolproof. And you can see why people were hopeful. People said that it would strengthen marriage, for example, to empower couples to have control over their fertility. People said that the pill would reduce abortion. This, by the way, was Margaret Sanger's argument for contraception. She believed that it would reduce abortion. And so despite all of these hopes, the opposite seemed to happen. So within a few years of the adoption of widespread hormonal contraception, instead of strengthening marriage, what we saw was a sharp rise in divorce rates, later in cohabitation. Instead of the pill and company reducing abortion, abortion rates skyrocketed, um, into the millions within a few years of this same cultural change. So what I'm trying to do in my research is piece together why this happened and I'm doing it with the help of, uh, perfectly secular sources. These are not books of theology. You don't have to believe anything about religion to understand the arguments of the books. And I think that's important to establish because this kind of talk about what happened after the birth control pill, what did the sexual revolution really do tends to get confined to a religious ghetto. And I think it's important that people understand that the, the reality is upon us, whatever you believe. You can be an atheist, you can be a devout Muslim, you can be anything you want, but you still have to understand that the effects of this revolution have been epic and in more areas than one.
Okay, let's talk about abortion then. How does contraception reduce or increase abortions? What, what are the outcomes of introducing it?
It does not reduce abortion. Contraception increases abortion by changing intentionality, and this is something else that has been well studied and, um, that I talk about in the footnotes to these books. But essentially, what contraception does is make pregnancy a woman's problem, and this is the big cultural change that we see. Back before there was reliable contraception, uh, it was assumed that an unplanned pregnancy was a problem for two people and that they had to figure out what to do about it. The man was expected to bear some responsibility. But once women are contracepting en masse, clearly a pregnancy is a, a "failure" uh, that is her fault, her responsibility. I- I'm not defending that outlook. I'm explaining the, the change in thinking that resulted once contraception became unremarkable. And that's where abortion comes in, or to put it another way, uh, the, uh, the adoption of contraception effectively ended the so-called shotgun wedding. I assume that's an American phrase, but-
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