What the revolution won. . .

Having grown up in the time of the sexual revolution and, having already made it through puberty when the freedom was being claimed, I should be one of its champions.  In reality, it is an embarrassment that I was part of the generation that pushed for the liberation of desire from love and commitment.  It has changed not only our vocabulary or the sense of appropriate sexual decorum but also transformed the most vaunted institutions which form the bedrock of society.  And for what?

Freud insisted that sex was at the heart of our identity and personality as people as well as the core and center of our lives together as a society of people and the shape of our culture.  When we began to dismantle them in the cause of freedom and to liberate people from the prison of mores and values deemed ancient and prudish, we did not realize that we would at the same time sanction the dismantling of all those essential human relationships and bonds the defined us as a society and a civilization of people.  That is, after all, what the sexual revolution ended up doing.  It turned overturned the established lifelong union of husband and wife within the primary purpose of procreation and replaced it with a mere recreational activity designed more for self-expression, self-fulfillment, and, in the end, pleasure.  

The shape of the bond between a man and a woman (and any other gender or desire bonded together) was made into a partnership of whose success or failure hinged primarily upon the fulfillment of the members and much of that fulfillment was measured by the sexual needs of those in the "relationship". The end result is that sex today is not about self-giving or any other kind of giving.  It is about taking what you want, what you desire, and what you deem to be right and good and it has turned the partner into merely a another who consents to be a part of it all.  Who has been liberated by rampant divorce, a slower marriage rate among all, the absence of children from love and marriage, the objectification of sex to the point where even scripted pornography takes a second place to artificial intelligence versions of it all?  Is there anyone who has not been touched by this or harmed by it all?  By removing love, commitment, and fertility from the sex act, the act itself was turned into something merely erotic and eventually only prurient.    

In once sense, this had already happened in Germany in the wake of the first great war.  Germany ended up as a nation whose morals had gladly been surrendered to the gods of pleasure and desire.  It did not last and it could not.  The Nazi's rose up to end the reign of terror that had weakened family, home, work, and faith.  In the end their own form of terror replaced both the liberty and what was a hallmark of German virtue prior to the rise of the Kaiser and his socialist replacement.  It has taken longer for the sexual revolution to take hold in America and yet its fruits are little different from that which happened in the pre-Hitler Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.  Now we have come to think it natural to define marriage as a local commitment between any two people who can meet each other's needs and children have become the exception rather than the rule.  Any form of desire is considered legitimate and the traditional domains of family and home have been painted with the brush of patriarchy and submission which no woman can stomach and no man dare expect.  So, instead, the people have made marriage itself into a temporary arrangement subject to the whims of pleasure and happiness defined almost exclusively in terms of the individual.  But are we really happy?  Are we happier than those who went before us?  I am afraid that we all know the answer to that question.