A review of The Sexual Revolution and its Victims by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
By Austin Ruse
This article was first posted at Crisis Magazine on May 1, 2015.
It is inevitable that advocates for the Sexual Revolution will say all we need is a bit more of it. More orgasms. More sex-ed. More abortion.
More contraception. Less guilt. More freedom, man.
But they will never acknowledge that their revolution has been tried and found wanting, wanting being a fairly benign way of saying murderous.
Their revolution has been murderous indeed and the body count grows ever higher. Yet still they want more, just a little bit more.
Pat Buchanan recently wrote, “The French Revolution was many times more terrible than the Bourbon monarchy. The Russian Revolution made the Romanovs look
benign.” You could add Mao Tse Tung, who made Chiang Kai-shek look like a schoolboy.
And so it is with the Sexual Revolution; it is many times more terrible than the supposed patriarchy it supplanted, the one where women were forced to
stay home, bake cookies and never found their G-Spot.
Many revolutions have impressive body counts. But the Sexual Revolution is far and away the most impressive and it shows no sign of abating, only metastasizing.
Well, maybe Plato’s Retreat closed in ’85 but Ashley Madison is alive and well, as are the sex ads at Craig’s List and Backpage.com. Maybe the gay
bathhouses closed, but check out the website Grindr. Actually, don’t.
Gay writer Jeffrey Escoffier says, “Central to the Sexual Revolution was the growing acceptance of sexual encounters between unmarried adults.” He says
sexual debut came earlier and earlier and that increasing divorce “provided another opportunity for men and women (to a lesser degree) to engage in
non-monogamous sexual activity.”
The underlying issue was freeing the sexual id from the religious and societal taboos holding it down. He credits Freud, Wilhelm Reich and pornography
with loosening everyone up. Reich “argued that sexual expression (primarily, the orgasm) was natural and that social control of libidinal energies
by the family, institutionalized sexual morality, and the state was destructive.”
Escoffier says the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s “would never have happened without a series of extended
battles over obscenity and pornography,” that “these battles helped to create a public space in American culture for sexual speech.…”
It is a wonder to see sexual revolutionaries, just like the communists before them, insist that all we need is just a little bit more. At least the communists
thought the breaking of a few eggs might be regrettable but in the long run was beneficial to the omelet. The sexual revolutionaries deny the eggs.
The litany of broken eggs is tedious, certainly, but we must continue to recite it and in the recitation lay it all at the doorstep of the revolutionaries:
more than 50 million dead babies in this country alone; almost one million deaths due to AIDS; 19 million new cases of STDs every single year in the
United States; millions addicted to pornography; sex trafficking; galloping pedophilia; forty percent of children born without a father in the home.
Your mother never heard of chlamydia. Now teen girls get shots to prevent it.
The Sexual Revolution, which Wikipedia oddly says ended in the 1980s, is the heart of the matter. It is the font of all our current difficulties. Many
of us work on bits and pieces of it: ending abortion, defending marriage, religious freedom and the like. One person works right at the heart of it,
Jennifer Roback Morse, who runs the Ruth Institute in California.
Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She has held fellowships at Stanford, Cornell Law School, and
the University of Chicago. For years she has raised the alarm about the Sexual Revolution and its victims. She believes we can make common cause with
them; the survivors and walking wounded anyway, and perhaps one day, in the hazy future, end it.
She has published a very helpful collection of her essays called The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims.
She starts by calling the revolutionaries liars.
“All we want to do is lower the cost of divorce to the handful of people whose marriages have irretrievably broken down.”
“All we want to do is allow married couples to use contraception for serious health reasons.”
“All we want to do is provide sexual education for children whose parents might not be responsible enough to do it themselves.”
All lies, she says, told for the purpose of establishing an easily expandable principle. And we have certainly seen these “modest reforms” expand and expand
again and again.
She calls these the battle cry of the “ruling class” and like all revolutions, this one has certainly eaten its young, feasting most ravenously on the
defenseless, that is, children, and the poor.
Roback Morse describes the modern view of sex as “a recreational activity with no moral or social significance. The freedom we have come to value is to
be completely unencumbered by human relationships. We are entitled to end or walk away from any relationship with a person who might legitimately make
demands upon us that we don’t want to fulfill. And the reproductive freedom in particular is the right to unlimited sexual activity without a live
baby resulting.”
She says the major tenets of the Sexual Revolution are that every person is entitled to unlimited sexual activity, contraception will cure all negative
consequences including conception and disease, no one is required to give birth and therefore abortion is an absolute entitlement, any consequences
not handled by contraception and abortion are not worth talking about, no one ever gets attached to an inappropriate sex partner, no one ever regrets
a consensual sexual encounter, and teen depression linked to hooking up doesn’t exist.
Such tenets are awfully expensive, both in terms of the individuals who live by them and those who are merely collateral damage. The cost to society runs
to the hundreds of billions of dollars even if you just look at Federal money spent on the underclass whose problems have been exacerbated exponentially
by internalizing the Sexual Revolution.
We watch this week as the Supreme Court ponders whether to constitutionalize yet another adult sexual experiment the cost of which will be born by kids
and by society at large.
Roback Morse thinks we are fighting the symptoms—abortion, gay marriage—and not the disease. She proposes something of an Inchon landing. The
sexual revolutionaries have been attacking from the front for going on 50 years, their victims strewn out behind them. She proposes a landing behind
their front lines, striking at the heart of their movement, counting on the victims of contraception, divorce, abortion, pornography, and promiscuity
to assist us.
She is not suggesting that the individual battles cease, only that we open a new front.
As we wait, the body count rises ever higher and all the while the revolutionaries insist the revolution hasn’t really been tried, not yet anyway. All
we need is a little bit more: more orgasms, more pills, more sex-ed, more abortion, more freedom man, and then you’ll see the beautiful things we can
do for humanity.
Just ignore all those bodies.
