The sexual revolution has been a catastrophic failure, having wrought only disease, abortion, divorce, unwed pregnancy, and other miseries, with none of the advantages it promised. Maybe it's time to cut our losses and go back to the old fashioned way, which is the only way that works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| I wrote a piece yesterday about the sexual revolution, kind of a follow-up 50 years later. | |
| Checking in. I mean, how did that work out? | |
| How'd all that go? Didn't work out very well, it turns out. | |
| And I was prompted to write about this because of a story out of California where STD rates are at record highs among young adults, according to a new report. | |
| And the STD epidemic is very serious across the nation, so this story was pretty familiar at this point. | |
| And we could go down the list of what the sexual revolution brought to us. | |
| STDs, that's just one part of the problem. | |
| I don't say that the sexual revolution Created or invented STDs. | |
| You had them beforehand. | |
| But we are seeing STD epidemics and certain diseases are at record highs now. | |
| And that's not a coincidence. | |
| Now, we know what the sexual revolution promised to bring us. | |
| It promised to bring us free love and happiness and pleasure and all that. | |
| What did it actually bring us? | |
| Well, STDs. | |
| When we talk about STDs, let's start with AIDS. Okay? | |
| The AIDS epidemic swept America right on the heels of the sexual revolution. | |
| And that is not coincidental. | |
| You know, you had the hippies with their free love and everything, and then, boom, we have AIDS. Okay? | |
| And then now we have epidemics of gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia across the nation. | |
| What else? If you look at a chart of the divorce rate, it's very interesting, and I would recommend that you do that, just to kind of fact check me here. | |
| Don't do it now, but after the video. | |
| Or the podcast. Go look at a chart of the divorce rate starting in like 1890. | |
| And what you're going to find is that it is steadily inclining all along. | |
| It's a steady, gradual incline. | |
| Which tells you that these problems didn't start yesterday. | |
| They didn't start with the sexual revolution. | |
| Our cultural problems go back much further than that. | |
| But if you look 1890 through, you know, the early part of the 20th century, just a steady divorce rate, still low, steady incline. | |
| You get to World War II and there's a brief sudden spike, which coincides with a brief sudden spike in the marriage rate. | |
| And then it plummets back down again. | |
| And it starts that gradual incline. | |
| And then right around the 60s, 70s, 80s, that's when it just explodes. | |
| There is an explosion of divorce. | |
| And it stays extremely high for a while. | |
| Now, it has recently been trending back down again. | |
| It's still very, very high, but the divorce rate has been declining again. | |
| And people will point to that and they'll say, oh, okay, well... | |
| You know, I guess that spike in the divorce rate was an anomaly, and we're kind of figuring things out. | |
| Not really, because what you'll notice is that the incline in divorce is also coinciding with a drastic drop in the marriage rate. | |
| So millennials are giving up on marriage completely. | |
| They're just cohabitating instead. | |
| But many millennials have replaced marriage with cohabitation. | |
| The average age of first marriage for men now is 30. | |
| Compared to in 1950, it would have been... | |
| I know for women, it was like 20. | |
| For men, it was probably around 23, 24. | |
| Now, that is a very high. | |
| That is a very big difference between those two. | |
| So average age of first marriage has gone way up. | |
| And there are many millennials who have just given up on marriage. | |
| I think something like 20 to 25% will never get married. | |
| So the next step... | |
| It's kind of underway as we speak. | |
| Divorce was merely the spike of the divorce rate, the explosion of divorce, was just the first consequence of our enlightened sexual attitudes. | |
| The next step, which is happening now, is the dissolution of marriage as an institution. | |
| So divorce was endemic for my parents' generation, the generation that started the sexual revolution. | |
| And now in my generation, and these are the kids who were raised by all these divorced parents, they're just throwing up their hands and they're bailing on marriage and they're saying, I don't need it. | |
| Again, that's not a coincidence. | |
| You have this kind of domino effect. | |
| That began with the explosion of the divorce rate on the heels of the sexual revolution, which destroyed a whole generation of families. | |
| And then it completely soured another generation to the whole idea of marriage. | |
| And so what's going to happen with a generation after this? | |
| It's not good. What else? | |
| What else did the sexual revolution give us? | |
| Well, lots of dead children, 60 million dead children through abortion and counting. | |
| Then we have the spike in unwed pregnancies, which we have to distinguish from teen pregnancies. | |
| That's another objection I've heard. | |
| People have said, well, the teenage pregnancy is down. | |
| Teenage pregnancy is less common now than it used to be. | |
| Well, yeah, that's because, you know, your grandparents and your great-grandparents, their generation, yeah, teenagers were getting pregnant, but guess what? | |
| Those teenagers were married. | |
| So the teen pregnancy rate doesn't mean anything at all. | |
| There's nothing wrong with an 18-year-old being pregnant if she's married. | |
| And that's how it used to be. | |
| As I said, the average age of first marriage in the 40s and 50s for women was 20, which means that a whole lot of them, millions, were getting married when they were teenagers. | |
| It was very common throughout human history for women to get married young. | |
| So that's not the problem. | |
| The problem is unwed pregnancy. | |
| A married 18-year-old woman who is pregnant is in a much better situation than a 35-year-old single woman who is pregnant. | |
| So we have the spike in unwed pregnancies. | |
| We have, obviously, the problem of porn addiction, fatherless homes, on and on and on. | |
| It even ruined our university system, which has turned into this embarrassing orgy of drunkenness and debauchery, which it was never meant to be, but that's what it's become now. | |
| And why? Why did it have this result? | |
| Well, it goes back to what we were talking about yesterday. | |
| Sex is a powerful thing. | |
| And there are two things that happen. | |
| When you're reckless and frivolous with sex, and you remove it from the bonds of marriage, like we discussed yesterday, and this is what the sexual revolution was all about, taking sex, removing it from marriage, and then what happens is, number one, you lose the deeper joy that can be found in sex. | |
| You've settled for mere pleasure, which was already a part of the joy. | |
| That was already a part of the bargain. | |
| But the joy is something that you experience through the intimacy with someone who you are committed to and you love and you're devoted to. | |
| And you have, you know, it is happening within the safe confines of the marital union. | |
| That's how you experience the deeper joy in that intimacy. | |
| Now, we've lost the joy. | |
| You still have the physical pleasure, but you haven't gained anything. | |
| Because as I said, the pleasure was already part of the joy. | |
| All you've done is you've lost something, which is the joy. | |
| Second, you still have to deal with the consequences of the power of sex. | |
| Sex is a powerful thing. | |
| And you still have to deal with those consequences, except you're going to be unprepared for those consequences because you aren't married. | |
| And thus the consequences are worse. | |
| So the, quote, old way was to save sex for the confines of committed marriage because it's the safest context for it. | |
| This is really the only form of safe sex that you can have. | |
| You hear a lot today about safe sex, and it's just absurd. | |
| I mean, it really is ridiculous to That we're telling 16-year-old high school students that it's possible for them to have safe sex with some classmate of theirs if they use contraceptive. | |
| It's still not safe, as is clearly evidenced by all the things I just listed off. | |
| Everyone's having safe sex now, yet we're having all these problems. | |
| So, clearly, there's a disconnect here. | |
| It's still not safe. | |
| There are still many potential consequences that cannot all be solved or prevented by contraception. | |
| It's kind of like telling somebody that it's kind of like if we invented some sort of A special helmet and harnessing system for a vehicle that you can use so that you can safely drive drunk. | |
| It's like saying to kids, well, listen, it's best if you don't drive drunk, but if you're going to drive drunk, well, here's this special helmet and special seatbelt. | |
| Make sure to use that. Now, I don't want you to, but I know you kids and you're going to do it, so just make sure you do it safely. | |
| There's no safe way to do it. | |
| It is by nature a reckless act. | |
| When you've got unmarried high school students who are reckless and frivolous and dumb, and they're going around having sex with each other, well, there's no safe way to do it. | |
| It doesn't exist. So you've got the two potential options, save it for marriage, don't save it for marriage. | |
| And the question, the equation kind of works like this. | |
| You know, it's like you have to ask yourself, okay, here is this act of sex, this act, and it requires you to fully expose yourself to another person and to be completely vulnerable to them. | |
| It can bring great pleasure, but it can also be an effective means to transmit awful and deadly diseases. | |
| So it can do both. | |
| At the same time. And also, you're not going to know if the other person has a disease unless they tell you. | |
| And a lot of times, they don't want to tell you. | |
| It will likely cause you to feel an emotional attachment to this other person. | |
| Or else, if you do it with the wrong person in the wrong context, it may cause you to feel a deep disgust with yourself and a shame. | |
| And, oh, by the way, this act can make babies as well. | |
| I mean, it can do that. | |
| Now the question, should you do it with a stranger? | |
| Everything I just listed, fully expose yourself, completely vulnerable, offering yourself up, can transmit disease, involves your emotions, can make babies. | |
| Before we even talk about what this act is, pretend you had no idea about human biology, and I just explain it to you that way, which is completely accurate, and then I say, you know, whatever this thing is, do you think it's something you should do with a stranger? | |
| We used to say, uh, no. | |
| Of course not. Obviously not. | |
| But with the sexual revolution, we said, yeah, sure, what could go wrong? | |
| Well, a lot could go wrong. | |
| And did go wrong. | |
| Now, some people have argued with me and they point out that the world was not a bastion of sexual morality before the 60s. | |
| There was rape, there was disease, there was prostitution, there was lust, there was promiscuity, all throughout human history. | |
| The sexual revolution didn't invent any of that. | |
| That's what I've heard over and over and over again over the last day. | |
| And this is the argument that you hear any time you talk about the moral decay in our culture. | |
| There are always people who try to rationalize it, they try to dismiss it, they try to undermine the importance of what you're talking about by saying, well, this is how things always have been. | |
| And yeah, it's true that this kind of stuff has always happened. | |
| It hasn't always been as bad as it is now. | |
| Now, that would be completely false. | |
| Because what you have now, there have always been promiscuous people, lustful people, there's always been prostitution, there's always been people having sex outside of marriage, there's always been adultery, all this stuff. | |
| What you have now is that all of those things are completely mainstream. | |
| They're entirely in the mainstream. | |
| They're not out on the fringes. | |
| They're not seen as this fringe, gross, shadowy, shameful thing that you have to slink off to a dark corner of society to engage in. | |
| That's how it used to be. | |
| And yeah, people were engaging in it in those dark corners. | |
| But now it's just out in the open. | |
| Why is that? Because there's a really crucial difference between how it is now with these things and how it used to be. | |
| People used to do these things, yet society and the individuals who did the things still knew that it was wrong. | |
| To be lustful, to be unfaithful, to be promiscuous was seen as shameful and wrong and dirty, which didn't prevent anyone from acting that way, but it did mean that our, although it was a disincentive, I'm sure it convinced a lot of people to not act that way. | |
| But no matter how effective it was in terms of preventing, it did mean that our basic moral compass was still preserved. | |
| The acts themselves didn't change, but what changed is our attitude about those acts. | |
| And because our attitude changed, that means that these things are even more common now. | |
| Now, it's one thing for someone to do something evil and admit that it's evil and be shamed by society for the evil, but it's another thing for him to insist that the evil thing is actually good, and then for society to agree and throw him a parade celebrating it. | |
| Society can survive when people do bad things because people have always done bad things. | |
| But society cannot survive when people are celebrated for doing the bad things. | |
| So that is a really important difference. | |
| It's a hugely important difference. | |
| And it's the difference between a thriving society Growing, prosperous, healthy civilization at a civilization that is collapsing. | |
| Now, another argument is that a lot of these things, as I just touched on earlier, but a lot of these things, divorce, certain STDs, unwed pregnancy, some of these things are on a downward trend again. | |
| And that's true, but all that means is that they exploded as a result of the sexual revolution, and society has since been struggling to kind of contain the damage. | |
| So going back to the explosion and divorce on the heels of the sexual revolution started to decline again. | |
| Part of that is there was this catastrophic result of this horrible thing called the sexual revolution, and society has now just been trying to catch up and find some way to contain this. | |
| It has made some progress in containing some of the damage, but the problem remains, and the fact is we still have damage to contain. | |
| And at what cost has the damage been contained? | |
| Well, as I said, the divorce rate is down largely because the younger generations aren't getting married. | |
| So that's been the cost. For getting the divorce rate down, the cost is discouraging marriage altogether. | |
| Teens today are actually less sexually active according to, you know, different reports and studies that you'll read. | |
| Teens today are less sexually active than they were in years past and even in the last, you know, they would have been 20 years ago or 30, but that's largely because they're inside on their computers and And a lot of the sexual activity has migrated online. | |
| And I'm not sure if replacing in-person promiscuity with online promiscuity is really an improvement. | |
| I'm not sure that it is. | |
| It's probably more of a lateral move. | |
| It may actually be a step backwards because it's less human. | |
| I mean, you've got On one hand, you consider a teenager who's 16 and has sex with his girlfriend, which is not good and not advised. | |
| On the other hand, you have a teenager who's 16 and isn't even attempting to go that route because he's just watching four hours of porn a day instead. | |
| And he's kind of getting his fill that way. | |
| We're supposed to believe that there's been some kind of improvement because teens are going with the latter approach, but I'm not sure that it's really better. | |
| I'm not sure the hours of porn a day are better than that in-person experience. | |
| As I said, at least it's lateral. | |
| It may be worse, actually. | |
| It may easily be worse. | |
| Because there's this dehumanizing that goes on with pornography, this reducing of another human being to just nothing but an image on a screen for you to consume. | |
| So, not sure that's an improvement. | |
| I mean, it certainly is not an improvement at all. | |
| Now, the final argument people have made against my point is that I haven't offered a solution. | |
| Which, first of all, I kind of think that's sort of a lazy way around. | |
| When somebody is observing and pointing out problems in our culture, especially problems that a lot of us refuse to face and admit are problems, which is what I'm trying to do here. | |
| So when someone does that and then you come in and say, well, there's no reason to talk about it unless you offer solutions. | |
| We've got to be solution-oriented. | |
| Give me a five-step plan to solve the problem. | |
| And I know that's supposed to sound very practical and logical. | |
| It's actually lazy. It's kind of a lazy, cowardly way around the observations that the person is making. | |
| It's a way for you to not engage the observations that the person is making. | |
| Because, yeah, obviously I can't sit here right now and solve society for you, okay? | |
| I can't do it. Neither can you. | |
| And if that's the price of entry into this conversation, is that we have to come equipped with a three-step solution to solve all the ills of mankind, well, that means that we should never talk about anything ever again, because none of us have that solution, all right? | |
| Yeah. So no, in fact, I think it's gotten so bad and we're at a point in our societal collapse where I'm not sure that there is any solution. | |
| I'm not sure that it can be solved. | |
| I'm not sure that we can be pulled back from the brink at this point. | |
| I'm not sure that we can. I can look throughout history. | |
| I can find many civilizations that have gotten to the point Of course, ancient Rome is a great example. | |
| I can find many civilizations that have gotten to the point where we are now. | |
| I'm not aware of any that ever got to that point and then did a 180 and turned back and went the other direction and saved themselves. | |
| I'm not sure of that ever happening. | |
| So we may be at the past the point of no return. | |
| I don't know. But I do have a solution, actually, on an individual level. | |
| I can't do anything about it. | |
| I don't know about it on a collective level. | |
| I can't force anyone to adopt this solution. | |
| But the solution is actually pretty simple. | |
| It's a solution that I offered yesterday. | |
| It's a very simple solution, but it is a solution to almost all these problems I have just mentioned. | |
| And that is to get married, stay married, be faithful and monogamous. | |
| That's it. That's the solution. | |
| So those are the steps. | |
| Get married, stay married, be faithful. | |
| That's a three-step plan. | |
| There we go. Married, stay married, faithful. | |
| You want a three-step plan? | |
| I tell you what, if everybody did that as an alternative, if everyone adopted that approach as an alternative to the modern sexual revolution approach, almost all these problems would go away. | |
| They'd be gone. | |
| They would not be problems anymore if everyone actually did that. | |
| Now, I know that everyone is not going to actually do that, so this solution is not going to solve the problem because it's not going to be adopted. | |
| But if it were, that would solve a lot of our problems. | |
| Just like, and this course is related, so many of our societal problems would be all but solved overnight if we got rid of the fatherless issue and dads just stayed home with their kids. | |
| Stayed home with their families and didn't leave. | |
| That also would solve a lot of our problems. | |
| If we had intact families and marriages, and if people prioritized their families and their marriages, and if they saved sexual activity for the confines of marriage, I'm not saying we would live in a utopia, but We would certainly live in a society that doesn't have to deal with hardly any of this stuff. | |
| If you want a solution aside from that, well, I can't give you one because it doesn't exist. | |
| So basically, we do that or there's no solution and we just plummet into our civilizational demise. | |
| Those really are the two options. | |
| There is not a third one. | |
| So it's up to us to decide. | |
| I think I have a pretty good idea of which one we're going to choose, unfortunately, but we can always pray and hope. |