The sexual revolution promised freedom, but resulted in captivity. It promised enlightenment, but led to new darkness. It was, in truth, a god that failed. Almost half a century ago, the prophets of the sexual revolution went mainstream, preaching a gospel of joy and fulfillment through the practice of free love.
Those prophets attracted an army of true believers, and their gospel became the unofficial creed of the postmodern West, weaving itself into the culture’s films, art, literature and lifestyle. Another gospel, however, once warned that a tree is known by its fruit and 40-plus years after the sexual revolution began, its fruit isn’t looking so good.
The dawn of contraception brought with it the deception of ‘safe sex’, a do whatever you want world, if it feels good do it, just do it! Lust and sin increase the rupture between body and spirit. When we use our own and others bodies as objects for pleasure or to fill the emptiness inside us, there is an increased break. And this is indeed what we are seeing today.
The making and breaking of feminism, the divorce culture, the sexualisation of our children, the rise of the porn culture, sex education, the break-up of marriage and family, the meaning of love, and the importance of morality in our thinking and discussions of sex all came with this sexual revolution.
Everyone has been a loser in this revolution, but it is the children who have especially suffered. We are really letting our kids down big time because of the new sexual paradigm that now reigns. It is the gospel of non-judgementalism, libertarianism and market-driven sexploitation. And its the kids that have been the major casualties.
Let’s consider the tweens, those aged between eight and twelve. They are a market niche group who are being robbed of their childhood while parents are being robbed of their hard-earned cash. We have kids being sold g-strings and coerced into looking like a porn star, or at least a rock star (often one and the same, at least in terms of appearances).
There are two main themes that run through the lives of tweens, both directly related to the sexual revolution. One is absentee parents, and all the problems associated with that major social malady. Then there is the corporate world which markets tween sexuality, promoting the media image that to be cool is to be sexual, and the younger the better.
Thus peer pressure, driven by the corporate marketeers, is replacing parental authority, as the major formative force in the lives of tweens. And the outcomes do not look good.
Sex is a passion too powerful to be left unconstrained, and in the old days, conscience, religion and the personal sense of shame kept sex in check. Today it is running out of control, and ‘stigma’ needs to be regained. Sexual mores are a matter of public concern, and we need all the help we can get in curbing harmful sexual appetites.
Mere legislation cannot compensate for the loss of social sanction. The inner directed sense of shame and guilt used to perform a wondrous task of keeping people out of mischief. But now that we have thrown out stigma, we have either the heavy hand of the law, or nothing, to help keep ourselves, and especially our young people, from engaging in harmful and destructive sexual practices.
I’m not saying that we should teach kids that sex is something shameful, it’s a beautiful, awesome, humbling experience within the constraints of marriage. I mean something where two become one, something used by God as the pro-creative mechanism can be nothing but beautiful. I’m not saying to shout it from the mountain tops, ones sex life should be private, between husband and wife, not the daily soap opera gossip as what it has become. But one does have to talk to their children about it because trust me its better for them to hear it from you. If you don’t teach them, talk to them, the world is more than willing to teach them about free love and self indulgent ‘love’. The fact remains that sex outside marriage is wrong and needs to be regarded as such.
The popular television series, Sex and the City, and now Desperate Housewives, a major premise of the show, at least expressed through its female characters, is that equality means having women acting as debauched as sex crazed men. But aping male promiscuity and crudity is hardly the path of women’s liberation. Instead it drags them down to the same vulgar and animal level. Some of the earlier feminists disapproved of promiscuity, because they knew that real power for women came through morality, not immorality.
Sadness best describes the four females on the show. And that is exactly one of the bitter fruits of radical feminism and the sexual revolution. Women were promised freedom but instead have been newly enslaved. Indeed, while men can now much more easily love ‘em and leave ‘em, women are often left literally holding the baby. So much for liberation!
Obviously, the problems with sexuality are nothing new. Sexual misuse and abuse have existed for centuries. However, since the onset of the "sexual revolution" in the late sixties, an ever wider variety of sexual problems has confronted us, these problems are more numerous and severe than ever before in human history.
The number of illegitimate births is increasing dramatically, sexually transmitted diseases are infecting adults, teenagers, and newborns at record levels, new diseases and new manifestations of old diseases are surfacing at an unprecedented rate, debate over abortion is more impassioned than ever, censorship by those offended by sexually graphic works is bitterly opposed by the artists, hate-filled confrontations escalate in the battle over homosexual rights, women express outrage over sexual harassment and date rape and the divorce rate has skyrocketed.
Today, the harmful consequences of sexual behavior are increasing at an alarming rate among the young, the old, the single, and the married. I am afraid for my relatives and friends and my children to be, in this time of sexual crisis. But through all this some of us still believe that sex can and should be the source of the greatest pleasure and human joy.
In the early decades of this century, many people were dismayed with what they saw as repressive, "Victorian" attitudes toward sex. They may have been right that some sort of change was needed, but what we now have is the wrong revolution. Ideas of the past have been replaced with worse ideas.
Any thoughts ??
