It seems that it’s not.
Behavior, legal changes, and attitudes all suggest a negative answer. In terms of behavior, we find that divorce, cohabitation, nonmarital birth, and single parenthood persist at historically high levels.
In the case of transgenderism, legal rights have advanced rapidly. Few imagined in the early years of the sexual revolution that those who are biologically one sex but identify with another would be legally entitled to use bathrooms and showers formerly reserved for those of the opposite biological sex. Participation, indeed domination in some areas, of women’s sports by biological males continues unabated despite protests by female athletes and their feminist supporters.
The rights, indeed the very designation of natural parents as mothers and fathers, are being subordinated to the judgments of bureaucrats and professionals. Same-sex marriage is universally established as a legal status across the United States and many other countries.
The confidence of its advocates in their victory is so great that they no longer talk of “live and let live,” but instead demand that everyone affirm and celebrate the newly defined institution and the sexuality on which it is based. Those who in conscience adhere to the view of previous generations and millennia must be driven from the public square, their jobs, careers, and businesses. “Punish the wicked!” (notably Christians) replaces “live and let live!”
In terms of attitudes, nontraditional family structures, such as those in which children grow up without one parent or either, are normal and not to be stigmatized. Sex acts that elicited widespread disgust prior to the sexual revolution are more widely accepted (while other acts, such as mistreating animals, are regarded with increased disgust).
The boundaries of behavior that we’re not only to tolerate but must also celebrate continue to expand, and the age group at which the normalization is aimed continues to decline—public libraries host drag queen story hours for young children, and children are transitioned to a gender discordant with their biological sex at younger ages.
Behavior once condemned as “grooming” young children who deserved to be protected from such things is now promoted in the name of teaching tolerance and celebrating diversity (with regard to sexual matters but not, of course, religious ones).
Expected Collapse
In the face of these sudden and dramatic changes, some Christians have expected the collapse of such unconstrained secular craziness in the face of its own contradictions, of its defiance of reality, of who we are as humans and what it takes for us to flourish. No society can sustain indefinitely the collapse of marriage, family, and community—the institutions that give life meaning and purpose and make it worth living.“But one conclusion seems obvious: permissive sexual attitudes and practices have not stimulated the religious revival many Christians claim the Sexual Revolution will yet yield. I see no evidence of it. On the contrary: Christians seem to grow more complicit—or at least more quiet about their misgivings—by the year.”But against that view, we nevertheless can see cracks in the ice that may lead to a break-up of the sexual revolution as sudden, revolutionary, and unexpected as the changes ushered in by its birth. The costs for women, children, and men are high and increasingly evident.
Pushback
Many women are angry at the effects of the “magic pill” on their bodies, their sexuality, and their relationships. The pill, with abortion as its backup, is the technological base of the revolution that delinked sex from procreation and children, and so from marriage and family. But the utopian optimism of early sexual revolutionaries is long gone. At considerable cost to their health and well-being, women embraced the pill. It made life easier for men, in particular predatory men, who wanted the convenience of sex without the responsibilities of marriage and children.Similarly, social conservatives have noted that every time courts or legislatures undermine some norm of morality in the name of women’s equality or women’s rights, the big winners are men who want easy (or easier) access to women’s bodies.
As for abortion, the Supreme Court, far from settling the matter with Roe v. Wade, gave rise to a pro-life movement that became the largest civil rights struggle of our time, a movement primarily of younger women to protect the right of children to not be killed in the womb.
The euphemisms about “reproductive health” and “choice,” used to promote the right to kill the most innocent and vulnerable among us, appear increasingly bogus and self-serving in the face of undeniable scientific evidence about the beginning of human life at conception (on which the Supreme Court declared itself agnostic in the 1970s).
Lasting Effects
The sexual revolution had devastating effects on children. It made marriage an option for the affluent, but all but out of reach for many of the poor. Meanwhile unilateral (“no-fault”) divorce, nonmarital births, and single parenting became the norm among the poor, as Kay Hymowitz showed in her aptly titled book “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.”The sexual revolution, Hymowitz shows, made marriage harder to achieve and easier to dissolve—increasing insecurity, poverty, and inequality. It reduced the life chances of low- and middle-income children—with lower educational achievement and higher delinquency rates.
Men appear to be the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. But even that “benefit” has not worked out well, except for the predatory cad. The threat of the “shotgun wedding” may have died along with the stigma against sex outside marriage. But the price has been the loss of the life script that men followed from adolescence to maturity as they exerted themselves to learn the skills and meet the responsibilities of a husband, father, protector, and provider.
All societies regulate sex. Those that thrive do so with relatively strict mores, laws, and social and religious sanctions. When sexual morality is loosened up too much or for too long, the society gives way to internal and external forces such as religious awakening or foreign invasion—forces that sweep away lax and licentious ways and impose, once again, stricter moral standards.