The following is an excerpt from Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All, published with permission from Ignatius Press.

The devil may offer the world, but he’d rather give people hell.

Rejecting Satan and all his empty promises is not just a rhetorical flourish in traditional baptismal vows. The blandishments of sin are deceptive. The immediate enjoyment rarely lives up to the hype, and in the long run we find ourselves, in the words of C. S. Lewis’ wily devil Screwtape, ruled by an “ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.”

This is why the sexual revolution’s promises of freedom, authenticity, and happiness were empty indeed. The revolution’s ethos of sexual liberalism triumphed in the United States, insofar as people are now free to hop in and out of beds, relationships, marriages, and even genders as they wish. The acolytes of sexual liberation won with a half century of abortion on demand as a constitutional right, and a ferocious commitment to abortion in many states even after the Supreme Court corrected that error. They won by framing religious objections to, and opt-outs from, this new order as bigotry.

The Sexual Revolution Failed

The sexual revolution has conquered institutions from academia to Wall Street, which observe its holidays, fly its flags, and repeat its creeds. But though the new regime of sexual liberalism reigns almost unchallenged, it has failed on its own terms. It has not made Americans happy, or even sexually satisfied, let alone fixed the problems that its advocates claimed it would solve.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were assured that ditching traditional norms, obligations, and loyalties would allow people to be their authentic selves, liberated from the unwanted bonds and baggage of the past. People would be free to be who and what they want to be, to love whom and how they want, to enjoy what they want when they want it. This freedom would make us happy and eliminate, or at least reduce, the causes of social strife and oppression.

Yet we need only look around to see the failures of sexual liberation, from the social to the personal. At the civilizational level, Americans, along with much of the world, are increasingly unmarried and childless, with birthrates well below the replacement rate. Apparently, having babies is one of those jobs that Americans won’t do.

There is something wrong with a culture that cannot fulfill the imperative of pairing enough men and women to beget and raise its next generation — a civilizational ailment manifest in an aging, often lonely population.

Freedom or Failure?

Supporters of sexual liberation might reply that this chosen childlessness is a feature, not a bug. After all, the point of the sexual revolution was to give people more sexual and relational freedom, and so getting married and having children should be personal choices, not civilizational duties encouraged by social expectations and legal norms. So what if voluntary sterility has become normal and birthrates are declining throughout the world — especially in rich, developed nations? Those who view the pressure to settle down and have kids as an imposition will shrug and say that’s the price of freedom. And they might add that though an aging, shrinking population poses challenges to everything from the economy to immigration, it is at least better for the environment.

Childlessness has been rebranded as a certified-green “child-free” lifestyle. And if this means more Americans live alone as they age, well, they will have the satisfaction of environmental virtue, as seen in a sympathetic 2021 New York Times piece profiling those choosing not to have children because of worries about the climate. And these Americans will enjoy lives lived on their own terms, without the inconveniences imposed by dependents. Consider, for example, a 2022 New York Times piece in which Frank Bruni extolled living alone — oh, the bliss of an uninterrupted morning coffee routine!

Decline of Happiness

This ode to solitude would be more persuasive if sexual liberalism were delivering on its promises of happiness — if the declines in marriage, childbearing, and family stability correlated with increased personal happiness. The truth is the reverse. Married people are, on average, happier than their unmarried peers. The same is true for churchgoers compared to the nonobservant and nonbelieving. And though they may be denounced as miserable puritans or hateful bigots, conservatives are generally happier than liberals.

As Musa al-Gharbi wrote in a 2023 article for American Affairs, “The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. . . . Conservatives report significantly higher levels of happiness, meaning, and satisfaction in their lives as compared to liberals. Meanwhile, liberals are much more likely to exhibit anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychic distress.”

This happiness gap is, at least partly, due to conservative resistance to the sexual revolution. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox and his colleagues reported in 2021, liberals are happier when they get married, go to church, and have children. These habits of life used to be nonideological, but after the sexual revolution, they are increasingly perceived as conservative.

Thus, even those on the left who personally live in these ways are reluctant to preach what they practice, and so Wilcox observed that “the very institutions that might improve liberals’ happiness are increasingly viewed negatively by liberals.” Ideological commitment to the sexual revolution is impeding happiness by discouraging the pursuit of better ways of life.

Relationships Bring Happiness

Sexual liberalism produces unhappiness because it is inimical to relationships and practices that offer us profound meaning and joy in life. Deep relationships require deep commitments, but sexual liberation requires that every romantic relationship (and therefore also every parental relationship) be severable. Thus, the sexual revolution doubly cheats its disciples. Not only does its ethos of pursuing immediate pleasure injure the commitment that is needed for lasting and fulfilling relationships, but it also provides far less sexual gratification than promised.

Rising singleness is not the result of Americans having too much fun to want to settle down. Rather, Americans are increasingly alone, depressed, and anxious, with fewer children than they say they want, and these lonely people are not filling their lives with great sex. Indeed, we are in the midst of a sex recession, as The Atlantic labeled it in a much-discussed 2018 story by Kate Julian.

This reduction in the amount of sex Americans are having is not the result of a return to chastity but of people, especially younger people, struggling to pair up in a hookup culture. After all, for most people, having a regular sex life requires a committed partner. As Julian blandly put it, “People who live with a romantic partner tend to have sex more than those who don’t.”

Thus, as much as men may want it, the old Playboy dream of a tall blonde today, a petite brunette tomorrow, a curvy redhead next week, and a sexual world tour next month is unattainable for most. Marriage, or the “marriage lite” of a long-term relationship, is still the most reliable way for the average person to have sex; as these pairings decline, so does the amount of sex people are having.

Married People Have More Satisfying Sex

This is why, contrary to the expectations of sexual liberalism, married churchgoers are having more, and more satisfying sex. As Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang noted in a 2024 First Things essay, “Churchgoing couples report more sex than non-religious couples. Specifically, about two-thirds of husbands and wives who attend religious services together have sex at least once a week, compared to less than half who do not regularly attend together or at all,” and “couples who attend religious services together also report the greatest sexual satisfaction.”

This is probability, not certainty — getting married and going to church is not a sure ticket to sexual paradise — but it is still a marked contrast to the likes of Julian’s “sex recession” reporting, which depicted a generation that is delaying marriage and children to an unprecedented degree without enjoying the sexual liberation it was given in exchange.

As she observed, “I was amazed by how many 20-somethings were deeply unhappy with the sex-and-dating landscape; over and over, people asked me whether things had always been this hard.” And it is not just that forming and maintaining stable relationships is difficult but that the sex is often terrible.

If there was one thing the sexual revolution was supposed to deliver, it was lots of great sex. Yet it is failing to do so, in part because the casual sexual encounters it encourages are not conducive to satisfying sex. Hookups are a bad sexual teacher. They provide little opportunity or incentive to become a good lover, in large part because strangers don’t know how to please each other and aren’t going to stick around long enough to learn. And pornography is training people, especially young men, to be bad in bed.

As Julian reported, “In my interviews with young women, I heard too many iterations to count of ‘he did something I didn’t like that I later learned is a staple in porn.’” These unwelcome sexual habits range from uncomfortable to humiliating to outright violent. That such behaviors are becoming normal should be horrifying, but it is to be expected when almost every teenage boy is given a smartphone that provides immediate access to an endless supply of porn videos that shape his sexuality.

Sexual Liberation Brought Misery

Sexual liberation cannot offer the rewards of virtue, and it is increasingly stingy with the pleasures of vice. Thus, in recent years, a noticeable unease about the sexual revolution has emerged even in the high, holy places of sexual liberalism, such as The Atlantic and The New York Times.

For example, a piece in the latter by Nona Willis Aronowitz complained that even though “women’s right to sexual satisfaction is taken as much more of a given . . . extracting what we actually want from a mess of cultural and political influences can still sometimes feel like an impossible challenge.”

Michelle Goldberg, a columnist at the same paper, has likewise wondered how sexual liberation has produced so much misery and oppression. She admitted that “as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography . . . [it] became a cause of some of the same suffering it was meant to remedy.” Elsewhere, she wrote that our “dating culture appears to be an emotional meat grinder whose miseries and degradations can’t be solved by ever-more elaborate rituals of consent.”

Liberal feminists writing in flagship liberal publications are acknowledging that the sexual revolution has failed to provide good sex and that it regularly makes men and (especially) women unhappy.

Christians Knew the Model All Along

And all the faithful Christians said “Amen!”—and maybe also “I told you so.” Christians predicted these evils and saw that each successive victory of the sexual revolution would lead to more radical demands.

Recognition of the now-undeniable harms of the sexual revolution should lead to further questions, such as whether this wretched sexual and relational landscape explains why a multitude of young women are suddenly fleeing being female and embracing transgender or nonbinary identities. Or these writers (and the many others who think as they do) might wonder whether this culture of terrible sex and unhappy relationships is really worth the hundreds of thousands of abortions it demands each year.

The Addict’s Demand For More Liberation

But answering these questions might require curtailing, or even condemning, the sexual revolution, which few are willing to do. Rather than admit they have been badly wrong, they insist that just a little more liberation will do the trick.

Goldberg concluded that women just need to be more assertive, both in bed and in the dating market, to realize their desires. In her view, sex should be treated as a negotiation between self-interested actors who must reach a mutually satisfactory settlement. Sex, in this view, is undertaken between partners, not necessarily of any more significance to each other, and possibly of less, than partners in any business transaction.

Women, Goldberg argued, are “too willing to act in what they believe to be their partners’ best interests rather than their own”. They “are still embarrassed by their own desires, particularly when they are emotional, rather than physical”. She suggested that women just need to get better at the art of the relational and sexual deal — to be more aware of what they want and more assertive in trying to get it from their partners.

Willis Aronowitz was even more committed to staying the course, declaring that “reaching for more sexual freedom, not less — the freedom to have whatever kind of sex we want . . . is still the only way we can hope to solve the problems of our current sexual landscape.” If hookups and kink are not satisfying, the solution must be more and kinkier hookups.

This doubling down is the mindset of an addict chasing the dragon of a better high, even as lives crumble, relationships collapse, and flesh decays. It is how, as Screwtape put it, the devil seeks to “get the man’s soul and to give him nothing in return.”

In the end there is no longer even much pleasure, just desperate and despairing appetite — a wretched Gollum clutching the Ring in the miserable darkness, year after year.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of "Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All" (Ignatius, 2025).