How We Got Here and The Consequences
When I (Renee) was part of the Colson Fellows program a few years ago, I learned a sentence that has served me well since. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. The Sexual Revolution entered the scene with the idea that free sex would be liberating for men AND women, but we have seen so many victims in its wake, particularly with women and children.
Today we are going to walk through how we got here so that you can have a better idea of how to talk to you kids about the sexual world they’ll be entering.
Many thanks to Barb Adadmson at the Vitae (VAI-tee) Foundation who summarized this history so well in her article How the Sexual Revolution Freed Men and Failed Women
How the Sexual Revolution Changed the Sexual “Marketplace”
When the Pill first arrived in the 1960s, it was hailed as the great equalizer, finally allowing women to separate sex from motherhood. But what few anticipated was how radically it would reshape the “sexual marketplace.” By making casual sex seem consequence-free, it shifted expectations and pressured women to conform to a new sexual norm. Today, about 90% of women have sex before marriage, and the pressure to engage in premarital sex is stronger than ever.
Author Louise Perry writes in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, “The pill offers this illusion of sex being a meaningless leisure activity. But just because you’re taking a contraceptive pill does not mean that you’re not emotionally affected by sex.”[1]
What was once a deeply intimate act tied to commitment and trust has been reduced to a transactional encounter that too often leaves women feeling used, discarded and alone.
And in this new sexual economy, it is men, not women, who have benefited most. Freed from the expectation of marriage before sex, men gained access to intimacy without obligation. Women, meanwhile, bore the physical risks of contraception and abortion, along with the emotional weight of being told to embrace detachment and suppress their own longing for love and commitment.
Mounting research reveals that this “liberation” has been incredibly harmful. A study of nearly 500 first-year college women found that casual sex correlated with clinically significant depression.[2] Another study in 2022 showed that women are significantly more likely than men to experience regret, anxiety, depression and social stigma after casual sex.[3]
This is not liberation. As Perry observes, “The evidence doesn’t reveal a generation of women reveling in sexual liberation — instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant, crappy sex out of a sense of obligation.”
Abortion: The “Safety Net” of the Revolution
If the Pill rewrote the rules of sex, abortion became the safety net that made the new sexual marketplace possible. The Pill, resulted in so much more casual sex, that the result was actually an increase in the number of abortions.
Once casual sex was normalized, society needed a way to erase its consequences to preserve the illusion that sex could be free of cost or commitment. In this way, abortion became the necessary safety net for lacking or failed birth control. The CDC reports that nearly nine in ten abortions are sought by women in uncommitted relationships.[4]
But the so-called solution has been devastating. Countless women carry the physical and emotional scars of abortions they were told would make life better. Instead of feeling empowered, many describe feeling isolated and coerced, their grief hidden beneath a cultural script that calls abortion liberation.
Men, however, gained sexual access without responsibility. As author Louise Perry notes, “Modern feminists who have only ever known a world with the Pill can easily forget that, in an era without contraception, a prohibition on sex before marriage served female, not male, interests.” The absence of such boundaries has not resulted in freedom but instead has left women lonely and deeply unhappy.
Far from securing equality, the tools of the sexual revolution have entrenched inequality. Women are left to carry the weight of “choice” alone.
Abortion Is Not Liberation
Since the sexual revolution, sex has been increasingly separated from reproduction. For many, pregnancy is no longer seen as a natural outcome of sex but as a disruption to freedom and identity.
Vitae Foundation’s decades of research confirm this reality: most women choose abortion because it feels like the only way to preserve freedom and identity.
In one study, women described abortion as “the least of three evils,” believing it less devastating than either adoption or parenting. Motherhood was seen as the “death of self.” Adoption was viewed as a double loss: the loss of self and the loss of the child. Abortion seemed the only way to erase evidence of a mistake.[5]
And so, in a culture that teaches women their worth lies in pursuing a vision of freedom where motherhood is optional, abortion feels like the only way to survive.
A New Vision of Liberation
If the sexual revolution taught women anything, it was this: you are on your own. Pregnancy became the woman’s problem, and abortion sold as the solution. But what our culture has never admitted, and what Vitae Foundation’s research confirms, is that this isn’t liberation. It is abandonment packaged as empowerment.
Instead of reordering society around the dignity and design of womanhood, the culture increasingly demanded that women function like men: fertility-free and emotionally detached from sex.
In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington summarizes the idea well when she says, “By trying to make women ‘equal’ through sameness, we’ve medicalized fertility, industrialized childcare, and treated motherhood as a handicap.”[6]
In the wake of this “sexual liberation,” women are the ones facing the consequences. This reveals a crisis of abandonment: a culture where mothers are devalued and women are only handed “choice” as their key to freedom.
True liberation begins when mothers are valued and supported in our culture. It begins when women are not forced to choose from three devastating options. It begins when we treat motherhood as a noble and worthwhile endeavor.
Modern women, now offered the same “choices” as men in education, careers and independence, are often unprepared for motherhood because it is no longer seen as inevitable or even desirable. With birth control and abortion readily available, many never seriously consider when or if they will have children. When an unexpected pregnancy occurs, it comes as a profound shock. For women who cannot reconcile motherhood with their identity or life plans, abortion appears to be the only option to preserve their present and protect their future.
Yet Vitae’s research reveals that this so-called solution brings its own kind of death: a slow erosion of self, marked by guilt, regret and unacknowledged grief. Far from freeing women, abortion often traps them in cycles of trauma, secrecy and shame.
From Betrayal to Renewal
The sexual revolution promised women the world: freedom, equality and control. But what it delivered was a cruel bait-and-switch. It erased the cultural safeguards that once protected women, normalized male detachment from commitment, and told women they must carry the burden of “choice” alone. But as the research makes clear, this isn’t freedom. It’s bondage.
True liberation means restoring what the sexual revolution stripped away: the dignity of women, the beauty of motherhood and the expectation that men commit to the families they help create. Women long for commitment and connection, not a culture that leaves them used and discarded.
The path forward is not easy, but it is clear. We must push for a culture in which women don’t feel like casual sex is the admission price for finding love and commitment, only to be left with costly consequences.
Explaining this to your kids: The Economics of Sex
the Colsons Fellows program, we watched this short video about the economics of sex in our American culture after the Sexual Revolution. The premise was simple:
You probably remember this from marketing or economics in high school: When demand is high and supply is low, prices go up. When demand is high and supply is ALSO high, prices go down.
There is a supply and demand element to the “mating market,” and it tends to be in societies that women hold the supply of sex and men hold the demand. And by the way, don’t get all mad at us. This is a GENERALITY. We know women also desire sex, but any married woman knows the demand in men remains steady while women’s rise and fall. ANYWAY, throughout most of history, when men demanded sex, they came and got it. Women didn’t have much choice in the matter. That’s what so profound about marriage being established in a society. A woman’s family would at least have a say in the matter of marriage and the man had to “pay something.”
The sexual revolution promised women that they could behave like men and get everything they wanted. Fast forward to our post sexual revolution world: demand was high and supply was also high, sex became cheap.
Also, enter the competition: pornography.
Pornography went from a multi-million dollar industry in the 60’s to a multi-billion dollar industry today. And NOW we’re adding artificial intelligence to the competition, and women must compete with screens and bots who don’t demand anything of the men they’re servicing. (And women are using it too!)
Young women feel a lot of pressure to “play the game” in order to get what they want, which is relational security and advantage. Mark Regnor notes that women were promised autonomy and what they got is exploitation.
More Freedom, Less Sex
Louise Perry notes that we are in the midst of a sex recession/depression. Young people are having much less sex than their supposedly “prudish and inhibited” grandparents. Very attractive men are the winners in the model. They can and are having lots of “casual” sex. Women, on the other hand, struggle to find a man who will commit to a relationship. She notes that our species norm is polygamy – 80% of cultures have practiced this – and Christianity was unusual because it insisted on sexual restraint and monogamy. Over 2000 years that historical norm was changed so that you can only marry one woman in the Western world. That monogamous restriction produces better outcomes for low status men and most all women: lower crime rates, lower domestic violence rates, less economic inequality etc. What we’ve done by eliminating all boundaries and restrictions is create much worse outcomes for the most vulnerable people: women and children.
Americans are having a record low amount of sex. In 1990, 55% of adults ages 18-64 reported having sex weekly. By 2024, the number fell to 37%. Sexual frequency is dropping across all demographic groups, including age and marital status, but the decline is larger among young adults.