"This book could hardly be more timely. ..."

... The Obama Administration's birth control mandate may be a matter of religious liberty and the First Amendment, but it has also opened up the questions about contraception and the sexual revolution that have hardly been discussed in sophisticated society--or even in Catholic parishes--in anything but celebratory terms.

The sexual revolution, which is unimaginable without the pill, has had a profound effect, still barely understood, on relations between the sexes, human happiness, and a host of intractable social problems. Yet it is so much taken for granted and assumed to be such a great good for women and for society that has become impossible to discuss it seriously.

Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, offers a collection of essays, most of them originally published in First Things or Policy Review, that deploy a mass of empirical findings from the social sciences as well anecdotal and confessional testimony to examine the dark side of the sexual revolution.

If it was so liberating, she asks, why are its supposed beneficiaries, especially women, unhappier than before? Why did the very effects that Pope Paul VI* predicted in his much despised but (in her eyes, prophetic) 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, come to pass—an increase in infidelity and divorce, the objectification and degradation of women, abandonment of women and children, cohabitation, sexual promiscuity and increased abortion rates?

Eberstadt aims to connect the dots in order to show how the sexual revolution has harmed women and children, undermined marriage (especially for the lower social strata, so widening the class gap in poverty and education across generations), led to a massive increase in pornography, and left enormous numbers of children to grow up without one or both of their biological parents (with negative impacts in terms of poverty, health, mental health, school success, and other measures of child well-being).

There is an insightful discussion of "pedophilia chic," of how children were being sexualized and sexual relations between men and boys were being normalized in smart circles -- until the priest scandal broke and the same people who had promoted or condoned this kind of sexual license became outraged by it. It was the one and only case where the "advances" of the sexual revolution have been reversed.

Continue reading this review of Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, written for MercatorNet by Paul Adams.

You can also read the Introduction to the book here on Insight Scoop, and a recent interview with Mary Eberstadt on the Catholic World Report site: "The Party's Over".