Victims of the Revolution:
How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All
by nathanael blake
foreword by ryan t anderson
ignatius press, 272 pages, $18.95
John Lennon was an artist. And like any good artist—I use the term loosely—he sensed Something Big coming in advance. Then he captured it in a single, 1968 track of music: “Revolution 9,” eight and a half minutes of incoherent noise.
More on that in a moment. But first, a golden oldie.
I arrived as a Notre Dame freshman in the fall of 1966. My graduating cohort (1970) was the university’s penultimate all-male class. St. Mary’s College, an excellent all-female institution, sat directly across the road. The schools shared, and still share, the city of South Bend. Today South Bend is a pleasant, mid-size urban center. Back then, it was where hope went to die. Winters were soul-crippling and endless. Notre Dame men outnumbered St. Mary’s women four to one. Which meant that underclassmen could kiss feminine companionship goodbye and enjoy a months-long, deep-dish helping of Arctic despair—in the Indiana dark. Come the fertility of spring, this could have interesting tribal results.
Consider the following from Anthropic’s helpful AI assistant, Claude:
On April 16, 1967, 1,500 Notre Dame students initiated a panty raid on the students of Saint Mary’s College. Cries of “We want panties” and “Go Irish” erupted as bra bandits ran across Saint Mary’s campus, collecting undergarments thrown from the windows of dorms. During the madness, one Saint Mary’s student asked someone why he wanted her panties. The answer: “Hell, because they’re there!” . . . South Bend Police pretended to give a hoot by blaring their sirens as the girls threw underwear out the windows.
As it happened, the “raid” was entirely innocent. It was—dare one even think it today?—fun. I know because I was there. More importantly, so was my future wife, later the mother of our four children and a career Catholic educator. She was one of the (many) women gleefully tossing their underwear out the windows of Holy Cross Hall.
Sharing the story above triggers two standard responses. The first is predictable. It’s a lecture on sexism from the gender police. The second is far more interesting. It’s the amused (or bored, or uncomfortable) look on many young adult faces when I tell it. Why a raid? Why the drama? Why storm the Bastille for something as available and casual as sex?
They’re logical questions. For the young, the past is a distant continent. Nostalgia comes naturally with age, and it can be both pathetic and dangerous. The mid-1960s were far from the “good old days.” They had their own ugly list of tensions, including a war in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle, and fraying relations between the sexes. Yet they were also the still relatively sane top of a very steep slalom into the world we’ve since created. And it can be tempting to long for a do-over; a chance to rewind history and avoid the crater of social unrest and broken relationships at the bottom of the slope. Which is where we find ourselves now.
Alas, here’s the bad news: In the real world, rewinds and do-overs don’t happen. But there’s also good news: Course corrections can happen. And in Victims of the Revolution, Nathanael Blake does two important things to that end, with convincing skill. He explains in persuasive detail how the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century “liberated” millions of people to be miserable, in bed and out. And he offers a path forward with strong reasons for hope.
Victims is a simple book in the best sense: concise, vividly written, and tightly argued; backed by solid research, and powered by common sense. Adjectives of praise are cheap, but Blake—a scholar with the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and a colleague of this reviewer)—has produced something genuinely crucial to understanding our current cultural turmoil. He notes that the sexual revolution was intended as a healthy overthrow of repressive, bourgeois sex attitudes and a hollow respectability in matters related to eros. Instead, it “produced a multitude of hypocrisies and cruelties of its own,” without healing “the ills of the old order nearly as well as its proponents hoped.”
Early in his text, Blake sets the theme of his argument: Contrary to its own sales pitch, “liberated” sexuality
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 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.
To put it another way, there’s an elegance, delight, patience, and fertility to the dance of a lasting romantic relationship. These things depend on self-giving and restraint. And they all get jackhammered by a culture of serial orgasms with multiple partners. Two exquisite ironies flow therefrom. Married couples, especially if they’re religiously active, typically enjoy a high degree of sexual happiness. Meanwhile, many “liberated” young adults live a very real-world version of “Revolution 9,” struggling with anger, depression, moral incoherence, and online pornography, and a significant decline in actual sexual relations relative to previous generations.
There’s much more. For Blake, “violence [is] inherent in the sexual revolution,” most obviously in its dependence on abortion as an alleged guarantee of female equality and liberty. But even more striking, as he notes in his chapter on “The Abolition of Man and Woman,” is the way the sexual revolution has, inevitably, morphed into gender anarchy. What began as a hymn to the free pleasures of the body has become an assault on the meaning and dignity of the body. The result is not just an affirmation of homosexuality, but a transsexual license for self-mutilation.
In Blake’s words: “Treating the body as clay to be remade at will is the consummation of the sexual revolution’s stripping the body of all intrinsic significance, leaving only that which is subjectively asserted.” And both the gay and trans movements are expert in using emotional blackmail—an inflated threat of suicides—to educate or coerce critics into silence.
In spite of today’s challenges, Blake’s book is very far from an exercise in pessimism. It’s the opposite. His concluding chapter amounts to a call for renewed Christian realism about the world, with the power of the gospel as the soil of a compelling hope. As he argues throughout his text,
The overwhelming triumph of the sexual revolution is creating the conditions in which Christian sexual morality will once again appear protective and merciful. . . . In a sexual world (mis)ruled by the tyranny of desire, the Christian view of sex as a self-giving act of love looks pretty good, and the restraints around it appear as necessary protections for that love to flourish.
For Blake, the Christian who trusts in the Lord will find signs of hope and renewal even amid decline, “as the failures of the world fertilize the fields of future evangelism.” And what he says so well is true. But of course, the work of seeding and harvesting the field belongs to us.
