William Murchison

It was not precisely out of the blue that people decided there was nothing wrong with—as we say in these allegedly enlightened times—terminating a pregnancy.

Pregnancy, one could note with some scientific justification, is a central element in sex. For attitudes on abortion to change, there needed to be a revolution in the way men and women looked at their meeting ground; a new way of considering rights and obligation under a regime as old as Adam and Eve. And of course exactly that has been the case.

What is curious is to see these profound changes consummated as it were in a period of little more than 30 years. I remember it all. So, likely, do you, gentle reader. (And I mean the age allusion ever so gently, believe me. Three decades is no big deal at all.)

There had been a moral revolution during the 1920s—building, as always happens with revolutions, on the not-inconsiderable spade work performed by advanced spirits in previous decades; and afterwards there was Rosie the Riveter and the bikini and rock ‘n’ roll and other signs of, or opportunities for, assertive freedom and sexuality on the part of American women. But who was ready—I certainly wasn’t, despite living, generationally speaking, at Ground Zero—for the mind-boggling collapse of the carefully laid structure of attitudes and behaviors relating to and governing relationships between men and women?

In 1963, the year I graduated from college, the old order seemed more or less in confident place. By the mid-1970s, it was gone—“all changed, changed utterly,” as Yeats wrote after the Easter rebellion. There is some resemblance to the demise of the World Trade Center, if you think about it.

We went from girls who went to college for their MRS. degree to Women who were headed for law school—or West Point; from lingering kisses at the dorm door to group sex on the first date; from mononucleosis to AIDS and VD; from marriage for life to divorce as a way of life; from Margaret Chase Smith to Hillary Clinton; from abortion as a scandal, besides a crime, to abortion as a human right and proud badge of selfhood and liberation; from “abortion,” if you please, to “choice.”

It took the world by surprise; it caught civilization off guard. Only in a culture where the creation of life had taken an official backseat to the cultivation of pleasure could the Roe vs. Wade regime be enforced: sex as a right, and the consequences of sex rendered optional at best.

Understanding, over the short run, why we changed so much in so short a time could occupy us for years to come; understanding the consequences of the change is simpler altogether. We use our eyes; that is all. Of the sexual revolution and its fruits Theodore Dalrymple, the noted English writer-physician, observes: “I think of the words commemorating architect Sir Christopher Wren in the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—if you seek his monument, look about you. A just tribute to a great artist; a bitter reproach to a society that came to think of liberation as fulfillment.”

Dalrymple is one of six writers whose essays from the Manhattan Institute’s fine publication City Journal are bound in hardback as Modern Sex: Liberation and Its Discontents—with the “o” in “modern” rendered as the top of an open condom. Myron Magnet is editor of the collection, and some collection it is: “The ‘L’ Word: Love as Taboo,” “All Sex, All the Time,” “Bring Back Stigma,” and so on. All the contributors, including Dalrymple, are noted commentators on the topic at hand: Roger Scruton, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Kay S. Hymowitz, Wendy Shalit, Harry Stein.

The diagnosis is bleak; America’s obsession with sexual liberation has brought disaster. “[W]hat you see after all the coupling,” writes Magnet, in the introduction, “is a profound sadness. In the world of low-commitment sex, cohabitation has replaced marriage for many, and relationships are temporary, leaving the partners mistrustful, resentful, even vengeful once the breakup occurs.”

Americans are lonelier as well as sadder: men wary of women and women of men. “Sex without feelings” was the original aim, and it seemed so comfort-making, so easy and agreeable. No exposure of vulnerabilities, no hurts; no hurts, no anger, no fights, no withdrawals, no ruptures. There was just this one little-bitty problem: Human existence is not set up in this comfort-making, easy, and altogether agreeable way. Emotions drive human relationships: emotions that humans never can bury deep enough to prevent their rising from the coffin, like Christopher Lee in a Dracula movie, and biting those who “encounter each other, expecting to give and to get so little beyond the sexual thrill.”

So, too, in our day and age, are children “sexualized earlier and earlier, a consequence also of the advertising and entertainment fantasy world that surrounds them and to whose allurements their still-fragile egos are particularly susceptible.” The loss of stigma for sexual misbehavior “has left individuals much more exposed to violation.” Of commitments and enduring love we see less and less.

And then the book really begins! All to this point was prelude. We get down soon to brass tacks: single mothers, neglected children, broken hearts, sexual diseases, emotional turmoil. Abortion? That, too. However, just in passing—in an essay, “How We Mate,” by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (who became a mini-celebrity some years back with her Atlantic article affirming how right Vice President Dan Quayle had been in 1992 to criticize single motherhood as a lifestyle).

“Increasingly,” writes Whitehead, “[women] believe that a woman has a right to have a baby on her own. This idea is historically recent, originating with the sexual revolution and the contraception revolution.” Of the two events, the sexual revolution was the more central in creating the notion of sex for recreation rather than for bringing life into the world. “According to proponents of the new sex ideology—with a strange combination of feminists and Playboy magazine taking the lead—women should be free to enjoy their bodies and their sexuality without any of the procreative consequences of sex.” That is to say, without babies to burp and diaper and accompany, eventually, to soccer practice.

Whitehead does not remark on the strangeness of this expectation, though she certainly would acknowledge it. It is the weirdest of all the weird implications of the sex-without-commitment revolution. It makes no sense when you think about it.

What would be the purpose of sex, after all? I mean the purpose, not merely the sweaty, palpitating byproducts (though this is neither to dis nor to dismiss those byproducts, to which I will return in due course, and which meantime have an unmistakably large place in human relationships)? The purpose of sex would be, of course, the creation of life. That’s how you do it. That’s how things are set up, whether you believe or disbelieve that allegedly outdated “Adam knew Eve his wife” business. Is Sex Necessary? James Thurber slyly inquired in a famous book title. Well, you could certainly say so on the basis of experience!

Even the artificial inseminators acknowledge the centrality of sex. They employ in their line of work real live sperm from real live people—the sort of thing that cannot be manufactured, pressed into shape, packaged, prescribed, ingested at bedtime with a glass of Merlot.

Thus abortion—which supposedly liberates sexuality and the sexual impulse—in fact reduces and attenuates the possibilities of the marriage bed; squeezes those possibilities down to recreation. Recreation for what? For recreation’s sake, so far as anyone can see. How inspirational. It is as if George W. Bush offered himself for constable of McLennan County, Texas, or Jack Welch assumed control of a chain of lemonade stands. They could succeed, all right, at these shriveled pastimes. Then they would ask—inevitably—is this all?

When you reduce sex to recreation, the question surfaces once more: Is this all? Everything? The whole shooting match? So it would seem, the central purpose of sex having been neatly discarded. De gustibus, one could say—if that’s the way you like things, that’s the way you like things, and no one else should object. But Myron Magnet’s words worm their way into consciousness: “profound sadness.”

The main thing left after sex for conception has gone away is sadness. The City Journal essayists have not produced an anti-abortion document. It would be unreasonable to suggest they meant to or should have, although their moral worldview is congruent with that, say, of Human Life Review’s readers. They have much to show us, nonetheless, concerning the fruits and consequences of sex unyoked from its purpose.

“Sadness” is not the first word that normally comes to mind in appraisals of the sexual revolution. If ever a revolution was designed for pleasure, this was the one. Fun was its charter: abandonment, pleasure, let the good times roll. If one sexual partner was good, why wouldn’t nine or ten be better yet? If nine or ten were as good as all that, how about dozens, maybe hundreds? The church, in specifying one as the limit, was performing its usual killjoy function. What did the clergy know about fun? (As for celibate Catholic priests pronouncing on something they’d never even experienced. . . !)

It turns out that the clergy, among other so-called bluenoses, knew and understood quite a lot about sex. One of the more interesting essays in Modern Sex is Wendy Shalit’s “Sex, Sadness, and the City.” She writes here of the popular HBO series “Sex and the City.” She writes not to damn (as some might suppose in a book of this character) but to weep a little with the series characters and the plights they have created for themselves. “While promoters offer the show as one more brave step in the sexual liberation of women, leading to greater fulfillment, in fact it is a lament for all things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked. If Candace Bushnell [whose New York City newspaper columns inspired the series] were a practicing Catholic, she couldn’t have produced a more effective proselytizing tool for continence and modesty.”

Now there’s a large claim. What might Ms. Shalit mean? First, that the females, who of course are single and looking for love, are unlikely to find it in the modern milieu. Love (read: “commitment”) is out this season. What’s left are odd little rituals like sleeping around (the art dealer Charlotte) to entice the supposed beneficiaries into performing chores and tasks around the house. “As for the men she does care for, she gives them presents they usually reject: ‘Whoa, too fast,’ one exclaims to Charlotte: ‘Next you move in, and then you hate my music!’”

“Consistently,” says Ms. Shalit, “‘Sex and the City’ derides women who impulsively jump into bed and then complain about men’s bad character. The women in the show, it is clear, have given up the opportunity to get to know these men better.”

Again and again the show shows forth “what the sexual revolution expects of women, and what the woman who looks for liberation through the bedroom can expect.”

And yet, concludes Theodore Dalrymple, in another essay, “the ideas and sensibilities of the sexual revolutionaries have now so thoroughly permeated our society that we are scarcely aware any longer of the extent to which they have done so . . . Happiness and the good life are conceived as prolonged sexual ecstasy and nothing more.”

We wonder that the culture embraces abortion? How could it not? Sex is out; sexual ecstasy is the thing now—and how different are the two; each powerful but in radically different ways.

“Sex” (a word largely replaced now by “gender” except of course when the topic is ecstasy) is about difference and complementarity. Difference as regards reproductive mechanisms; difference regarding—perhaps a man may say it in a forum like this without expecting assault and battery on the way home—temperament, outlook, ways of thinking, ways of acting. The differences are morally neutral. That is not to deny their reality.

Decades ago, I read, maybe in Reader’s Digest, of a manhunt that led to an airplane waiting on the ground for takeoff. The police were seeking a man. There he was, already in his seat—or, rather, no, the person in question was wearing women’s clothes. Hmmmm. To test the original assumption, an officer tossed his pocketknife at the suspect’s lap. The suspect grabbed the knife in mid-air. At that point it was, all right, buddy, stand up, hands over your head. A seated woman in a skirt, you see, would instinctively have used the skirt as a net, trapping the pocketknife without touching it. I’ve no idea whether any of this makes sense. I have remembered the incident because of the way it purported to illustrate a real, if hardly significant, difference between the only two sexes there are.

Yet the differences work together in concert, like violin and cello. There seems a fitness to it all. The wife of a World Trade Center victim who was profiled by the New York Times analyzed the couple’s relationship in simple terms, yet also profound: “We completed each other.” What one was not, the other was, and vice versa. That was sex in the classic sense; sexual ecstasy, whether they had it or not, was another commodity.

Conception, pregnancy, and birth are eminently related in classic sex. The differences make it all possible. Indeed, just to think about the differences—which hardly require description—is to appreciate the symmetry. Vaulting and buttresses hold up a cathedral. The family is held up by similarly distinct yet complementary attributes, emotional as well as physical. Why not leave it at that, rather than veer off the road into caricature and stereotype?

So it took, as I said in the beginning, a change in the way men and women come together, and in the assumptions both make when they come together— that is what it took for old attitudes about abortion to die and new ones to take their place. Or would it be truer to say, for attitudes about birth and life and family itself to change in important ways? We proceeded from sex to sexual ecstasy via—among other routes—agreement to pretend that pregnancy was no more than a medical encumbrance; and you know what we do with encumbrances in a liberated society—get rid of them as quickly as possible, that’s what.

Thus we really ought to have seen all this coming. An acute social observer could have retired to the Caymans by betting on the U.S. Supreme Court to establish a constitutional right to abort a pregnancy—whether in Roe v. Wade or in some subsequent ruling. In fact, the court grabbed the first train out of Hicksville: which, to every appearance, was how the court majority viewed the old America and its quaint cultural assumptions. We were no longer into “sex,” the justices seemed to understand; ecstasy was the thing people wanted, and no court should stand in its way. No court since then really has done so.

But the sadness persists. Indeed it seems to deepen. That is the distinct contribution of this valuable collection of essays, Modern Sex: showing where the culture of ecstasy has led. Straight to—among other places—“The Teen Mommy Track,” as Kay S. Hymowitz terms it. To “a culture created and ruled by children, a never-never land almost completely abandoned by fathers and, in some sad cases, by mothers as well”; a culture “made possible by adult negligence” and “enabled by mixed messages coming . . . from mainstream society itself.” If ecstasy is what we want, why shouldn’t teenagers have it? If there is the temptation to rejoice that at least some budding mothers keep their babies, a contrary temptation squashes it—the temptation to mourn the burgeoning of unwed motherhood and its dismal effects, such as poverty and physical abuse.

Ms. Hymowitz also profiles “Tweens: Ten Going on Sixteen.” The title says it all.

In addition, as Dalrymple notes, the culture of ecstasy has led to the “thorough coarsening of feeling, thought, and behavior.” And to moral neutrality: “The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible.”

From a sexual standpoint, we are in one heck of a mess, you could reasonably conclude. Roger Scruton, the philosopher, has some helpful things to say in the book. He advises, for example, setting before our children “an image of the good man and the good woman,” teaching them “to imitate what can be loved and admired.” He is right as can be.

Still, I want to note some ground for optimism, in the long run if not the short. The optimism is founded on the fact that when one talks about sex, one talks about reality. Sex is—a thing, you would think, hardly requiring explanation or rationalization. As we see all too well, is-ness (viz., reality) is no guarantee of cultural acceptance. This very day, as I write, numerous Muslims around the world, and in this country, fold their arms solemnly and sullenly: They don’t care what that videotape of Osama bin Laden shows him confessing to; it’s a put-up job, a forgery, whatever you want it to be.

Exactly. Whatever we want a thing to be—that’s what it becomes, not merely in Muslim but also in post-Christian or even Christian circles. You want ecstasy as the first priority? You got it (as waiters superfluously assure us on taking our orders). And with it, sadness, disillusion, pain, dislocation—the list could go on and on.

Curiously, our therapeutic culture often enjoins us to eschew the mental state called “denial.” We are “in denial” when we refuse to acknowledge an addiction or a death or some other affliction in life or the family. Is it not also the case that we are “in denial” when we posit ecstasy as the definitive replacement for the old understanding of sex—an understanding that seems to entail inconvenience and occasionally hardship?

Heretics, it has been often noted, have a piece of the truth they turn, as it pleases them, into the whole truth. Sexual ecstasy is a portion of truth: one odd thing about ecstasy being that, when it occurs, it seems to proceed most surely and most lastingly from plain, homely, old-fashioned love-based “sex.” “Sex” as invoking complementarity rather than division; union as opposed to apartness and jealousy; the art of giving as distinguished from the act of taking. If one does not see that it all works as advertised, then just possibly one has not been looking with due attention.

The 20th century may be seen in some sense as a concentrated flight from reality—away from the way things actually are and in the direction of things as we would like them. How else explain communism—the century’s grandest project for the remaking of human nature; a project that finally failed when human nature said, exasperatedly, “Wait just a minute here . . .” Pleasure is a treasured and unmistakable part of the human experience (if you except the experience of that much-diminished band, the true ascetics). Nonetheless, pleasure, the opposite of that sadness to which Myron Magnet draws our attention, is conditioned on our acknowledgment of its part-time status, and of its fragility. There are no guarantees—though human experience indicates, with some consistency, that lives led in obedience to norms such as duty and responsibility have the best chance of keeping pleasure alive. It is this paradox that our age resists with all its force.

Still, as I say, sex is. And to argue that it isn’t—to plead for its pliability or friability—doesn’t render it less central to human existence. Go on in this vein, and we all may find it necessary to reestablish formally the connection between sex and the things sex accomplishes, not least of which is the production of life and the replenishment of the human species. Will wonders never cease?

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