Take it Personal: The Sexual Revolution

We are unmaking ourselves

If an alien trying to learn about humanity were to survey the films, books, music, and television of the last sixty years in order to try to learn what sex is, he would likely conclude that sex is the most powerful force in our culture. It is, he would deduce, an expression of our identity, a fulfillment of our deepest longings, and a means of social cohesion. Of course, he may also come to the conclusion that it is something frivolous and stupefying, but if we assume our alien is sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between serious and superficial cultural expressions, he might see past purely salacious depictions of sex. The rest, however, would be unavoidable, as the sexual revolution has infused the concept of sex as identity deep into our psyche. Sex is personal revelation in the modern world. It is how we know who we are.

The term “sexual revolution” is often used to refer to the cultural shift that took place in the west in the 1960s and 1970s around what is and is not appropriate sexual behavior. However, the makings of the sexual revolution have a much longer history, beginning with shifts in attitudes about sex as early as the eighteenth century. The fundamental change was not what people thought about sex though, but what people thought about what makes us human in the first place.

Often the sexual revolution is characterized as a victory of secularism over religion. This is not inaccurate, but it is a different kind of victory than most people realize. The battle was not between a repressive Church that hates sex and an enlightened humanism that sees sex as natural and fun. It was between a Christian worldview that sees the human person as a reflection of the divine, and an atheistic worldview that understands the human person primarily as an expression of self-will. In the latter view, each of us is the sum of our experiences as we choose to reflect upon them and interpret them. That last part is key. In the absence of God, we must make our own meaning and define our own narrative. We have to find a reason to live, a way of being that gives us a sense of satisfaction. Sex has always been a powerful motivator of human activity, so as the new understanding of what makes a person moved from the background to the foreground in the sixties and seventies, it made sense that sex would become one of the main ways in which that understanding would be expressed.

Over the course of the decades since then, however, that idea of sex as a sign of independence and personal choice has hardened into something else. We have entered a new sexual revolution. Now sex is not just how we express our humanity, it is our humanity. It has gone from being something that can make our dreary, godless lives worth living, to an object of worship in its own right. Sex is more than just important. It is everything. We do still find personal expression through it, but that expression is guided by a vague notion of an inner self, immutably forged with certain tendencies and desires that are fundamental to our personhood. The earlier sexual revolution said I was free to explore my desires. The current one says I am my desires. Even the slightest suggestion that I apply discipline to those desires is not only old fashioned and insulting, but it is an affront to my very humanity. If I am not finding and expressing my desires, I am nothing at all.