There are a lot of clever observations in this piece by Ann Farmer (“Sexual Revolution: Is the Honeymoon Over?”) which shows that replacing the deep desire for love with the shallow pleasures of lust is unworkable.
Despite the best efforts of the sexual revolutionaries to banalise, commodify and compartmentalise the subject, the survey results suggest that there really is something to lose in the realm of sex. The widespread dissatisfaction among the young and unattached that Curran notes might have something to do with the fact that, as sex has been romanticised, love has been sidelined. Whereas in the past love quite often led to sex (eventually), sex now becomes an end in itself, and the sexual partner is as disposable as the experience, along with what used to be seen as the natural outcome of sex — babies.
Certainly, I would quibble over the phrase “sex has been romanticised” since it’s really lust we’re talking about here. (Interesting how sex becomes intimacy and gender becomes sex, no?) Nota bene: sex is short-hand for sexus, from which we derive section (i.e. Wessex and Sussex are, respectively, the western and southern sections of a region). Thus male and female are the two sections of the human race, which are meant to provide a cohesive whole for the benefit of all. This is why “The LORD God said: It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suited to him” (Genesis 2:18). But now we pit male against female, grasping for fleeting pleasures at the expense of the other and wondering about how to make it better (“ethical porn, yes!”).
To be sure, language lives, and cultures morph, and evil will have its day. And yet for all the changing and morphing and throwing off the shackles of ancient wisdom, young men and women are as miserable as ever. “Turn to me and live, says the Lord.” True joy is found in the true revolution: the Incarnation and all that it implies.
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