Syndicated columnist George Will called Mary Eberstadt “intimidatingly intelligent.” The Hoover Institution research fellow can rattle off diagnoses for America’s woes without pause. Her most recent book is “Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution,” which examines the social science documenting the unintended consequences of the birth control pill. A consulting editor of Policy Review, she has also written for First Things, the Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard. Eberstadt is originally from upstate New York and now lives in D.C. with her family.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I’m a Catholic Christian. I appreciate the way in which church truths are validated by sources outside the faith itself — aesthetically, intellectually, empirically.
You’ve argued that the sexual revolution made women less happy. But with more choices and more equality, how can that be?
I’m not the first one to have noticed the paradox that women have more opportunities and better education now, and yet they don’t seem as happy. There’s evidence from all over to validate this point. Of course we’re not talking about every individual; we’re talking about women in the aggregate. Two years ago, two Wharton School economists wrote a paper devoted to exactly this phenomenon. It was called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” and it was much discussed at the time, for good reason. They used survey and other data from the past 35 years, not only in America, but across the Western world. What they found was women reported less satisfaction and happiness in life than they had 35 years ago. This is a paradox: They have more choice — why are they less happy? Part of why they’re less happy, maybe, is that the sexual revolution has put a great strain in human relationships. One of the main things that women want out of life — and it’s the same thing that many men want out of life — is connectedness and intimacy and human relationships. But the sexual marketplace has been flooded with available partners thanks to artificial contraception. In a way, you can see this as a market phenomenon. The competition has increased greatly, and because of it, it’s harder for many people to get what they ultimately want, which is a lasting relationship.
Your book discusses the negative consequences of the birth control pill. But many say that cultural battle has already been lost, with the majority of even Catholic women using contraception. Do you hope that the next generation of women will abandon the pill? If so, how would they get there?
The sexual revolution, being 50 or so years old, is actually a very new phenomenon when measured against the sweep of human history. This is a very large, now global, experiment, and we’re only now just beginning to understand what the toll of the sexual revolution is. It has an economic dimension. If you look at what’s happening in Western Europe right now, you know that there is a catastrophe booming, and the problem is a demographic problem fundamentally. Western Europeans have not had enough children to support the immense welfare state they’ve created. In domestic terms, we all know family breakup has soared, divorce has soared, out-of-wedlock births have soared since the invention of the pill. Obviously there are causal connections between those things.
Will people of the future think differently? I don’t think it’s impossible that they would think differently. I think people of the future will be more green, for example — that’s another trend that we’ve seen. Some people say that putting back together the procreative and recreative parts of sex is a return to a more natural way of being. So for all kinds of reasons I don’t think it’s right to say that there’s no turning back the clock. As a more general point, every time a source has claimed inevitability for its side, something comes along to upend that judgment. Marxism, Freudianism claimed inevitability. Fifty years ago, it might have seemed inevitable that most adults would smoke and smoke everywhere. That changed, and that’s just one example of how movements that seem here to stay can in fact prove transient over time.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that people are rational and that they’re swayed by argument. And that’s why I felt compelled to write this book.
– Liz Essley
